The Hanging Tree

twenty-five

How did you find me?”

She held the apartment door open only the width of her face. Through the crack I saw that her hair had gone from silver to ash, with strands of white that fluttered away from her head like feathers. In one hand she held something shaped like a bowl, wrapped in brown paper.

“A hockey buddy,” I said.

“They’re all the same, aren’t they?”

“Pretty much. Could I come in, please? I won’t stay long.”

“You’re not writing a story.”

I held my empty hands up. “Didn’t even bring a pen.”

Felicia Haskell opened the door.

It was late April. The ice on Starvation Lake had broken up. I had driven down to Detroit to find Laird Haskell’s wife.

She had borrowed the two-bedroom apartment from a girlfriend after leaving Starvation Lake. The living room was strewn with cardboard packing boxes. Some were open at the top, others taped shut and shoved against a wall beneath a panoramic photograph of Detroit’s skyline. Felicia set the wrapped dish inside a box.

“Taking off again?” I said.

“Not soon enough.”

She moved to a counter alongside the kitchen. It was stacked with unwrapped dishes and glassware.

“Taking Taylor with you?”

She kept wrapping and packing as if she hadn’t heard me.

Doc Joe had held on to the coroner’s report for weeks, even after Dingus and the Pine County prosecutor had sheepishly agreed to drop the murder charge against Laird Haskell. What Doc finally released told us little we didn’t already suspect. The cause of death was indeed strangulation, in combination with fractures along the upper cervical spine-a severely broken neck.

I scoured the report for any signs of a struggle, even of Gracie struggling with herself. Had she changed her mind at the last minute? Had she decided, in the final seconds of her life, that she ought to live for her son, however unavailable he was, rather than die for him?

I tried to interview Doc Joe. He ignored my calls and e-mails. One unseasonably warm evening, I found him at his house. He was sitting outside in the dying daylight, reading a history of World War I, in which, I had heard, his grandfather had fought.

Doc Joe wore a wool sweater vest zipped halfway up. I stood looking down on his bald spot. Inserting a scrap of paper as a bookmark, he closed his book, put his reading glasses in his vest pocket, and listened. When I had finished, he gazed out at the lake.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve always liked the color of your mom’s place. But the missus, she’s never going to let me paint our place yellow. No, sir.” He turned back to me. “Why do you want to know, son? She killed herself. I understand that someone may have helped. But still.”

“She was family.”

“I am very sorry for your loss.” He pinched his glasses to his nose, opened his book. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

The next morning, I dialed Wally’s Wonder Print in Melvindale. Wally was out, but five minutes later he called me from his cell phone. I invited his hockey team up for a weekend of games and drinking with the Chowder Heads. “Oh, fucking-ay, man, we are so there,” he said, and he must have nearly driven off the road because I heard car horns honking angrily in the background.

Then I told him why I’d really called. I needed to find someone. Someone in hockey circles. “Yeah, the goalie,” Wally said. “I heard the kid ain’t even skating anymore. Some kind of head case.” I didn’t bother telling him that it wasn’t so. He called me back that night with an address in Farmington Hills. “Just keep my name out of it, bud,” he said.

So there I was with Felicia Haskell.

She had initially been charged with aiding and abetting a suicide for whatever role she had played in Gracie’s death. But, without witnesses, the Pine County cops knew they’d have trouble making it stick. Along with the state police and the feds, they were also more interested in putting her husband behind bars than in punishing Felicia. She helped them. Probably still was helping. Though he was no longer charged with murder, Laird Haskell now faced multiple counts related to prostitution, solicitation, and fraud. And the IRS was still all over him and his enfeebled bank accounts.

“My lawyer would kill me if she knew you were here,” Felicia said. She looked around the room. “Where’s the goddamn tape? Oh fuck it.” She set the plate she was holding in one hand back on the counter. “Sit.”

She plopped on a stool. I took one facing her.

“What do you-wait.” She covered her face with her hands. I waited. “Why am I doing this?” she said, not to me, but to herself. She brought her hands down. She wiped her cheeks with a sleeve.

“We are totally, completely, unequivocally off the record,” she said.

“That’s fine.”

“I am doing this for you. And your family. Not for your newspaper. Not for the people in that godforsaken town.”

“Understood.”

“You’re still with the paper?”

“I’m back with the paper, yes.”

Our online story on Kerasopoulos’s ties to Laird Haskell had not gone over well with Media North’s board of directors. While they concluded that Kerasopoulos had done nothing illegal, they nevertheless asked for his resignation. He threatened to sue, but the board quieted him with a severance package rumored to be in the neighborhood of $3 million.

At Philo’s urging, I had returned to the Pilot as if I had never left.

“All right,” Felicia Haskell said. “It’s not that I’m worried about getting arrested again or anything. It’s just-my son. He knows enough.”

I could have said, He isn’t your son, but that probably would have ended the conversation.

“How’s Taylor?”

“Fine. He’s with my mother until I get things sorted out here.”

“Then you’re leaving.”

“Then we’re leaving.”

“Where?”

She spun halfway around on her stool, surveying the boxes. “Ask me something else,” she said.

“I hear he’s not playing anymore.”

“Not that either.”

“OK,” I said. “I just wish… it might have been nice to talk to him once before you leave.”

“I’m sorry,” Felicia said. “I thought about your request. But in the end, I just… couldn’t.”

“He’s family.”

“No, actually he’s not.” Felicia let that sink in. “He knows who his birth mother is, or was. Now she’s gone, and it’s best for a fourteen-year-old boy to leave all of this behind.”

“I understand.” What choice did I have? “So tell me why. Why did she-why did you-do it?”

Felicia placed her hands in her lap. They were naked of the rings and bracelets I’d seen before.

“You didn’t know your cousin very well, did you?” she said.

“I know her a little better now.”

“Well, I doubt I know her-knew her-any better than you. It’s really not that complicated, Grace and me. We had a lot in common. We both hated someone. And we both wanted the best for Taylor.”

“How could the best be for Gracie to die?”

“You’re not going to want to hear this. But she was never going to have Taylor. She was never going to see him. She was never going to get near him. Never. I made that clear. I made it clear to her and to my worthless husband. Taylor was mine. Legally mine. All mine.”

“That was your prerogative.”

She came halfway out of her chair, slapped a hand on the counter. “I brought him up knowing- knowing — that he was the bastard son of a whore and her… her bastard lover, my husband. But I was a good mother. A damned good mother. And I still am.”

I wanted to tell her not to call Gracie a whore. But I didn’t want her to throw me out yet.

She sat back down.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Part of me felt for her. I thought of the prenup that I figured left her with whatever was in the boxes in that room and not much else. Then I thought of the boxes in Gracie’s house. They were a lot different than the ones Felicia was packing.

“Tell me: Were you ever…” I decided to alter my question in midsentence. “Did you know Trixie?”

“This is not about me.”

There was no point in disagreeing.

“So whose plan was it, exactly?”

Felicia wrapped her arms around herself. “I could tell you it was Grace’s, because it was. But it took two, obviously.”

“How did you even-”

“I knew about Grace long before she knew I knew. Before even Laird knew. He thought he was so smart. God, he thought he was smart.”

She brushed an angry tear from a cheek.

“We knew we couldn’t have kids. So we adopted. It all happened so fast. Everybody I knew who adopted, it took forever. But of course Laird knew all the right people, you know, he called in some chits, this judge, that lawyer, a social service worker, and the next thing you know we have this beautiful boy.”

“Fourteen years ago.”

“And for six or seven years, it was fine. I didn’t know where Taylor came from and I didn’t care. He was such a good boy. And then, one day, Laird was out of town, and this package shows up.”

“In the mail?”

“In the mailbox. No postage. Just a little box. Addressed to me.”

“What was in it?”

“A shoe.” She had trouble getting it out. “A baby shoe.”

“For the right foot.”

“How do you know that?”

“Go on.”

Haskell pleaded ignorance, she said. He called the shoe a prank, blamed it on another lawyer he said was messing with him over a case. Felicia hired a private investigator. A young woman, the investigator discovered, had been trying to make contact with the son she had long ago given up for adoption. A young woman who knew Laird Haskell quite well.

As Felicia spoke, I imagined Gracie sitting high in the rafters at the rinks around Detroit, arriving late and leaving early, her face hidden by a hat or a scarf, surreptitiously watching her son play hockey. And I thought of her again at the Red Wings game with Vend. She stayed close to him, I decided, so she could keep tabs on Haskell, and on her son. It wasn’t the smartest way to go, but by then, what else did Gracie have?

“Did you finally confront him?” I said.

“At first I just decided it didn’t happen, it didn’t matter. Fired the investigator. Threw the shoe away. But finally it was just too much. So I went to him.”

“And he denied it.”

“Oh, no. It was too late for that. No, he just came clean, the son of a bitch. God, that man. You’d have thought I was sitting in a jury box.” She reached out and grabbed my sleeve. I could feel the anger in her grip. “It was just like that day in town hall, all that confessional bullshit.”

“I can imagine.”

She let go of me. “You know, that was the hardest part of this whole charade. Sitting in that room with all those idiots, playing the good wife, screaming and crying like he fucking mattered to me.”

“I’m thinking Gracie played the harder part.”

She lowered her head to her chest, squeezing herself again.

“She followed us up here. She followed us. Our marriage had been shit for years. I’d hung on for Taylor. Then he moves us a million miles from civilization, away from our friends, and Taylor’s friends, and then he has the gall to start in with the stock trading, sitting on his ass yelling at the computer all day. He thought he was so goddamned smart.” Felicia shook her head, loosed a bitter laugh. “You know he was just bored. Like me and Taylor. Just plain bored up here.”

“So you went to Gracie.”

“Oh, no. Hell, no. She came to me. Woman to woman. I told her to go to hell, go back to Detroit, get out of our life. At first. Then the calls started coming. These men with strange accents. Coming to the house, where my son might answer the phone.”

“And the money problems…”

“Unlike my husband, I wasn’t counting on a pro hockey contract.”

She looked tired. Tired of the conversation, tired of packing boxes, tired of trying to escape from her husband’s grasp.

“You made Laird send that rejection letter to Gracie.”

“Actually, I had one of his staff do it.”

“And the explosion at the rink? What was that about?”

“That was Grace. She wanted Vend as badly as Laird. Bad idea, in retrospect.”

I thought of the clipping in Gracie’s dark room, of Vend acquitted of bombing a rival strip club, how the episode had amused him.

“The flowers were a bad move, too,” I said. “In retrospect.”

“Also Grace’s idea. But I felt for your mother.”

“Sure you did.”

“Part of the plan. They had the intended effect.”

“And you set the chimney fire so the cops would find the shoe? How do you a set a chimney fire?”

“You wait for your husband to go to bed and you build a really big out-of-control fire using lighter fluid and then you call the fire department and tell them you think you have a chimney fire.”

“And of course they come, whether you have one or not.”

“Silly women, huh? What do they know?”

“Right. What about the blackmail note? Why didn’t you just get it to the cops somehow?”

“Grace figured it’d look better if you found it for them and gave it to your girlfriend.”

“Jesus.”

I thought of how Gracie had led us to this moment in this room filled with boxes. How she’d fooled me in the Zam shed and shown me the hiding place I later thought I was so clever to plumb. How she’d stocked her little fridge and left her Wings cap hanging and marked the calendar so that my piqued curiosity would lead me to where she wanted me to go. How she knew the pages hung on her walls would at once flatter and anger me to action. How her bogus blackmail note would neatly and easily satisfy my hunger for a motive.

And those videotapes at Gracie’s house? They were probably blank. Of course Trixie wouldn’t let me take one.

“That night at the pizzeria,” I said.

It stumped her for a second. “Oh, that disgusting place. She made me go.”

“Belly blew your cover.”

“Belly?”

“Was Gracie having doubts?”

“Doubts about what?”

I was beginning to get angry.

“Doubts that she wanted to kill herself, Felicia. Doubts you talked her out of.”

“No.” Felicia held my eyes, made sure I saw that she was not lying. “She had no doubts. Once she saw that I would not bend on her seeing my son, she had no doubts. None at all.”

I believed her. It sickened me, but I believed her.

“Gracie was fucked up,” I said.

“Your words. But yes.”

“So you made a deal. You could kill a lot of birds with that stone, eh?”

“I tried, Gus,” she said. She wasn’t answering my question. She wanted me to know something else. “Right at the end.”

“Tried what?”

The women struggled across the road with the extension ladder Felicia had taken from the toolshed at her home. The snowstorm howled, the shoe tree a hulking phantom in the blizzard dark.

The wind kept grabbing one end of the ladder and whipping it away. Gracie held it fast to her shoulder, spitting orders as she bit down on a penlight in her teeth. Felicia kept glancing over her shoulder for headlights. Even here, she thought, the storm would keep most people inside. She had made sure her husband took an extra sleeping pill before telling him she was going downstairs to read. Beneath her parka she wore the cashmere robe and flannel pajamas she’d been wearing before she left him snoring.

They propped the ladder against the shoe tree.

It would look like a suicide so obvious that it could only be murder. Haskell would take the rap after Felicia planted one of Gracie’s shoes in their fireplace. Haskell, in turn, would finger Vend. Both would go to prison for one crime or another. Felicia would disappear with Taylor. And Gracie’s life insurance policy would take care of the only people who had ever taken care of her, my mother and Trixie.

The cool, clear logic of desperation.

Gracie climbed the ladder, tucking her head into her shoulders against the wind and pelting snow. Felicia followed two rungs below. They faced the road so Felicia could watch for cars.

Gracie had visited the tree at dawn to select a bough that appeared strong enough to hold her, high enough that she would not touch the ground. She had fashioned a noose from black nylon rope and foam sheathing, the same as the many she had made for her clients. She’d been wearing it around her neck beneath her coat when Felicia had picked her up on the service road in the woods behind the rink. Felicia had felt her stomach flip but decided not to say anything. This was how it would be and soon it would be done.

Near the top of the ladder, Gracie hugged the bough with her left arm, wound the rope around the bough, and knotted it in a loose-fitting loop that she slid out onto the branch as far as she could reach. The ladder wobbled and Felicia leaned right and grabbed at the tree trunk. In the branches above Gracie’s head she saw the blurred white shapes of sneakers and boots and skates.

Gracie bent and slipped off her left shoe, an ankle-high work boot with a worn hard-rubber sole. She wasn’t wearing a sock. She dangled the boot down by a lace and Felicia took it and stuffed it into one of the flap pockets of her parka. She looked up again and saw Gracie staring down at her.

Felicia closed her eyes. She counted slowly to five, six, seven… She hadn’t known what to expect. Would she feel the weight of the body as the rope unraveled to tautness? Would she open her eyes to a woman struggling against her noose? She felt herself holding her breath, gripping the ladder so hard that her palms hurt. Would she be able to simply slide the ladder back into her SUV and drive home and slip back into the soft leather chair in her living room and pick up her book where she’d left off?

The ladder shook. Felicia felt the rattle, violent and abrupt, from her fingertips to the bottoms of her feet.

“And that was it?”

Felicia shook her head. She held her left arm up in front of me. “Remember, I was wearing a bandage when we last met.”

“So?”

“I tried to grab her. I tried to reach her, pull her back. I tried. But I lost my balance and fell. By the time I got up, it was too late.”

And once Gracie was dead, what choice did Felicia Haskell have but to follow through with their plot?

She let her arm fall to her lap. I stood.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I called her boyfriend. I didn’t have to do that.”

I didn’t care anymore that she was sorry. I didn’t care if she lived out of boxes for the rest of her life.

“All you had to do was tell her you’d share Taylor. But that wouldn’t have solved your husband problem.”

“I think it’s time for you to go.”

“What about Taylor? Is he ever going to get to play hockey again?”

“What difference does it make?”

“He’s a good kid. He might like to play again.”

“You people and your stupid hockey.”

I went to the door. Felicia stayed put. I turned to say good-bye, but before I could, she said, “You still don’t really know her, do you?”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I know she loved her son.”

Late that afternoon, I knocked on Parmelee Gilbert’s office door. He was getting ready to call it a day and walk home, but he invited me in.

I repeated for the fifth or sixth time my desire to speak with Gilbert’s client, Laird Haskell. But before Gilbert could again inform me that he would not be trying Mr. Haskell’s case in the media, I told him about my visit to Gracie’s house, about the drawing of the hockey player, the photograph of Gracie with Darlene, the coffee cup in the dish drainer, the implements in the boxes in her dark room.

Only once as I told him did I glance at the picture of Carol Jo, the pigtailed cheerleader Parmelee Gilbert had lost to an unknown killer more than thirty years before. Gilbert listened to me. If the expression on his face changed from its usual flat calm, I didn’t notice. He said he would get back to me.

The next morning, there was a message on my office voice mail: Haskell would see me at one thirty.