The Hanging Tree

six

Cold whipped across my face as I rolled my window down. D’Alessio had hidden his eyes behind unnecessary sunglasses.

“Frankie,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Can’t be parking here.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of town. “Got to move it along.”

D’Alessio had come to Starvation from Detroit as a boy. His father had been a Detroit cop who got sick of the shot-up streets and falling-down houses, so he came up north and bought a grocery store in town. Frankie had a wife and a couple of kids. He skated in the Midnight Hour Men’s League. Not a lot of skill, but a knack for whacking the top of your skate with the heel of his stick when you weren’t looking, something I hadn’t had to endure when I was playing goalie.

He also carried a barely disguised hard-on for Channel Eight’s on-air reporter, Tawny Jane Reese.

“What do you think?” I said. “I hear you’ve got a suicide note.”

“Crazy little bitch,” he said, meaning, I assumed, Gracie. “No comment.”

“It’s not a suicide.”

“All communications with the press should be directed to the sheriff or the on-duty press liaison.”

I chuckled. “Tell me, Frankie. How do I get you to leak me stuff like this so-called suicide note? I hope Tawny at least gave you a hand job.”

I didn’t really think she’d ever given in to D’Alessio’s come-ons, but I was sure she regularly used them to her advantage.

“You want a tip?” D’Alessio said. He grinned and leaned his head down so he could look at me over the tops of his glasses.

“I’m not giving you a hand job.”

“Meat’s back.”

I tried to look nonchalant. “Who?”

“Fuck you,” D’Alessio said. He leaned his head back but kept the grin in place. “You know-the guy whose wife you been banging.”

He meant Jason Esper, Darlene’s estranged husband. I had heard rumors that he might come back to Starvation after leaving Darlene and town many months before.

Those of us who played hockey called him Meat for how the knuckles on his right hand looked after dozens of fights in the lowest of the low minor leagues. Like pounded meat. Darlene had told me that Jason went through periods when it was too painful for him to put his hand in his pocket. He also happened to be about as big and muscled as a steer.

“Aha,” I said. “Well, welcome back, Meat. Why’s he back? Did someone beat his video golf record at Dingman’s?”

“I hear he’s fixed himself up pretty good,” D’Alessio said. “But you can see for yourself tomorrow.”

Tuesday night, Soupy and I and our team, the Chowder Heads, had a first-round playoff game in the Midnight Hour Men’s League.

“No shit, huh?” I said. “Meat’s playing?”

“Yes, sir. Last time you saw him on the ice, he was skating for the Pipefitters, wasn’t he?”

The Pipefitters was the team from south of Detroit that beat us in overtime in the 1981 state final.

“Yeah,” I said. “But he was young, didn’t get a lot of ice time.”

“He’ll get plenty tomorrow, unfortunately for you.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Deputy!”

The shout came from the shoe tree. We both looked to see Dingus waving his arms over his head. He didn’t seem happy. D’Alessio, flustered, gave him a thumbs-up, then looked back at me.

“Move it along,” he said. “I’ll see you at the rink or”-he smirked again-“maybe in the hospital.”

I swung my truck around and headed back in the direction of town. As I turned north on Ladensack Road, I tried Soupy’s cell phone. As usual, he didn’t answer. Probably still in bed, I thought. I didn’t bother to leave a message he wouldn’t bother to retrieve.

The Starvation Lake Arena, in all of its cinder-block glory, squatted in a parking lot ringed by snow-laden pines and birches.

I slowed to let a snowplow pull onto the road in front of me. I was glad to see the lot empty but for a single Dodge pickup. Snow was piled high against the marquee on wheels near the roadside, but I could still make out the advertisement for that night’s game. “River Rats v Mar ue te, 7 o’clock, SRO”, it said, the “q” and a “t” missing from “Marquette”. I smiled and shook my head. It had been a long time since the Rats had commanded standing-room-only crowds. Back then, I was the goalie, Soupy was the all-state defenseman, and the Rats were one of the best squads in Michigan.

I drove around to the back of the building and parked. A rusted oilcan overflowed with beer cartons covered in snow. The door to the back of the rink was locked so I walked around to the front, hoping I was alone.

The sweet smell of refrigerant filled my nose as I pushed open one of the double doors between the arena lobby and the rink itself. The only sound was the hum of a generator beyond the walls somewhere. I walked to my left and stopped on the rubber-mat floor behind the net I had tended as a kid for the River Rats and, many years later, in the Midnight Hour Men’s League.

I’d liked the vantage all those years I was a goalie: the rink spreading out in front of me, the bleachers rising to the shadows beneath the ceiling on my left, the benches and penalty boxes stretching down the dasher boards to my right, the opposing net facing me two hundred feet away, the banners dangling from the rafters overhead. When a crowd had gathered, I could feel the glass behind me groaning against their weight, hear them cursing me or praising me, no matter what I did. Some were on my side, some weren’t. Sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference.

Finally, I had had enough of throwing myself in front of flying pucks, enough of people firing pucks at my head. A year before, I had ditched the mask and leg pillows and chest protector, grabbed a stick with a hook on the blade, and started playing on a wing. It felt good to be on the bench bitching about the goalie instead of being the one on the other end of the bitching, good not to be alone between those iron pipes.

I scanned the rink, looking for whoever had parked the Dodge outside. Sometimes old folks came and walked circles around the perimeter for exercise. None were there on this morning. The preschool figure skating class wasn’t due for another hour. I knew these useless facts because I read them each week on the press releases someone sent to the Pilot. I peered up at the banners. The last, in faded Rats blue and gold, had been hung in 1987, when the team won the regional final before losing in the state quarters. The best-or the worst-was the banner from 1981, when my own Rats team lost in the state final, in that very rink, because of the goal I allowed into the net I was now standing behind.

A noise came from the concession stand. I turned and saw a cardboard box marked Koffee-Kleen Filters appear on the counter. Whoever drove that Dodge was working back there-probably a kid a year out of high school who’d work in rinks and on construction sites between unemployment checks his whole life without ever leaving Starvation Lake. I ducked my head and skittered around the corner of the rink boards to my right, hoping no one had seen me.

Staying low, I scrambled along behind the benches and penalty boxes toward the back of the arena. The floor peeled up in places. Chilly drafts blew over me through thin cracks in the walls. An electrical outlet box hung haphazardly off the back of the announcer’s box, spewing bare wires. Puddles had formed where water had dripped through the sieve of a roof. Even though the Rats were finally winning again, skating stride for stride with the downstate teams for the first time in years, the town was letting the rink go to pot.

The town council, chaired by none other than Elvis Bontrager, had planned the year before to pay for refurbishments. Then Laird Haskell showed up at a council meeting one night with a box of glossy blue-and-gold folders embossed with the slogan “River Rats: Return to Glory.” He had a goaltender son who would keep other teams off the scoreboard and a bank account that would build the finest hockey facility in Michigan, complete with a weight room, two Zambonis, a bar called the Stanley Club-and a new scoreboard with a video screen that would show replays of his son’s brilliant saves. “We’ll build this,” he told the council, “and the championships will come.”

The council, without asking a single hard question about when or where he was going to get the money, gladly set aside the plans to fix the old rink and started shoveling our tax dollars toward helping Haskell. What reason was there to doubt him? He was a wealthy man-just look at his enormous house on the lake. Why would he propose a new rink if he couldn’t pay for it? Why throw money at the old rink when a free one was there for the taking?

At the back of the arena, I looked back over the top of the boards toward the concession stand and saw Johnny Ford doing something at the frozen yogurt machine. So that was his Dodge in the lot. He wasn’t out of high school yet. Either he didn’t have morning class or he was skipping.

He hadn’t seen me, I decided.

I crept past the two extra goalie nets leaned against the back wall and into the high-ceilinged bay where the Zamboni stood dripping water on a concrete floor. Johnny must have run it just before I’d arrived. I walked around the Zam once slowly, smelling gasoline, looking for anything that might give me an inkling as to how Gracie had wound up in the shoe tree.

Three tall plastic buckets embossed with Miller Lite logos sat along the back wall, one filled with rags, another with clotted snow. Next to the buckets stood a broom-sized squeegee and a pair of shovels. Along a side wall stood half a dozen carbon-dioxide tanks beneath a fuse box.

I glanced once more out the Zamboni bay to make sure Johnny wasn’t coming, then ducked under the yellow police tape strung across the doorway into the shed that Gracie had called home for the past few months.

I smelled something like incense mixed with the unmistakable odor of marijuana. The town had so lost interest in the rink that nobody even cared if the Zamboni driver smoked dope. Maybe that’s why Gracie had been turned down for a job at the new rink.

The floor in Gracie’s home was concrete. A scuffed wooden workbench ran alongside the wall to my left. A pegboard above the bench was empty, maybe because Gracie was too short to reach it. The bench was strewn with tools, cans of oil and paint and WD-40, greasy rags, some purple-and-orange marking pens, and an old Detroit Red Wings cap frayed around the bill. Gracie had worn the cap whenever she ran the Zam, her fading reddish hair streaked with silver straggling out the back.

I stopped for a second and thought, She must’ve taught herself to use the tools to keep the Zam in working order. I had never given it a thought before she died, when my pals and I were playing and she was driving the Zam. Before she returned to town, I had never known she was handy around machinery, that she didn’t mind getting dirt under her sparkly pink-and-purple fingernails. Nor did I have the slightest idea what she had done for a living during her years downstate. Never cared either.

When Gracie last lived in Starvation, she’d slung ice cream cones at the Dairy Queen. Business was especially good on her Friday nights because she always wore the tiniest, tightest top she could find, and boys would come all the way from Torch Lake to flirt. The luckiest one would get a cone that came with a wink and a question: “Extra sprinkles tonight?” More than a few times, the lucky one was Soupy. And Soupy being Soupy, I was never short on the details of what happened in the backseat of his Chevy Nova or the woods around Gracie’s mom’s trailer. “The Gymnast,” he took to calling her, or sometimes “Nadia.”

Beyond the bench stood an old wooden filing cabinet, a small refrigerator, and Gracie’s cot. As quietly as I could, I pulled out each drawer of the cabinet to see what I could find. Three of the drawers were empty and one contained a smattering of file folders filled with papers, some of the folders marked with dates from the early 1990s. Dampness had stuck the edges of the paper together. Maybe the cops had already taken all the revealing stuff, if there was any. Could there be a diary? A journal? I couldn’t imagine Gracie having the patience to sit and write in one.

Atop the fridge stood four empty bottles of Gordon’s gin, their caps removed; two unopened bottles; and one bottle still about half full. I opened the fridge. The inside of the door was lined with sixteen-ounce plastic bottles of Squirt, the grapefruit soda pop Gracie splashed into her gin. I counted the bottles: ten unopened, one not quite empty. Five bottles of Blue Ribbon waited in the back of the fridge. For Soupy. The fridge’s top shelf held a loaf of wheat bread that hadn’t yet been opened, a package of cheddar cheese, and a bunch of low-fat strawberry yogurts. I picked up one of the yogurts and looked for the expiration date. March 11. More than four weeks away.

Gracie had just bought all of this stuff, I thought. Why would she go grocery shopping if she knew she was going to kill herself? She wouldn’t.

I closed the fridge.

Her cot was unmade. There was a pillow, a sheet that looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks, and an afghan identical to the one my mother had made for me. Mom had given it to Gracie when she’d left for downstate. I imagined her asleep, breathing refrigerant and paint fumes.

Beneath the cot I spied a green-and-gold Wayne State University duffle bag. I reached under and pulled the bag out. It was unzipped. I poked around inside. There were a couple of Squirt bottle caps and, in a zippered pocket inside the bag, a blue plastic hairbrush with black bristles.

“I’ll be goddamned.”

My mother had bought me the blue brush at Fortune Drug when I turned nine. I kept it proudly on the top of my dresser. Gracie, during one of her extended stays with us, took it and hid it. I threatened to beat her up but she laughed in my face. She said my mother would kill me if I touched her.

She was right about that. So I waited for her to go out to the lake one day and snuck into her room and went through her things until I found the brush in the back of her underwear drawer. I was grossed out, as Gracie surely had intended, but I wanted my brush. She stole it back while I was asleep that night. “You’re a little bitch,” I told her the next day, and my mother heard me and made me stay in my room for the duration of a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Then Gracie told Darlene about the brush and the next thing I knew, Darlene had stolen it from Gracie and Gracie was calling her a slut. My mother finally figured out what was going on, but instead of using her motherly prerogative to order the brush returned to its rightful owner, she filched the brush herself while she was over at Darlene’s having coffee with Mrs. B. She let Gracie and me know she had it over dinner at the picnic table that night, and Gracie laughed so hard that she choked on a mouthful of hot dog.

By the next morning, Gracie had pilfered the brush from Mom, and by night, I’d grabbed it and hidden it in the freezer box of the fridge in the garage where Dad used to keep his Carling Black Labels. Mom found it there and hid it in the bird feeder on the beach. Gracie took it from there and didn’t have it a day before Darlene stole it and stuck it beneath her mattress.

I didn’t even think about using it on my hair anymore. Once Mom joined the game, the brush became something entirely other than a brush. It was now the brush. And it wasn’t so much the having of it that mattered, but the keeping of it, the not losing it to someone else, at least for me. Maybe it was because I was a hockey player; one-goal games and sudden-death overtime were much more about fear than triumph. Once I had the brush in my possession, I tried not to give it a thought-then I would wake up in the middle of the night to see my bedroom door being swung shut by one of the thieves in my life, Gracie or Darlene or my own mother.

I came to hate losing it. It was my brush, after all. And it didn’t matter who had it, or where it was; if I didn’t have the brush in my possession, I blamed Gracie, because she had started the stupid game. And whenever the rest of us seemed to have lost interest, Gracie would find the brush and secretly return it to me, then wait a few days before stealing it back, just to show me that she could make me feel that sting. I was an idiot, of course, but I fell for it again and again. Occasionally I would try to reconcile Gracie’s nasty streak with her lot in life, having lost her father and been forced to live with her crazy mother. Of course I’d also lost my father, and though my mother wasn’t crazy in the same way Shirley McBride was, it was clear whose side Mom was on when it came to the brush. And I let that gnaw at me too.

The last time I had had the brush in my hands, I was a senior in high school and Gracie was in her first semester at Wayne State. Her mother had gone out of town with her latest boyfriend and locked Gracie out of her trailer, so Gracie spent Christmas with us. On Christmas morning, I found a gift from Gracie beneath our tree. I couldn’t remember ever getting a Christmas present from Gracie. She watched, smiling, while I undid the shiny red-and-green paper and silver bow. Inside was the brush. Gracie wanted me to laugh.

I tossed the brush at her. “Keep it,” I said.

“Gussy,” Mom said.

“Don’t be a baby,” Gracie said.

“Or give it to her,” I said, pointing at Mom. “Or Darlene. Or whoever you like. I don’t want to see it again.”

“Gus,” Mom said. “Gracie is trying to be nice.”

“No. She’s messing with me. She’ll probably steal it back tonight.”

“You’re an asshole,” Gracie said.

“Grace Maureen McBride!”

That was one quiet Christmas dinner.

The taunting began a few years later. I had just begun working at the Detroit Times. As a rookie reporter, I didn’t get a lot of mail. One day an envelope showed up, postmarked Detroit. The address was handwritten. I wondered if a reader had seen one of my stories and written a nice note.

But there was no note. Just a color photograph of the brush balanced in the right hand of the Spirit of Detroit, a bronze statue outside the city-county building downtown.

“Fuck you, Gracie,” I said. I tore the photo into shreds and threw it away.

Over the years, the photos kept coming, one every six months or so. The brush on the edge of the boards at Joe Louis Arena. The brush dangling from the hand of a hot dog vendor at Tiger Stadium. The brush on a blackjack table in a Windsor casino. The brush on a railing along the Detroit River at dawn. I trashed them all. Finally I started recognizing the envelopes and tossed them without even opening them. The photos stopped coming sometime in the early 1990s, and I forgot about the brush.

Until I found it in Gracie’s duffle bag.

I didn’t use brushes much anymore on what was left of my hair. But I stuffed it in my pocket and kicked the bag under the bed.

A calendar hung on a nail on the wall over Gracie’s pillow. I had never noticed it before but then why would I have? My infrequent visits to this room were usually to chase a beer or two for Soupy while he showered after a game. Now I leaned in and saw, to my mild surprise, that the calendar came from Pandit’s Shell amp; Service in River Rouge. I tried to picture it. River Rouge was one of the little blue-collar pockets south of Detroit where steel was once made and cars built. Why the hell would Gracie have a calendar from River Rouge?

The calendar was correctly turned to the page for February. Way to go, Gracie, I thought. Each day was struck through with an X etched in black ballpoint pen. Some X’s were the squiggles a drunk would make, but they were all there-except on the last day of Gracie’s life. Maybe that made sense, or maybe it did not. I tried to imagine what she might have been thinking. I couldn’t.

When Gracie scratched the X across the day before she died, did she know for a certainty that it would be her last full day on earth? If she knew she was going to die, why wouldn’t she have struck through the actual last day as well? On the one hand, I was surprised that Gracie had maintained this daily discipline at all; on the other, I figured she of all people would relish the flourish of being able to X out her end for everyone to see. She could have been smiling no matter what the outcome was going to be.

I unhooked the calendar from the nail and flipped the page back to January. There wasn’t a single X mark there.

“Goddammit, Gracie.”

I put the calendar back on the wall.

I leaned back against the workbench and wondered whether the cops had spent any time here. The county had whacked Sheriff Aho’s budget twice in the past year; he couldn’t afford overtime. Darlene had been complaining that her regular hours had been cut. Maybe a deputy had just hung the police tape and left the room for later. Or maybe they’d done a quick dusting for fingerprints, though I couldn’t see what good it would have done. They would have found me and Soupy and Johnny Ford and a dozen men’s league players who had wandered back to bum a beer.

I had been back in the Zam shed myself two nights earlier, the night before the night Gracie died.

“Gracie,” I’d said when I walked in.

She was standing at the bench, her hands streaked black with grease, fiddling with something metal that must have come from the innards of the Zamboni. Within her reach stood a tall blue plastic cup embossed with a gold River Rats logo, a toothy rodent carrying a hockey stick like a pitchfork.

Gracie didn’t seem to notice me at first, though I was standing six feet away. I watched her for a moment. She was just tall enough to get her elbows up on the bench without having to stand on something.

“Gracie,” I said.

“This… this fucking piece of shit,” she said, slamming the part down on the bench. She grabbed a rag and swiped it across her face, leaving a black smudge on a cheek. She looked up and down the bench, apparently not finding what she was looking for, then finally turned to me and waved an arm toward the fridge. “Are you blind? Get your own beer.”

“Didn’t come for a beer,” I said. “But I’ll take one, thanks.”

I slid past her. She was wearing black-and-green snowmobile pants hitched by suspenders over a red flannel shirt unbuttoned to her bosom. I reached into the fridge and grabbed a Blue Ribbon. I twisted the cap off and pinged it into the metal wastebasket beneath the bench.

I reached into my coat pocket and produced a pair of gray wool mittens, a red “G” knitted into the back of each. Mom had made those, too. In high school I had had a pair with blue “G”s on the backs. I would wear them as I was leaving the house, then trade them out for black leather gloves, because I was terrified of what I’d hear if I walked into the hockey dressing room with those mittens on.

“Got your mittens,” I said.

Gracie had the Zamboni part in her hands again, staring at it with her head cocked to one side. “You know,” she said, “you play like a pussy out there.”

I almost coughed up the beer I’d just swallowed.

“What?”

“You heard me. You think I don’t watch?”

My team, Soupy’s Chowder Heads, had beaten the Dead Wings of Murray amp; Murray Funeral Home that night, 5–2. I thought I’d had a pretty good game.

“Did you see my two assists? Including on the game winner?”

She swiveled her head around to look at me. “Only pussies talk about assists,” she said. “So you give the puck to Soupy, he scores. BFD. You still play like a pussy.”

“What the hell do you know about hockey?”

In my entire thirty-five years, I could not recall Gracie ever saying a word to me about hockey except to complain about the reek of my equipment drying in the basement of Mom’s house. She never seemed to care. She never came to a Rats game, at least not that I could remember, unless it was to drink and smoke dope with the burnouts and the football players who clustered behind the rink before we played, hoping the cops would ignore them. I figured she’d taken the job at the rink because it came with a cot and a fridge and a concession stand she could lift food from, not because she gave a rip about hockey.

“I know enough,” she said, turning her eyes back to the Zam part. Without looking she took up the River Rats cup, swished it around a little, and took a drink. “Enough to know you ought to have your ass back in the goal.”

“How the-you never even saw me play net.”

She set the cup back down. “It’s obvious you shouldn’t be playing wing. I mean, you’ve got good enough wheels and you’re smart enough to know your hands ain’t so hot so you’ve got to get the puck to other people. But you don’t like mixing it up in the corners and in front of the net, so you might as well just put your mask back on and get back in the goal where it’s safe.”

“Are you kidding me? Did you ever take a slap shot to the neck?”

“What are you being so pissy for? I didn’t say you were a pussy. I just said you play wing like a pussy. There’s a difference. You’re a goalie. Be a goalie, for fuck’s sake. Just be who you are. At least you have the chance.”

“Thanks for the advice.” I slapped her mittens down on the workbench. “Here.”

“Ah,” she said, her dull eyes brightening a little. She picked up her drink with one hand, the mittens with the other. She drank again while staring at the mittens as if trying to recall where she’d last seen them.

She had left them at Riccardo’s Pizza a few nights before after she and Darlene had had their weekly pizza and Greek salad. They had said their good-byes and Darlene had gone to the ladies’ room. She noticed the mittens sitting on their table on her way out. Gracie was already in her green LTD, about to pull out of the parking lot. Darlene ran outside waving the mittens over her head. But Gracie gunned her engine and Darlene stood in the lot watching the lights of the LTD recede over the Estelle Street Bridge. Later that night, Darlene gave me the mittens and asked me to drop them off at the rink. She wouldn’t see her friend again until Gracie was hanging dead in the shoe tree.

Now Gracie tossed her head back for the last drops in her cup. She set the cup down and pushed away from the bench, mittens in hand.

“Hmm,” she said, to no one I could see. “Don’t want to lose these again.”

She lurched toward me as if I weren’t there. I stepped aside, watching. She grabbed the cot by a leg and dragged it away from the wall, the metal legs scraping on the concrete. She slid around behind the cot and eased herself down to her knees.

On the wall next to her was a heating vent. She set the mittens on the cot and reached into her snowmobile pants, producing a set of keys. She used a key to unwind the two screws holding the vent grille in place. The grille clattered to the floor. Gracie leaned down to peer into the vent.

“Gracie,” I said. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t seem to hear. Totally shit-faced, I thought. All that talk about the way I played wing was just gin-and-Squirt babble.

Gracie reached into the vent with her left hand up to her elbow. The hand came out holding a baggie filled with marijuana. Her stash. I wondered whether the heat flowing around the baggie could turn her room into a giant bong.

She stuck the bag back into the vent. She took the mittens in hand and reached back inside. This time her hand came out empty. “Gracie,” I said, but she did not acknowledge me. It took her a couple of tries, but she fitted the grille back onto the vent and redid the screws. She stood, moved out from behind the cot, shoved the cot back into place, and rubbed her grease-stained hands together. Then she looked up and noticed me as if I’d just walked in.

“How the hell did you get in here?”

Now I crouched behind the cot. The screws on the vent grille came out easily enough. I was careful to lay the grille quietly on the floor.

I leaned my head down and looked inside. It was too dark to see much. I stuck my left arm in, expecting to feel a lumpy cylinder of plastic. But my hand found only the vent’s flat metal walls. I lay down on my side so I could shove my arm in farther. My knuckles banged against the back wall of the vent. I swept my hand all the way to the left and then back to the right.

I found it in the back right corner. Something small and soft. I squeezed it in my palm and pulled it out.

In my hand rested a tiny white shoe. A baby shoe. For the left foot. With a blue satin ribbon intertwined in the white cotton laces. I took it by the ribbon and let it dangle in front of my face.

Was it Gracie’s own shoe? Why would she have saved it? Why would she have stuffed it in this vent? Where was the other shoe? If this shoe was hers, then why a blue ribbon, why not pink?

Down near the tongue of the shoe, a rust-colored key was tied to the ribbon.

I undid the key from the ribbon and slipped it on to my key chain. I put the shoe in my pocket with the brush. I replaced the grille, backed out from behind the cot, and was about to swing the bed back into place when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around.

“Excuse me,” Johnny Ford said.

I’d seen him around the rink a few times but never up close. He always seemed to be scuttling around in the rafters like a squirrel, messing with the arena lamps, crisscrossing the bleachers with a trash bag.

“Johnny,” I said. “Good morning.”

He looked at the floor, nervous. His black jeans sagged atop his unlaced lumber boots. I noticed a mustard stain on the “N” of his Hungry River Rats sweatshirt. The shirt bagged around him, his left forearm hidden in the pouch.

Until his accident, Johnny Ford had been a promising young River Rat center who handled the puck like his stick was part of his body. Working a summer job at Grandview Golf Club, he was mowing at the edge of a pond at number 10 when the mower caught up in some damp weeds and stalled. Johnny reached in to dislodge them, and twenty-two pounds of snapping turtle bit off the first three fingers on his left hand and vanished with them into the green murk. There was a screwup at the hospital; the hand became infected and had to be amputated. He never played hockey again.

“Uh,” he said, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be back here. I mean, you’re not.” He tossed his head toward the police tape. “You know, the cops.”

“Yep, saw it,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t touch anything. Just wanted to look around, see if there were any, like, pictures or anything I could use for the paper. I would’ve asked the sheriff for permission, of course. She was my second cousin, you know. Gracie, that is.”

Johnny looked around the room. “You find any?”

“No, not really. Nothing I can use. Guess I’ll check with her mother.”

He just stood there, saying nothing.

“You going to run the Zamboni now?”

It was a dumb question I hoped would distract him. “Already did.”

“Did Gracie ever let you?”

“Once.” He turned back to me. “You better go.”

“OK.” I put my hands in my pockets, made sure I still had the brush and the shoe. Not that I had any idea what use they would be.

“Sad thing, isn’t it?”

Johnny shrugged. I wondered, for just a second, if Gracie might have seduced him, just for kicks. Probably not, I decided.

“You didn’t see a cell phone around, did you?” he said.

“A cell phone? You have a cell phone?”

“Used to. She borrowed it.”

“She borrowed your cell phone?”

“For twenty dollars.”

“Oh. Well, no. Didn’t see it. Sorry.”

He looked around the room again. “I got to get back.”

I took a step closer to him. “Hey, Johnny, do me a favor, will you?” His face told me he wasn’t sure. “You know the expression ‘What goes on the road stays on the road’?”

“Nope.”

“Ha. Well, it’s a hockey thing. I was hoping maybe you’d kind of think of me coming here like that. One skater to another. I don’t want to get the cops pissed off. Especially when one of them’s my girlfriend, you know?”

“I’m not a skater anymore.”

“Just between us then?”

“Twenty bucks?” he said.

I gave him a ten and two fives. I was less worried about the sheriff finding out I was snooping beyond his police tape than I was about everyone else in town hearing it.

On the way back to town I dialed Darlene’s cell. It went immediately to voice mail. “Remind me,” I said. “Which shoe was Gracie missing?”