Then there was the rink in Trenton, home of the Pipefitters, a cramped, frozen box with a corrugated tin roof and bleachers along one side of the ice that swayed under the weight of more than a thousand people, almost every one in ’Fitters black and gold. One game, we had a 4–1 lead after two periods and came out in the third determined to grab our first win ever against what most people believed, year after year, was the best team in Michigan. When the Pipefitters tied it up with three goals in four minutes and thirty-six seconds, I looked out through my goalie mask and swore that the roof was trembling with the crowd’s ferocious din. With fourteen seconds to go, Zilchy had a chance to break a 5–5 tie. His hurried wrist shot beat the ’Fitter goalie over his left shoulder but hit the crossbar and sailed harmlessly over the glass.
After the game, Zilch sat on the floor against the dressing room wall, his head in his hands. Nobody noticed him sobbing at first, but then he began to weep, louder every second, and then to scream, shaking, hysterical, tears streaming down his cheeks, tearing his helmet off and slamming it against the floor until it split in two. “Fuck, Zilch,” Soupy said. He jumped up and crossed the room, one skate on and one off, and slapped Zilchy once, hard, across the face. Just like we’d seen on TV. And just like that, Zilchy stopped.
We never did beat the Pipefitters.
I turned onto Allen Road. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular, not yet. I had no idea where Gracie had lived. But Mich had given me rough directions to Vend’s address. Now I was working up the courage to go there. As a reporter, I had never grown comfortable with confronting people face-to-face, no matter how many times I did it. I did not envy the cop reporters who routinely had to show up on people’s doorsteps to ask what they felt about their teenage daughter being found raped and knifed to death in a viaduct along the Lodge Freeway. I wasn’t sure I wanted to present myself on the porch of a man who took joy in breaking another man’s nose with his head, who I was beginning to believe had a hand in the death of Gracie McBride.
I passed a radiator shop, a two-story condominium complex trimmed with shake shingles, a Moose lodge, three gas stations, an awning shop, a motel with Christmas lights strung around its windows. There was an Italian bakery, a bar, a bank branch, two liquor stores, a pharmacy, a McDonald’s, a Chinese restaurant called Ming Sun, a Slavic one called Putka’s. I slowed my truck as I passed Wally’s Wonder Print, trying to see in through the windows.
Bare maples and oaks and ragged piles of mud-crusted snow lined both sides of Harman Street. The sidewalks were clean. Neat bungalows nestled behind the matted brown lawns, patchy with snow. Basketball hoops with their nets removed stood outside one- and two-car garages. I passed the house twice, once going south, once north. I circled around Hanna Street to Elizabeth and back up Harman again. I parked across the street and two doors down from Vend’s house, beneath an enormous oak that could have doubled as the tree in which Gracie was found.
I shut off the ignition and made sure my doors were locked.
The one-story ranch was the last place I would have looked for a strip- club magnate. It was dressed in clean white aluminum siding. The white awnings over the front windows and porch were trimmed in royal blue. The lawn surrounded a rock garden set off by a neat curving border of beige bricks. In the middle of the garden stood a statue of the Blessed Mother.
What was I going to do? Just walk up and say, “Is Knobbo here?” I wasn’t even sure that Vend lived there anymore. The address I’d found in Dingus’s file was almost four years old, after all.
I picked up my cell phone. There were messages from Darlene and Philo. I dialed Darlene, ready to be yelled at.
“‘Apparent suicide’?” she said. “Three paragraphs? You know we have a bomb squad here from Traverse? Does it sound like we’re treating this like a suicide?”
“It’s not what I wrote,” I said. “The fucking fat ass in-”
“Why do you let them push you around?”
That wasn’t as simple a question as she might have imagined.
“I don’t, Darlene. But it’s not my paper.”
“Whatever. The Pilot’s so irrelevant anyway.”
“Thanks.”
“I just hope it doesn’t make people who might have information think it’s OK to keep quiet.”
“Look, I’m sorry. At least Dingus seems to be letting you in on things.”
“Where are you?”
“Beautiful Melvindale, Michigan.”
“Good. Gracie lived there. Or at least that’s where I mailed my letters… Hang on. I’m drying my hair. Finally got a shower.”
Her hair had been wet the first time I had really noticed Darlene. I was thirteen. I crossed her yard next door to mine to catch the school bus that stopped in front of her house. I leaned against the mailbox facing Darlene’s house, my books under one arm. Next door my mutts, Fats and Blinky, started barking as the bus approached.
Darlene’s screen door opened halfway and then banged shut and then opened again. She stepped out onto her porch in her white parka, a stack of books cradled against her chest, her damp, dark hair shining in the sun. I heard the bus rumble to a stop behind me but I kept watching Darlene. She didn’t even look at the bus. She bent forward at the waist and with her free arm shook out her hair as it fell over her face. Then she tossed it all back and shook her head some more and ran her hand through her hair again and again, smoothing it back and over her hood.
The bus driver beeped her horn. A year before, a month before, a day before that morning, I would have yelled, “Come on, Darlene, move!” But today I just stood there watching her take care of herself. Of course she was being selfish and vain and disrespectful. And that thrilled me. She wasn’t afraid to believe that she knew what mattered at that moment, and that it wasn’t the bus or the school bell or anything else but that she looked her very best before she started her day. As I watched her cross her lawn and climb the bus steps without a word or a glance for the bus driver or for me, I knew that I wanted to matter to her.
“It’s crazy here,” she said now.
“The coroner say anything yet?”
“No. Dingus is trying to hold him off. We think the bomb was set off remotely. You can do it with a phone call to a beeper or a cell phone.”
“Can you trace it?”
“Pretty hard without the beeper or the cell. We’re working on it. Actually, I’m working on it.”
“Has anyone taken credit for it?”
“Credit?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No one has stepped forward. No one has contacted us. We can only conclude it was someone who had it in for Gracie.”
“Could it be somebody trying to send a message about the new rink?”
“What would the message be?”
Build it and they will die, I thought. But I said, “I don’t know. Why would somebody kill Gracie and then bother with a bomb that apparently wasn’t intended to hurt anyone?”
“How do you know it wasn’t intended to hurt anyone?”
Because Michele Higgins had told me.
“I don’t,” I said.
“We think the bomb was planted on the underside of that stool Gracie used on the Zamboni. So it could have hurt her, or somebody else driving it. I don’t know. Maybe there was a screwup. Maybe there’s more than one person involved. Maybe there’s more to this than just Gracie.”
“Any prints?”
“Just Gracie’s and a couple from that kid who works the concession stand, but that’s no surprise.”
“I suppose Tawny Jane’s been all over this.”
“She was waiting for me when I left the department an hour ago.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“I told her I liked how she colored out the gray in her hair. How about you? What are you doing?”
“Driving around mostly.” I didn’t mention Mich. Instead I told Darlene about Vend and that police report from 1995. She went quiet for a minute.
