The Hanging Tree

twenty

All the shoes were gone.

Stars glimmered on a black sky between the snowy branches of the shoe tree. I looked way up where Gracie’s pink sneaker had hung with Ricky’s football cleat. My eyes moved down and across the boughs where other sneakers and boots and sandals and galoshes should have been dangling.

They weren’t there anymore.

Darlene looked up into the tree. She was standing at the trunk in snow to her knees. She held one hand on the tree, as if she was reassuring it.

She had left a note under a windshield wiper on my truck: Midnight at the shoe tree. She was in her brown-and-mustard uniform again, her hair tucked up into her earflap cap. Reflections of stars sparkled in her onyx eyes.

“What happened to the shoes?” I said.

“Evidence,” she said. “We took them all down this morning.”

“Huh. Did you see my skates?”

“What skates?”

“The skates you made me hang up there with your softball spikes.”

“Oh, those.” A sad smile flitted over her mouth. “I don’t know.”

I walked up to within a few feet of where she stood.

“You’re limping,” she said.

“No shit. Since when are you interested in hockey?”

She ignored my question. “D’Alessio told Jason to press charges.”

“Right. The last thing Jason wants is cops messing around with him. Do you know the kind of crazy shit he’s involved with downstate?”

Darlene folded her arms, looked down at her boots.

“Darlene?”

“I can’t talk about it now.”

“Can’t talk about what?”

“Jason. Downstate. Anything.”

“Why did you ask me out here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“I’m right here. Why didn’t we just meet at the apartment?”

“Not smart at the moment. I have to work anyway.”

“Not smart? Why? What the hell is going on?”

“A police investigation is going on.”

“I didn’t set fire to any house downstate, Darlene.”

“I know.” She reached up and briefly took my collar in her gloved hand. “You have to trust me. Things have gotten complicated.”

“I’ll say. Would you like to hear about my trip?”

“I’ve got a few minutes; go ahead.”

“Are you going to spill to Dingus?”

Darlene didn’t say anything.

“I want you to know because you loved Gracie,” I said.

“I can’t promise anything.”

I explained how Kerasopoulos had killed my original story about Gracie and made it a brief about an apparent suicide. I told her about Gracie’s house, about the darker of the two bedrooms, about Trixie, about Vend, about Haskell, about the woman on the swing set in Sarnia. Again I didn’t mention Michele Higgins. Darlene said, “My God,” once or twice. The expression on her face shifted from surprise to anger, from anger to sadness. The surprise wasn’t quite shock, though; it was as if she had heard bits and pieces of the story already.

“Did you ever see her house?” I said.

“No. Until-” She stopped herself. “I mean, I didn’t know she had one.”

“I’m not sure it’s actually hers. You never saw it when you visited?”

“No. But I hadn’t been down there for years.” She steepled her gloves beneath her nose, thinking. “I hadn’t been down there to see Gracie since she was still in school.”

“Or pretending to be in school.”

“I guess. Every time I made plans, she came up with some excuse to cancel. Now I guess I know why.”

There was another reason Darlene didn’t go downstate: I was there.

“She never said a word about Vend or Haskell?”

“Not by name.” She sighed. “No, Gracie didn’t mention anything about…” Her voice trailed off. “Although I do remember her mentioning that Trixie woman once or twice. Said she was the only real friend she had down there.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I bet that kind of hurt.”

Darlene shrugged. “She didn’t even make my wedding. A bridesmaid. I should have cut the bitch off then.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I mean, I tried, I tried to just forget her a bunch of times, but then I’d go to the mailbox and there’d be a letter, and I’d be right back on the hook again. And when she came back here, we took the time to catch up. Or at least I thought we did.”

“How perfect that you kept those letters in a shoe box, eh? Have you had a chance to look through those?”

“Most of them. Even with twenty-twenty hindsight, they don’t tell you much. There’s all this girly chatter about how she’s dating this guy or that guy, and he screwed her over or she blew him off, and she hates her job and her boss is a butthole but it pays well so she’s going to hang in there.”

“Vend.”

“I’m so stupid.”

“Darlene.” I stepped forward and reached for her shoulder, but she put a hand up to stop me.

“No. I am so stupid. Every now and then, she’d make a joke about how she was going to die young, it was her destiny. I just figured it was the usual Gracie drama. But it was all there. She was destined to die young and it just…” She looked up into the tree, struggling not to cry. “It just sucks.”

“Do you think it was Haskell or Vend?”

Darlene went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “Then she came back, and we’d go to Riccardo’s and she’d talk about how she was trying to get a real plan in her life, she just had to get out from under some things.”

“The abortion.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. Or maybe that’s what she wanted me to think. Obviously there were other things going on. God. I thought, I really thought she was sounding better, even last week.”

We both turned our heads toward the sound of sirens coming from the direction of town. I saw the lights of a police cruiser blinking behind the tree line a mile from where we stood, heading north along the eastern shore of the lake. It was followed by a different set of flashing lights, perhaps a fire truck or an ambulance.

Static crackled over the microphone clipped on Darlene’s shoulder. She turned away. “Oh, God,” I heard her say. “Another?” She said something else I couldn’t make out, then “Ten-four” before she turned back to me.

“I have to go.”

“Where?”

She just looked at me.

“OK. Why do you say Gracie was better?”

“I don’t know. Just her attitude. She ordered double pepperoni on her pizza. She was talking about how she was having fun with Soupy, how she thought she might be able to save up enough to at least rent a little cabin on the lake and get out of that disgusting Zamboni room.”

“Haskell or Vend?”

“Doc Joe says she killed herself,” she said. She fished her keys out of her coat pocket. “I have to go.”

“Doc Joe’s covering his ass.”

“It’s in his job description.”

She started to walk past me to her cruiser parked on the road.

“Wait,” I said. “Will I see you later? Or tomorrow?”

She stopped and put a gloved hand flat on my chest. “I’m glad you’re safe,” she said. “But I don’t know. Maybe not till this is over.”

“Then I hope it’s over soon. You’re holding back.”

“It’s my job.”

“I don’t mean your job.”

She turned away quickly and started for the car. I trudged behind her. She stopped and turned back to me again. “Why is it, Gussy, that the people you love the most hurt you the hardest? Huh? Why is that?”

“Darlene. What’s the matter?”

She trudged up the bank and onto the road.

“Do not follow me,” she said without turning around, “or you will go to jail.”

“Darlene.”

I stood in the road and watched the rear lights on her cruiser recede in the dark. I felt helpless. She veered up the same shore road that the other vehicles had taken a few moments earlier. I couldn’t think of anywhere else they would be going at that hour in that direction but the home of Laird Haskell.

Soupy jumped when I hissed at him from the kitchen behind the bar at Enright’s. I had slipped in through his alley door.

“Jesus, Trap,” he said. “What the fuck?”

“Any of the boys out there?”

“Nah. We’re cleared out. Just me, cleaning up. The game got over early, as you know.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“No you’re not.”

“No I’m not. So you didn’t play it out?”

“Without a ’tender? Shit. We played out that period, blew off the rest. Clem Linke was all pissed off that he had two goals and wanted to go for a hat trick. But the Chowder Heads said, See you at the bar, and we left. Six to one final.”

Soupy stood in a white apron spattered with hot wing sauce, scrubbing out a bar sink with a Brillo pad. In his other hand he held a spatula. He had turned the bar lights up, illuminating the pall of cigarette smoke floating just below the ceiling. Silence fell as “Ring of Fire” ended on the jukebox.

“Jason didn’t come in, did he?” I said.

“Last I heard, he was at the hospital. You got him good, man.”

“Good.”

“You want a beer, help yourself. And help me too.”

I opened a wooden fridge door beneath the back bar and yanked out two Blue Ribbon longnecks. I flicked the caps off and handed Soupy one. He put down the Brillo pad and we both took a long pull.

“Yes, sir,” Soupy said. “First one of the day always tastes best.”

It wasn’t quite one o’clock, so I guessed Soupy was trying to make me laugh. I didn’t. I just said, “I came to settle up.”

“OK. Three fifty.”

Again, I didn’t laugh. “You know what I mean.”

The spatula clanged into the sink. Soupy untied his apron and threw it on the bar. He took two small glasses and a bottle of peach schnapps off the back bar and motioned toward the kitchen. “In there,” he said.

I sat down on some boxes of paper napkins. A Hungry River Rats calendar hung on the wall behind my head. The February picture showed Taylor Haskell in full legs-splayed flop, snagging a puck out of the air with his catching glove.

Soupy propped himself against his griddle. He undid his ponytail and his blond hair fell around his face. He pulled it back onto his head and nodded toward the calendar and said, “What do you think of the messiah?”

I glanced at the calendar. “Ha. Yeah. Watched him last night. Good glove, good on his feet. Gotta keep his head in the game.”

“Don’t we all.”

We sat and sipped our beers for a minute. “Yeah,” Soupy said. “Grace used to say, ‘That kid doesn’t even want to be here.’ ”

“Gracie said that?”

“She’d surprise you, man. Surprised me. She knew some hockey. I don’t know a lot of chicks who understand the two-line pass.”

“Loved the Wings, eh?”

“Yeah. Fedorov was her man.”

Soupy unscrewed the cap of the schnapps bottle, set the glasses down, and filled each halfway. He handed me one, clinked it with the other.

“To Grace,” he said.

“Gracie.”

We gulped them down.

“Jesus, Soup,” I said, grimacing. “Peach schnapps?”

He capped the bottle and set it aside. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d prefer Jack Black. But Grace hated this shit.”

“You mean she loved it.”

“No. Despised it. That’s why she drank it.”

“You’re not making any sense. And what’s with the ‘Grace’ instead of ‘Gracie’?”

Soupy grabbed his beer and took a sip. He cradled the bottle against his chest and looked up at the ceiling.

“She liked ‘Grace’ better,” he said. “I wish I’d called her that before. Maybe”… He waved his bottle around in front of his face. “Ah, nah, fuck it, man. She liked ‘Grace’ better. Enough said.”

“What about the schnapps? Why’d she drink it if she hated it? Whenever I saw her, she was parked behind a gin and Squirt.”

“No,” Soupy said. “Hang on.”

He set his beer down and went back out to the bar. He came back holding a half-filled bottle of Gordon’s gin. The label was marked with a big black “G.” He shoved it toward me. “Try it.”

“No thanks. I know what gin tastes like.”

“Trust me, Trap. Just take a sip.”

I took it, uncapped it, and raised it to my lips, expecting the smell of alcohol. There wasn’t any. I took a sip, swished it around, took another.

“This is not gin,” I said.

“Remember the time we fucked with Stevie on his birthday?”

Soupy and a few of the other boys had brought big blond Stevie Reneau down to Detroit to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. We’d spent most of a Friday night at the Post Bar, ordering round after round of tequila shots. Except only Stevie was drinking tequila. The rest of us were drinking shots of tap water, thanks to the ten spot Soupy threw the bartender when Stevie wasn’t looking. We let him in on it after the tenth or eleventh shot. He took a wild swing at Soupy and fell on his face while the rest of us howled with laughter. We had to carry him to Lafayette Coney Island for 3:00 a.m. dogs.

“So it’s water,” I said. “I don’t get it.”

Soupy took the “G” bottle back and swigged from it. “Gracie wasn’t really drinking, except for a shot of peach schnapps every now and then.”

“Let me get this straight. She wasn’t drinking. But she drank schnapps.”

“Whenever she had the urge to drink, she took a shot of the peach shit.”

“Which she hated.”

“Hey, I didn’t say this was the straightest-thinking chick I’ve ever hung out with. Although she was Einstein compared to my ex. But look, Grace knew what people thought of her. She basically wanted nothing to do with them. Best way to do that, she figured, was let them think what they wanted.”

“That she was a fucked-up drunk.”

“Yeah.”

“So they’d leave her alone. Talk about esteem issues.”

“I’m telling you, man, she was working on it.”

“That and a bottomless glass of Squirt and water.”

I took a long pull on my beer. Gracie had faked me out. I recalled the last time I’d seen her, in the Zamboni shed. She’d seemed shit-faced to me. I recalled how Trixie had gotten in my face when I’d said Gracie was always high or drunk. Of all people, you should know that appearances… she had said, without finishing the thought.

“You really did like her, didn’t you, Soup? It wasn’t just the fucking.”

He pulled his hair back on his head again, held it. “Yeah.” He chuckled. “She kept saying she wanted to hang one of her shoes and one of my skates in the tree.”

I smiled. “Of course.”

“She was messed up, but she was all right. Good heart.”

Kind of like Soupy. Except he wasn’t dead.

“So that’s it?” I said. “That’s what you had to tell me?”

“Don’t get pissy with me, Trap.”

“I’m not pissy. It’s late.”

He set his beer down and came across the room. “Move,” he said. I stood up from the napkin boxes. Soupy took the River Rats calendar off the wall. He flipped inside it to the month of November.

The top half of the page showed a photograph of the Rats mobbing Taylor Haskell after a win. The bottom half was obscured by a piece of loose-leaf paper folded and taped across the days and dates. Soupy peeled it away and handed it to me. It was a photocopy of what appeared to be a letter.

I read the four short lines twice before I looked up.

“Where did you get this?” I said.

“Grace.”

“When?”

“Technically, last week.”

“Around the time she found out the new rink wasn’t going to hire her.”

“Yeah, about then.”

“What do you mean ‘technically’?”

“She gave it to me then. She told me to keep it in case something happened to her. Then something happened.”

“Did she give the original to Haskell?”

“She never said. I don’t know what she did with it. If anything.”

“She obviously intended to give it to him.”

“Looks that way. But I don’t know.” He waggled his empty beer bottle. “Another?”

“No thanks. Jesus, Soup. If this is real…”

“Looks pretty real to me. Though who knows if Grace would’ve followed through. She kept saying she was done with all that.”

I thought of the boxes in her dark room.

“Why didn’t you give this to the cops?” I said.

“Almost did,” he said. “Dingus put the heat on me, man, the whole interrogation room with the lightbulb thing. Said he’d do everything he could to bust me for underage drinkers. But I honestly didn’t know shit. They just got me because I called.”

“What do you mean you called?”

“I called, man. I called her in. Grace. I found her.”

I imagined Soupy’s pickup truck rolling up to the snowbank on the road shoulder by the shoe tree. Sheets of snow blowing across his windshield, his wipers beating vainly against the blinding white. He might not have seen Gracie right away. Maybe he backed the truck onto the road sideways so that his headlights shined over the bank past the dangling silhouette.

“You closed early,” I said.

“Fucking-ay, huh? I must have been out of my goddamn mind.”

“But how did you know she was out there?”

“I didn’t. But I was worried. It was after ten, and she still wasn’t here. She was always here by ten. Then I got a call.”

“A call from who?”

“No idea. They didn’t say and I didn’t recognize the voice.”

“A man or a woman?”

“Whoever it was wanted me to think it was a man. The connection wasn’t so hot either, and I couldn’t hear shit because of the bar. But I’m pretty sure it was a woman.”

A woman? My chest tightened. What woman could have known that Gracie was hanging in the tree? Darlene? Trixie?

“And she said what?”

“‘She’s waiting for you at the shoe tree.’ ”

“Good God. So you closed the bar? Nice move, man.”

“I know. I freaked. But I guess I’m not so paranoid, huh? I mean, she’d given me that letter and all I could think was-”

“Did you open it then?”

“No. It was at my house. I read it later.”

“So you went out there and called it in but what? You just bolted?”

“She was dead, man. There was nothing I could do. Maybe I’m fucking stupid, OK, but what would you have done? I’m her boyfriend. I closed the bar early. I’m the only one out there. Here, Dingus, slap the cuffs on. I freaked.”

And you’re Soupy Campbell, I thought. Still a boy.

“But the cops traced your call.”

“Fuck, man.” Soupy shook his head. “You know how sometimes you think you shut your phone off but you didn’t?”

“Nice. So Dingus brings you in. What’d you tell him?”

“What I saw.”

“Gracie hanging in the shoe tree.”

“Yeah.”

“So, again, why didn’t you give the letter to the cops?”

“I want a beer.”

He walked out of the kitchen. I looked around. His makeshift desk, a folding table with a checkerboard etched into the top, was pushed into a corner beneath a bulletin board covered with pink-and-yellow invoices. I counted three stamped OVERDUE. It made me sad. Soupy had given up his family’s marina along a soft stretch of beach for a tunnel of darkness and smoke and hourly replays of “Freebird.”

He returned with a fresh Blue Ribbon. “She didn’t want me to,” he said.

“She didn’t want you to give it to the cops? Then why would-”

“She told me to make sure you saw it.”

“Me? No.”

“Yeah. You. She said you’d take care of it.”

Of course she wouldn’t have gone to me directly. She thought I couldn’t stand her. I thought she couldn’t stand me. And yet there she was downstate with my stories hung on her walls, and here she was up north, trusting me from the grave to find her murderer. I tried to stop the pang of grief I felt by reading the letter again.

“So what was all the horseshit you were giving me yesterday when I was in here?” I said. “Why didn’t you give me this then?”

“For one thing, I didn’t have it with me. For another, I wasn’t about to spill my guts in front of those losers who sit at my bar all day drinking three two-buck beers. My brain wasn’t exactly working right, Trap. I mean, the last thing I need right now is to have my name splashed all over your paper. I’m barely holding on here.”

I finished my beer and stood the empty on Soupy’s folding table. “Sorry, Soup,” I said.

“You, too, man.”

We shook hands. I waved the letter at him. “You don’t mind if I take this now, do you?”

“You going to put it in the paper?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. At that moment, I had no idea how I would confirm that the letter was authentic. The person who’d signed it was dead.

“How about I just take it for now and if I want to write anything, I’ll tell you?”

“Cool. But you get it, right?”

I slipped the paper into my jacket. “Get what?”

“It wasn’t my fault, man. Either way, it wasn’t my fault.”

“Understood. Get some sleep, Soup.”

I pushed the back door open. The wind had kicked up.

“Hey,” Soupy said. “Good to have you back between the pipes.”

“It was a one-night stand, pal.”

“Nah. Once you got the kinks worked out, you looked pretty good.”

“Go to hell.”

I sat in my pickup rereading the letter beneath the flood lamp outside my mother’s little yellow house.

It was dated Wednesday, February 3, a few days before Gracie died. It looked like she had used a marking pen, perhaps blue or purple, given the gray shade of the letters on the photocopied page.

L

Here is YOUR letter.

You have taken everything from me.

And left me with nothing.

Except what I KNOW.

— G

Motive, I thought. It obviously goes to motive. I thought of those videotapes again. And I thought, Why wouldn’t Haskell at least have tried to appease her? He’d made a career of negotiating, of finding that middle ground that made Vend sneer. Why not give Gracie whatever she wanted-some money, a lousy little job driving the Zamboni at the new rink?

Unless, of course, Gracie could not be appeased. Unless she really did want her dignity back, and neither Haskell nor Vend-who might well have received the same sort of note from Gracie-could give it to her.

I stepped out of my truck. I watched the boughs of the evergreens along Mom’s bluff swaying gently in the night wind, heard the pulley cable on Mom’s flag clanging off the metal pole.

I folded the letter and slipped it into the inner pocket of my jacket. What would I do with it? What could I do, without knowing whether Gracie had actually presented Haskell with her notion of blackmail?

I thought of Haskell and his wife and his son sleeping in their mansion beyond Mom’s evergreens, across the frozen lake, two of them more than likely knowing not a thing about Gracie and Haskell and the things they had done downstate. Unless Haskell had really killed her, or had her killed, what claim did Gracie really have on him and his family? Yes, Haskell was a goddamn bastard, as Trixie had said. So was Vend, who seemed a lot more capable of doing what had to be done. But Gracie was a big girl. She’d known what she was doing.

I supposed I could just go to Dingus, or Darlene, give one of them the letter. And watch Tawny Jane Reese tell the world about it on Channel Eight.

Oh fuck, I thought.

I had to be in Traverse City-I looked at my watch-in about five hours. As Philo said, eight o’clock sharp or I would no longer be employed by Media North or the Pine County Pilot, as if it mattered anymore.