The Hanging Tree

twenty-four

The diced onions had just begun to sizzle. I was peeling the ring bologna when Mom emerged from her bedroom in pajamas and robe. One lamp was lit in the living room, the lake invisible in the dark beyond the windows. Mom sat down in her easy chair, wrapped herself in my River Rats afghan.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

“I was reading. I thought I might watch the news.”

The news wouldn’t be on for another hour.

“Can I make you a sandwich?”

Mom turned her head, gave me a look. “Do I look like your father?” My dad had loved fried bologna sandwiches, taught me how to make them. Mom never cared for them. “Phyllis made us a nice salad.”

“Good.”

She turned back to the living room. The TV remote sat untouched on the table next to her. I took out a cutting board and began to slice the bologna lengthwise into the pan. The long curls of meat crackled in the bubbling butter.

“It was quite a day in Starvation Lake,” Mom said.

I had decided I wasn’t going to tell Mom about my job situation until the website appeared the next day. I had some questions, but Mom wasn’t going anywhere, and I was hungry. I uncapped the ketchup and squirted it around the pan. The sugary tang filled my nostrils.

“I’ll say,” I said. “What was going on with you and Shirley? I thought she was going to punch you.”

Mom made a show of folding her arms. “Are you just going to talk to the back of my head?”

I looked at the bologna and onions snapping in the pan, looked back at Mom. I turned the heat off and went over to sit on a footstool facing her.

“OK,” I said.

She shook her head, threw the afghan back off her shoulders. “What did you ask me?” she said.

“About Shirley. The hockey fight you guys had at town hall.”

“Hockey fight?”

“Shirley McBride, Mom.”

She wasn’t remembering. But she was trying. She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips together in her lap.

“Shirley and I-oh, God. That was like a hundred years ago. The only person who gives a damn about it is Shirley.”

“Gives a damn about what?”

She opened her eyes. “Eddie.”

“Gracie’s dad?”

“Yes. Eddie. Your father’s cousin. The one who died in the war. “

“OK.”

“He used to come up here on weekends when he was in high school. I didn’t really know your father yet. I actually met Eddie first. Down at the public access. He pretended to help my father put our boat in.” She smiled. “He was standing on the stern and Daddy gunned the boat and Eddie went flying.”

“Ah,” I said. “You and Eddie had a little summer fling?”

“Well…”

“I’m not sure how much of this I want to know.”

“Not a fling,” Mom said. “I wasn’t that kind of girl.”

“Good.”

She sat there thinking. She looked at me. “Shirley,” she said. “That was her on the sidewalk today.”

“That was her, yes.”

“She was wearing braids. All sorts of braids.” We were back in the distant past again. “After Eddie, she wouldn’t braid my hair anymore.”

“No?”

“No. She never forgave me for Eddie. Even after, especially after Eddie died, and she started in with the boyfriends.”

I thought of the trailer where I would knock on the only door and sing out, “Graaaayseee!” Most days Gracie would come right out and close the door quickly behind her. Once in a while she’d ask me in because she hadn’t finished her Frosted Flakes and tea. I thought her kitchen smelled like a doctor’s office. Shirley might come to the table and sit silently smoking in her slip. Once there was a hickey the shape of a snail on the skin over her collarbone.

“All those men, every single one of them a piece of shit.”

“Right.”

“I’m sorry, son. Forgive my language. Shirley was drawn to that like a deer fly, but those men…” She brushed at her eyes. “What was I supposed to do? Turn Gracie away? Send her back to that revolting little trailer in the woods?”

“You did the right thing, Mom. Gracie loved you.”

“She loved you, too, Gussy.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why won’t you believe me?”

“Mom,” I said. “When you saw Gracie at Audrey’s the other day, she gave you an envelope.”

“I didn’t see Gracie at Audrey’s the other day.”

“Yes, you did, you told me you did.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Now she was telling the lie she’d forgotten to tell two nights before.

“All right. So what?”

“She brought you an envelope.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Yes, you do. It was a life insurance policy.”

“No-”

I stood. “Should I get it out of your bedroom?”

She gave me a look of reproach that she couldn’t sustain. “Sit down,” she said. I sat. “I brought the envelope to Audrey’s. Gracie had sent it to me, she said for safekeeping. Of course I had to take a peek. And when I saw that…” She shook her head no. “I’m glad I peeked. I don’t want that money.”

The money Shirley had been talking about at town hall.

“So you tried to give it back?”

“I told her I didn’t want that money, I didn’t want her to die.”

I leaned in closer. Gracie would have given Mom the policy around the time she gave Soupy her letter to Haskell, “in case something happened.” Around the time Gracie supposedly was with Felicia Haskell at the pizzeria. I looked over at the bouquets people had sent. Felicia’s weren’t there anymore.

“Mother,” I said, “she was just giving you her life insurance policy. Did you have some reason to think she was going to die? Did she tell you she was in some kind of danger?”

“No.”

“Or you don’t remember?”

“I remember. She was fine.”

“Did she say anything about-wait.” I was thinking about the rejection letter, which made me think of the Zamboni shed, which made me remember what I had found there. “Hang on.”

I stood and dug in my jacket hung on the back of a kitchen chair, then sat back down with my mother. “Look what I found.”

I handed her the blue hairbrush.

“Oh.” She took it in her left hand. “Where did you get this?”

“In the Zamboni shed. Gracie had it in a secret place.”

Mom turned it over in her hands. As she did, her lips began to tremble. Her eyes welled.

“Mother?”

She clutched the brush in both hands and brought it to her chest. She bowed her head. She began to sob.

I reached across the chair and took her by an arm. “Mom. What’s wrong?”

“She didn’t have to-” Mom had to stop for a moment. “I told her you could have helped.”

“What are you talking about?”

She thrust the brush at me. “Why couldn’t you two get along? Why couldn’t you both just-” She was struggling to talk. “I told her. I told her… I told her you could help her.”

“Help her what?”

“She wouldn’t listen. ‘He’ll never help me. He hates my guts.’ That’s what she said. But you, you…” She pulled the brush back into her, crying harder. “Shirley can have the money. I never wanted any money.” She was sobbing so hard now that she could barely catch her breath. “I could have… I could have…”

“What? You could have what?”

She held up a hand to stop me. She set the brush in her lap and reached one hand out. I took it.

“Mom, what is it?”

“Those people. All those people from down there. I wish they’d just stay. Just leave us alone. We don’t need their big houses and fancy boats.”

“Mom?”

She tightened her grip on my hand.

“You know, I would give my life for you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes. I know that.”

My mother hitched forward in her chair, gathered up my other hand. “Any mother,” she said, “a good mother, would lay down her life for her son.”

I waited.

“Gracie didn’t have an abortion,” Mom said. She saw the quizzical look in my eyes. “There was no abortion.”

“So there was no baby?”

“Yes. There was.”

I looked down at our entwined hands. “I know who.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You don’t know, Mom. There’s a really bad guy downst-”

“No, Gus. Think.”

In my mind I walked into Gracie’s good bedroom again, the one with the light coming in, the poster on the wall, the child’s drawing of the hockey player. Then I heard the piano music again. I looked up at my mother.

“Are you-” I let her hands go. “No. My God.”

“I wish she would have asked you for help.” She picked up the brush again. “It’s my fault that you two never got along.”

“You knew? You knew all along? All this time? Fourteen years?”

“I’m sorry, son.”

I ate the bologna sandwich cold, without tasting it, as I drove to the rink. I parked in front and grabbed my skates out of my hockey bag. Until then, I had forgotten about the pain in my foot. I limped into the arena.

A peewee team from Starvation Lake was playing one from Alpena. I didn’t bother to check the scoreboard. Johnny Ford watched from his perch behind the concession counter. He held his gaze even after I plopped my skates on the counter. He was wearing the same River Rats sweatshirt he had worn the night he had caught me snooping in the Zam shed, with the same mustard stain on the “N,” the yellow now turning brown.

“Hey, Johnny,” I said. “Can you do these?”

He still didn’t look my way. “Look at that,” he said. He pointed the stump below his left elbow in the direction of the ice. I turned to see. “Three guys coming into the zone, all on the same side of the ice. What’s the advantage in that? Might as well be two guys. Shit, one.”

I had figured that Johnny Ford watched a lot of hockey, but until then I had no idea that he cared.

“Yep,” I said. “All about two-on-ones, man.”

“Really ain’t that complicated.” Now he looked at me; then, dolefully, at my skates. “It’s kind of late, isn’t it?”

“I don’t need them tonight,” I said.

“When’s your next game?”

“Pickup skate, tomorrow night.”

“I’ll leave them under the counter. Four bucks.”

I gave him a twenty. He turned his back and moved to the cash register. He punched something with his stump and the drawer flew open. I heard the bill-holders snap inside the drawer as he plucked out a ten, a five, and a single with his other hand.

“Hey, Johnny.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever find that phone?”

He shoved the drawer shut with his butt. He laid the change next to my skates. “Nah,” he said. “She probably lost it.”

I took the ten and the five.

“You get a new one yet?” I said.

He dug in his sweatshirt pouch, produced a cell phone. “This.”

“They let you keep your number?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yeah.”

“Why the hell did you loan it to her anyway?”

“She let me drive.”

“The Zam?”

“Yeah.”

“How was it?”

“All right. A little harder with the-” He waggled his stump.

“I’ll bet. But you’re doing a fine job now, man. Ice was good last night.”

“Thanks.”

“I heard a funny story about a Zamboni driver tonight. He was-”

“No, no, no, man.” Johnny waved his hand at me. “Bad luck.”

“OK, OK.” I laughed. “But look, I was just thinking, you know, the cops are all over Gracie’s stuff since, you know. They might find the old phone. You can trade it in for, I don’t know, maybe some cash.”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to mess with cops.”

“I don’t blame you.” I looked at the skates. “Ready tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

I started to leave, then stopped and turned back to Johnny Ford. “Shit, you know, John, I’m talking to the cops about ten times a day. Give me your number and if it turns up, I’ll give you a call.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No trouble.”

He had to get low to the counter, his hair hanging down over his face, so he could hold a napkin down with his stump while he scratched out the number.

The napkin was crumpled in my left hand as I knocked on the door of Darlene’s apartment with my right.

She answered in an old white-and-green Michigan State football jersey that hung to her knees, number 23. She opened the door without a word, turned and walked into her little kitchen. I followed. She flicked on a light and took a glass out of the dish drainer and filled it with water from the tap.

I unzipped my jacket. “We have to talk,” I said.

Darlene pulled her dark hair back with one hand and drank the glass down. She set the glass in the sink. She turned to me.

“Did you sleep with her?” she said.

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I had no good answer for that. “Like you said, things got complicated. I was doing my job.”

We didn’t say anything for a minute. Darlene gazed vacantly at the wall behind me, thinking. “I was doing my job, too.”

“When?”

“When you saw me at the rink. We had Jason under surveillance. Dingus had talked to someone in Detroit about him. I was the tail because he wouldn’t suspect me.”

“You?” I felt at once stupid and relieved. “Jeez. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She lowered her eyes now. “We followed you, too.”

“When? When I went downstate? No.”

“Yes. D’Alessio.”

“Frankie? He let those shitheads basically kidnap me?”

“You were doing your job, Gus. Isn’t that what you wanted? You got to Vend, right? You figured it all out?”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Why are you here? Haven’t you had enough pain yet? This isn’t hockey. You can’t just swing your stick at somebody’s head and make everything right.”

I set the napkin on the counter, the number facedown.

“Whatever happened to Sarnia?” I said.

“You’re such a boy.”

“What about the chick on the swing set, Darlene? The Sarnia cops wouldn’t talk because I’m a reporter. But they’d talk to you.”

She wasn’t going to tell me. Or she didn’t know. Or she hadn’t called. “You know I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation,” she said.

“Of course. Not now. So you can’t tell me whether you ever tracked down that phone call, can you?”

“What phone call?”

“The one that set off the Zamboni bomb.”

That stopped her, as I had expected. “Why?”

“What do you mean why? Did you track it down or not?” She started to shake her head. “Stop fucking with me, Darlene.”

“Why are you fucking with me?” It was almost a shout. Tears were filling her eyes; I couldn’t tell whether from anger or sadness. “What difference does it make? Gracie’s gone. Nothing’s going to bring her back.”

Goddamn, I thought. She knows, too. She knows. Maybe not what my mother knew, but something nobody else did.

I flipped the napkin over and pushed it along the counter. “That’s the number of the cell phone that ignited the bomb,” I said. “Gracie got the phone from Johnny Ford, the one-handed kid at the rink.”

Darlene wouldn’t look at it.

“Am I getting a little closer to what really was getting complicated?”

She pulled the State jersey up to swab her cheeks. “Haskell’s in jail,” she said. “Jason’s in jail. The state police are going to have Vend soon. Isn’t that enough? Do you really want to bring in-” She stopped herself. She was going to say too much. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Bring in who? My mother? Your mom? Trixie?”

“Go.”

She stepped forward and shoved the heel of one hand hard into my chest. I fell back a step. But I wasn’t leaving yet.

“The phone that called this phone to make it ring and set off that little bomb-the area code was two four eight,” I said. “Wasn’t it? Only one person could have set that off and been sure it wouldn’t hurt a certain someone. Only one person knew exactly where her boy was when she dialed that number.”

Darlene grabbed the napkin and balled it up in her hand and drove both of her fists into my chest, driving me backward into the door.

“Get out.”

“You knew.”

“Get the fuck out.”

I opened the door, felt cold wash over the back of my neck. “You knew,” I said. “I mean, you didn’t know what Gracie was going to do, but once she did it, you knew. And you kept it to yourself.”

“Everything is,” she said, “as it should be.”

I stood at the bottom of Darlene’s stairway for a while, shivering in the dark, wondering if she would reconsider. The outside light over her door went out. I walked away, feeling the ache in my bruised foot again.

“Sarnia Police,” said the woman’s voice. “Officer Poulin.”

Her voice on the phone, husky and matter-of-fact, reminded me of Darlene’s. I was at my desk in the Pilot newsroom. I told Officer Poulin I was a sheriff’s deputy in Pine County, Michigan, and I needed to confirm the details of a recent suicide-or perhaps it had been reclassified as a homicide-in Sarnia. I described a young woman hanging from a swing set.

I was not terribly surprised to hear Officer Poulin chuckle. “A swing set, eh?” she said. “That’s a good one. I have a feeling I’d remember that. Are you sure it happened recently?”

“That’s what our source says. A few weeks ago.”

“Who’s your source?”

“You know, some goofball trying to trade info.”

“Well, that explains things, eh? But you’re calling awfully late-or early, depending.”

“Picked him up on a DUI. He has a warrant out in Detroit.”

“Right-o. He sure doesn’t want to go back there.”

“No, ma’am. So, you have no record of a suicide or a homicide occurring there in the last few weeks, or even months?”

“Wait just a minute. I’ll double-check.”

She set the phone down. Someone, probably Mrs. B, had cleared my desktop. All the pens and pencils in my Detroit Tigers beer mug were gone.

Officer Poulin came back on the phone.

“Deputy-I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

I hesitated, then said, “Esper.”

“Esper? Hmm. We had a young man played for the minor league team here named Esper. Pretty good with his fists.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Some years back. Anyway, I checked and we have zero reports of suicides or homicides in the past six months, certainly none involving a swing set. Or monkey bars, for that matter.”

“Sorry for the bother.”

“No bother at all. You have a nice day.”

I hung up the phone.

Trixie had lied about the girl on the swing set. And about the abortion. I should have picked up on it when she’d fibbed about knowing who Haskell was. She had been having trouble with her landlord, whom I now knew to be one Jarek Vend. Gracie’s life insurance money would be good for her worthy mission. And, as Darlene had said, there was nothing anyone could do to bring Gracie back. The bad guys would get what they deserved.

I had a decision to make.

I could go home and get some sleep and let Philo post our stories online as we had planned. But now I knew that we had it all wrong, or a lot wrong. I didn’t have to think hard or long about why Gracie did what she did. There was vengeance and there was love and there was the belief, however misguided it may have been, that she was out of options.

I picked up the phone and dialed. It rang fourteen or fifteen times before I hung up and redialed. After a dozen more rings, Soupy picked up. He coughed and I heard him drop the phone-“Fuck,” he said-then he came on.

“What the hell, Trap?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Who else would it be? What do you want?”

“Listen,” I said. “Some shit’s going to come down tomorrow. I just want you to know, you were right. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Gracie. Like you said.”

“Oh, Jesus, man.” He fumbled around with the phone again. I heard something that sounded like a bottle banging off the floor. “What are you going to do?”

“I have to go. Just wanted you to know, buddy, you’re a good guy. We’ll talk tomorrow night.”

I took my Tigers mug when I left the Pilot.

It was still dark when Philo answered his front door. I had managed two and a half hours of fitful dozing on Mom’s sofa. Philo stood in the doorway in boxer shorts and a U.S. Navy T-shirt, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Why are you here?” he said.

“Remember what I said about imagining your corrections?”

“What?”

“We’ve got to rewrite our stories.”

“You’re kidding.”

He made a pot of coffee and some peanut butter toast. We wrote and rewrote. We questioned every little thing we had written the night before. Around eight o’clock, Philo’s cell phone started ringing every ten minutes or so. He ignored it. “No desire to talk to my uncle,” he said.

The second the clock struck nine, I called Nova at the Wayne County Clerk’s Office. “Let’s make it two Lions games,” I said. I asked her to run down one more piece of information. She said she would call me back.

Philo ducked out at ten to cover the Haskell arraignment. Haskell stood mute and Judge Gallagher entered a plea of not guilty. For some reason, Kerasopoulos was in attendance. He motioned across the courtroom for Philo to come see him, but Philo pretended he didn’t see, then slipped out a side door.

We were ready a little before noon. The sidebar, on Kerasopoulos’s business relationships with Haskell, was essentially the same. Philo had e-mailed his uncle a list of questions. This is silliness, Kerasopoulos had replied. Won’t dignify with answer. Our sidebar quoted him.

The main story had been redone from top to bottom. The headlines read:

Murder Charge May Be Flawed

New Evidence Suggests Suicide

“Let’s not post it until I hear from my source in Detroit,” I told Philo. Instead of asking about my source, he went to his fridge for two more Amstels.

“Quite a morning,” he said as he handed me a beer.

“Yeah.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. Just thinking of something Dingus told me a couple of days ago. Something about the newspaper being a snapshot of the dark human soul.”

“Hmm. They didn’t teach us that at Columbia.”

Nova called a little after twelve thirty. “This took some digging,” she said. “Had to call in a chit with folks at probate. I think you owe Michael a Lions sweatshirt, too.”

“Done,” I said. “What do you have?”

On December 6, 1984, Grace M. McBride had given birth to a son. The birth certificate did not name a father. The boy weighed seven pounds, six ounces. A note in the file indicated the boy was adopted shortly thereafter. Gracie named him Taylor Edward McBride.