The Hanging Tree

five

I waited until I got into my truck to call Darlene.

“Esper,” she said.

“Good morning.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“My God, Gus, I am so-” She stopped herself. I imagined her holding the cell phone close to her face, ducking away from the sheriff and the other deputies. “I am so sick of being a girl.”

“What?”

“Being treated like a girl.”

“What happened?”

“Dingus sent me back to the department.”

“You’re at your desk?”

“I’m handling the frigging press. We’re off the record, by the way.”

I decided not to make a joke. The “press” would be me and the woman who went on the air for Channel Eight. I started my truck, pulled it into Mom’s driveway, threw it in reverse, and backed it onto Beach Drive.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Are they thinking-”

“Don’t you dare take their side.”

“I’m not. I just thought-”

“I know what you thought. You thought, This is my oldest friend, maybe I shouldn’t be working on this.”

“No.” I really hadn’t. Yet.

“Well, that’s what Dingus said. ‘Maybe you should take a little time, Darlene.’ He can kiss my buns.”

Dingus, I thought, might also have worried that she would tell me things she shouldn’t. He didn’t always mind me knowing things, but he liked to be the one who decided what I knew or didn’t and when.

“Maybe he’ll reconsider.”

“I’ll make him.”

I let the conversation pause as I veered onto Main Street and passed the old marina, Repicky’s, Enright’s, Sally’s, Audrey’s, and crossed Estelle where the businesses gave way to two-story houses on either side of the road, their sprawling front porches buried in snow.

“How are you really?”

“I’m pissed.”

“I know, but, I mean, you know, with Gracie and all.”

“Are you going to write a story?”

“I have to write something.”

“Like what?”

“Are you handling the press now?”

She softened her voice. “Like what, Gussy?”

The houses fell behind me and fields of white opened beyond both road shoulders. An occasional fence post knotted with barbed wire poked through the drifts. A new cell tower jutted into the sky high above the tree line.

“I don’t know. If I had to write it this minute, I don’t know how I could write anything but apparent suicide. But I have yet to hear from Dingus-”

“Screw Dingus.”

“-and you cut me off last night and then you left me that weird voice mail this morning. Luckily, I don’t have to write this minute, but I will a little later today, so any help you can give me…”

“Hang on,” Darlene said. I imagined her looking around her office to make sure no one could overhear.

I pulled the truck to the side of the road, not far from where I had parked it the night before. Down the road, the lights of police cruisers flickered near the shoe tree.

As far as I knew, a pair of my old hockey skates still hung from one of the higher branches. When I was still a very young man, Darlene had brought along a paper grocery sack on one of our dates and insisted I take her to the tree. It was the summer before I left Starvation Lake. Parked near the tree in my truck we made love; I remember searching for her eyes in the dark.

Darlene pulled her jeans on and took the paper bag from the flatbed and beckoned to me. From the sack she produced a pair of her softball spikes, still flecked with dried mud, and a pair of my skates she’d gotten from my mother. “Now,” she said. I climbed as high as I could and hung them next to each other on the only branch I could find without shoes already hanging from it. Perched on a branch, clinging to the tree trunk, I looked down and felt glad to hear her laugh and see the sweat on her forehead glistening in the moonlight.

It was not enough to keep me in Starvation, though. As I said, I was a very young man. Three weeks later, I left town for what I thought would be forever. Darlene refused to visit me in Detroit; we would either be together at home, in Starvation, she told me, or we would not.

Years passed. We didn’t talk. It was awkward when we bumped into each other on my infrequent visits north. Darlene began to see a former minor-league hockey player named Jason Esper.

Just before they married, I heard through the grapevine that Darlene had climbed into the shoe tree after a night of drinking and torn her spikes from the branch. Hearing that, I imagined her hair swinging to and fro across her back as she clambered angrily from one branch to another.

More years passed before my troubles at the Times sent me back to Starvation, where I happily found Darlene in a marriage empty enough that she would reconsider me. Now, with her voice in my ear, I hoped that what had happened to her friend in that tree wouldn’t make it harder on the two of us.

“So there was no car,” I said.

“No,” Darlene said.

I stared through my windshield at the distant crooked bough of the shoe tree where Gracie had been hanging the night before. One of the cops turned and pointed at my truck.

“And no ladder, nothing to stand on.”

“Nope.”

I wasn’t accustomed to Darlene talking about cases. We had a loose rule that we didn’t talk to each other about what we were working on. It was more Darlene’s rule than mine; it wasn’t like I was sworn not to divulge the contents of next week’s school lunch menu. But Darlene was staunch. She’d talk about the doughnut sprinkles that got stuck in Dingus’s handlebar mustache, about the other deputies’ cheating on overtime, about how they had contests to see who could write the most speeding tickets on a holiday weekend. She almost never talked about specific cases.

“Any footprints out there?”

“Covered or blown over.”

That reminded me. “One of her feet was bare, wasn’t it?”

She waited, begrudging me this detail. “Yes.”

“Have you-”

“No. We haven’t found the other boot, unless it’s up in the tree. Dingus is trying to get a cherry picker out there, but the snow’s an issue.”

“Well, how the hell did she get up there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she had help.”

I thought of the stool Gracie had sat on driving the Zamboni. Soupy was always joking that she really needed a booster seat on top of that so she didn’t drive the thing through the boards.

Then I thought, Oh, holy Christ, Soupy. He and Gracie had been seeing each other, less discreetly than they no doubt had imagined. Soupy had closed Enright’s early the night before. I hadn’t thought too much of it then, given the snowstorm, though it wasn’t like Soupy to close his bar even one minute before he could sell-or drink-one last beer. Now I had to wonder whether Soupy had driven Gracie out to the shoe tree. Nobody could be that stupid.

Except maybe Soupy. My stomach tightened. He wasn’t capable of hurting anyone intentionally. But he was damned good at hurting himself.

I decided against asking Darlene about Soupy. Instead I said, “So what about your voice mail?”

“Did you go to Audrey’s?”

“Yeah. Elvis was holding court.”

“I figured. What did he say?”

“He said the cops-you guys have a suicide note. Said it was on TV this morning, why the hell hadn’t I seen it, blah blah.”

“Which is why I left that message.”

“So there is no suicide note?”

“No… well, there’s a… it’s complicated. She had a piece of paper on her. Some people might call it a suicide note, people who knew about Gracie’s”-I thought I heard a catch in Darlene’s voice-“you know, her flair for drama.”

“A piece of paper? Like what?”

“It wasn’t a suicide note.”

“So, what then?”

“She was trying to tell us something.”

That she was suicidal? No. No car. No ladder. A shoe missing. “What exactly did she write?”

“She didn’t. The people at that new hockey rink did.” There was a pause. I thought Darlene might have been collecting herself. “A rejection letter. One page.”

“She applied for a job at the new rink?”

“Yes. The same job she has-had at the old rink.”

“Was the letter dated?”

“Not sure. They haven’t let me actually look at it. But I assume it’s recent.”

It seemed a little strange that the owner of the new rink, or his minions, would be making decisions about jobs when the rink was barely a skeleton of structural steel. Might Gracie have gotten the job if construction hadn’t stopped? Now I understood what Elvis had meant by the “connection” between my rink stories and Gracie’s death: my stories, by halting construction, had killed Gracie. Elvis had quite an imagination.

“And they told her no?”

“Yes. They told her to go to hell.”

“Forgive me, Darl, but why would anybody think that’s a suicide note?”

“Most people wouldn’t. But we’re talking about you-know-who.”

She meant Pine County sheriff’s deputy Frank D’Alessio, who probably had leaked the detail to Channel Eight. “Where did you find it?” I said.

“In a snowdrift a few feet from where she was hanging.”

“So she could have just dropped it.”

“Or it could have fallen out of her pocket as she was being dragged up into the tree.”

I tried to imagine it. A man? Two men? It wouldn’t be a woman. Not with Gracie. No, it would be a man, or men. But why? I had no idea. All I could think at that moment was that the answer was likely to be found somewhere other than Starvation Lake. Somewhere downstate.

“When do you expect to hear from Doc Joe?” I said.

“You mean Doc Slow?” Doc Joe was Joe Schriver, Pine County medical examiner. He was not known for expediting cases. “We’ll probably figure this out before he rubber-stamps it.”

“You’ve positively identified-Jesus!”

A rapping on the window to my left startled me. I turned and saw D’Alessio standing in the road outside, a long flashlight in one hand.

“What?” Darlene said.

I lowered my voice and put a finger up to let D’Alessio know I’d be just a moment. “I have a visitor,” I told Darlene. “You-know-who.”

“Gus,” Darlene said, “somebody wants us to think this was a suicide. Somebody who really didn’t like Gracie.”

D’Alessio rapped the butt end of his flashlight on my window again, harder. “Open up, fuckhead.”

I took another look at the shoe tree. “You’re right,” I told Darlene.

“Gracie was no angel but-”

“I know. She didn’t deserve this. Don’t worry. I’m on it.”