Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“Please understand,” she said without taking her eyes off the road. “I am not happy that you are here. I am not happy that this day has arrived. I never am. But in all honesty, I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

“Tired Women and Girls?” I said.

“Tired of being abused?”

“So why not just abused?”

“Too many others with names like that.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

She continued to drive without speaking. A gentle smile made its way onto her face. Then it was gone. She turned to me.

“I don’t mean to be glum,” she said. “It’s hard.” She reached across and touched my forearm. “I’m sorry for your loss, too. Although, again, in all honesty, I can’t say that I think you appreciate it.”

“Thanks, I think.”

She withdrew her hand. “It’s all right. Grace was not easy to know. For anyone. It didn’t matter how much you loved her, or how hard you tried.”

“Then you obviously knew her well.”

Trixie tilted her head to one side, smoothing the crinkled skin along her jaw. A slender necklace of gold lay on her pale white neck. I decided she had been a beautiful woman once. “Sometimes, yes,” she said, “I thought I did. But that’s just vanity, isn’t it? Most of us don’t even know our own selves.”

She turned a corner and eased off the gas as the Civic approached a cul de sac. She parked at the curb in front of a house that looked like so many there, only a shade of paint or a set of shutters different than Vend’s. The aluminum siding was a dingier white and there was no rock garden or statute of the Blessed Mother. An orange-and-brown paper turkey dangled in the front window. It reminded me that Gracie had declined Mom’s invitation to Thanksgiving dinner because she had been going for a visit downstate.

A piece of white paper was tacked to the front door.

“This is where Gracie lived?” I said.

Trixie looked past me at the house. “I know she could have used the money,” she said. “Now I’m glad she didn’t sell it, so you can see.”

“She owned the place? Gracie had a mortgage?” I pointed at the house. “What’s the paper on the door? That a foreclosure notice?”

“Details like that don’t really matter now.”

“Yes, they do. Unless you think Gracie really killed herself. I don’t.”

Trixie’s gray eyes moved to mine. “Why are you here again?”

“To find out what really happened to Gracie.”

“Do you think that’s possible? Without hearing it from Gracie’s own lips?”

“I guess I must, or I wouldn’t be here.”

The car was still idling.

“You know,” Trixie said. “We didn’t call her Gracie. We called her Grace.”

“We?”

“Her sisters back at the house. Me.”

“Gracie always called herself Gracie. She said Grace sounded old.”

Trixie looked out the windshield. “The will of God,” she recited, “will never take you where the grace of God won’t protect you.” She turned the car off. “Let’s go.”

Trixie had a key. As she swung the front door open, she blocked my view of the piece of paper. Then she closed the door.

“OK,” I said. I reached into my back pocket for my notebook.

“Be kind,” she said. “This is not a crime scene.”

“I don’t have such a good memory.”

“You reporters are so full of it.” She tapped two fingers on her chest. “Imprint what you see and hear on your heart. The story will be much clearer.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. For now, I left my notebook in my pocket. “Are we on the record?”

“You can write whatever you like. But for the sake of the women in my care, I don’t want to see my name in your paper. I’m already having enough trouble with my landlord.”

“What’s the problem?”

“None of your business. This way.”

The inside of the house was clean and sparsely furnished but obviously lived in. In the living room, another afghan like the one Mom had made me-identical to the one I’d seen in the Zamboni shed-lay in a bunch at one end of a sofa. An unlit lamp stood on an end table. An armchair faced the sofa across a coffee table. A television perched atop a mostly empty bookshelf. On the mantel over a fake fireplace stood a framed black-and-white photograph: Gracie and Darlene stood with their arms around each other at the end of a dock, smiling and squinting against the sun, ripples of lake water glinting behind them.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“What?”

“Why would Gracie leave all this stuff here if she was moving back to Starvation?”

“Good question.”

“I mean, did she have to leave suddenly or something? Was she in trouble?”

“Well,” Trixie said, “if she wasn’t in trouble before, she obviously found it. I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t know if she wanted to move up there permanently. Grace didn’t tell me everything. Let’s go in here.”

The kitchen smelled faintly of Murphy’s Oil Soap. My mother used up a big bottle of Murphy’s every few months and said its lingering aroma was her favorite in the world next to that of a cinnamon cake baking.

There was a breakfast table with two chairs covered in flowery green vinyl, white cabinets, Formica counters the color of bananas. The table held an empty schnapps bottle sprouting a bouquet of dried hydrangeas. Lacy cotton curtains dressed a window over the sink that looked out on a tiny backyard, a concrete side drive, and a one-car garage. In the dish drainer rested a chipped black coffee cup embossed with a Detroit Red Wings logo.

It was the cup more than anything that made me silently marvel: Gracie had had her own house. I pictured her standing in that kitchen, sipping coffee from that cup, looking out the little window to see whether the morning promised sun or rain or snow. Was it really hers? That wouldn’t be too hard to find out. I made a mental note to check before I went back up north.

I opened a cabinet next to the sink. There were half a dozen each of plates, bowls, coffee cups, and milk glasses. I looked in the next cabinet, saw a platter, two serving bowls, an empty shelf. I crossed to the other side of the sink and opened another cabinet. Inside I glimpsed a collection of flower vases before Trixie’s hand appeared and pushed the cabinet shut.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you looking for something?”

“Booze.”

“You won’t find it here.”

I looked over at the schnapps vase on the table. Peach schnapps, I noticed.

“Ancient,” Trixie said. “Come on.”

A hallway off the kitchen led to a pair of facing bedrooms. The door on the left stood halfway open. The door on the right was closed. Trixie stopped just short of where I could see into the rooms and placed her big body in front of me.

“How did you know to find me?” she said.

“Someone told me.”

“Who?”

She seemed determined to know. The implication seemed to be that if I didn’t tell her, I wouldn’t see the rooms. I had no idea what I might find in there, but I definitely wanted to see.

“Darlene Esper,” I said. “A friend of Gracie’s. Do you know her?”

“I know of her. She’s the wo-the girl-in the picture in the living room.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been in love with her your whole life.”

Her certainty startled me.

“Isn’t that right?” she said.

“Pretty much.” I nodded toward the rooms. “Which was Gracie’s?”

“Wait,” she said, stepping forward and placing a hand against my chest. “Do you know what Grace did when she came to Detroit? Have you ever really given it any thought-a girl of, what, eighteen or nineteen, leaving her tiny little town up north to come to the big city?”