Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

He pulled his hair back on his head again, held it. “Yeah.” He chuckled. “She kept saying she wanted to hang one of her shoes and one of my skates in the tree.”

I smiled. “Of course.”

“She was messed up, but she was all right. Good heart.”

Kind of like Soupy. Except he wasn’t dead.

“So that’s it?” I said. “That’s what you had to tell me?”

“Don’t get pissy with me, Trap.”

“I’m not pissy. It’s late.”

He set his beer down and came across the room. “Move,” he said. I stood up from the napkin boxes. Soupy took the River Rats calendar off the wall. He flipped inside it to the month of November.

The top half of the page showed a photograph of the Rats mobbing Taylor Haskell after a win. The bottom half was obscured by a piece of loose-leaf paper folded and taped across the days and dates. Soupy peeled it away and handed it to me. It was a photocopy of what appeared to be a letter.

I read the four short lines twice before I looked up.

“Where did you get this?” I said.

“Grace.”

“When?”

“Technically, last week.”

“Around the time she found out the new rink wasn’t going to hire her.”

“Yeah, about then.”

“What do you mean ‘technically’?”

“She gave it to me then. She told me to keep it in case something happened to her. Then something happened.”

“Did she give the original to Haskell?”

“She never said. I don’t know what she did with it. If anything.”

“She obviously intended to give it to him.”

“Looks that way. But I don’t know.” He waggled his empty beer bottle. “Another?”

“No thanks. Jesus, Soup. If this is real…”

“Looks pretty real to me. Though who knows if Grace would’ve followed through. She kept saying she was done with all that.”

I thought of the boxes in her dark room.

“Why didn’t you give this to the cops?” I said.

“Almost did,” he said. “Dingus put the heat on me, man, the whole interrogation room with the lightbulb thing. Said he’d do everything he could to bust me for underage drinkers. But I honestly didn’t know shit. They just got me because I called.”

“What do you mean you called?”

“I called, man. I called her in. Grace. I found her.”

I imagined Soupy’s pickup truck rolling up to the snowbank on the road shoulder by the shoe tree. Sheets of snow blowing across his windshield, his wipers beating vainly against the blinding white. He might not have seen Gracie right away. Maybe he backed the truck onto the road sideways so that his headlights shined over the bank past the dangling silhouette.

“You closed early,” I said.

“Fucking-ay, huh? I must have been out of my goddamn mind.”

“But how did you know she was out there?”

“I didn’t. But I was worried. It was after ten, and she still wasn’t here. She was always here by ten. Then I got a call.”

“A call from who?”

“No idea. They didn’t say and I didn’t recognize the voice.”

“A man or a woman?”

“Whoever it was wanted me to think it was a man. The connection wasn’t so hot either, and I couldn’t hear shit because of the bar. But I’m pretty sure it was a woman.”

A woman? My chest tightened. What woman could have known that Gracie was hanging in the tree? Darlene? Trixie?

“And she said what?”

“‘She’s waiting for you at the shoe tree.’ ”

“Good God. So you closed the bar? Nice move, man.”

“I know. I freaked. But I guess I’m not so paranoid, huh? I mean, she’d given me that letter and all I could think was-”

“Did you open it then?”

“No. It was at my house. I read it later.”

“So you went out there and called it in but what? You just bolted?”

“She was dead, man. There was nothing I could do. Maybe I’m fucking stupid, OK, but what would you have done? I’m her boyfriend. I closed the bar early. I’m the only one out there. Here, Dingus, slap the cuffs on. I freaked.”

And you’re Soupy Campbell, I thought. Still a boy.

“But the cops traced your call.”

“Fuck, man.” Soupy shook his head. “You know how sometimes you think you shut your phone off but you didn’t?”

“Nice. So Dingus brings you in. What’d you tell him?”

“What I saw.”

“Gracie hanging in the shoe tree.”

“Yeah.”

“So, again, why didn’t you give the letter to the cops?”

“I want a beer.”

He walked out of the kitchen. I looked around. His makeshift desk, a folding table with a checkerboard etched into the top, was pushed into a corner beneath a bulletin board covered with pink-and-yellow invoices. I counted three stamped OVERDUE. It made me sad. Soupy had given up his family’s marina along a soft stretch of beach for a tunnel of darkness and smoke and hourly replays of “Freebird.”

He returned with a fresh Blue Ribbon. “She didn’t want me to,” he said.

“She didn’t want you to give it to the cops? Then why would-”

“She told me to make sure you saw it.”

“Me? No.”

“Yeah. You. She said you’d take care of it.”

Of course she wouldn’t have gone to me directly. She thought I couldn’t stand her. I thought she couldn’t stand me. And yet there she was downstate with my stories hung on her walls, and here she was up north, trusting me from the grave to find her murderer. I tried to stop the pang of grief I felt by reading the letter again.

“So what was all the horseshit you were giving me yesterday when I was in here?” I said. “Why didn’t you give me this then?”

“For one thing, I didn’t have it with me. For another, I wasn’t about to spill my guts in front of those losers who sit at my bar all day drinking three two-buck beers. My brain wasn’t exactly working right, Trap. I mean, the last thing I need right now is to have my name splashed all over your paper. I’m barely holding on here.”

I finished my beer and stood the empty on Soupy’s folding table. “Sorry, Soup,” I said.

“You, too, man.”

We shook hands. I waved the letter at him. “You don’t mind if I take this now, do you?”

“You going to put it in the paper?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. At that moment, I had no idea how I would confirm that the letter was authentic. The person who’d signed it was dead.

“How about I just take it for now and if I want to write anything, I’ll tell you?”

“Cool. But you get it, right?”

I slipped the paper into my jacket. “Get what?”

“It wasn’t my fault, man. Either way, it wasn’t my fault.”

“Understood. Get some sleep, Soup.”

I pushed the back door open. The wind had kicked up.

“Hey,” Soupy said. “Good to have you back between the pipes.”

“It was a one-night stand, pal.”

“Nah. Once you got the kinks worked out, you looked pretty good.”

“Go to hell.”

I sat in my pickup rereading the letter beneath the flood lamp outside my mother’s little yellow house.

It was dated Wednesday, February 3, a few days before Gracie died. It looked like she had used a marking pen, perhaps blue or purple, given the gray shade of the letters on the photocopied page.

L

Here is YOUR letter.

You have taken everything from me.

And left me with nothing.

Except what I KNOW.

— G

Motive, I thought. It obviously goes to motive. I thought of those videotapes again. And I thought, Why wouldn’t Haskell at least have tried to appease her? He’d made a career of negotiating, of finding that middle ground that made Vend sneer. Why not give Gracie whatever she wanted-some money, a lousy little job driving the Zamboni at the new rink?