Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“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.”

I turned. Audrey stood with her rump propping the door open, arms folded against the chill. “They were arguing,” she said.