Enough, I told myself. You’re already letting the place get to you and you haven’t even seen it yet.
Then I did. I turned the corner at the end of the road and found the small parking area near the break in the trees. In the summer, this was probably a boat launch, but here in the last month of winter it was just an empty pocket of level ground, mostly cleared of snow, with a view westward across the lake and facing directly into the cold wind. There was a great oak tree at the far end of the lot, and I could see a red ribbon tied around the trunk. This must have been where it happened.
I turned off the truck. I sat there for a moment, listening to the silence, wondering why anyone even bothered plowing this place. I didn’t see any snowmobile trails, although I figured there had to be at least one or two out there in the woods somewhere. I didn’t see anything but snow piled high in the shadow of the trees and the open water in the lake swirling where the river emptied into it.
As I got out of the truck, I took out the photograph Raz had given me. Young Charlie Jr., not quite as fair as his father, maybe some of his mother’s coloring in the mix, but the same strong, confident face. In the picture it’s summertime and the young man is standing on the end of a dock, with a fishing pole in his hand. He has turned toward the camera and the sun is going down behind him. I didn’t know where the picture was taken. Maybe on another part of this very same lake, on another day not that long ago. Just a matter of months and yet look at where he ended up.
I went over everything Raz had told me. His son came home for Christmas break. He seemed a little down, a little more quiet than usual. He didn’t say anything at all about his girlfriend or about his classes. He slept in late every morning. He went back to school a couple of days early, saying he wanted to hit the New Year’s Eve parties. There may have been a few words spoken on the way out the door, about his decision to switch from criminal justice to forestry. The last words his father would ever say to him.
But no, I thought. No way. Sons make their own way and sometimes their fathers don’t understand. It’s not a big enough reason to end your life before it’s even begun. I just don’t get it.
I went to the tree where he hanged himself. The red ribbon around the trunk was already weathered from the wind off the lake. I wondered who had put it there as I stood directly below the big branch that extended over the parking lot. This had to be it, I thought. This exact spot, right here.
As I looked up I tried to picture where the rope had gone. It occurred to me then that this wouldn’t necessarily have been an easy thing to do. You can’t just tie the rope to the branch, after all. You’d probably have to secure one end to something else on the ground, maybe wrapping it around the trunk of the tree, and then dangle just enough of the rope over the branch to give you a noose at just the right height. That’s apparently what he did. Sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., he drove his car the twenty-three miles from Houghton. The rope must have been in the car with him, maybe coiled up right there beside him on the passenger’s seat. Was it already tied into a noose? Or did he wait to tie it when he was here?
He backed the car into just the right position to stand on, the noose just close enough for him to slip his neck through. He fell backward off the car and the weight of his body tightened the rope around his neck. With only this short drop, he probably didn’t lose consciousness right away. It probably took several seconds for the blood flow to his brain to be reduced, and then for his lungs to start screaming for air. I had to wonder, as I stood under that tree, did he live long enough to regret his choice?
Why the hell do it this way in the first place? Why here? It must have been so cold that night. Why not just take a few dozen sleeping pills and lie down in your warm bed and never wake up?
Or hell, if you had to do it here, why not just stay in your car? Take your pills there, or if you can’t find pills, go buy a rifle and put the barrel in your mouth. It’s Michigan, after all. You can always buy a rifle somewhere, twenty-four hours a day.
More than anything else, why make such a spectacle of it? Hanging from a tree like this, facing the lake like some sort of horrible sacrifice? I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, even in my darkest hour. Not this way.
I looked at his picture one more time. You see someone’s face in a picture like this and you think you can form a basic impression of what kind of person he is. But everything I’d ever know about him would be completely secondhand, and even if I talked to every friend he had, every classmate, every teacher, every person who ever knew him in any way… how would I ever know what was really going on inside him?
I stayed there for a long time, taking it all in. There were no houses or other buildings to be seen in any direction. No sign of life at all. Just high drifts of snow and more trees and the lake itself. I started to feel a strange foreboding about the place, and I could only wonder if it was because I came here already knowing what had happened. Would I have felt the same thing if I had just stumbled upon this place by accident?
There was no way to know.
I got back in the truck and started it. I turned up the heat to warm my hands. Then I started driving up to Houghton to see what else I could find out about the late Charlie Razniewski Jr.
CHAPTER FOUR
Houghton, Michigan. If you know your history, you know what this city once meant to the rest of the state. Hell, to the whole country.
The first big mining boom happened here, even before the gold rush out west. Copper Country, they called it. That’s how all of the Finns ended up here, along with a few Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians. You can still hear the accents in many of the locals. You can still see some of the heavy equipment standing silent and rusted where the mines were. This is where they took all the copper from the ground and turned it into electrical wire and shipped it all over the world. It all happened right here.
They built the college and it went through several mining-related names until it finally ended up being known as Michigan Technological University. It’s not about mining anymore, of course. It’s all about science and engineering now. The students come from all over Michigan and besides studying, the one thing they’d better be ready for is snow, because they get a hell of a lot of it. Most years, anyway. I was reminded of that as I drove up into the Keweenaw Peninsula and saw the big sign by the side of the road. It was a measuring stick as tall as a tree, with that winter’s current snowfall amount marked at around twelve feet. On the second day of April, usually they’d have at least twice that by now.
As I got closer to the city, I passed a huge set of concrete slabs along the shoreline. Even taller than the snowfall stick, they looked like a giant set of dominoes. More relics from the copper mining, I’m sure, but beyond that I had no idea what they were used for. It made the whole place feel even more foreign to me.
When I got to Houghton itself, that feeling got even stronger. You lose sight of Lake Superior, but as you go inland, you see Portage Lake stretching out across the middle of the Keweenaw. The land rises on either side of the water, and the biggest lift bridge you’ll ever see connects Houghton to Hancock, the city to the north. The middle section of the bridge can rise a hundred feet to let ships pass beneath it.
Most strange of all is how the city of Houghton is built on an incline, with streets running parallel to each other and climbing in elevation as you get farther away from the water. It looks like a miniature San Francisco, I swear, and you have to remind yourself that you’re still in Michigan.
I passed Michigan Tech on my way into the center of the city, then I found the Houghton County Sheriff’s office on the fourth street up from the water. Just like back in the Soo, they seemed to have had the same idea when they put up the building. Start with the county courthouse, the tallest, grandest, most beautiful building in town. Connect another building to that, but make sure this one is a gray concrete box, with all the charm of an air raid shelter.
One of the county plows was touching up the parking lot. I waited for him to finish and gave him a little wave as he left, one plow operator to another. Then I parked the truck and went inside.
The receptionist asked if she could help me, and I picked up yet another Scandinavian accent. I would have guessed Swedish this time, but I wouldn’t have put much money on it. I bet if you live out here you can pick them out right away.
“I’d like to talk to the sheriff,” I said. “I’m a private investigator visiting from Chippewa County.”
I had my license with me, burning a hole in my pocket. It felt strange to refer to myself as a PI.
“He’s not in the office right now. I believe the undersheriff’s here, if you’d like to speak to him.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
