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cut him down. Had to look this kid right in the face. He was as frozen as an icicle. Just a couple weeks later, I hear about an old friend of mine, a sergeant down in Iron Mountain. His son shot himself behind the barn. Put a bullet right in his own head.”
    He paused for a moment, then continued.
    “My wife’s father killed himself a few years ago, so it’s already kind of a hot spot for me.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Yeah, he just drove off one day. He found a deserted spot and he tried to run a hose from the exhaust pipe through the window, had it all taped up with duct tape. He didn’t realize that new cars don’t put out that much carbon monoxide anymore. So it must have taken hours. If he didn’t have a full tank, it might not have worked. Although in that case he might have just froze to death. But anyway, he’d been suffering from depression. We had him on some new medicine, but I guess it wasn’t doing the job. Takes a while, they said. So meanwhile he has to slip away from us when we’re not looking and take all damned day to kill himself. It absolutely destroyed my wife, I’ll tell you that much.”
    He dropped the pad back on the desk. The mess made a little more sense to me now. This man was just trying to keep it all together, and a clean desk was pretty low on his list of priorities.
    “It would have been better if her father had died in an accident,” he said. “Or hell, even if somebody had broken into the house and killed him. At least that way, you wouldn’t have to keep wondering why he did it to himself, you know? I can’t imagine a worse thing to have to go through. But anyway, ever since then, every time I hear about a suicide, it just hits me right in the gut, you know? Now two kids killing themselves in the same winter. One of them in my county.”
    “Look, I’m sorry I’m bringing all this back up. I had no idea this was going to hit so close to home with you.”
    “You just have to understand. Lately I’m beginning to think that everybody I see is going to find some way to kill themselves.”
    “Well,” I said, “I’m not going to. I promise.”
    “Okay. That’s good to hear. That’s a start, I guess. But you know, to tell you the truth … maybe it’s a good thing I’m the one you got to talk to today. Because maybe most cops wouldn’t understand why you’d come all the way out here just to pry into a situation that’s obviously not going to change.”
    I started to protest, but he put up his hand to stop me.
    “It’s okay, Mr. McKnight. I get it. If it was somebody from my family, I’d be asking the same questions myself. Or else I’d be sending out a wise-looking old cop like yourself to ask the questions for me.”
    “I’ll take that as a compliment, I guess.”
    “I meant it no other way. And to answer your question, the rope was approximately fifty feet long.”
    “So more than long enough to tie off around the trunk, and then extend over that big branch.”
    “That’s how he did it, yes. Beyond that, I just wish I could give you more information. We’ve got so many kids who come up here for college. Then they’re gone. I’m afraid that young Mr. Razniewski was just one of those temporary residents.”
    “His father gave me three names to look up—his girlfriend and two of his other friends.”
    “You got the phone numbers?”
    “I do, yes.”
    “Then give them a call. On a Wednesday, this time of year, there’s not a whole lot to do besides going to class or hanging out in a bar somewhere.”
    “Sounds familiar,” I said. “Except for the going-to-class part.”
    “This is a terrible thought,” he said, his voice lowered, his head leaning toward me. “But sometimes in the dead of winter up here … as I get older, I mean, I start to wonder why we don’t see even more suicides.”
    There wasn’t much I could say to that. So I thanked the man and left him to his pile of papers and his morbid thoughts.
    Before I could even