The Hanging Tree

by Bryan Gruley

  “She owned the place? Gracie had a mortgage?” I pointed at the house. “What’s the paper on the door? That a foreclosure notice?”

  “Details like that don’t really matter now.”

  “Yes, they do. Unless you think Gracie really killed herself. I don’t.”

  Trixie’s gray eyes moved to mine. “Why are you here again?”

  “To find out what really happened to Gracie.”

  “Do you think that’s possible? Without hearing it from Gracie’s own lips?”

  “I guess I must, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  The car was still idling.

  “You know,” Trixie said. “We didn’t call her Gracie. We called her Grace.”

  “We?”

  “Her sisters back at the house. Me.”

  “Gracie always called herself Gracie. She said Grace sounded old.”

  Trixie looked out the windshield. “The will of God,” she recited, “will never take you where the grace of God won’t protect you.” She turned the car off. “Let’s go.”

  Trixie had a key. As she swung the front door open, she blocked my view of the piece of paper. Then she closed the door.

  “OK,” I said. I reached into my back pocket for my notebook.

  “Be kind,” she said. “This is not a crime scene.”

  “I don’t have such a good memory.”

  “You reporters are so full of it.” She tapped two fingers on her chest. “Imprint what you see and hear on your heart. The story will be much clearer.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. For now, I left my notebook in my pocket. “Are we on the record?”

  “You can write whatever you like. But for the sake of the women in my care, I don’t want to see my name in your paper. I’m already having enough trouble with my landlord.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “None of your business. This way.”

  The inside of the house was clean and sparsely furnished but obviously lived in. In the living room, another afghan like the one Mom had made me—identical to the one I’d seen in the Zamboni shed—lay in a bunch at one end of a sofa. An unlit lamp stood on an end table. An armchair faced the sofa across a coffee table. A television perched atop a mostly empty bookshelf. On the mantel over a fake fireplace stood a framed black-and-white photograph: Gracie and Darlene stood with their arms around each other at the end of a dock, smiling and squinting against the sun, ripples of lake water glinting behind them.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why would Gracie leave all this stuff here if she was moving back to Starvation?”

  “Good question.”

  “I mean, did she have to leave suddenly or something? Was she in trouble?”

  “Well,” Trixie said, “if she wasn’t in trouble before, she obviously found it. I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t know if she wanted to move up there permanently. Grace didn’t tell me everything. Let’s go in here.”

  The kitchen smelled faintly of Murphy’s Oil Soap. My mother used up a big bottle of Murphy’s every few months and said its lingering aroma was her favorite in the world next to that of a cinnamon cake baking.

  There was a breakfast table with two chairs covered in flowery green vinyl, white cabinets, Formica counters the color of bananas. The table held an empty schnapps bottle sprouting a bouquet of dried hydrangeas. Lacy cotton curtains dressed a window over the sink that looked out on a tiny backyard, a concrete side drive, and a one-car garage. In the dish drainer rested a chipped black coffee cup embossed with a Detroit Red Wings logo.

  It was the cup more than anything that made me silently marvel: Gracie had had her own house. I pictured her standing in that kitchen, sipping coffee from that cup, looking out the little window to see whether the morning promised sun or rain or snow. Was it really hers? That wouldn’t be too hard to find out. I made a mental note to check before I went back up north.

  I opened a cabinet next to the sink. There were half a dozen each of plates, bowls, coffee cups, and milk glasses. I looked in the next cabinet, saw a platter, two serving bowls, an empty shelf. I crossed to the other side of the sink and opened another cabinet. Inside I glimpsed a collection of flower vases before Trixie’s hand appeared and pushed the cabinet shut.

  “Hey,” she said. “Are you looking for something?”

  “Booze.”

  “You won’t find it here.”

  I looked over at the schnapps vase on the table. Peach schnapps, I noticed.

  “Ancient,” Trixie said. “Come on.”

  A hallway off the kitchen led to a pair of facing bedrooms. The door on the left stood halfway open. The door on the right was closed. Trixie stopped just short of where I could see into the rooms and placed her big body in front of me.

  “How did you know to find me?” she said.

  “Someone told me.”

  “Who?”

  She seemed determined to know. The implication seemed to be that if I didn’t tell her, I wouldn’t see the rooms. I had no idea what I might find in there, but I definitely wanted to see.

  “Darlene Esper,” I said. “A friend of Gracie’s. Do you know her?”

  “I know of her. She’s the wo—the girl—in the picture in the living room.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve been in love with her your whole life.”

  Her certainty startled me.

  “Isn’t that right?” she said.

  “Pretty much.” I nodded toward the rooms. “Which was Gracie’s?”

  “Wait,” she said, stepping forward and placing a hand against my chest. “Do you know what Grace did when she came to Detroit? Have you ever really given it any thought—a girl of, what, eighteen or nineteen, leaving her tiny little town up north to come to the big city?”

  “Forgive me, but what’s the big deal? Lots of kids leave up north every year to go to college downstate. I did. And they do fine. And they don’t have rich benefactors paying their tuition for them like Gracie.”

  “So your answer is no, you have not given it much thought.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Grace’s benefactor? You mean the man—it could only be a man, or more than one—who promised her an education? She got one, all right.”

  She told me about it.

  Gracie had enrolled in the freshman program at Wayne State University in the fall of 1980. She had hoped to declare her major as English. One semester of tuition and room and board had indeed been paid for in full. But no money had been provided for her required texts. At the campus bookstore Gracie learned that the bill for those would come to nearly $350. She had saved barely half that from her summer job at Dairy Queen. Her appeals to her mother for the rest met first with promises, then with lectures about saving money, then with unreturned phone calls. Grace started classes without books.

  Finally she contacted her anonymous benefactor. The only requirement the donor had was that Gracie write a short letter at the midpoint and the end of each semester reporting on her academic progress. There was a post office box to which she was supposed to mail the letters. Now she wrote explaining her book dilemma. In the letter she apologized for her ignorance and promised to repay any book money provided.

  Soon Gracie heard from a man. He didn’t say whether he was her actual donor, but he had a job for her waiting tables. Late one afternoon she showed up for her first six-hour shift. Although it served food and drinks, B.J.’s Office wasn’t a restaurant. B.J.’s was a strip club on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, about a fifteen-minute drive from Gracie’s dormitory. When she drove up to the place, she thought maybe she’d gotten the address wrong.

  “I’m aware that Grace was no angel in her youth,” Trixie said. “But even she was, shall we say, taken aback.”

  “But she took the job,” I said.

  Trixie shrugged. “This wasn’t some smoky pit frequented by guys missing teeth and stuffing dollar bills in G-strings. Thi
s was a gentleman’s club. A jacket was required. You had to pay twenty-five dollars just to get in the door. The girls were from everywhere but here.”

  “Canada? Poland maybe?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “Hm. Well, on a good night, Grace could make two or three hundred dollars in tips. So she really only had to work one or two nights a week, which left her more time to study.”

  “And I’m sure she used it for that,” I said.

  “I didn’t know her then, of course, so I can’t say for sure. But she told me she tried, and I’ll take her word.”

  “Did she dance at the club?”

  “No. She waited tables.” Trixie folded her arms and gazed down at the floor. “But she might have been better off dancing.”

  The middle-aged men who sat with their $7.50 Heinekens at the little round tables in the shadows of B.J.’s Office hadn’t made their fortunes by pursuing things that were easily available. The dancers, of course, were easily available; the waitresses were not, or at least not as obviously so. To bed a slinky young woman who peeled off her clothes before men as routinely as she poured herself a morning coffee was one thing. To seduce a waitress—especially that pretty college student named Gracie—now that was something else.

  Midway through her second semester at Wayne State, Gracie stopped going to classes. She moved out of her dorm and into an apartment in the Bricktown neighborhood near downtown Detroit. She continued to work at B.J.’s one or two afternoons a week. Her nights were given to other employment that paid her much more. There was a man, a very rich man, many years her elder, who paid her rent and bought her things. After a while there were other men, other apartments, more money and things.

  “So she was a hooker,” I said.

  “Of a sort,” Trixie said. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t strictly about having sex for money. Grace became very good at satisfying a particularly difficult-to-satisfy customer. And, unfortunately for her, she came to enjoy it. At least for a time, she enjoyed it at least as much as the customers.”

  “Jesus. What kind of customer?”

  “Please be respectful of the Lord’s name.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Tell me, Gus. Are you familiar with sexual bondage? Autoerotic sex asphyxiation?”

  From the Lord’s name to autoerotic sex. This woman was tough. I studied her face for any sign of weariness. There was none. She looked to be in her sixties. I wondered if she merely looked older than she was because of the past life she had led.

  “I’ve heard of it. Can’t say I’m familiar.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “So,” I said, “this whole anonymous donor thing was bull.”

  I pulled out my wallet and showed Trixie the clipping I’d cut from the Pilot of March 18, 1980. She scanned the article quickly, smiled wanly at the picture. “Look at her,” she said. “Just a child. Can I keep this?”

  “It’s yours,” I said. “Whoever paid her tuition was really a”—I searched for the word—“a recruiter.”

  “Essentially. Small-town girls from troubled homes, out of sorts in the big city. We had two others at the center. Grace brought them to me.”

  ”Goddamn b—excuse me.”

  “That’s all right. All these guys were bastards.”

  She pushed open the door to the room on the left and let me step in before her. The room was lit by the flat afternoon light coming in through the window facing the street. The first thing I noticed was the poster on the wall at the head of the single bed. Red Wings star Sergei Fedorov was spraying ice and snow at the camera in a sideways hockey stop. He wore a bright red jersey, number 91, and a wide smile on his boyish face. Beneath the poster a red bedspread was emblazoned with the Red Wings’ white winged-wheel logo. Three foot-high stacks of Red Wings game programs sat on a trunk at the foot of the bed.

  A small desk and a chair stood next to the bed. Atop the desk was a red plastic cup filled with pencils and pens, a photograph in a standing frame, and a single piece of construction paper.

  I stepped over and picked up the photo frame. Eddie McBride—Gracie’s late father, cousin and drinking buddy of my own father—reclined across the backseat of a boat, shirtless, in a yellow bathing suit that set off his deep tan. On his lap sat a baby girl with reddish curls and a cloth diaper. She was smiling.

  There was no picture of Gracie’s mother, Shirley McBride.

  I set the photo down and took up the sheet of paper. It held a pencil drawing of a hockey player with his arms and stick raised over his head in celebration of a goal. It was crude enough to have been rendered by a child, but I supposed it could just as easily have been Gracie’s work.

  “Whose room is—was this?” I said.

  “Grace,” Trixie said. “Grace slept here.”

  “When she wasn’t at the center?”

  “Here mostly, at least the last couple of years. Until she went back up north.”

  I went to the closet on the opposite wall and slid the doors open. The hangers were filled with simple cotton dresses and jumpers and frilly tops. The floor was covered with pairs of shoes piled on one another. There were pumps and flats and mules and slingbacks, sneakers and moccasins, clogs and knee-high boots and flip-flops and slippers. I shoved the door closed and turned back to Trixie.

  “Except for that, looks like a boy’s room,” I said.

  “Grace loved hockey. Loved the Detroit team, that player especially.”

  Fedorov, one of the Wings’ Russians, was a gifted skater who could play as well as anyone in the world at either end of the ice—when he wanted to. Some nights he played as if he didn’t much care. I wondered if his occasional ambivalence appealed to Gracie, whether she saw whatever struggle she was going through mirrored in her hockey hero.

  “I had no idea,” I said.

  “Why would you?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving on the street outside. I turned and saw the back end of a blue sport-utility vehicle sliding slowly past the house.

  “What?” Trixie said.

  “Nothing.”

  I moved to the foot of the bed and started riffling through the first stack of programs on the trunk. I was looking for one from that Detroit-versus-Chicago playoff series when I thought I had seen Gracie. But Trixie grasped my shoulder and pulled me toward the door.

  “Come on, I don’t have all afternoon.”

  She left the door to Gracie’s room open, stepped across the hall, and produced a pair of keys that unlocked the two locks on the door to the other room. She pushed the door half open and stood across the threshold. “Gracie called this her dark room,” she said.

  “Not for photography, though.”

  “No.”

  I peered into the room, couldn’t see a thing. I looked at Trixie. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did Gracie have a son?”

  Trixie held my gaze for what seemed like a full minute. Then she looked away. “No,” she said. “Grace …” She looked back at me. “Her employer said she couldn’t be pregnant. But Grace let … let the baby go. It was her choice.”

  “What employer?”

  Trixie looked at me again. “You’ll see.”

  “I will? What about that drawing in the other room?”

  “Part of her rehabilitation was volunteering at a local grade school. The kids in Melvindale love the Red Wings, too.”

  So Darlene was right about the abortion. I thought of the baby shoe Gracie had hidden in the Zam shed. Something approaching sadness swelled then receded in the pit of my stomach.

  “When did she have it?”

  “What?” Trixie said.

  “The abortion.”

  She pursed her lips. “I don’t think Grace would want me talking about it.”

  “Grace is dead.”

  “Not yet. Not to me, at least. And not to you, either, or you wouldn’t be here now, would you?”

/>   “Do you talk in riddles with the women at the center?”

  “Do you want to see what’s in this room or not? If you prefer, we can leave right now and you can go chase down whoever was outside the bedroom window.”

  Trixie didn’t miss a trick. “All right,” I said.

  She stepped aside and let me pass.

  seventeen

  The room was tiny, more like a sewing room than a bedroom, with the musty smell of a place no one had been in for a long while. And it was indeed dark, the shades drawn on the window opposite the door. Trixie flicked a wall switch. A bare bulb in the center of the ceiling threw a dim oval of yellow light that left the corners of the room in shadow.

  Next to the window hung a glassed-in frame containing a medal pinned on white satin. The Purple Heart.

  “Is that her father’s?” I said.

  “Why else would she have it there?” Trixie said.

  “Don’t tell me—she got it off the Internet.”

  “How did you know?”

  For $33.50, I thought. “Things get around in Starvation Lake.”

  Cardboard boxes sat along the baseboards on two walls. Above them, to my left, hung four pages that had been clipped out of newspapers and thumbtacked to the wall. I stepped past Trixie to see them up close.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  The first was the front page of the Detroit Times, Sunday, March 3, 1996. A thirty-six-point headline ran across the top: “Teen’s Fiery Death Shines Harsh Spotlight on Superior Pickup Truck.” The story beneath it ran under the byline of A. J. Carpenter. Augustus James Carpenter. Me.

  “What does she have this up here for?”

  “Maybe you had a fan,” Trixie said.

  I shook my head as I read the first few paragraphs of the story, remembering. “Gracie never gave a damn about what I did. She used to call me a fag if I got an A in school.”

  “I don’t know what she used to do. Keep going.”

  The next page, yellower than the first, was also from the front of the Times, Friday, January 31, 1992. Under my byline again, barely above the fold: “Local Attorney Nabs Another Big Verdict; GM Vows Appeal.” The amount of the verdict, which someone had underlined in red ink, was $28.3 million. The copy wrapped around a small black-and-white photo, circled in red ink, of the local attorney, a handsome smiling man named Laird Haskell.