The Hanging Tree (3 page)

I stopped at the locked front door of the Pine County State Bank. The doorknobs of every shop along Main had been rubber-banded with glossy green-and-yellow brochures. I undid the one on the bank door.

“Media North Invites You to the 21st Century!” the cover said. Media North was the company that in the past year had bought up the
Pilot
, Channel Eight, and just about every other media outlet from Grayling north to the Mackinac Bridge, including billboard firms and video rental stores. The brochure described the all-in-one packages the company was bringing up north even before the city dwellers in Detroit and Lansing and Ann Arbor would have them: cell phones, beepers, satellite TV, the Internet. I had a Media North cell phone, but this was the first I’d heard that we were in the Internet business. I wondered if it meant we might get new computers for the newsroom.

Probably not, I decided.

I glanced across the street at Audrey’s Diner, thought of going in for a bite, decided against it. I loved Audrey’s coffee and her gooey cinnamon buns—loved Audrey, too, had known her since I was a boy—but I’d been avoiding her place of late. I’d written some stories for the
Pilot
that had angered more than a few of the locals, and Audrey’s was their favorite soapbox. Letters to the editor wouldn’t suffice; better to tear the local editor a new one while he tried to eat his pancakes and bacon. Nor did I care to hear their gossip about how and why Gracie met her end.

I stopped on the sidewalk beneath the shake shingles hung over the front window of the
Pilot
offices. A new logo in slanted, foot-high letters—
MEDIA FORCE NORTH
—had just in recent days been painted across the latticed glass in spaghetti sauce red. I had taken the sign that had previously hung there for years—
PEERLESS PILOT PERSONALS WILL PUT YOU ON THE PATH TO PLEASURE AND PROFIT
—and given it to my mother as a souvenir. She hung it on the wall over the beer fridge in her garage.

Behind the darkened front counter a sliver of light bled from the door to the newsroom. Either I’d left it on or, more likely, Philo Beech was already at his desk. I hoped the former and stepped inside.

“Good morning,” Philo said. He looked up from his computer and gave me a prim smile before returning his eyes to whatever he was doing.

“Morning,” I said, throwing my coat on the back of my chair. I might’ve said, “You’re in early,” but after two months of working with Philo Beech, I knew that seven o’clock was not early, not for him.

“Wow,” he said, swiveling in his chair to face me. My new boss, seven years younger than me at twenty-eight, was wearing a sleeveless argyle sweater—the blue-and-black one he alternated daily with a red and gray—over a starched blue dress shirt with a button-down collar. “Philo” rhymed with “silo”, which was how he was built, a slender cylinder one head and a half taller than me, topped with horn-rimmed glasses beneath short dark hair moussed to stand at attention. He had to stack three telephone books beneath his computer screen so he wouldn’t have to crook his neck down to see. “I don’t know how you guys do it.”

“Do what?”

“The gray,” he said. “The constant gray. I mean, I can take the cold and the snow. You know what they say: ‘There’s no bad weather, just bad clothing.’
But the gray, the clouds, the constant overcast. Jeez-oh-pete, we haven’t seen the sun in what? A month?”

“Actually, Thursday morning,” I said. “I was up early.”

“Ha!” he said, raising his arms over his head. “I missed that—I wonder why?” He looked around our windowless little newsroom. “Boy oh boy, how do you guys keep from offing yourselves?”

Any other morning I might have chuckled lamely and said something like, “That’s what Enright’s is for,” because that would be true. But on this particular morning, with my still-fresh memory of Gracie hanging in the shoe tree, I could think of nothing to say to Philo’s stupid little joke. I just ran a hand through my thinning brown widow’s peak and, as politely as I could, gave him a look that said his foot was in his mouth.

“What?” he said.

“Well,” I said. I looked over my shoulder at the police scanner. “Did you turn that off?”

Philo looked at the scanner and shrugged. “It seemed like a waste of electricity to have it on this early in the morning. I mean, we publish twice a week, it’s not like …” He threw his hands up in the air. “OK, I give. Why?”

I told him about Gracie McBride. It took longer to make him understand what the shoe tree was—apparently he hadn’t noticed it yet in his brief time in Starvation—than what had happened there. When I finished, he crossed his long legs, folded his arms across his chest, and sighed.

“That is extremely sad,” he said. “Did you know her?”

“Not very well.”

I didn’t say more because I wanted to see how interested he really was. I didn’t tell him that Gracie had been my girlfriend’s best friend, that she’d been dating my own best friend, that she was my dead father’s dead cousin’s daughter, my second cousin, and an adopted daughter of sorts to my mother.

“My condolences,” he said. “Will you be writing it up?”

“Sure,” I said. I smelled Windex on the air; he’d been cleaning again. He had a screwy theory that a clean newsroom was a more efficient newsroom. “We don’t usually do much with suicides.”

“People don’t like to read about them, do they? I certainly don’t. It’s always, you know … I suppose this woman had problems with drinking and drugs and whatnot, the usual?”

“Usual” wasn’t a word anyone who knew Gracie would have used to describe her. But Philo’s question reminded me of what Darlene was saying when she’d cut herself off a few hours before, her husky voice insistent in my ear:
That’s not what I meant.
It had kept me from sleep when I’d gone back to her apartment, alone. Was Darlene going to tell me that Gracie had not taken her own life? That someone else had hung her in that tree?

Gracie had left Starvation for Detroit as a very young woman. She was gone for nearly eighteen years. Nobody heard much from or about her while she was downstate. Then Gracie quietly returned to town, and moved into her mother’s trailer in the woods near Walleye Lake. That ended one morning with Gracie’s mother firing a 12-gauge into the air and yelling, “You owe me, you little bitch, you owe me more than that,” as Gracie escaped into the summer trees, laughing in threadbare pajamas. Darlene later told me Gracie and her mom had argued over a game of euchre they’d lost at the Hide-A-Way Bar the night before.

Gracie took a room with a kitchenette at the Hill-Top Motel. She talked her way into a job at the hockey rink concession stand, making cocoa and popcorn for $3.50 an hour. I hadn’t known her to be a hockey fan—she’d certainly never attended any of my games—but she learned to sharpen skates and drive and maintain the Zamboni. She ditched the motel room for the cot in the Zam shed at the back of the rink.

I saw her when I went to play in the Midnight Hour Men’s League. She’d be on the Zamboni, circling the ice perched on the stool she needed to see over the steering wheel. Gracie put down a good sheet of ice, smooth and hard enough that it didn’t get too chipped up for at least half a game. Some nights after hockey I’d see her late at Enright’s, where the proprietor, my old friend Soupy Campbell, served her double gin and Squirts and slowly sweet-talked her into his bed. Or maybe Gracie sweet-talked him.

There was an appearance of normalcy. Gracie and Darlene got together once a week for greasy ham-and-pineapple pizza at Riccardo’s across the river from downtown. If they talked about Gracie’s downstate years, Darlene did not let on, or at least not very much. I chose to believe that Darlene wasn’t deliberately keeping things from me but protecting her friend’s privacy, knowing that Gracie and I, though we were second cousins,
though we had spent a good deal of time around each other as kids, had never really gotten along.

I assumed that Darlene knew many things about Gracie that I did not know, that I really didn’t think I cared to know. But now that she had been found dead, I was curious, of course, mostly because of what Darlene had left unsaid on the phone.

“I don’t know much,” I told Philo, “but Gracie could drink most guys under the table. Drugs? Not sure. Maybe. She did a bunch of stuff when she was a kid, but that was a long time ago.”

“Obviously some issues there,” he said. “A few grafs then. ‘Apparent’ suicide, unless the police confirm the real thing.”

“Right. They won’t. Not here.”

Philo clapped his palms on his knees and stood.

“Now,” he said. “We have a bit of decent news on the financial end of things. An opportunity to consider.”

I leaned back in my chair. Philo had been named managing editor of the
Pilot
on the fifteenth of December. I was already executive editor. It was explained that he outranked me. I tried not to care. I told myself that I already had so many bosses at Media North headquarters in Traverse City that one more couldn’t make much of a difference. Especially not Philo, who had written exactly two bylined stories since arriving, one on a routine school board meeting, the other on the arraignment of a man for stealing a dog, both of which required corrections (he misspelled the names of both the school board president and the dog, Zuzu). Before that, he had worked at a couple of nothing papers near his home back east.

His blunders did nothing to change the impression he gave that he felt he owned the place. It took me an afternoon of phone calls to Traverse City to determine that Philo was actually the nephew of Jim Kerasopoulos, the chief executive of Media North.

He began to pace between the leaky watercooler and the copier-and-fax machine that had been low on toner for two weeks. His penny loafers clacked on the linoleum, almost but not quite drowning out the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“Hutch’s Hockey Heaven wants to lock in a quarter-page ad twice
a week for a month, ramping up to a half page when the new rink opens,” Philo said. “That alone”—he stopped and closed his eyes as he counted on his fingers—“is close to twenty percent of current budget and would help push us up, quarter to quarter, a couple of percentage points.”

“Nothing to sneeze at,” I said, although, in truth, I knew almost nothing about ads or circulation or anything but putting stories in the paper, such as they were in a town like Starvation. I knew ads brought in money, and money gave me space in the paper. The rest I left to the business guys.

“No, sir,” he said. “Better up than down, which is where it’s been going for the last two years.”

“Maybe we could get some toner,” I said. “I had to call the Kiwanis the other day because I couldn’t read the flyer they faxed about their mostacciolli dinner.”

Philo hesitated for a second before resuming his pacing.

“Even better,” he said, “the rink itself has proposed a month’s buy of full pages in the weeks before it opens followed by a special section—they’re talking eight pages, full color—about the rink, the local hockey team, et cetera. That’s a little gold mine in and of itself. Then they’ll renew the weekly ads on a month-to-month basis depending on local interest, which I’m sure will be no problem to sustain. The town is dying for this.”

Starvation was indeed eager for the new rink. The old one, once called the John D. Blackburn Memorial Ice Arena after an old River Rats coach but now called simply Starvation Lake Arena, was a little more than thirty years old, almost as old as me. It had always been a patchwork job. It had opened as an outdoor rink, complete with hockey boards and goal nets and refrigeration pipes running invisibly beneath the ice to keep it hard through the occasional warm winter day.

I could still remember the thrill of stepping out onto the ice for the first time as a five- or six-year-old and how I yanked my mittened hand from my father’s and then promptly fell down, wondering if I was smelling the secret chemical that froze the ice in the snow that scraped my cheeks. That night, Dad, Mom, and I stood along the boards with hundreds of people from Starvation and Kalkaska and Sandy Cove and Mancelona and cheered for the River Rats midget squad against some Detroit team. I didn’t care that the Rats lost by five or six or that I had to get up on my tippytoes to see over the boards. I had a foam cup of hot chocolate from
a thermos Mom had brought and I rolled the miniature marshmallows around in my mouth until they melted away.

By the time Dad died of cancer—I was seven years old—the rink had a ceiling and walls built on two of the four sides. A few years later, the town scraped up the money to close the north and south ends, which meant goaltenders no longer had to blink against snow and sleet being sucked through one end and out the other.

Bad memories lingered, though. The River Rats had lost their one chance at a state championship in that rink. I was the goaltender who’d given up the overtime goal that lost the title game. Eighteen years had passed, and I thought I had finally gotten over it. The town had not.

Now a wealthy man had come from downstate to build a brand-new rink with no bittersweet history. He had brought millions of dollars and a fourteen-year-old son who some said was the best young hockey player Starvation had ever seen. The boy happened to be a goaltender.

“That sounds terrific, Philo,” I said. “What’s the catch?”

Philo stopped pacing and looked at me. He was standing in front of a desk in the back that had nearly disappeared beneath old copies of the
Detroit Free Press
and
Chicago Tribune.
The pile wasn’t going to grow because Media North—actually, Philo—had canceled those subscriptions.

“It is a great opportunity for us,” he said.

“Yep. Are the ad guys in Traverse working it?”

“Of course. But we can’t rely on them to carry the entire load.”

“Well,” I said,“you don’t want me selling ads, do you?”

Philo walked over and sat against my desk, pushed his glasses up his nose, folded his arms. Now I heard the fluorescent lamps. I hated that buzzing. It made me feel lonely, even with this long hockey stick of a man sitting next to me on my desk.