The Hanging Tree (2 page)

Gracie wasn’t as good at climbing down, or at least she pretended not to be. Ricky put his pants on and tried to help her, but he was too heavy to climb as high as Gracie, and she insisted, giggling again, that she was too afraid to descend. He finally drove into town while Gracie sat on a high branch in the dark, wearing nothing, until a fire truck came and plucked her from the tree like a pussycat. When one of the Pine County sheriff’s deputies asked her what the hell she was thinking climbing fifty or sixty or seventy feet into a tree naked in the dark, she said, “I don’t know, officer. Didn’t you ever do anything for love?”

Soon more shoes began to appear in the tree. At the high school, hanging shoes became a spring ritual for graduating seniors, which naturally prompted a brief, futile attempt by the police to stop it, seeing as the kids’ hangings usually involved beer and sometimes ladders. But adults hung shoes in the tree, too, especially after a night at Enright’s Pub. Out-of-state tourists saw the tree and pulled over and hung their own shoes and flip-flops, their equivalent of writing in the guest book at a rental cottage. Sometimes when a romance soured, one of the two lovers would bother to shinny into the tree and slice a pair of shoes away.

But mostly the shoes multiplied, and over the years the oak took on the look of a matronly ghost dressed in a ragged nightgown. And somewhere in her highest branches dangled a single snow-covered football cleat tied to a high-top sneaker faded to a dirty gray, the pink but a memory.

And way below the sneaker now hung Gracie herself.

The headlights on my pickup truck pushed through the dark, my tires creaking through the fresh eight inches of snow left by the blizzard that had howled through Starvation between supper and sometime after midnight. Wind whistled into the cab through a twisting hairline crack in the
window next to me. Twice I had to slow down and steer around branches the wind had severed from trees.

I saw the dim pulse of blue and red police lights about half a mile ahead. The silhouettes of the bare trees etched skeletons on the linen sky. I pulled onto what shoulder there was and parked, reached into my glove box and pulled out a notebook, my cell phone, a ballpoint pen, and a pencil, in case the pen didn’t work in the cold. I stuffed it all in my jacket and stepped out onto the road.

For the record, I did not follow Darlene. After I heard her clomp down her back stairs and roar away in her police cruiser, I dressed and hurried out across Main to the
Pilot
. The police scanner on the plywood shelf near my desk told me all I needed to know.

The tree stood in a clearing about twenty-five feet off the road, surrounded by a field buried in snow and ringed by woods. The cops hadn’t taken the body down, probably had barely touched it yet except to ascertain that it was dead, as they worked to encircle the clearing with yellow do-not-cross tape.

I veered to the shadows along the right shoulder across the road so the cops were less likely to see me. It wasn’t easy to see over the wall of snow piled high along the opposite shoulder, but it gave me a bit of cover. The sheriff generally didn’t appreciate me showing up before he’d had a chance to determine what had happened and what he would tell me and my friends at Channel Eight.

I spied Darlene unspooling police tape at the far end of the clearing, a duty she might have chosen so she would not have to face the body of her oldest and best friend up close in death. The area around the base of the tree was illuminated by headlights and the flashing lights of an ambulance, a fire truck, and three police cruisers parked at haphazard angles along the road.

Two paramedics bundled in parkas and wool caps stood behind the open double doors of the ambulance talking with the sheriff. The sheriff, a man built like an elm tree in a knee-length brown parka and a fur-lined earflap cap, pointed at the body. One paramedic nodded. The other climbed into the back of the ambulance. The sheriff held up a hand, as if telling them to wait a minute, then started toward the tree. He had to lift his knees high to get through the accumulated snow.
We’d had a lot this winter, more than we’d seen since the 1980s. When the sheriff reached the hanging corpse, he stopped and played a flashlight slowly up the limp body. The light flashed white on her face.

“Jesus,” I said to myself.

The wind gusted near the tree and Gracie swayed back a few inches, then swayed forward again. Not much of her face was visible through the jagged scraps of ice and snow that clung to her forehead and cheeks. Patches of white covered much of the rest of her. She was wearing something dark beneath all the snow and ice. Maybe a black leather jacket, a pair of black jeans.

Her left foot appeared to be shoeless. She could have lost a boot as she kicked away whatever she had stood on. I couldn’t tell if the foot wore a sock. And whatever Gracie had climbed up on must have fallen into the snow. She hadn’t climbed nearly as high as she had all those years ago. Just enough to secure herself to one of the sturdy boughs eight or nine feet off the ground. She wasn’t ninety pounds anymore either.

Stray snowflakes blowing around had dampened the first page in my notebook. I flipped back to a dry page, took off my right glove, grabbed the pencil, started jotting some notes. I had reported on one suicide before, before I’d left Detroit and returned to my hometown, Starvation Lake, back when I was still covering the auto industry for the daily
Detroit Times
. A laid-off middle manager for Superior Motors, a big auto manufacturer, leapt from the Ambassador Bridge spanning the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor. Hitting the water didn’t kill him but the current sucked him under, and his body, in dark suit, white shirt, and red print tie, fetched up on Fighting Island downriver. My four paragraphs got buried at the bottom of A14 or 15.

I figured Gracie would get similar treatment in the
Pine County
Pilot.
Newspapers didn’t care much for suicides, unless they involved rock stars. The editors would argue that you could never truly prove anyone had committed suicide without knowing exactly what they were thinking right up to the last milliseconds before they died. Even if there was a note, you couldn’t be positive that the dead one hadn’t felt a desperate urge to call it off, to save himself as he plummeted toward the sidewalk, or whether the carbon monoxide so flummoxed her that her fingers weren’t able to roll the car window down. Maybe it was, in the very end, just an accident.

This was no accident, though. Gracie had many choices that had led her to this final one. I can’t honestly say that, as I stood watching her body rock in the wind, I felt much sympathy for Gracie. But I felt for Darlene.

Brilliant light flashed across my notebook. I stopped writing and looked up. The sizable upper half of Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho loomed over the snowbank in front of me, his flashlight extended.

“This is a crime scene, young man,” he said. “Better get going.”

I shielded my eyes against the glare and took a step closer.

“Dingus,” I said.

He waved the flashlight beam toward my pickup.

“I’ll ask you once to get in your truck and go home,” he said. “If I have anything to say, you’ll hear it later.”

“Sorry, can’t hear you,” I said, moving close enough that I could see the ice striping his handlebar mustache. “That’s Gracie McBride, isn’t it?”

“I have nothing to say at the moment.”

Despite his bulk, it was sometimes hard to take Dingus seriously because he still spoke in the singsong lilt of a Finn who’d migrated down to Starvation from the Upper Peninsula.

“This would be the first suicide in the shoe tree, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“Nice try. Now move along.”

I scribbled something illegible in my notebook, just to let Dingus know I wasn’t giving up. Not that it mattered much. Early on a Monday morning, Channel Eight would have an entire day to cover the story before Tuesday’s
Pilot
came out. And I doubted we’d run much anyway. A woman who’d been racing toward the gates of hell for most of her life had arrived a bit quicker than we’d all expected. Not much news there, actually.

“Dingus, could you at least confirm—”

“Gus!” he said, turning the beam on his face. “Look at me.”

I stopped writing. The light gleamed on the badge pinned to the front of his earflap cap. He jerked a gloved thumb over his shoulder.

“You don’t really want her to see you here, do you?”

I looked past him and saw Darlene and another deputy moving toward the ambulance. Dingus was right, I really didn’t want Darlene to see me, but I didn’t know how that could be avoided.

“I’m just doing my job,” I said. “She’ll have to understand.”

“She’ll
have to
, huh? I think you know her better than that.”

“I guess.”

“Look—off the record?”

“Sure. It’s Gracie, right?”

He shrugged. “It’s getting dangerous to drive a Zamboni around here.”

Gracie had driven the ice-resurfacing machine at the hockey rink where my buddies and I played late at night. Starvation’s last suicide, about a year before, had also driven the Zam at the rink.

“You going to do an autopsy?”

“Up to the coroner. But it’s pretty standard procedure.”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded toward the tree. “What happened to her other shoe?”

A vehicle approached. Both of us turned our heads. Twin yellow beams shined between the headlights. Dingus squinted in disapproval as the Channel Eight van rolled closer.

“Damn it all,” he said. He shouted at his deputies. “Let’s move it, people. Get her down and into that ambulance chop-chop. I don’t want her mother seeing this on TV.”

I stepped back to the opposite bank and watched as the deputies and paramedics lowered Gracie from the shoe tree. I expected Darlene to stand aside but she shouldered her way in and took hold of Gracie around the waist.

“Careful,” she shouted. “Be gentle with her.”

The ambulance doors slammed shut as the Channel Eight van’s passenger door swung open. Out jumped a slim woman in a quilted black parka. She shot me a frown before bounding up the snowbank, waving a microphone over her head. “Sheriff! Sheriff Aho!”

I looked past her and saw Darlene at the back of the ambulance. She held one gloved hand flat against the door. She dropped it only after the ambulance pulled away, churning snow in its wake.

I wished I could wrap my arms around her. Later, I thought.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets and started back to my truck. As the ambulance siren faded in the distance, I heard the muffled ringing of my cell phone in my pocket. It could only be one person.

“Darlene,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t see you?”

She was upset. I decided I’d let her be.

“Sorry. Gotta do my job.”

“You always say that.”

Cold stung my knuckles. I switched the phone to my other hand.

“We don’t do much with suicides anyway,” I said.

“Good.”

“Yeah, no need to embarrass her mom.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She said it with such force that I stopped and spun around toward the shoe tree. “What do you mean?”

“Gracie did not—oh, goddammit, Dingus. Hold on.”

I waited, watching the police lights flicker in the branches of the shoe tree. Darlene came back on.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “We’ll talk later. I love you.”

two

Clouds the color of bone hid the morning sun when I stepped onto Main Street just before seven o’clock.

Exhaust snaked up from three pickup trucks and an SUV idling in the angled parking spaces that ran down both sides of Main to where the street veered southwest at the eastern shore of the lake. The trucks had been left running to stay warm while their owners ate breakfast at Audrey’s Diner. I imagined four grizzled old men in plaid flannel shirts buttoned over thermals sopping up egg yolk with white toast and talking about the chance for more snow, about the Detroit Red Wings’ goaltending problems, about that new hockey rink going up in town, and maybe, if they had heard by now, about Gracie McBride.

A brittle gust of wind off the lake raked my face as I crossed Main at Estelle Street. Up and down Main stood two-story clapboard-and-brick buildings erected decades before, when the town of Starvation Lake—known back then, at the turn of the century, as Sleepy Corner—was civilization to the lumbermen who’d come north to demolish forests of pine from Lake Huron across to Lake Michigan. They had drunk and fought and sometimes killed and then, when the forests had all been leveled to stumps and pine needles, they had gone, leaving the settlement and other places like it to figure out how to survive.

Starvation had lasted by luring just enough tourists from Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland to come north to party and swim and boat and snowmobile. For a time, Starvation was Michigan’s secret resort darling, one of the few inland towns that could tempt tourists away from Traverse City and Charlevoix and Petoskey on the big lake. But Sandy Cove and other little lakeside villages caught on and started grabbing for the same vacationers. There had been a time, too, when hockey teams from all over Michigan and even from outstate came to Starvation to play against our
kid hockey team, the River Rats. I had been the goaltender on the greatest of those teams and, to some of the townsfolk—actually, a lot of them—the most disappointing.

If you counted, as I had, you would see that about one of every three buildings on Main had a sign in the window that said
FOR LEASE OR SALE BY OWNER
. Vandals had destroyed one side of the marquee on the shuttered Avalon Cinema. The Dairy Queen had closed its doors the day after Labor Day and the owner couldn’t say whether he’d reopen come summer.

Still, there was the diner, the florist, Fortune Drug, Kepsel’s Ace Hardware, the old marina, a bait shop, Parmelee Gilbert’s law office, a dentist, Repicky Realty now where Boynton Realty had once been, Enright’s Pub, and Big Larry’s Party Store, closed Mondays and Tuesdays during winter.

And there was the lake, named for a drought that had almost dried it up until one of FDR’s make-work projects built a dam to divert the Hungry River. As I saw it walking up Main toward the
Pilot
, the lake was a vast field of white, crisscrossed with snowmobile tracks and dotted with the dark trapezoids of ice-fishing shanties. Wisps of low clouds shrouded the tops of trees crowding the bluffs on the far shore. The lake stretched north and west from the town in a seven-mile crescent, spring fed, clear as tap water, as deep as 250 feet in some places. In summer it would come alive with the roar of boat motors and the squeals of children.