I leaned back against the workbench and wondered whether the cops had spent any time here. The county had whacked Sheriff Aho’s budget twice in the past year; he couldn’t afford overtime. Darlene had been complaining that her regular hours had been cut. Maybe a deputy had just hung the police tape and left the room for later. Or maybe they’d done a quick dusting for fingerprints, though I couldn’t see what good it would have done. They would have found me and Soupy and Johnny Ford and a dozen men’s league players who had wandered back to bum a beer.
I had been back in the Zam shed myself two nights earlier, the night before the night Gracie died.
“Gracie,” I’d said when I walked in.
She was standing at the bench, her hands streaked black with grease, fiddling with something metal that must have come from the innards of the Zamboni. Within her reach stood a tall blue plastic cup embossed with a gold River Rats logo, a toothy rodent carrying a hockey stick like a pitchfork.
Gracie didn’t seem to notice me at first, though I was standing six feet away. I watched her for a moment. She was just tall enough to get her elbows up on the bench without having to stand on something.
“Gracie,” I said.
“This… this fucking piece of shit,” she said, slamming the part down on the bench. She grabbed a rag and swiped it across her face, leaving a black smudge on a cheek. She looked up and down the bench, apparently not finding what she was looking for, then finally turned to me and waved an arm toward the fridge. “Are you blind? Get your own beer.”
“Didn’t come for a beer,” I said. “But I’ll take one, thanks.”
I slid past her. She was wearing black-and-green snowmobile pants hitched by suspenders over a red flannel shirt unbuttoned to her bosom. I reached into the fridge and grabbed a Blue Ribbon. I twisted the cap off and pinged it into the metal wastebasket beneath the bench.
I reached into my coat pocket and produced a pair of gray wool mittens, a red “G” knitted into the back of each. Mom had made those, too. In high school I had had a pair with blue “G”s on the backs. I would wear them as I was leaving the house, then trade them out for black leather gloves, because I was terrified of what I’d hear if I walked into the hockey dressing room with those mittens on.
“Got your mittens,” I said.
Gracie had the Zamboni part in her hands again, staring at it with her head cocked to one side. “You know,” she said, “you play like a pussy out there.”
I almost coughed up the beer I’d just swallowed.
“What?”
“You heard me. You think I don’t watch?”
My team, Soupy’s Chowder Heads, had beaten the Dead Wings of Murray amp; Murray Funeral Home that night, 5–2. I thought I’d had a pretty good game.
“Did you see my two assists? Including on the game winner?”
She swiveled her head around to look at me. “Only pussies talk about assists,” she said. “So you give the puck to Soupy, he scores. BFD. You still play like a pussy.”
“What the hell do you know about hockey?”
In my entire thirty-five years, I could not recall Gracie ever saying a word to me about hockey except to complain about the reek of my equipment drying in the basement of Mom’s house. She never seemed to care. She never came to a Rats game, at least not that I could remember, unless it was to drink and smoke dope with the burnouts and the football players who clustered behind the rink before we played, hoping the cops would ignore them. I figured she’d taken the job at the rink because it came with a cot and a fridge and a concession stand she could lift food from, not because she gave a rip about hockey.
“I know enough,” she said, turning her eyes back to the Zam part. Without looking she took up the River Rats cup, swished it around a little, and took a drink. “Enough to know you ought to have your ass back in the goal.”
“How the-you never even saw me play net.”
She set the cup back down. “It’s obvious you shouldn’t be playing wing. I mean, you’ve got good enough wheels and you’re smart enough to know your hands ain’t so hot so you’ve got to get the puck to other people. But you don’t like mixing it up in the corners and in front of the net, so you might as well just put your mask back on and get back in the goal where it’s safe.”
“Are you kidding me? Did you ever take a slap shot to the neck?”
“What are you being so pissy for? I didn’t say you were a pussy. I just said you play wing like a pussy. There’s a difference. You’re a goalie. Be a goalie, for fuck’s sake. Just be who you are. At least you have the chance.”
“Thanks for the advice.” I slapped her mittens down on the workbench. “Here.”
“Ah,” she said, her dull eyes brightening a little. She picked up her drink with one hand, the mittens with the other. She drank again while staring at the mittens as if trying to recall where she’d last seen them.
She had left them at Riccardo’s Pizza a few nights before after she and Darlene had had their weekly pizza and Greek salad. They had said their good-byes and Darlene had gone to the ladies’ room. She noticed the mittens sitting on their table on her way out. Gracie was already in her green LTD, about to pull out of the parking lot. Darlene ran outside waving the mittens over her head. But Gracie gunned her engine and Darlene stood in the lot watching the lights of the LTD recede over the Estelle Street Bridge. Later that night, Darlene gave me the mittens and asked me to drop them off at the rink. She wouldn’t see her friend again until Gracie was hanging dead in the shoe tree.
Now Gracie tossed her head back for the last drops in her cup. She set the cup down and pushed away from the bench, mittens in hand.
“Hmm,” she said, to no one I could see. “Don’t want to lose these again.”
She lurched toward me as if I weren’t there. I stepped aside, watching. She grabbed the cot by a leg and dragged it away from the wall, the metal legs scraping on the concrete. She slid around behind the cot and eased herself down to her knees.
On the wall next to her was a heating vent. She set the mittens on the cot and reached into her snowmobile pants, producing a set of keys. She used a key to unwind the two screws holding the vent grille in place. The grille clattered to the floor. Gracie leaned down to peer into the vent.
“Gracie,” I said. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t seem to hear. Totally shit-faced, I thought. All that talk about the way I played wing was just gin- and-Squirt babble.
Gracie reached into the vent with her left hand up to her elbow. The hand came out holding a baggie filled with marijuana. Her stash. I wondered whether the heat flowing around the baggie could turn her room into a giant bong.
She stuck the bag back into the vent. She took the mittens in hand and reached back inside. This time her hand came out empty. “Gracie,” I said, but she did not acknowledge me. It took her a couple of tries, but she fitted the grille back onto the vent and redid the screws. She stood, moved out from behind the cot, shoved the cot back into place, and rubbed her grease-stained hands together. Then she looked up and noticed me as if I’d just walked in.
“How the hell did you get in here?”
Now I crouched behind the cot. The screws on the vent grille came out easily enough. I was careful to lay the grille quietly on the floor.
I leaned my head down and looked inside. It was too dark to see much. I stuck my left arm in, expecting to feel a lumpy cylinder of plastic. But my hand found only the vent’s flat metal walls. I lay down on my side so I could shove my arm in farther. My knuckles banged against the back wall of the vent. I swept my hand all the way to the left and then back to the right.
I found it in the back right corner. Something small and soft. I squeezed it in my palm and pulled it out.
In my hand rested a tiny white shoe. A baby shoe. For the left foot. With a blue satin ribbon intertwined in the white cotton laces. I took it by the ribbon and let it dangle in front of my face.
Was it Gracie’s own shoe? Why would she have saved it? Why would she have stuffed it in this vent? Where was the other shoe? If this shoe was hers, then why a blue ribbon, why not pink?
Down near the tongue of the shoe, a rust-colored key was tied to the ribbon.
