The Hanging Tree

twelve

The old rink shuddered with cheers as I walked in.

Through the glass doors between the lobby and the arena, I saw Taylor Haskell glide away from his net with the puck cradled against his chest in his catching glove, his stick held high to ward off opponents who might think of giving him a little after-the-whistle bump. Three young River Rats in their blue-and-gold uniforms coalesced around him, whacking his leg pads with their sticks as Taylor flipped the puck to a referee. Whistles trilled and Taylor returned to his net. The stands exploded again with applause.

The scoreboard said River Rats 1, Maroons 0.

I’d had to park in the First Presbyterian lot a quarter mile from the arena because cops were waving vehicles away from the jammed rink lot. Pickups and SUVs lined the road shoulders for two hundred yards in either direction. A handmade sign taped to the arena’s double-door entrance announced TONIGHT’s GAME SOLD OUT! Luckily, as a Rats alumnus I needed no ticket, regardless of my allowing that title-blowing goal in ’81.

I squeezed into the crowd lining the glass to the left of Taylor Haskell. Though I didn’t play goalie anymore, when I watched a game I still liked to be near the furious action around the net. Be they pros or teens or squirts in jerseys that hung to their shin guards, I liked to see the expressions on their faces, hear the shit-talking between opponents, watch the goaltender try to keep a clear line of vision to the puck through all of the crisscrossing bodies.

From up in the bleachers, hockey looks like a game of savage grace and swift beauty, which it is, but only up close can you see how hunger and poise and guile and anger can make a player who lacks wheels and hands the best player on the ice at any given moment, sometimes the moment that decides a game. Only up close can you see the difference between someone who knows how to play ice hockey and someone who is a genuine hockey player.

As the skaters glided into the face-off circle to his left, awaiting the next drop of the puck, Taylor skated slowly back and forth between his posts, settling himself after his last save. HASKELL read the white-and-gold nameplate across the back of his shoulders, over the numeral 19. Goaltenders usually wore number 1 or 30 or 31 or 35, but I had heard that Taylor wore 19 because it was the number of his favorite Red Wing, Steve Yzerman, and of his most hated Red Wing opponent, the wily sniper Joe Sakic of the Colorado Avalanche. I had never heard of a kid wearing the number of a player he didn’t like; I guessed Taylor had a mind of his own.

The teams lined up at the face-off dot to Taylor’s left. He got into his squat, square to the dot, his catching glove open at his left shoulder, his stick pressing flat against the ice. I wondered if he had always been a goaltender. Many a player becomes a goalie by default: as a six- or seven-year-old, he’s the weakest skater on the frozen lake or the flooded backyard, so he gets stuck standing at one end of the rink, stopping pucks and jumping up and down on his blades to keep warm when the action’s at the other end. But many goalies develop into strong and agile skaters who can stay with the fleetest defensemen and forwards on their teams, even while wearing all that extra armor. And some can shoot as hard as any of them, too, for their arms and wrists have grown sinewy wielding that big stick with those potholder gloves.

But, at least on the ice, they remain alone, always.

I’d thought I quit tending goal because I was tired of waiting around for things to happen. Which is what goalies do, a lot of the time. But now, as the referee dropped the puck and I followed it between one center’s skates to a winger’s stick blade and off the high glass and outside the blue line where the River Rat center gave chase against a Marquette defenseman, I thought maybe I had stopped because I no longer wanted to feel alone.

In the dressing room, in the hockey shop, in the tavern, the goalie is one of the boys. On the ice he is stranded, lost inside his bloated pads, hiding his face behind a mask. When he gives up a goal his teammates figure he should have stopped, he is alone, circling his crease, dousing himself from his water bottle, wishing he had another chance at the shot he was sure he had with the toe of his skate until it hit someone’s knee and deflected just inside the post.

He knows that on the bench the other guys are muttering about the pylon or sieve or funnel between the pipes. He knows that even if he had a chance to explain-the puck took a funny hop, the defenseman left a guy uncovered-he would not be understood. Because nobody sees the game as a goalie does: as a low, flat, horizontal puzzle of bodies and blind spots and caroms and bounces that is constantly being assembled and disassembled on his left, his right, behind him, his left again, in front of him, beneath him, down low, up high. All of which he feels responsible for trying to control. Even if he isn’t, really. Even if it’s ultimately impossible to control, or even make sense of.

Not terribly unlike my day job. Or my life.

Marquette’s number 6 collected the puck and slapped it across the rink to his defensive partner, number 4. Beyond the boards behind him I noticed Darlene and Deputy Skip Catledge standing in uniform at the entrance to the Zamboni shed. No yellow police tape was in sight. The Zamboni driver was dead but the game would go on.

Number 4 shoveled the puck right back to 6. High above 6’s helmeted head at the top of the bleachers perched the private box Laird Haskell had built. A banner proclaiming “The Rat Pack is BACK” hung the length of the box. I couldn’t see inside the box from where I was, but usually Laird Haskell stood at one end with a mixed drink in hand, chattering with whatever guests he might have without ever taking his eyes off his son. Whenever the puck was around Taylor’s net, Laird Haskell would stop his conversation and shout clipped commands at the boy: Stop it! Kick it! Grab it! Freeze it! And just before face-offs, always: Focus! I never heard him say “Taylor”; instead Laird Haskell called his son “19”, or “number 19”. I couldn’t tell if Taylor heard his father. He never looked up at the box or made any other sign of acknowledgment, unless you counted the way he sometimes bowed his head when his father snapped, Nineteen! Focus! Maybe Taylor was focusing. Or maybe not.

Next to Haskell’s box, the bleachers were filled top to bottom, blue line to blue line with high school kids wearing gold sweatshirts embossed in blue with the slogan the puck stops here. The Rats had started selling the shirts after the Haskells arrived the autumn before and Taylor, the brand-new goalie from downstate, started the season by shutting out the first five opponents he faced. He snapped his catching glove like a bullwhip, and he got down and up and from one post to the other faster than goalies who were years older. Some of the kids passing me to go to the concession stand and the pay phones had had their sweatshirts autographed by the fourteen-year-old guarding the Rats goal tonight.

I had met Taylor Haskell once, a few weeks before.

I had gone into the rink pro shop to buy a stick. I was looking at the rack with left-hand curves when I noticed a kid in River Rats sweats picking through the right-curve sticks on the opposite side of the rack. Taylor said the gold stitching over his left breast. He selected an Easton and held it in both hands like a right wing would. He leaned down on the shaft until it bent a little, testing its stiffness.

“Fresh lumber?” I said. “Aren’t you in the wrong rack?”

He looked up and his cheeks flushed as if I had caught him doing something wrong. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the door to the shop.

“Um,” he said. “Just waiting for my mom.”

“You want those, don’t you?” I pointed at a rack of paddle-bladed goalie sticks across the room. “That little thing you got isn’t going to stop a slapper.”

“I’m just looking.”

I walked around and offered my hand. We shook. He was a little taller than I’d thought. His damp brown hair-he’d just showered after practice-glistened over blue eyes flecked with green. He had a pinkish sprinkle of acne along his forehead. Except for the eyes, he looked like his father.

“Gus Carpenter,” I said. “I used to have a jacket like that.”

He looked down at his jacket, as if he’d forgotten he had it on. “You were on the Rats?”

“A long time ago. Played goalie, too. Not anymore, though.”

“Huh. How come?”

“How come what?”

“How come you stopped playing goal?”

It was not an idle question asked by a bored adolescent. Number 19 of the Hungry River Rats really wanted to know why I had chosen to leave goaltending behind. I wondered if Taylor Haskell knew that I had been the goat of the ’81 title game. Maybe he hadn’t been in Starvation long enough for that indoctrination.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Guess I had enough of people shooting pucks at my head. Time to have some fun for once, you know?”

I was joking, but Taylor didn’t take it that way.

“Yeah,” he said. “What’s it like?”

“Playing out of the net?”

“Yeah.”

I really hadn’t given it much thought. I knew I didn’t feel nearly as much pressure playing wing. That was probably the best part. Even in a men’s league where games started at 11:45 p.m. and guys showed up stoned or drunk, I got butterflies before going out to tend goal. Wingers can screw up two or three times a shift and nobody cares. A goalie screws up twice in a game and their buddies start yelling at them to start fucking trying already.

“It’s fun,” I said. “I mean, I’m nothing great on wing and, from what I’ve seen, I wasn’t nearly the goalie you are.”

“Taylor, what are you doing?”

The woman was standing in the lobby just outside the shop in a white ankle-length parka trimmed with fur. She gave me a once-over without meeting my eyes. Taylor turned around and said, “Can I get a stick?”

“Taylor,” she said. “We don’t have all day.”

“Come on, Mom.”

The woman gave me a look that said this was none of my business.

“We’ll talk to your father again tonight.”

Taylor’s shoulders drooped. “Oh, right.”

“We’ll see.” She waved him out. “Let’s go.”

Now Marquette’s number 6 faked around a Rats wing and veered left toward the center of the ice. Jeremy Bontrager, Elvis’s nephew, stepped up to cut him off but 6 wound his stick back behind his left ear and, one stride outside the blue line, slapped a long, chest-high, flip-flopping shot at Taylor Haskell.

Following the fluttering puck while watching Taylor out of the corner of my eye, I knew immediately that he’d come out of his crease half a second too late. The crowd didn’t know it, but I could feel them holding their breath anyway, because Taylor Haskell, for all of his shutouts and spectacular stops, had gradually gotten a reputation for giving up soft goals.

It’s one thing for a goalie to stop back-to-back shots then watch a third one go in as he’s sprawled on the ice. It’s one thing for a goalie to be beaten by a sniper firing a bullet of a shot through a tangle of bodies. It’s one thing for a goalie to succumb to a skater bearing down unmolested who knows exactly what he’s going to do with the puck. But it’s another thing entirely for a goalie to let in a goal he should not let in: A middling wrister that sneaks between his legs or wobbles high when he guessed down. Or, worst of all, a long dying quail of a shot that the shooter himself never imagined would score, that the shooter was just flipping toward the net in hopes of a rebound or a face-off.

Soft goals are death to a hockey team. Almost nothing-a stupid penalty, a missed empty net-is more demoralizing. A team can totally dominate a game, outskating their opponents, beating them to every loose puck, blasting shot after shot at the opposing net, but if their own goalie then lets in a shot that everyone in the rink knows a blind man could have stopped, the game can change as suddenly and unforgivingly as if the teams had traded jerseys. A goaltender never wants to give up any kind of goal. But when I played in the net, there were nights when I would rather have faced the other squad’s best skater on a breakaway than a tumbling puck sliding toward me from a hundred feet away.

Nobody in Starvation Lake was saying it out loud, because the softies surrendered so far by Taylor Haskell had come late in games, with the Rats enjoying comfortable leads. But there were whispers nonetheless. About the high one against Muskegon that he seemed to lose in the lights. The weak backhander that dribbled between his skates against Panorama Engineering. The one from behind his net that bounced in off of his butt against Compuware. The titters and the whispers became nervous little jokes that Taylor was so impenetrable that he had to actually let other teams score once in a while.

The night Compuware scored off of his rear end, Channel Eight was waiting in the arena lobby when Taylor emerged from the dressing room. Usually his parents whisked him out a side door to their idling SUV, but tonight Laird and Felicia had gotten intercepted by Elvis Bontrager, and they weren’t about to cut off the chairman of the town council. By the time they reached Taylor, he was standing in a ring of teammates and their moms and dads, bathed in camera light and speaking haltingly into a microphone held by Tawny Jane Reese. I happened to be there, standing behind a gaggle of girls getting up on their toes for a glimpse of number 19.

Tawny Jane asked him about the game-the Rats had won, 4-1-and he grinned and said it was a lot easier to be a goalie when the puck was in the other end most of the time. Good answer, I thought. She asked what he thought of the new rink going up and he said he hoped it would be ready for next season. Oops, wrong answer, I was thinking when I felt someone push past me: Laird Haskell. Felicia had him by a sleeve but he pulled away and pushed through the throng. Tawny Jane was asking the boy what had happened on that butt-bounce goal.

Taylor didn’t seem to mind. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” he said. He shrugged. “I was kind of bored.”

“Miss Reese,” Haskell said. “Please.”

Tawny Jane looked up. Taylor turned around, eyes wide with apprehension, looking like he had in the pro shop when I’d seen him shopping for regular sticks. I turned and saw Felicia standing with her hands clapped over her mouth, looking mortified.

“Please turn that off,” Laird Haskell said as he emerged into the camera light. “Miss Reese, I really wish you would have asked me about interviewing my son.”

Tawny Jane looked over her shoulder at her cameraman. The light stayed on. “Mr. Haskell,” she said, shoving the mike in his face. “Taylor tells us he hopes the new rink is ready for next season.” She smiled her widest fake smile. “Does he know something the rest of us don’t?”

Haskell shook his head no as he took Taylor by the shoulders and moved the boy behind him. “He’s fourteen years old, Miss Reese.” Beads of sweat had broken out on Haskell’s forehead, but he pasted on his own phony smile. “I worry about the rink, he worries about keeping pucks out of the net.”

“Yeah,” one of the mothers said. “Stick to hockey, lady.” Others chimed in. Tawny Jane glanced around, saw me. I was grinning, as much in sympathy as amusement. She lowered her mike. The light went off.

“Could we talk later, Mr. Haskell?” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “Call my attorney.”

I watched Felicia grab the boy, wrap an arm around his shoulders, and hurry him away, Laird Haskell trailing behind. “Bored?” Haskell snapped. “What do you mean, bored?” Over her shoulder his wife shot him a look of searing disdain as she ushered the boy through the lobby doors.

Whoa, I thought. Bet they’ll be having a chat tonight.

Now, as the fluttering shot from Marquette’s number 6 reached Taylor Haskell, I could see that he was in trouble. Because his initial reaction had been late, he had overcompensated, trying to catch up. He was off balance, his stick had come up from the ice, and his body wasn’t square to the puck. He should have snagged it easily with his catching glove, but instead it smacked him just under his mask on the left side and bounced up and over his shoulder while he flailed with his glove. The crowd groaned. The puck bounced in the crease and rolled toward the goal line and a 1–1 score. Taylor toppled over backward, twisting his body around, stretching his glove out for the puck.

He grabbed it just before it crossed the goal line. Players crashed into one another above him. Whistles blew. The stands exploded with a cheer of relief. I felt a sharp poke in the back of a shoulder and turned around.

“Got a minute?” Jason Esper said.

He threw the inside bolt on dressing room 3. I sat in the spot where I always sat for both the Rats and Soupy’s Chowder Heads, on a bench along the cinder-block wall. The tang of disinfectant stung the air. Johnny Ford must have just swabbed the shower mats.

Jason grabbed a folding chair. He spun it around in front of me so that he sat facing me with his elbows propped on the chair back.

“Not a bad little ’tender,” he said.

“The Haskell kid? Yeah.”

“But something ain’t right.”

“Gives up a softie now and then.”

“Got lucky on that last one. But it’s more than that. He doesn’t want to be out there.” Jason smirked at me. “Kind of like you, eh, Carp?”

“He’s fourteen, Meat. I’m thirty-five.”

“Fuck,” Jason said, and he guffawed. “He’s the fucking future of Starvation Lake. And you’re the past. God fucking help us all.”

“What do you want, Jason?”

“What do I want?”

I waited.

“What the fuck do you care what I want?” he said.

I didn’t want to have this discussion. “How the hell did you end up here anyway?”

Jason shrugged. “Ah, you know, this guy knew that guy. Hockey’s a pretty small world. You know.”

He hitched the chair forward a foot. I caught a whiff of whatever goop shined in his tight blond curls.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “How the hell did Wilford fuck up his marriage? Wasn’t he married to that Brenda babe?”

“Brenda Mack.”

Why did Jason Esper care about Brad Wilford’s failed marriage?

“The calendar thing finally do him in?”

At the start of each season, Wilf dutifully noted all of his scheduled hockey games on a calendar hanging in his kitchen. He would add a fictitious game or two and, when those nights came, tell Brenda he didn’t really feel like playing, he’d rather just spend the time with her. This, he bragged to us, was the surest way to get laid without having to get his wife plastered.

Of course, this being Starvation Lake, Brenda found out.

“Among other things,” I said.

Jason studied his right hand, turning it around as if he were examining it for the first time. The stringy scars crisscrossing his knuckles made the hand look like he’d stuck it in a lawnmower. “You know,” he said, “I wasn’t just a goon. I wasn’t even a goon. I could skate. I had size. I had hands.”

“You played for the Pipefitters.”

“Yeah. But I got better after that. I had a real shot, did you know that?”

“At the pros?”

“The Flyers. Twenty-one years old. Bus gets me to Philly the afternoon of the game and I figure no way they’re putting me on the ice tonight-shit, they’re playing the Habs-so I’m getting something to eat. I go in a bar, get a couple beers and a cheesesteak, maybe another couple beers. Love those cheesesteaks with mushrooms. I walk over to the rink just to check out the locker room and I’ll be goddamned if my name isn’t on the lineup card. Dude, I’m penciled in on a line with fucking Zezel and Kerr.”

“Really.”

“I’m like, oh fuck, what do I do? I go out into the concourse because I don’t want anyone to see me in the locker room and I find a men’s room and lock myself in a stall and jam two fingers down my throat. Got a little out but the goddamn cheese just wouldn’t come up.”

“Did you play?”

“Yeah. Three shifts. Tripped a guy after he got by me because I was gassed. Stupid fucking penalty. Of course the Habs score on the power play. Coach moves me to the fourth line. I get one more shift. And that was it. One of the guys said I looked like Casper the Ghost.”

“And you never played in the bigs again.”

Jason didn’t like the way I said that.

“Always figured I would,” he said. “But that was it. One chance and I blew it. Bounced around in the minors. Started to fight, thinking I might get the call-up as a goon. Got my ass kicked a bunch but finally learned how to go and got a pretty good reputation as a hammer.” He looked at his hand again.

“Did you like fighting?”

“I don’t know. You like typing?”

“Depends what I’m typing.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Which brings us to what I’m about to tell you.”

In one quick motion he had my left wrist in his hand, squeezing the bones between his thumb and forefinger. It hurt. I tried to pull away but my arm stayed where it was. Jason leveled his eyes on mine.

“I’m done fucking up my life,” he said. “And you are done fucking my wife.”

A shiver rippled down the backs of my arms. Not because I was afraid; Jason Esper, coach-to-be of the River Rats, wasn’t about to kick my ass in a dressing room in the middle of a game with half the town in the arena. But the certainty with which he said what he said made me wonder: Had he told Darlene the same when they spoke in the parking lot behind the sheriff’s department? Had she told him to go to hell? Or had she said something that made him think he could succeed in scaring me away? Or winning her back?

“She’s only your wife,” I said, “on a piece of paper.”

Jason let go of my wrist. He stood. He picked up his chair in one hand and set it back against the wall near the shower. Then he came back and stood over me. “Maybe I should’ve got a prenup like the one old Laird stuck his old lady with, eh? Now that’s one happy fucking household. If she wants out-and believe you me, she wants out-she gets her panties back dirty, that’s about it.”

“Serves her right for negotiating with a scumbag lawyer.”

Jason leaned back and considered me.

“You know,” he said, “I had the hots for Darl way back when we were in high school. But I wasn’t one of the hotshots on the River Rats.”

He stepped forward and angled his face in close to mine.

“Now I’m the coach, motherfucker.”

“Good for you. Beat the Pipefitters, will you?”

“Uh-huh. And that piece of paper? It says we’re married. If she wanted to get divorced, she could’ve gotten divorced. I wasn’t stopping her. Now I am.”

“Sorry, Jason, but-”

“Listen,” he said. “Listen fucking good. Whatever you did with her up to this minute, count yourself lucky, because I ain’t holding it against you. But from now on, she’s my wife, and I’m going to make amends, and you goddamn better well respect that.” He showed me his cleverest smile. “Man, I’m the new coach of the new River Rats. For the sake of the team, for the sake of the town, I can’t have my wife running around with some shithead reporter who doesn’t even want a new rink built around here.”

“The rink has nothing to do with your fucked-up marriage.”

“It does now. You heard me. I ain’t fucking this up anymore. If I hear-”

It sounded like a firecracker. A huge firecracker, out in the arena. There was one booming pop, then nothing, then the screams, the women loudest and shrillest, Oh my baby my baby… “What the fuck?” Jason and I said in unison. He threw the bolt on the door and we scrambled out.

My nostrils filled with the smell of gasoline cut with something bitter that I did not recognize. I saw a cloud of black smoke turning to gray obscuring the bay where the Zamboni was stored. On both benches, coaches were yelling, “Down, get down!” and pushing their players to the floor. Parents were rushing out of the bleachers and around the boards to get at their boys. Some of the kids in the sweatshirts followed them into the lobby while others hung in the stands, hugging one another, staring across at the Zam shed.

Oh Jesus, Darlene was down there, I thought. I couldn’t see her for the smoke and the chaos of people running back and forth, so I pushed past Jason and ran down the aisle behind the benches, clambering over the young skaters cowering on the floor. Jason followed me. “Darlene,” I heard him yell and then I yelled myself, “Darlene, where are you?” I glanced up at the scoreboard. The game clock read 1:14 left in the first period; above the scoreboard, a real clock showed the time was 8:01. I slammed into Poppy Popovich, the outgoing Rats coach. “What the hell’s going on around here?” he said as Jason grabbed me by the back of my coat, tossed me aside, and hurried past.

“Halt.” Deputy Skip Catledge stopped Jason and me with both hands held high. We were about thirty feet from the Zam shed. Smoke billowed out both sides of the Zamboni’s flat snout. I saw Darlene on one knee near the back wall of the rink, her hat off, holding her head in one hand. A man I recognized as Doc Joe knelt down beside her.

“One more step and you’re going to jail,” Catledge told Jason and me.

“Is she all right?” I said, the stink burning my sinuses.

Darlene heard me, lifted her head.

“A little shaken up. She should be OK.”

“What happened? Did the Zam explode?”

Jason took another step forward, then another, until he was almost touching Catledge. “That’s my wife.”

Catledge placed a hand on Jason’s coach jacket. “Stand back, sir.”

“I’m the new coach. That’s my goddamn wife. Let me through.”

Catledge looked around at Darlene. He looked at me. “Quickly,” he said, letting Jason pass. Jason gave me a glance over his shoulder as he trotted to Darlene. I started to follow him but Catledge stopped me.

“No.”

“Come on, Skip.” What was I supposed to say? I’m sleeping with her?

“Sorry.”

“Darlene,” I shouted, but now her face was obscured behind Jason’s wide back as he moved toward her. “Darlene!”

Now she half stood. Her cheeks were streaked black with soot or motor oil. Jason put his arms around her. I didn’t see her arms wrap around him but neither did she push him away. Then she caught my eye. She shook her head no, glanced up at Jason, turned around, and disappeared into the smoke.

My mother answered on the fourth ring. I pictured her sitting in her chair in the living room. I hoped she wasn’t still grieving to Robert Goulet.

I was sitting in my idling truck in the road in front of the rink. Police tape ringed the parking lot, filled now with flashing police cruisers, fire trucks, and ambulances. Locals huddled in small groups up and down the road, trying to comprehend the possibility that someone had set off a bomb in their quiet little town with its sole traffic light at Main and Estelle, its willow-lined streets, its cozy family diner, the clear blue lake where they had learned to swim and fish and drive a speedboat. I’d jotted everything I could recall in a notebook, even though we wouldn’t have another Pilot for five days. I didn’t even know if I’d still have a job then.

My mother listened while I told her what had happened: the Zamboni had exploded. It wasn’t yet clear what had caused it. No one had been seriously hurt, including Darlene, who’d been closest to the blast. Even the Zam itself hadn’t sustained serious damage.

“Gracie’s killers did this,” Mom said.

“Well, they were a little late then.”

“Maybe this was the real plan.”

I supposed it was possible that a bomb-if it was a bomb and not just something that had gone wrong inside the Zamboni-could have been set days before and that whoever set it wouldn’t have been foolish enough to risk going back to unset it after Gracie was found dead. Luckily, no one was near enough the explosion to get seriously hurt. It just scared the hell out of everyone.

“Maybe,” I said. “Tell me, Mom, do you have any idea what exactly Gracie did all those years she was downstate? How did she make a living? Did she actually live in Detroit or one of the ’burbs?”

“I know she waitressed.”

I pictured the Gracie I had glimpsed at the Red Wings game. She didn’t look like a waitress.

“Anything else?”

“Let me think.” I couldn’t tell if Mom was struggling with her failing memory or just deciding whether to tell me something. I wished she would just go to the damn doctor. My impatience got the best of me.

“Did she ever say anything to you about an abortion?” I said.

“Why… an abortion? No. I don’t-I think I would remember that.”

“Would she even have told you?”

“Yes. Yes, I think she would have.”

I wasn’t so sure of that. I put my truck in gear. I had to steer around Tawny Jane Reese and her cameraman doing a stand-up in the middle of the road. I resisted the urge to honk my horn as I slid past her. As Kerasopoulos had told me, we were all a team now under the valiant Media North banner.

“All right,” I told Mom. “I’m heading down there.”

“Yes,” she said, talking on without hearing me, talking faster as she went, “I definitely think she would have told me that. When we had coffee Saturday, she was talking, a little wistfully I thought, about having children and-”

“Wait,” I said. “Saturday two days ago?”

“Yes, Gussy, we had coffee at Audrey’s, late in the morning. Gracie was just out of bed. Is that all right with you?”

“Fine, but you told me this morning the last time you saw her was in the drugstore last week.”

“Did I?” She hesitated. Had she let on something she didn’t mean to let on? Had she just forgotten what she was supposed to fib about? “Well, what difference does it make? I saw her again Saturday. We had coffee and a nice little chat and it was the last time I got to see her.” I heard a catch in her voice. “I’m getting a little tired of being interrogated. I didn’t kill Gracie.”

“I thought you wanted me to get to the bottom of this.”

“I think you need to get out of town.”

The cop lights flickered in my rearview mirror. I decided I had to make a quick stop at the paper.

“I just said I’m going to Detroit.”

“Good. Go safely. I’m going to bed now. I love you.”

I found the letter on my desk at the Pilot. It actually wasn’t postmarked Detroit, as Mrs. B had said, but Dearborn, a suburb abutting Detroit on the west that also happened to border on Melvindale.

I sliced it open with a penknife. Inside I found a single piece of unlined white paper, folded once. I opened it in the pool of light thrown by my desk lamp. Someone had scrawled six words across the page in red ink:

Build it and they will die

What the hell is this, a movie? I thought. I considered whether I could have helped avert the explosion at the rink if I had opened the envelope earlier and told someone about it, maybe even Dingus. I decided not.

I folded the note and the envelope into my wallet.

I called Darlene. She didn’t pick up. “I love you,” I told her voice mail. She wasn’t going to like my story in that morning’s paper, making Gracie into three paragraphs of apparent suicide. I’d have to explain later.

I called Kerasopoulos’s office number. I told his voice mail I had an emergency family matter that I had to attend to downstate. In a way, it was true. He’d either believe it or not. Either way, my days at the Pilot were probably numbered.

I took the penknife and descended the stairs to the Pilot basement, ducking cobwebs dotted with the carcasses of flies. A naked overhead bulb cast a dim light across the floor, revealing a puddle of water covering a rusted drain cover.

In the shadows along the walls stood racks built of two-by-sixes holding black binders of Pilots dating back nearly three decades. I found what I was looking for in the binder marked March 15–31, 1980. On page A3 of the March 18 issue, I found an eight-inch story beneath a two-column headline that read, “Anonymous Donor Bequeaths Scholarship on Local Girl.” A black-and-white school picture of Gracie was wedged into the story. With the penknife I cut the story out of the binder and put that in my wallet, too.

Back upstairs, I sat at my computer and did a quick search for clips under the byline of a certain Detroit Free Press reporter. I selected half a dozen, printed them, scanned each one, and jotted a few notes about them on a piece of paper I also folded and stuffed into my wallet.

Then I dozed for a few hours in an armchair that our fired photographer had used for afternoon naps. I woke at 4:47, put my coat on, and went out the back door, shivering against the cold.

Audrey seemed surprisingly unsurprised to see me at her back door an hour before she would open the diner.

She pushed the door open and told me good morning and asked me if I wanted something to go. Yes, I told her, a fried-egg sandwich with bacon and cheddar on toasted pumpernickel. And a large coffee, black.

Audrey bustled about her griddle in a white apron over a peach-colored smock. A song played on a transistor radio propped on a shelf against a bag of brown sugar, Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is?” Audrey would turn it down to a murmur when her first customers arrived.

I had always loved the diner. When I was a boy, Mom would bring me there on Saturdays, when Audrey made her special concoction, the egg pie, an envelope of Italian bread bubbling with eggs, cheese, sausage, onion, mushrooms, and whatever else you fancied. We’d sit at the counter so Mom and Audrey could gossip while I tore into my pie, shredding the top crust, letting the steam warm my cheeks, savoring the only thing in the world that mattered at that particular moment in my young life.

Gracie didn’t like Audrey’s, though; she said it smelled like old people. When Gracie stayed with us, we didn’t go to Audrey’s on Saturdays; instead, Mom made Gracie’s favorite, chocolate-chip-banana pancakes. I ate them only after picking out the banana.

“How is your mother doing?” Audrey said.

“As well as can be expected.”

“Are there funeral arrangements yet?”

“Not that I know of. I think the cops have to finish first.”

Audrey shook her head without looking back at me. “Looks like they have a lot more work to do after last night, huh?”

I let her bring the two eggs to a sizzle before I asked whether my mother had been in with Gracie on Saturday. She told me yes, they had come in late, in between the breakfast and lunch rushes.

“Did you happen to catch any of their conversation?”

With Audrey, the answer to that question was almost always yes. The real question was how much she would tell me. She liked me, though. She’d known me all my life. That helped.

“Not much, actually,” she said. She flipped the grilled slices of Canadian bacon and cheddar onto the eggs, covered it all with the toasted pumpernickel. “Molly wasn’t here and I was busy getting things ready for the lunch crowd.”

“They had coffee?”

“Gracie had coffee. Your mother had tea. Why do you ask?”

“Come on, Mrs. DeYonghe. You know.”

She wrapped my sandwich in wax paper, poured my coffee into a foam cup, handed them to me. “Where are you going?”

You know the answer to that, too, I thought. “Downstate.”

“And you’re coming back.”

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know, Gussy. Years ago, you ran when your hockey went bad. Then you ran back here when things went bad downstate. I don’t want you running again. Your mother needs you.”

“I understand.”

“You can’t just keep running. Eventually you have to make your choice and stand your ground.”

“Uh, OK,” I said. I’d taken a stand at the Pilot the night before and wound up standing on my dick. “Any particular reason for the five a.m. lecture?”

Audrey plucked a dishrag off the counter and wiped her hands. “I was a little surprised to see Gracie in here. I don’t think she’d been in since she came back to town. Your mother didn’t look very happy with her. And she didn’t stay long, left without Bea.”

“Huh. OK. Thanks. For the food too. Here.” She waved off my offer of a five-dollar bill. I tossed it on the counter. “I better get going.”

I was ten steps out the door when I heard her call after me: “Gussy.”

I turned. Audrey stood with her rump propping the door open, arms folded against the chill. “They were arguing,” she said.

“Arguing about what?”

“I’m not sure. They kept their voices down. But it had something to do with an envelope.”

Down from the walkway behind me the Hungry River lay frozen in the morning dark. Sometimes you could hear the burble of the water flowing beneath the ice. “Who brought the envelope?”

“I don’t know. But it was pretty clear that Bea didn’t want it. Then she almost left without it. I had to chase her down the sidewalk.”

“Yeah?”

“A manila envelope.” She held her right thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “About yay thick.”

Goddammit, Mother, I thought as I pulled my truck out of Starvation and aimed it toward Interstate 75 south.