The Hanging Tree (22 page)

Jason leaned back and considered me.

“You know,” he said, “I had the hots for Darl way back when we were in high school. But I wasn’t one of the hotshots on the River Rats.”

He stepped forward and angled his face in close to mine.

“Now I’m the coach, motherfucker.”

“Good for you. Beat the Pipefitters, will you?”

“Uh-huh. And that piece of paper? It says we’re married. If she wanted to get divorced, she could’ve gotten divorced. I wasn’t stopping her. Now I am.”

“Sorry, Jason, but—”

“Listen,” he said. “Listen fucking good. Whatever you did with her up to this minute, count yourself lucky, because I ain’t holding it against you. But from now on, she’s my wife, and I’m going to make amends, and you goddamn better well respect that.” He showed me his cleverest smile. “Man, I’m the new coach of the new River Rats. For the sake of the team, for the sake of the
town,
I can’t have my wife running around with some shithead reporter who doesn’t even want a new rink built around here.”

“The rink has nothing to do with your fucked-up marriage.”

“It does now. You heard me. I ain’t fucking this up anymore. If I hear—”

It sounded like a firecracker. A huge firecracker, out in the arena. There was one booming pop, then nothing, then the screams, the women loudest and shrillest,
Oh my baby my baby .
 . . “What the fuck?” Jason and I said in unison. He threw the bolt on the door and we scrambled out.

My nostrils filled with the smell of gasoline cut with something bitter
that I did not recognize. I saw a cloud of black smoke turning to gray obscuring the bay where the Zamboni was stored. On both benches, coaches were yelling, “Down, get down!” and pushing their players to the floor. Parents were rushing out of the bleachers and around the boards to get at their boys. Some of the kids in the sweatshirts followed them into the lobby while others hung in the stands, hugging one another, staring across at the Zam shed.

Oh Jesus, Darlene was down there, I thought. I couldn’t see her for the smoke and the chaos of people running back and forth, so I pushed past Jason and ran down the aisle behind the benches, clambering over the young skaters cowering on the floor. Jason followed me. “Darlene,” I heard him yell and then I yelled myself, “Darlene, where are you?” I glanced up at the scoreboard. The game clock read 1:14 left in the first period; above the scoreboard, a real clock showed the time was 8:01. I slammed into Poppy Popovich, the outgoing Rats coach. “What the hell’s going on around here?” he said as Jason grabbed me by the back of my coat, tossed me aside, and hurried past.

“Halt.” Deputy Skip Catledge stopped Jason and me with both hands held high. We were about thirty feet from the Zam shed. Smoke billowed out both sides of the Zamboni’s flat snout. I saw Darlene on one knee near the back wall of the rink, her hat off, holding her head in one hand. A man I recognized as Doc Joe knelt down beside her.

“One more step and you’re going to jail,” Catledge told Jason and me.

“Is she all right?” I said, the stink burning my sinuses.

Darlene heard me, lifted her head.

“A little shaken up. She should be OK.”

“What happened? Did the Zam explode?”

Jason took another step forward, then another, until he was almost touching Catledge. “That’s my wife.”

Catledge placed a hand on Jason’s coach jacket. “Stand back, sir.”

“I’m the new coach. That’s my goddamn wife. Let me through.”

Catledge looked around at Darlene. He looked at me. “Quickly,” he said, letting Jason pass. Jason gave me a glance over his shoulder as he trotted to Darlene. I started to follow him but Catledge stopped me.

“No.”

“Come on, Skip.” What was I supposed to say? I’m sleeping with her?

“Sorry.”

“Darlene,” I shouted, but now her face was obscured behind Jason’s wide back as he moved toward her. “Darlene!”

Now she half stood. Her cheeks were streaked black with soot or motor oil. Jason put his arms around her. I didn’t see her arms wrap around him but neither did she push him away. Then she caught my eye. She shook her head no, glanced up at Jason, turned around, and disappeared into the smoke.

My mother answered on the fourth ring. I pictured her sitting in her chair in the living room. I hoped she wasn’t still grieving to Robert Goulet.

I was sitting in my idling truck in the road in front of the rink. Police tape ringed the parking lot, filled now with flashing police cruisers, fire trucks, and ambulances. Locals huddled in small groups up and down the road, trying to comprehend the possibility that someone had set off a bomb in their quiet little town with its sole traffic light at Main and Estelle, its willow-lined streets, its cozy family diner, the clear blue lake where they had learned to swim and fish and drive a speedboat. I’d jotted everything I could recall in a notebook, even though we wouldn’t have another
Pilot
for five days. I didn’t even know if I’d still have a job then.

My mother listened while I told her what had happened: the Zamboni had exploded. It wasn’t yet clear what had caused it. No one had been seriously hurt, including Darlene, who’d been closest to the blast. Even the Zam itself hadn’t sustained serious damage.

“Gracie’s killers did this,” Mom said.

“Well, they were a little late then.”

“Maybe this was the real plan.”

I supposed it was possible that a bomb—if it was a bomb and not just something that had gone wrong inside the Zamboni—could have been set days before and that whoever set it wouldn’t have been foolish enough to risk going back to unset it after Gracie was found dead. Luckily, no one was near enough the explosion to get seriously hurt. It just scared the hell out of everyone.

“Maybe,” I said. “Tell me, Mom, do you have any idea what exactly Gracie did all those years she was downstate? How did she make a living? Did she actually live in Detroit or one of the ’burbs?”

“I know she waitressed.”

I pictured the Gracie I had glimpsed at the Red Wings game. She didn’t look like a waitress.

“Anything else?”

“Let me think.” I couldn’t tell if Mom was struggling with her failing memory or just deciding whether to tell me something. I wished she would just go to the damn doctor. My impatience got the best of me.

“Did she ever say anything to you about an abortion?” I said.

“Why … an abortion? No. I don’t—I think I would remember that.”

“Would she even have told you?”

“Yes. Yes, I think she would have.”

I wasn’t so sure of that. I put my truck in gear. I had to steer around Tawny Jane Reese and her cameraman doing a stand-up in the middle of the road. I resisted the urge to honk my horn as I slid past her. As Kerasopoulos had told me, we were all a team now under the valiant Media North banner.

“All right,” I told Mom. “I’m heading down there.”

“Yes,” she said, talking on without hearing me, talking faster as she went, “I definitely think she would have told me that. When we had coffee Saturday, she was talking, a little wistfully I thought, about having children and—”

“Wait,” I said. “Saturday two days ago?”

“Yes, Gussy, we had coffee at Audrey’s, late in the morning. Gracie was just out of bed. Is that all right with you?”

“Fine, but you told me this morning the last time you saw her was in the drugstore last week.”

“Did I?” She hesitated. Had she let on something she didn’t mean to let on? Had she just forgotten what she was supposed to fib about? “Well, what difference does it make? I saw her again Saturday. We had coffee and a nice little chat and it was the last time I got to see her.” I heard a catch in her voice. “I’m getting a little tired of being interrogated. I didn’t kill Gracie.”

“I thought you wanted me to get to the bottom of this.”

“I think you need to get out of town.”

The cop lights flickered in my rearview mirror. I decided I had to make a quick stop at the paper.

“I just said I’m going to Detroit.”

“Good. Go safely. I’m going to bed now. I love you.”

I found the letter on my desk at the
Pilot
. It actually wasn’t postmarked Detroit, as Mrs. B had said, but Dearborn, a suburb abutting Detroit on the west that also happened to border on Melvindale.

I sliced it open with a penknife. Inside I found a single piece of unlined white paper, folded once. I opened it in the pool of light thrown by my desk lamp. Someone had scrawled six words across the page in red ink:

Build it and they will die

What the hell is this, a movie? I thought. I considered whether I could have helped avert the explosion at the rink if I had opened the envelope earlier and told someone about it, maybe even Dingus. I decided not.

I folded the note and the envelope into my wallet.

I called Darlene. She didn’t pick up. “I love you,” I told her voice mail. She wasn’t going to like my story in that morning’s paper, making Gracie into three paragraphs of apparent suicide. I’d have to explain later.

I called Kerasopoulos’s office number. I told his voice mail I had an emergency family matter that I had to attend to downstate. In a way, it was true. He’d either believe it or not. Either way, my days at the
Pilot
were probably numbered.

I took the penknife and descended the stairs to the
Pilot
basement, ducking cobwebs dotted with the carcasses of flies. A naked overhead bulb cast a dim light across the floor, revealing a puddle of water covering a rusted drain cover.

In the shadows along the walls stood racks built of two-by-sixes holding black binders of
Pilots
dating back nearly three decades. I found what I was looking for in the binder marked March 15–31, 1980. On page A3 of the March 18 issue, I found an eight-inch story beneath a two-column headline that read, “Anonymous Donor Bequeaths Scholarship on Local Girl.” A black-and-white school picture of Gracie was wedged into the story. With the penknife I cut the story out of the binder and put that in my wallet, too.

Back upstairs, I sat at my computer and did a quick search for clips under the byline of a certain
Detroit Free Press
reporter. I selected half a dozen,
printed them, scanned each one, and jotted a few notes about them on a piece of paper I also folded and stuffed into my wallet.

Then I dozed for a few hours in an armchair that our fired photographer had used for afternoon naps. I woke at 4:47, put my coat on, and went out the back door, shivering against the cold.

Audrey seemed surprisingly unsurprised to see me at her back door an hour before she would open the diner.

She pushed the door open and told me good morning and asked me if I wanted something to go. Yes, I told her, a fried-egg sandwich with bacon and cheddar on toasted pumpernickel. And a large coffee, black.

Audrey bustled about her griddle in a white apron over a peach-colored smock. A song played on a transistor radio propped on a shelf against a bag of brown sugar, Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is?” Audrey would turn it down to a murmur when her first customers arrived.

I had always loved the diner. When I was a boy, Mom would bring me there on Saturdays, when Audrey made her special concoction, the egg pie, an envelope of Italian bread bubbling with eggs, cheese, sausage, onion, mushrooms, and whatever else you fancied. We’d sit at the counter so Mom and Audrey could gossip while I tore into my pie, shredding the top crust, letting the steam warm my cheeks, savoring the only thing in the world that mattered at that particular moment in my young life.

Gracie didn’t like Audrey’s, though; she said it smelled like old people. When Gracie stayed with us, we didn’t go to Audrey’s on Saturdays; instead, Mom made Gracie’s favorite, chocolate-chip-banana pancakes. I ate them only after picking out the banana.

“How is your mother doing?” Audrey said.

“As well as can be expected.”

“Are there funeral arrangements yet?”

“Not that I know of. I think the cops have to finish first.”

Audrey shook her head without looking back at me. “Looks like they have a lot more work to do after last night, huh?”

I let her bring the two eggs to a sizzle before I asked whether my mother had been in with Gracie on Saturday. She told me yes, they had come in late, in between the breakfast and lunch rushes.

“Did you happen to catch any of their conversation?”

With Audrey, the answer to that question was almost always yes. The real question was how much she would tell me. She liked me, though. She’d known me all my life. That helped.

“Not much, actually,” she said. She flipped the grilled slices of Canadian bacon and cheddar onto the eggs, covered it all with the toasted pumpernickel. “Molly wasn’t here and I was busy getting things ready for the lunch crowd.”

“They had coffee?”

“Gracie had coffee. Your mother had tea. Why do you ask?”

“Come on, Mrs. DeYonghe. You know.”

She wrapped my sandwich in wax paper, poured my coffee into a foam cup, handed them to me. “Where are you going?”

You know the answer to that, too, I thought. “Downstate.”

“And you’re coming back.”

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know, Gussy. Years ago, you ran when your hockey went bad. Then you ran back here when things went bad downstate. I don’t want you running again. Your mother needs you.”

“I understand.”

“You can’t just keep running. Eventually you have to make your choice and stand your ground.”

“Uh, OK,” I said. I’d taken a stand at the
Pilot
the night before and wound up standing on my dick. “Any particular reason for the five a.m. lecture?”

Audrey plucked a dishrag off the counter and wiped her hands. “I was a little surprised to see Gracie in here. I don’t think she’d been in since she came back to town. Your mother didn’t look very happy with her. And she didn’t stay long, left without Bea.”

“Huh. OK. Thanks. For the food too. Here.” She waved off my offer of a five-dollar bill. I tossed it on the counter. “I better get going.”

I was ten steps out the door when I heard her call after me: “Gussy.”