Bryan Gruley: The Hanging Tree

I scoured the report for any signs of a struggle, even of Gracie struggling with herself. Had she changed her mind at the last minute? Had she decided, in the final seconds of her life, that she ought to live for her son, however unavailable he was, rather than die for him?

I tried to interview Doc Joe. He ignored my calls and e-mails. One unseasonably warm evening, I found him at his house. He was sitting outside in the dying daylight, reading a history of World War I, in which, I had heard, his grandfather had fought.

Doc Joe wore a wool sweater vest zipped halfway up. I stood looking down on his bald spot. Inserting a scrap of paper as a bookmark, he closed his book, put his reading glasses in his vest pocket, and listened. When I had finished, he gazed out at the lake.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve always liked the color of your mom’s place. But the missus, she’s never going to let me paint our place yellow. No, sir.” He turned back to me. “Why do you want to know, son? She killed herself. I understand that someone may have helped. But still.”

“She was family.”

“I am very sorry for your loss.” He pinched his glasses to his nose, opened his book. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

The next morning, I dialed Wally’s Wonder Print in Melvindale. Wally was out, but five minutes later he called me from his cell phone. I invited his hockey team up for a weekend of games and drinking with the Chowder Heads. “Oh, fucking-ay, man, we are so there,” he said, and he must have nearly driven off the road because I heard car horns honking angrily in the background.

Then I told him why I’d really called. I needed to find someone. Someone in hockey circles. “Yeah, the goalie,” Wally said. “I heard the kid ain’t even skating anymore. Some kind of head case.” I didn’t bother telling him that it wasn’t so. He called me back that night with an address in Farmington Hills. “Just keep my name out of it, bud,” he said.

So there I was with Felicia Haskell.

She had initially been charged with aiding and abetting a suicide for whatever role she had played in Gracie’s death. But, without witnesses, the Pine County cops knew they’d have trouble making it stick. Along with the state police and the feds, they were also more interested in putting her husband behind bars than in punishing Felicia. She helped them. Probably still was helping. Though he was no longer charged with murder, Laird Haskell now faced multiple counts related to prostitution, solicitation, and fraud. And the IRS was still all over him and his enfeebled bank accounts.

“My lawyer would kill me if she knew you were here,” Felicia said. She looked around the room. “Where’s the goddamn tape? Oh fuck it.” She set the plate she was holding in one hand back on the counter. “Sit.”

She plopped on a stool. I took one facing her.

“What do you-wait.” She covered her face with her hands. I waited. “Why am I doing this?” she said, not to me, but to herself. She brought her hands down. She wiped her cheeks with a sleeve.

“We are totally, completely, unequivocally off the record,” she said.

“That’s fine.”

“I am doing this for you. And your family. Not for your newspaper. Not for the people in that godforsaken town.”

“Understood.”

“You’re still with the paper?”

“I’m back with the paper, yes.”

Our online story on Kerasopoulos’s ties to Laird Haskell had not gone over well with Media North’s board of directors. While they concluded that Kerasopoulos had done nothing illegal, they nevertheless asked for his resignation. He threatened to sue, but the board quieted him with a severance package rumored to be in the neighborhood of $3 million.

At Philo’s urging, I had returned to the Pilot as if I had never left.

“All right,” Felicia Haskell said. “It’s not that I’m worried about getting arrested again or anything. It’s just-my son. He knows enough.”

I could have said, He isn’t your son, but that probably would have ended the conversation.

“How’s Taylor?”

“Fine. He’s with my mother until I get things sorted out here.”

“Then you’re leaving.”

“Then we’re leaving.”

“Where?”

She spun halfway around on her stool, surveying the boxes. “Ask me something else,” she said.

“I hear he’s not playing anymore.”

“Not that either.”

“OK,” I said. “I just wish… it might have been nice to talk to him once before you leave.”

“I’m sorry,” Felicia said. “I thought about your request. But in the end, I just… couldn’t.”

“He’s family.”

“No, actually he’s not.” Felicia let that sink in. “He knows who his birth mother is, or was. Now she’s gone, and it’s best for a fourteen-year-old boy to leave all of this behind.”

“I understand.” What choice did I have? “So tell me why. Why did she-why did you-do it?”

Felicia placed her hands in her lap. They were naked of the rings and bracelets I’d seen before.

“You didn’t know your cousin very well, did you?” she said.

“I know her a little better now.”

“Well, I doubt I know her-knew her-any better than you. It’s really not that complicated, Grace and me. We had a lot in common. We both hated someone. And we both wanted the best for Taylor.”

“How could the best be for Gracie to die?”

“You’re not going to want to hear this. But she was never going to have Taylor. She was never going to see him. She was never going to get near him. Never. I made that clear. I made it clear to her and to my worthless husband. Taylor was mine. Legally mine. All mine.”

“That was your prerogative.”

She came halfway out of her chair, slapped a hand on the counter. “I brought him up knowing- knowing — that he was the bastard son of a whore and her… her bastard lover, my husband. But I was a good mother. A damned good mother. And I still am.”

I wanted to tell her not to call Gracie a whore. But I didn’t want her to throw me out yet.

She sat back down.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Part of me felt for her. I thought of the prenup that I figured left her with whatever was in the boxes in that room and not much else. Then I thought of the boxes in Gracie’s house. They were a lot different than the ones Felicia was packing.

“Tell me: Were you ever…” I decided to alter my question in midsentence. “Did you know Trixie?”

“This is not about me.”

There was no point in disagreeing.

“So whose plan was it, exactly?”

Felicia wrapped her arms around herself. “I could tell you it was Grace’s, because it was. But it took two, obviously.”

“How did you even-”

“I knew about Grace long before she knew I knew. Before even Laird knew. He thought he was so smart. God, he thought he was smart.”

She brushed an angry tear from a cheek.

“We knew we couldn’t have kids. So we adopted. It all happened so fast. Everybody I knew who adopted, it took forever. But of course Laird knew all the right people, you know, he called in some chits, this judge, that lawyer, a social service worker, and the next thing you know we have this beautiful boy.”

“Fourteen years ago.”

“And for six or seven years, it was fine. I didn’t know where Taylor came from and I didn’t care. He was such a good boy. And then, one day, Laird was out of town, and this package shows up.”

“In the mail?”

“In the mailbox. No postage. Just a little box. Addressed to me.”

“What was in it?”

“A shoe.” She had trouble getting it out. “A baby shoe.”

“For the right foot.”