Page 16

I watched him putting things into the baskets for half a minute before asking, “Where are you staying?”

“The AmeriVu.”

“They have a big enough fridge for that?”

He stopped. “Oh.” His hands shook slightly as he put down the jar of mayo. I could see the grief through his expression, a trapped wild thing clawing at him from the inside.

I walked around the kitchen island and wrapped him in my arms again.

I wasn’t used to Elliot being the one to give in to emotions—not that I didn’t get it. He’d just lost his only surviving parent. It had been him and his dad for the last almost-two decades after Naomi Crane had died of an aggressive cancer that her doctors hadn’t found soon enough—mostly because they’d dismissed her complaints for the better part of two years.

I remembered when Naomi died. It had been awful for Elliot, who’d watched her sicken and weaken. It had been a brutal reminder of mortality, looking down at her wasted, too-pale form in the coffin at her funeral, having to try to find the resemblance between the corpse in the box and the bright, lively woman who had fed me too much pie and ice cream and had taught Elliot and I how to weave pine needles into baskets. Ours were terrible, but she used to sell hers at the summer farmers’ markets in Green Bay and at the Menominee Casino and Resort.

This was so much worse.

Not because Gregory was the only parent Elliot had left, but because he’d been violently ripped away.

Elliot’s sobs subsided, but he remained leaning against me. “What did they tell you?” he asked me.

“Who?”

“I dunno. Anyone.”

“I’ve only talked to my parents, and they didn’t know much. Only that Henry—” I stopped, not wanting to say it.

“Found Dad,” he murmured into the now-damp spot on my shoulder.

“Yeah.”

“He—He said Dad was just… He was hanging. Over the beam in the office.”

That tracked with what I’d seen in the room, but I didn’t confirm it out loud. Didn’t need to give Elliot that image. I gently rubbed his back, letting him know I was here. That I was listening.

“The cops said—They said he killed himself. Fucking bastards.”

That struck me as wrong right away. First of all, Gregory Crane hadn’t suffered from depression a day in his life, at least not that I knew about. I mean, okay, they say you don’t necessarily know, but I was deeply skeptical that Elliot’s dad would commit suicide, and he certainly wouldn’t have hung himself if he were going to.

The man was a fucking herbal expert—if he were going to kill himself, he’d have used the plants he loved so much and knew so well. It’d be a hell of a lot less fucking awful than strangulation, that’s for damn sure, because the beam in the office wasn’t nearly high enough to snap your neck. Gregory would have known at least a half-dozen ways to just go to sleep—to die without ever feeling it coming.Andmake it a shit-ton less traumatizing for whoever found him.

But the Shawano PD didn’t know Gregory the way Elliot and I did. They only knew that hanging was one of the most common methods of suicide. Notthemost common—that was guns. Especially for men. Hanging or some other type of suffocation came next in terms of commonality. However, the little smudge of mud and the tiny button told me that someone else might have been in the room when Gregory Crane was hung from that rafter—on top of the fact that I knew hanging would not have been on the top of his list.

Which raised the question about how the fuck whoeverhaddone it had gotten him up there. Because he certainly wouldn’t have just fuckingletthem hang him. Gregory—like Elliot—was ripped and vicious when provoked. He was a fuckingbadger. You don’t fuck with badgers, not if you want to keep all your blood on the inside of your body. Which likely meant that someone had somehow incapacitated him first. I wondered if the cops would do a tox screen.

I was going to bet the answer was no. Because while there were clues that Gregory Crane hadn’t committed suicide—especially if you knew him—you had to be willing to see those hints. Had to be looking for something out of place or awry. I’m a suspicious asshole, so I’m usually looking to see what it is that someone doesn’t want me to see. I know the statistics. Most apparent suicides are suicides, but every now and then you find one where the shocked and horrified family who insists that their loved one wouldneverdo that turns out to be right.

This was going to be one of them.

“We’ll prove otherwise, El,” is what I said out loud. Because my best friend didn’t need a run-down of the statistics. What he needed was someone to tell him it would be okay. That justice would—for once—be served.

And then, as I was painfully, fully aware, he needed someone to actually fucking follow through on that.

I didn’t know if I’d succeed, but I was damn sure going to try.

4

I got back to my folks’house around eleven that night because Elliot and I had spent the afternoon sitting in his hotel room calling all the necessary places—starting the process of getting a death certificate issued, calling a funeral home who would follow Mamaceqtaw tradition once the body was released, finding an estate lawyer, and writing and sending out an obituary. We put off dealing with insurance because if the official cause of death was suicide, that was going to be a compete shit-show.

Although we’d already missed the traditional twenty-four hour window after death for burial, there were plenty of places willing to forego embalming and offered simple pine boxes. The service itself would be outside—even in the winter—and offerings of bread, berries, and maple sugar would be placed into the open grave, which would be marked with a spirit house instead of a headstone.