Misery Bay
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
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