Bryan Gruley: The Hanging Tree

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.

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?