I heard her say it again, louder, as the kitchen door banged shut behind me.
five
I waited until I got into my truck to call Darlene.
“Esper,” she said.
“Good morning.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“My God, Gus, I am so-” She stopped herself. I imagined her holding the cell phone close to her face, ducking away from the sheriff and the other deputies. “I am so sick of being a girl.”
“What?”
“Being treated like a girl.”
“What happened?”
“Dingus sent me back to the department.”
“You’re at your desk?”
“I’m handling the frigging press. We’re off the record, by the way.”
I decided not to make a joke. The “press” would be me and the woman who went on the air for Channel Eight. I started my truck, pulled it into Mom’s driveway, threw it in reverse, and backed it onto Beach Drive.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Are they thinking-”
“Don’t you dare take their side.”
“I’m not. I just thought-”
“I know what you thought. You thought, This is my oldest friend, maybe I shouldn’t be working on this.”
“No.” I really hadn’t. Yet.
“Well, that’s what Dingus said. ‘Maybe you should take a little time, Darlene.’ He can kiss my buns.”
Dingus, I thought, might also have worried that she would tell me things she shouldn’t. He didn’t always mind me knowing things, but he liked to be the one who decided what I knew or didn’t and when.
“Maybe he’ll reconsider.”
“I’ll make him.”
I let the conversation pause as I veered onto Main Street and passed the old marina, Repicky’s, Enright’s, Sally’s, Audrey’s, and crossed Estelle where the businesses gave way to two-story houses on either side of the road, their sprawling front porches buried in snow.
“How are you really?”
“I’m pissed.”
“I know, but, I mean, you know, with Gracie and all.”
“Are you going to write a story?”
“I have to write something.”
“Like what?”
“Are you handling the press now?”
She softened her voice. “Like what, Gussy?”
The houses fell behind me and fields of white opened beyond both road shoulders. An occasional fence post knotted with barbed wire poked through the drifts. A new cell tower jutted into the sky high above the tree line.
“I don’t know. If I had to write it this minute, I don’t know how I could write anything but apparent suicide. But I have yet to hear from Dingus-”
“Screw Dingus.”
“-and you cut me off last night and then you left me that weird voice mail this morning. Luckily, I don’t have to write this minute, but I will a little later today, so any help you can give me…”
“Hang on,” Darlene said. I imagined her looking around her office to make sure no one could overhear.
I pulled the truck to the side of the road, not far from where I had parked it the night before. Down the road, the lights of police cruisers flickered near the shoe tree.
As far as I knew, a pair of my old hockey skates still hung from one of the higher branches. When I was still a very young man, Darlene had brought along a paper grocery sack on one of our dates and insisted I take her to the tree. It was the summer before I left Starvation Lake. Parked near the tree in my truck we made love; I remember searching for her eyes in the dark.
Darlene pulled her jeans on and took the paper bag from the flatbed and beckoned to me. From the sack she produced a pair of her softball spikes, still flecked with dried mud, and a pair of my skates she’d gotten from my mother. “Now,” she said. I climbed as high as I could and hung them next to each other on the only branch I could find without shoes already hanging from it. Perched on a branch, clinging to the tree trunk, I looked down and felt glad to hear her laugh and see the sweat on her forehead glistening in the moonlight.
It was not enough to keep me in Starvation, though. As I said, I was a very young man. Three weeks later, I left town for what I thought would be forever. Darlene refused to visit me in Detroit; we would either be together at home, in Starvation, she told me, or we would not.
Years passed. We didn’t talk. It was awkward when we bumped into each other on my infrequent visits north. Darlene began to see a former minor-league hockey player named Jason Esper.
Just before they married, I heard through the grapevine that Darlene had climbed into the shoe tree after a night of drinking and torn her spikes from the branch. Hearing that, I imagined her hair swinging to and fro across her back as she clambered angrily from one branch to another.
More years passed before my troubles at the Times sent me back to Starvation, where I happily found Darlene in a marriage empty enough that she would reconsider me. Now, with her voice in my ear, I hoped that what had happened to her friend in that tree wouldn’t make it harder on the two of us.
“So there was no car,” I said.
“No,” Darlene said.
I stared through my windshield at the distant crooked bough of the shoe tree where Gracie had been hanging the night before. One of the cops turned and pointed at my truck.
“And no ladder, nothing to stand on.”
“Nope.”
I wasn’t accustomed to Darlene talking about cases. We had a loose rule that we didn’t talk to each other about what we were working on. It was more Darlene’s rule than mine; it wasn’t like I was sworn not to divulge the contents of next week’s school lunch menu. But Darlene was staunch. She’d talk about the doughnut sprinkles that got stuck in Dingus’s handlebar mustache, about the other deputies’ cheating on overtime, about how they had contests to see who could write the most speeding tickets on a holiday weekend. She almost never talked about specific cases.
“Any footprints out there?”
“Covered or blown over.”
That reminded me. “One of her feet was bare, wasn’t it?”
She waited, begrudging me this detail. “Yes.”
“Have you-”
“No. We haven’t found the other boot, unless it’s up in the tree. Dingus is trying to get a cherry picker out there, but the snow’s an issue.”
“Well, how the hell did she get up there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she had help.”
I thought of the stool Gracie had sat on driving the Zamboni. Soupy was always joking that she really needed a booster seat on top of that so she didn’t drive the thing through the boards.
Then I thought, Oh, holy Christ, Soupy. He and Gracie had been seeing each other, less discreetly than they no doubt had imagined. Soupy had closed Enright’s early the night before. I hadn’t thought too much of it then, given the snowstorm, though it wasn’t like Soupy to close his bar even one minute before he could sell-or drink-one
