The Hanging Tree

ten

Afternoon already had begun to succumb to night. I turned toward the lake. Low hanging cloud banks pinched the tree line against the far end of Main. I walked down the block and sat on a bench beneath the marquee of the old Avalon Cinema, remembering the smell of popcorn on the air when my mother had brought me there as a boy to see Willy Wonka amp; the Chocolate Factory. Now all I could smell was winter.

I had to make a few calls I didn’t want Philo to overhear. I dialed the numbers for three town council members who, if I caught them at the right time, might not mind talking. Most had shut me out since I’d started writing about Haskell and the new rink. A potato chip bag skittered past my boots as each of the calls landed on voice mail. I left bare-bones messages saying I needed clarification on a council matter; no need for them to know that I was prowling for another Haskell story.

I needed to confirm what Perlmutter had told me. Haskell had told me just enough off the record to tie my hands. Clever, I thought. Or stupid on my part. Now I had to write my story as if I’d never heard him say what he’d said about seeking help from the town. But I had to get the story. Everyone in town deserved to hear what the council was about to do before it was done and Haskell cashed his check, even if they didn’t want to hear it, which was probably the case. And I had to get back out ahead of Channel Eight.

Most important, I wanted to know what was going on with Soupy. I tried Darlene’s phone. She didn’t answer. “Hey, stranger, just checking in,” I told her voice mail. I shoved the phone back in my pocket and felt the old hair brush I’d found in Gracie’s Wayne State duffel. I pulled it out and scrutinized the stray hairs stuck in the bristles, auburn and gray.

I remembered what Mrs. B had said about a life insurance policy. So far as I knew, suicides often nullified life insurance policies; the beneficiary-I assumed it was Gracie’s mother, Shirley, based on what Mrs. B had said-was unlikely to get a penny. Even if it was obvious that Gracie was murdered, even if the police investigated her death as a homicide, someone would have to prove it or the insurance company could take forever to pay, if it paid at all.

And Soupy? Did he drive Gracie out to the shoe tree and boost her up to the hanging bough, then just leave her there to die? No way, I thought. Although he and Gracie were far from in love, they were having a hell of a good time. Or at least Soupy was.

“Dude,” he had whispered to me late one night as we dressed for a game. “I got no legs.”

“Why?” I said, digging for a roll of tape in my hockey bag.

“Gracie. I got to the rink early to get my skates sharpened and she hauled my ass back to the Zam shed.”

“No.”

“Yeah. Ever fuck on a Zamboni?”

I tried to imagine precisely how they had done it, decided I didn’t want to know. “Good old Nadia,” I said.

“More like Evel Knievel.”

I had to shut this conversation down. Without looking up from the sock I was winding with tape, I said, “So, you going to marry her?”

“Marry her? Trap, she won’t even let me take her to a movie. The woman fucks like there’s no tomorrow.”

And now there was no tomorrow.

I didn’t believe the cops were going to charge Soupy with a thing. More likely, I thought, the sheriff was trying to squeeze him for information.

So my next stop had to be Dingus-if Dingus would even talk. He didn’t do phones. I would have to go see him, hope whoever was at the front desk-maybe Darlene-would tell him I was there. I looked at my watch. I had enough time if he didn’t make me wait too long, if he agreed to see me at all.

I was about to get up from the bench when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“You are truly deep in thought, young man.”

I turned to see Parmelee Gilbert, attorney-at-law, in a charcoal topcoat and a wool scarf the color of a carrot.

“Impressive,” he said. “Would that all of us in Starvation think so hard about what we’re doing.”

“Hey, Parm,” I said. “I wish I knew what I was doing. How are you?”

“Staying busy.” He peeled the leather glove off of his right hand and extended it. “I am very sorry for your loss.”

I knew he meant it. “Thanks. Mom’s taking it pretty hard.”

“These sorts of things are never easy,” he said, and he meant that too. He slipped his glove back on. “Please extend my sincerest condolences.”

“I will, thanks. Did you see Gracie’s mom?”

The question took him by surprise. He folded his arms behind his back and leaned slightly forward, a polite smile on his face. Parmelee Gilbert was nothing if not polite. As Laird Haskell’s lawyer, he never failed to return my calls and politely decline to comment or to make his client available for questions.

“Shirley McBride?” he said. “I did speak with her, yes.”

“Ah, sorry,” I said. “Attorney-client privilege?”

He stood straight again, and peered past me down the street. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”

Twin mugs of tea steeped on coasters on Parmelee Gilbert’s desk. He sat in a leather chair behind the desk and lifted each of his legs to strip the slickened rubbers off his wingtips. The shoes gleamed with what I assumed was that morning’s polish. “I apologize,” Gilbert said, while setting the rubbers on a rug, “that I haven’t had you in before.”

From the straight-backed chair facing his desk, I could have laughed without being rude. Gilbert himself might have laughed with me. He had so thoroughly stonewalled me on my Haskell stories that I had almost given up on calling him. Of course I couldn’t actually give up; I had to keep trying, at least so I could tell the faithful readers of the Pilot that I had. Each time I called, he would thank me for calling with my “pertinent questions,” ask me to give his best to my mother, and promise to get back to me “with the clearest possible response I can offer.”

And then, invariably, he would call me at 5:40 p.m., twenty minutes before my deadline, to say, “We’re sorry, but Mr. Haskell prefers not to discuss these matters in the press” or “With our apologies, Mr. Haskell is focused exclusively on the positive aspects of this extremely vital project for Pine County and Starvation Lake.” He was a lawyer representing a lawyer. Sometimes I would wonder: Did Gilbert think at all like Haskell? Did he envy Haskell’s success? Or envy Haskell himself?

Gilbert always thanked me yet again for giving his client-never him, always his client-the opportunity to comment. He always declined, no matter how or how many times I asked, to say anything further. To my occasional attempts to get him to guide me one way or the other on an off-the-record basis, he would merely say, “With all due respect to you and your colleagues, in my experience there is no such thing as off the record.”

I knew reporters at my old paper, the Times, and our rival, the Free Press, who would have been pleased, even relieved, to have Gilbert’s nonresponse; it’s so much easier and quicker five minutes before deadline to insert “ so-and-so declined to comment ” than to have to shoehorn in a last-minute point-by-point rebuttal of every fact and nuance in your story without making it a he-said, she-said jumble that threatened readers with whiplash. “ No comment ” made a reporter’s job simpler. Unfortunately, simpler had never had much appeal for me. If I had preferred simpler, I never would have left Starvation, never would have gambled away my job in Detroit, never would have left the blessed sinecure of my crease and goalposts and mesh to play wing.

I had to grudgingly respect Parmelee Gilbert for refusing to go off the record. He was correct, of course, that there was no such thing. There was fact and there was fiction and it didn’t matter whether you said it was “according to a person familiar with the matter” if the person supposedly familiar was lying or ignorant or stupid. I had known plenty of lawyers and flacks who viewed off the record as an opportunity to dissemble and obfuscate. Gilbert hadn’t been terribly helpful, but at least he’d been honest in his unhelpfulness. So I didn’t laugh when he apologized for not having me in before.

“You’re doing your job,” I said. “I just figure you could bill a lot more hours by actually answering my questions.”

He smiled. “Milk? Sugar?”

“A little of both, please.”

While he finished preparing the tea, I looked around. For a lawyer who had hung his cedar shake shingle on Main Street for more than thirty years, Gilbert’s career mementoes were scant. Framed degrees from Michigan Tech, a bachelor’s in American history, and the University of Detroit law school decorated the otherwise empty wall to my left. A hot plate rested on the windowsill behind him. On his desk was a telephone, two pens and two sharpened pencils lined up alongside one another, and a blotter calendar neatly jotted with appointments and reminders. On my right, a waist-high bookshelf was lined with law tomes and a few slim editions of a book, Ghost Towns of Michigan.

Atop the shelf stood a photograph of a smiling girl in braces and pigtails entwined with white ribbons. She was wearing a cheerleader’s blue sweater embroidered with an interlocking “P” and “C” for Pine County High. Her name, I knew, was Carol Jo Gilbert. Had she lived, she would have been in her mid-forties.

When the girl was fourteen, her mother, Gilbert’s wife, had taken her downstate on an annual Christmas shopping trip. They went from store to store in the big Northland Center mall north of Detroit, stopping as always at Sanders for lunch. The mother left Carol Jo to finish a chocolate soda while going to a pay phone to let her husband know they were having fun.

Carol Jo wasn’t seen again until the ice melted on a pond near Harbor Beach where her killer had dumped her. I remembered hearing about it as a boy, the hushed, anxious whispers, the shaking heads and furrowed brows, while eating breakfast at Audrey’s with my mother. Carol Jo’s killer was never found.

Two months after Carol Jo was buried, her mother, who had not been seen outside the Gilbert home since the funeral, showed up at Sunday Mass in the middle of the priest’s homily. Mom and I, sitting in the front row, heard the murmur rising in the pews behind us and turned to see Mrs. Gilbert, in a wrinkled flannel shirt with the tails out, walking purposefully up the center aisle. She stopped in front of the communion rail. From the lectern astride the altar, Father Emmett gave her a sideways glance but continued with his sermon.

Her first scream stopped him. You have nothing for me, she yelled. She raised an arm and pointed at the tabernacle. You have nothing but death. Father Emmett stepped away from the lectern toward Mrs. Gilbert- Mary Jo, he said-but she kept up her wail as if he weren’t there, as if none of us were there. You are nothing. You are nothing but death.

Darlene’s father and two other men came out from their pews and tried to take Mary Jo Gilbert by the shoulders and settle her down but she pushed them away and continued her keening. Father Emmett hopped over the communion rail and approached her with his hand out, palm down, as if to bless her, but she slapped his hand away. I turned and watched the men drag her down the aisle until my mother twisted me around and told me to mind my own business.

Late that night, Parmelee Gilbert called the police to say his wife had gone to the grocery store hours before and had not come home. Early the next morning, two officers appeared on Gilbert’s front doorstep on Ambling Street. They told him his wife had been found in the woods a mile north of the lake. She had used a garden hose to feed the tailpipe exhaust back into her car. After burying Mary Jo, Parmelee Gilbert sold the home where the three of them had lived and bought another house two blocks away.

I had to believe that was why he had invited me in.

Now he walked from his house to his office each morning, Monday through Saturday, and returned home each night around six, carrying a brown leather satchel under one arm. His caseload was mostly mundane and domestic-probate, real estate closings, property tax appeals. He politely declined to handle divorces or disputes between neighbors, surrendering that business to lawyers in other towns. He was a fixture at town council and county commission meetings but rarely if ever showed up for more social events like hockey games or euchre tournaments or even the annual Kiwanis Christmas brunch. Such aloofness was normally frowned upon in Starvation Lake, but Parmelee Gilbert was forgiven, more because of Carol Jo than his wife.

He picked up his tea and gestured for me to do the same. “You inquired about Mrs. McBride,” he said.

I sipped. He’d gotten the sugar just right. “Yeah.”

“Please. I want to make it clear that she is not my client.”

“Got it. But I heard-”

“You heard that she is curious about the existence of a life insurance policy connected with the unfortunate demise of her daughter.”

“That’s right.”

He propped a wingtip against the edge of his desk and pulled his left sock taut on a pale calf. “I am not in position to confirm that there was or wasn’t a life insurance policy involved in this matter,” he said. He repeated the sock pull on his right leg. “But I can confirm that I have agreed, as of this morning, to represent the Haverford Life Insurance Company of Traverse City.”

“This morning?”

He sat up straight, picked up his mug, and looked at me over the top of it. “That is what I said.”

“But you can’t confirm that Gracie had a life insurance policy?”

“That would, as you say, violate the attorney-client privilege.”

“We are on the record, yes?”

“Unless I say otherwise.”

So he was confirming that Gracie had a life insurance policy without leaving his fingerprints, all while staying comfortably on the record. Why else would Gilbert have been hired that very morning?

I imagined Shirley McBride storming into his office, demanding her cut of the insurance proceeds, threatening to go to the paper, which of course she already had. Now Gilbert was trying to keep things calm and accurate and within his control.

“Sorry,” I said. “This probably isn’t comfortable for you.”

“It’s my job.”

“So Shirley is the beneficiary?”

Gilbert gave me a tiny smile, then took it back.

“I didn’t say there was a life insurance policy. However, just for your information, if there was in fact a policy, I would not be at liberty to tell you who any beneficiaries might be, as that would indeed violate attorney-client privilege as well as the potential beneficiaries’ privacy.”

“Understood.”

I wished I had looked more carefully through the file folders and papers in the cabinet in Gracie’s Zam shed. The policy might have been in there. What a dope I am, I thought.

“In addition,” Gilbert said, “strictly for your background information, life insurance policies are frequently voided in cases where the insured has inflicted death on him- or herself. In effect, there would be no beneficiaries in such a case.”

“Right. And you think Gracie was a suicide.”

“Gus, for the record, I have not said that the deceased is in any way related to my being retained by the Haverford Company. I trust that whatever you write, if you write anything, will reflect that.”

“Understood. But why would someone who planned to kill themself bother with a life insurance policy?”

He sat back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap.

“Off the record?” he said.

“Off the record?”

“Yes,” Gilbert said, as if he went off the record as routinely as he tied his tie every morning. He looked down at his folded hands. “As you can imagine, I feel terrible for Mrs. McBride and everyone who knew the girl. The loss is no less, whatever the cause.” He stopped. I waited. He looked up, his eyes flitting to the photo of his daughter before returning to me. “But who can divine the workings of a single human heart? Who really knows what a person thinks and believes when he or she decides to do whatever they do?”

I thought of Gracie sitting on the edge of her cot in the Zam shed, alone, weary, bedraggled, alcoholic. Why would anyone have wanted to kill her? Who could possibly have had a motive?

“Yes,” I said. “But you have a client with money on the line.”

“I am not speaking for any client.”

“Sorry. Will I see you at town council Wednesday?”

“Back on the record. Always possible. My clients frequently have business before the council.”

“I’m sure I’ll be there.”

“Well then.” He stood. “I have an appointment to get to.”

“How can I help you?”

Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho leaned back against the front edge of his gray metal desk, thick arms folded across his thick midsection, one hand twirling a curl of his mustache. The room smelled of Tiparillos and, strangely, perfume. Dingus had kept me waiting outside his office for half an hour. He didn’t usually make me wait. I had only an hour or so to file my stories and write up the other junk waiting back at the newsroom. I cut to the chase.

“No way it’s suicide.”

“You knew her,” Dingus said. “What do you think?”

Since I had returned to Starvation a year and a half before, Dingus and I had come to an unspoken trust that we would not deliberately waste each other’s time. Even in the typical cop-and-reporter cat and mouse, there was purpose. He had his, I had mine, and he had learned that I might actually know things that he did not. In the hallway outside his office hung a framed copy of a Pilot front page. The banner headline read, “Police Uncover Porn Ring.” We had helped each other on that story. Dingus could have had a byline.

Darlene merely tolerated my relationship with Dingus. I knew it rankled her that the sheriff could seem more forthcoming with me than with his own deputies. I told her that a big part of his job was managing information, and sometimes he had to pay more attention to someone digging for it than to people who were beholden to him for their jobs. “Bullshit,” she replied. “It’s because you’re a boy.”

“Hell, Dingus,” I said. “I didn’t know Gracie. She didn’t live here for years.”

“You guys were in Detroit together.”

“No. We were just there at the same time. We might as well have been living on different planets.”

He stopped twirling his mustache and squinted one eye. “And you had no idea whatsoever what she was doing down there?”

“Nope.”

“You know, of course, I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation.”

I’d heard that line before. He wouldn’t have had me into his office if he didn’t want me to know something. Or wanted something from me.

“What’s with the leaks to Channel Eight?” I said. “You want to get on TV? Or are you just trying to help D’Alessio get laid?”

Dingus ignored that and moved around behind his desk. His swivel chair groaned as he sat. He moved a half-filled doughnut box aside, reached into a drawer, and came out with a glossy black pamphlet. “I like this,” he said, waggling it in front of his face. “Some vagrant gave it to me in Florida when I was down there for a conference.”

I saw the title on the pamphlet cover: Hiding from God. Dingus read aloud: “‘When we open the newspaper, we see for the most part bad news. We see more of the dark side of humanity than the good and decent side.’ ” He looked over the top of the pamphlet at me. “Here’s the best line: ‘The newspaper is simply a snapshot of the darkness that is within each one of us.’ ”

“I was definitely thinking that the other day as I was typing up the St. Jude Society’s lost-and-found list.”

Dingus set the pamphlet on his blotter and pointed at my face. “Don’t give me that smart-ass bull. Your sister’s dead and all you care about is your stupid little scoops?”

His singsong voice sometimes made it hard to take him seriously. Not at the moment. His mood tasted like all the sharp metal in the room, the angle-iron chairs, the star points on his badge, the shelf brackets, his pistol.

“She wasn’t my sister,” I said.

“For all intents and purposes, she damned well was. Nobody took better care of her than your mother. I had the distinct privilege of being reminded of that about an hour ago when Gracie’s other mother was sitting in that chair you’re in now.”

“Shirley?” That explained the perfume.

Dingus snatched a yellow Post-it note off his blotter and slapped it down on the desk in front of me. I leaned in. The perfume filled my nostrils. Shirley usually used enough to deodorize a

ballroom. I peered at her scribble, which listed to the right: MUST TALK. URGINT NEWS. PLEAS CALL 231 555 3671.

“This is for me?” I said. “She’s threatening you?”

“Hell’s bells, it would take me all night to tell you how many times she’s told me she’d be going to the Pilot with this little bitch or that. She’s the least of my worries.”

I ignored the vibrating cell phone in my pocket.

“What did she want?”

He jumped up from his chair and paced to the back of the room, where a pair of particle-board shelves held cans of pepper spray, an assortment of black-and-chrome-colored handcuffs, and a photograph of Dingus’s ex-wife and current girlfriend, Barbara. “She wants me to find a murderer,” he said. His voice turned sarcastic. “She wants her daughter avenged. She wants closure.”

I imagined Shirley pounding her fat pink fist on Dingus’s desk, the bracelets she bought out of the clearance bin at Glen’s rattling, her bleached blond perm bouncing. She’d be wearing Kmart designer jeans pushing the zipper flap open and one of those $17.50 THROW AWAY THAT CORK! sweatshirts from the Just One More Saloon. Around town it was said that Shirley had sold her dead husband’s Purple Heart medal for $33.50 on an Internet auction site. It wasn’t hard to believe.

“She wants the life insurance proceeds,” I said. “And she’s going to raise a stink about it. But there is a murderer, isn’t there, Dingus?”

“l’ll be goddamned,” he said, turning away from me.

A light on Dingus’s phone started to blink. He didn’t notice. He was pacing from the shelf to his desk and back. The light went off and Dingus stopped in the middle of the room and held his arms out wide. His face flushed red.

“Why?” he said. “Why the hell did she have to come back here?” He pointed at his phone. “That thing’s been ringing all day. Every damn member of the county commission and the town council’s calling to tell me, ‘Leave it alone, Dingus’ and ‘Just let it lie, Dingus.’ ”

“Nobody wants a murder around here,” I said. “They have more important things to worry about.”

“Shirley’s just trailer trash to them, not worth the overtime,” Dingus said. “That doesn’t surprise me one bit. But they’re calling Doc Joe, too.” The county coroner. “They’re not supposed to do that. Doc, he gets the faintest whiff they might cut his budget, he’ll sign whatever they want.”

“Are they threatening to whack you too?”

“Funny you should ask.”

Dingus stepped to his desk, grabbed a file folder, and plucked out a sheet of paper that had come over a fax machine. He handed it to me. “You can’t have this,” he said. “But you can read it.”

The fax had been sent at 11:18 that morning. It was signed by town council chairman Elvis Bontrager. The town, which had long ago eliminated its own police force for lack of funds, now relied on the sheriff’s department and contributed to its budget. Elvis’s letter said an allocation of money for the purchase of two new police cruisers might have to be “temporarily delayed” because of “reconciliation issues” that had recently cropped up.

Damn, I thought. Laird Haskell, who probably didn’t know and certainly wouldn’t have cared, was picking Dingus’s pocket. Instead of paying for better public safety, the council was about to give $100,000 to a supposed millionaire so he could build a hockey rink. Great for the story I was about to write. Not so great for Starvation. Unless, of course, the River Rats won a state championship. Then everything would be fine, and it wouldn’t matter to a soul if the local cops had to resort to bicycles to do their jobs.

“That sucks,” I said, handing the letter back. “They can just do that?”

“They can just do that,” Dingus said. “And that’s not all. They’re talking with the county commission about more cuts. Just between us.”

I thought about Darlene. For all of her carping about Dingus and the other “boys” at the department, she loved being a police officer. She would hate to lose her job so the town could have a shiny new hockey arena.

“Why do they give a rip?”

Dingus might have been the only person in town-except, perhaps, my mother-who didn’t care about hockey. He’d never played it, didn’t watch it, and probably thought it just caused him a lot of grief, what with all the postgame bar fights and drunks steering their way out of the rink parking lot.

“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe they think a big murder investigation’ll spook their bankers and that rich fellow will walk and they won’t get their precious rink. I don’t know what the hell these people think.”

“What are you going to do?”

He sat down heavily in his chair. His phone started blinking again. “I plan to proceed with-”

There was a knock at Dingus’s door. It opened and Deputy Frank D’Alessio ducked his head in. He gave me a What the fuck are you doing here? look before telling Dingus, “Sheriff, you have a call.”

“I can see that,” Dingus said. “Who is it?”

D’Alessio glanced at me and said, “Uh, a council member.”

“Which council member, Deputy?”

“Chairman Bontrager.”

“Not now.”

“He said it’s important.”

“Tell him to go cut a hole in the lake and jump in.”

D’Alessio grinned. “I’ll tell him you’ll call back when you can.”

Dingus watched the door close.

“So,” I said, “you’re not really going to charge Soupy, are you? You just leaked that to buy yourself some time with the politicians.”

Dingus shrugged his acknowledgment. At least he hadn’t used me like he had Channel Eight. “I could still charge him with obstruction, though.”

“He’s not talking?”

“No, he’s-excuse me.”

A different light on his phone was blinking. Dingus picked up the phone and turned in his chair until he faced away from me. But I could still hear him, as he undoubtedly knew. “What’s up, Doc?” he said.

A full minute passed. “OK. Let me know. Thanks.” He turned around and hung up the phone. “Goddammit-why did she have to come back here?” He said it less to me than to himself. “You know, whatever happened to that girl-and we are off the record here, son-whatever happened to that girl has nothing whatsoever to do with the people of this town. Nothing at all.”

“Why don’t you send someone down to Detroit?”

“No,” he said. “They’re not going to have that.”

“They?”

He waved at his phone. “The whole lot of them.” He shook his head. “I told her not to come back here. I told her never come back.”

“What are you talking about?”

He pushed back up from his desk and walked to a file cabinet in the back corner of the office. He stretched a key ring on a retractable tether from his gun belt to the top drawer and unlocked it. He took out a brown accordion file, put it under one arm, locked the drawer, walked to the door, and opened it.

“This way,” he said.

I followed him out of his office. We walked down the corridor past the entrance, me glancing into offices to see if I might catch a glimpse of Darlene. I did not. At the end of the hallway we reached the locked door that opened into the Pine County Jail. Dingus peered through the little window crosshatched with steel. The door buzzed and Dingus pulled it open. He turned to me then and casually handed me the accordion folder.

“Hang on to this,” he said. “Do not lose it. Wait here.”

I took the folder and stood waiting, hoping no one would walk up and ask me what I was doing with a folder stamped CONFIDENTIAL on both sides. I stuffed it under an arm and glanced up at the surveillance camera screwed into the wall above the door, peering down on me like a crow on a telephone wire.

The door buzzed again. It opened and Soupy stepped through, Dingus right behind him. Past his shoulder I saw Darlene walking away and had to stop myself from calling after her.

“I’m releasing Mr. Campbell to you,” Dingus said. He turned to Soupy. “I’m not through with you. If you even think about taking any out-of-town trips, we’ll have you back in here before you hit the interstate. Got it?”

“Got it,” Soupy said.

“You tell them anything?” I said.

Soupy and I had just pulled out of the department lot, my headlamps carving the blackness into cones of white.

“I’m going broke, man,” he said. “Just get me back to my bar.”

He wasn’t going to talk. Not now. There’d be time to push him later.

There were all sorts of questions I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Dingus: What about that rejection letter Gracie had supposedly gotten? Why was she wearing only one shoe when she died? How did she get up into the shoe tree? Where was the ladder? Where was the car? Dingus might not have answered any of them. He usually gave me only what he wanted me to know, so that I might, in doing my own job, help him.

So I was dying to see what was in that accordion folder I’d stuck beneath my seat.

I glanced at Soupy. The way he was staring out his passenger window, I had to wonder if he was actually distraught over Gracie’s death, if he realized, facing the cops, that Gracie actually had mattered for more than whatever she did for him in bed, or on a Zamboni.

We rode in silence for a mile. Then, without turning to me, Soupy said, “Got something to tell you.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not yanking your chain.”

“About what?”

He shifted in his seat until he was looking out the windshield. “They put me in that room where the prisoners see their lawyers,” he said. I’d been in the room once for an interview myself. There was a table bolted to the floor, a few hard-backed chairs, a single window covered with a metal cage. “I’m looking out at the back lot, and who rolls up but Meat.”

“Jason?”

“Yep.”

My heart was suddenly racing. “And?”

“He wasn’t there to pick up his safe-snowmobiling certificate, Trap.”

He told me he saw Darlene come out to meet Jason. She wasn’t wearing a coat. I imagined her holding her arms tight around her bosom, her breath billowing around her head. Of course Soupy couldn’t hear anything. Then someone came to take him to another room.

“Well,” I said, “they probably have divorce details to work out.”

“Maybe. Didn’t notice any lawyers out there.”

I kept my eyes on the unfurling white road, my lights flashing on the lower halves of tree trunks whisking by in the dusk.

“Thought you’d want to know,” Soupy said.

“Yeah. Thanks.” The lamps along Main Street were coming into view ahead. “They didn’t, at least when-?”

“No. No touchy feely. But… I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“Looked to me like he wants her back or something.”

I cackled. It came out sounding like someone else. “That ain’t going to happen.”

I dropped Soupy at Enright’s and went around the block to the Pilot back lot, where I sat in the dark checking the messages on my cell phone.

The three council members I had called said they would have no comment on whatever story I was working on. A fourth whom I had not called also left a message saying she wasn’t interested in commenting. I had to figure they knew what I was going to ask.

The fifth message came from Darlene. She said she had to work late, don’t bother making spaghetti dinner, she’d catch up with me at the Rats game, or later. She loved me. She had to go.

Relax, I told myself. She still had issues to work through. She wasn’t going anywhere. Everything would be all right. I’d try her again later. We’d lock her door against the night and hide beneath her blankets.

I switched on an inside light and pulled the accordion folder out from under my seat. A label pasted to the top of the folder was inscribed in felt-tip pen: “McBRIDE, Grace Maureen, 08/26/95.”

I reached inside and pulled out a stapled bundle of pages, maybe fifteen in all. It was an official Pine County Sheriff’s Department report. I flipped immediately to the last page and, sure enough, there was the signature of then-deputy Dingus Aho. “Fucking-ay,” I said.

I looked at my watch: 5:21. I had thirty-nine minutes to write two stories and a few briefs. No sweat, I thought. But, as much as I wanted to see whatever Dingus wanted me to see, I did not have time then to sit and read that police report. There was no chance of it going in that night’s paper, and if I didn’t get my work done on deadline, I’d have a call from Jim Kerasopoulous waiting for me at eight o’clock the next morning. I had no desire to talk to Kerasopoulous, not about my dedication to my job, not about the future of the Pilot, not about the weather.

I slipped the folder back under the seat and started across the lot toward the newsroom. By now Philo was probably panicking. I started to write the Gracie story in my head. I wasn’t about to write the standard “apparent suicide” story, but, given what I had heard at the sheriff’s department, I had to be careful about using the word “murder.” Foul play, I typed on my imaginary keyboard, may have played a role in the macabre death of a Starvation Lake woman…

I stopped in my tracks.

Starvation Lake woman?

I turned and trotted back to my truck, unlocked the door. The inside light came on. I reached under the seat and slipped the police report out of the accordion folder. I wanted to see just one thing. It was typed on the very first page, just below Gracie’s name and house address: “Melvindale, Michigan.”

Melvindale sat just south of Detroit on the northwest border of River Rouge. River Rouge was the old steel town where the X’d-out calendar hanging over Gracie’s bed had come from.

I knew Melvindale. I’d played hockey there when I lived downstate and drank in a bar called Nasty Melvin’s. I hid the folder and locked my truck. Walking back to the newsroom, I had a feeling I might be visiting Nasty Melvin’s again.