Chapter One

When you’re the only woman deputy in the county sheriff’s department, and it’s Christmas Eve, who do you think is the lucky one who pulls the overnight shift? Yes, it was me.

The snow fell in huge flakes, promising us a white Christmas at the end of a brown December. Around ten o’clock that Monday evening, I was alone in my cruiser on the back roads of Black Wolf County, singing along to a cassette of Mitch Miller carols that my father had sent me from a truck stop somewhere in Wyoming. My brother was away in the oil fields of Texas. I was lonely and fighting a cold and trying to take my mind off the fact that my life was falling apart.

This was 1984. I’m sure you can do the math. You were still almost a year away from being born.

You might think the holiday would make for a quiet night on patrol, but you’d be wrong. Christmas does weird things to people. My first call was to deal with Darius Stedman, who was moonwalking to Michael Jackson on the boom box, in the parking lot of the 126 Bar. Mr. Stedman was wearing a Santa hat and only a Santa hat. The temperature was seven degrees outside, and body parts freeze pretty quickly in that kind of weather. So I turned on the siren and went screaming toward the 126 to make sure that Mr. Stedman’s various appendages didn’t start snapping off.

It’s not like he was a regular in the county drunk tank. We had plenty of those. No, he was forty-three years old, a solid citizen, and my former high school science teacher. I liked him. However, he’d lost his wife to a heart condition over the summer, and the holidays have a way of bringing those things roaring back, particularly when alcohol is involved. When I got to the 126, a crowd of bar-goers was cheering as Mr. Stedman danced to “Billie Jean.” Ricky, my husband of four years, was among them, but we ignored each other like strangers. I broke up the party, wrapped Mr. Stedman in a blanket, and took him back to his house to thaw him out and sober him up. He spent the next half hour sobbing to me about his wife over coffee.

It made me think how nice it must be to love someone so deeply that it hurts that much to lose them. I’d never experienced an emotion like that, and I wouldn’t until the following year.

Until you, sweetheart.

I left when Mr. Stedman finally fell asleep on his sofa. I had to drive by the 126 on my way back to the station, so I decided to stop to talk to Ricky. I was sure he was still at the bar. He was always there, drinking up my county salary and flirting with the eighteen-year-old waitresses. The 126 was our local dirty dive. It took its name from its location on Highway 126 about ten miles outside the county seat, a town called Random. During the summers, they had strip nights and wet T-shirt contests. Dart games turned into knife fights. Cocaine was snorted in the bathroom. And yet almost everyone in the county, from parents to preachers, came in for pizza and drinks at the 126 several times a week, because there was nowhere else to go.

Sundays were typically movie night at the bar, and that always drew a crowd. Yesterday, they’d shown Trading Places, which Ricky didn’t want to miss because of Jamie Lee Curtis and her boobs. I’d used my cold as an excuse to skip it, but Ricky and I had also had a big fight before he went off to see the movie. I’d lost my cool and said things I never meant to say out loud.

Like using the D word—divorce—for the first time.

It had been almost two years since Ricky got fired from the mine for assaulting his supervisor. With no unemployment, we were barely scraping by, and we’d only made the December mortgage payment because my dad gave me two hundred dollars. January was coming and the mortgage was due again, and Ricky was no closer to finding work. However, the fight was less about him and less about money than it was about me. I was struggling with Big Things. Who I was. The mistakes I’d made. What I needed to do to reclaim my life. More and more, I was thinking about a future without Ricky, but the time to say so wasn’t in the midst of an argument while we were both drunk and angry. So that Monday night, with it being Christmas Eve and all, I decided to stop at the bar and see if we could make peace, at least for the holidays.

Despite my good intentions, though, I didn’t get a chance to see him. Another call came in before I even made it back to the 126, so I had to change my plans. This time, the call came from Sandra Thoreau.

I usually heard from Sandra a couple of times a month about vandalism at her house. She was the lead plaintiff in a sexual harassment lawsuit that two dozen women had filed against the Langford copper mine, and given that the mine was the largest employer in the county, Sandra wasn’t exactly popular. The men around here made sure she knew it. She’d had obscene graffiti scrawled on her house so many times that she didn’t even bother to remove it anymore. In fact, she’d been adding to it herself by painting anatomically correct drawings of some of the lesser-endowed mine workers, with their names attached. Her motto was to give as good as she got.

I found Sandra sitting on the open tailgate of her pickup when I got to her house. She wore a long, fraying wool coat over a blue nightgown and had a cigarette between her lips and a can of Old Style in her hand. When she exhaled, steam and smoke mixed together in the frigid air. She wore earmuffs over her greasy brown hair and worn moccasins on her feet. Behind her, I could see that the front and back windows of her truck had been shattered by what was probably a shotgun blast. Broken glass littered the fresh snow, and the bits of glass twinkled thanks to the blinking Christmas lights that decorated her house.

“Merry Christmas, Rebecca,” Sandra greeted me. She flicked a chunk of glass off the tailgate like a cat’s-eye. “Ho ho ho.”

“The elves have been busy,” I said. “Did you see who did this?”

“I could give you some guesses, but no, I didn’t see them. I was in bed and heard the shot. By the time I got outside, they were gone. I could hear tires screeching up the highway.”

“Is Henry okay?”

“Yeah, he slept through it. That kid could sleep through a tornado.”

Henry was Sandra’s eight-year-old son. Yes, no kidding, Henry Thoreau. I was pretty sure Sandra had never read Walden and that she’d picked the name Henry because of Henry Winkler and the Fonz. But it was still funny.

Sandra was a single mother and absolutely devoted to that boy. Nobody around here knew who Henry’s father was, and to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure if Sandra did, either. She’d slept her way through most of the men in Black Wolf County, married or not, so there were plenty of suspects. But raising a kid on her own was no picnic, and that was why Sandra had taken a job at the mine seven years earlier. It paid well, and she needed the money. After she blazed the trail there, other women followed. Unfortunately, in the eyes of a lot of people around here, women working at the mine were taking badly needed jobs away from the men.

You can probably guess that they felt the same way about a woman working as a sheriff’s deputy. So while Sandra was no angel, the two of us had some things in common. As different as we were, she was one of my favorite people. It took guts to stick it out at the mine and even more guts to complain about how the men treated her. In those days, sexual harassment wasn’t something women took to court. The dirty jokes, the daily come-ons, the innuendos about sex lives and periods, the leering looks, the wolf whistles, the little touches and massages, the comments about legs and boobs and asses—that was just the ordinary price of being a woman at work.

“Have you had any threats recently?” I asked her.

Sandra shrugged. “What day is it?”

I walked around her truck but found no useful evidence to tell me who’d done this. I stood near Sandra’s modest rambler and put my hands on my hips to survey the long driveway and the highway between the trees. Snow had begun to turn the pines into white soldiers. There were tire tracks where a car had pulled up behind the pickup, but they weren’t clear enough to help me. Like Sandra, I could probably name twenty boys around here who might have pulled a stunt like this, but I’d never be able to prove it.

“If you didn’t see anybody, I can’t really do much except write it up,” I admitted.

“I know. I wouldn’t have bothered to call you, except Norm says I should report everything. He wants a record of it for the trial.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Norm Foltz was the local lawyer handling the litigation for Sandra and the other women working at the mine. They were trying to turn their harassment claims into a class action lawsuit, and although the mine had been trying to shut down the case for more than three years, Norm had finally beaten the skeptics by getting the class certified. The betting at that point was whether the mining company would offer a settlement or take its chances at trial. I had my money on a trial. The mine owners hated these women, Sandra in particular, and they were out to win.

I heard the static of the radio in my car. More Yuletide cheer was waiting for me somewhere in the county. “I’ll write up a report and send you a copy. You can pass it along to Norm.”

“Thanks.” Sandra lit another cigarette; she was in a mood to talk. “I heard you and Ricky got into it. Money problems, huh?”

“Good news travels fast.”

“Well, everybody was talking about it during the movie last night.”

“I don’t care about gossip,” I replied.

“Well, you can say that now, but I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end. Believe me, honey, the games can get pretty mean.”

“I know.”

I headed for my car, but Sandra called after me. “Hey, Rebecca? Aren’t you going to ask me where I was?”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard Gordon Brink’s little blond ice queen got the full Carrie treatment. Somebody nailed her with a gallon of pig’s blood. I sort of figured I’d be the prime suspect, what with Brink representing the mine. But you never came to see me.”

“Did you do it?”

“No. I was in the pit all day.”

“Yeah, I checked,” I told her. “That’s why I didn’t bother coming to see you. I don’t suppose you know who did do it?”

“Absolutely no idea,” Sandra replied, snickering through her cigarette smoke. “But I’m just sick about it.”

“I can see that.”

I started for my cruiser again, my boots crunching in the snow, but Sandra wasn’t done.

“Rebecca?” she said, with sharpness in her voice. “Don’t feel sorry for Brink or his wife or any of those bastards. They killed my dog. I didn’t report it, but that’s what they did.”

“Are you sure?”

“I let Pogo out two weeks ago when I got home from work. He never came back. We never saw him again. You try explaining that to a sobbing eight-year-old boy. The mine people and their lawyers are sons of bitches. I hope every one of them rots in hell.”

Sandra wiped a tear from her face. She liked to pretend that she was hard as nails, because as soon as the men at the mine smelled weakness, they’d be all over her. But I knew that, deep down, much of her toughness was an act. I knew, because I often had to wear the same disguise in the sheriff’s department.

“I’m sorry about Pogo,” I told her gently, “but you know, we lose a lot of animals around here. This is wild country. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was Gordon Brink or the people at the mine.”

“The next day at work, I found a bag of doggy treats in my locker,” Sandra went on.

I shut my mouth.

She was right. Of course, she was right. The games were mean.

“I’m telling you, Rebecca, these people are evil. They care about money, they care about winning, and they don’t care about anything else. I don’t give a shit what happens to them. I really don’t. They deserve whatever they get.”

*

Christmas Eve continued on its strange path from there.

I spent the next several hours following up on other holiday problems around the county. Emily and Kevin Pipewell called in a panic to report that their twin girls were missing. When I got there, I spotted the girls eating graham crackers up on the roof near the chimney, where they were waiting for Santa. We got them down and back in bed.

Four-year-old Denny Bublitz called because his parents were sleeping. He’d flushed his goldfish to see what would happen, but after it disappeared, he wanted me to look for it. I told him that Mr. Jenkins at the pet store was in charge of rescuing flushed fishies, and that Denny’s parents would be able to get his goldfish back from Mr. Jenkins after Christmas.

Louisa Shepherd, who was eighty-one and still spry enough to chop her own firewood with an ax, called to let me know that she’d baked Christmas spritz cookies and did I want some? Yes, I did.

And finally, Al Poplar called to say he had a gun and was going to kill himself. He’d made the same call half a dozen times since Thanksgiving, and every time I’d gone over there, I’d discovered that the gun was empty. I stopped by again just after midnight and spent almost an hour talking him out of his holiday depression before he handed me the Smith & Wesson.

This time, the gun was cocked and fully loaded.

It reminded me of what my partner, Darrell, always said was the most important lesson of police work: you never know.

By two in the morning, most of the people in Black Wolf County were finally asleep, which meant I had my overnight lull. I drove back to the town of Random and parked on the empty street. All the Christmas lights were on, making the town look like a Hollywood movie set in the 1930s. Beyond the two blocks of old brick buildings that made up the town center, the national forest loomed at the outskirts, as dark as it must have been for Jonah inside the whale. I got out of my cruiser and crossed Main Street, and mine were the only tracks in the fresh bed of snow.

Random. This was my hometown. I’d lived here my whole life.

Do you wonder why it’s called that? A lot of people do. I think they expect there must have been a Jedediah Random who built the first church here. Or maybe there was some Indian, French, German, or Swedish word that got mangled into Random over the years. The real answer is, we don’t know. No one can explain why we’re here or why we’re called what we are. Historians say the word Random started showing up on maps a couple of centuries ago, but they don’t know who first made a settlement here. We have no river and no pioneer crossroads to explain our reason for being. The copper mine keeps the town going, but Random was here long before the mine.

I like to think the name explains itself. Random. I’m convinced there was a settler with a sense of humor who is still laughing at us as we try to puzzle it out. He knew life was simply random. It’s random where you’re born. It’s random who you meet along the way.

It’s random what you encounter when you’re walking in the woods.

I let myself inside the sheriff’s office, which was combined with our city hall and the county courthouse in one somber old building with a clock tower, a cupola, and a huge marble statue of Lady Justice. I actually enjoyed the Christmas shift, because I had the building mostly to myself. Our tiny office smelled like cigarettes and the menthol rub that our department secretary, Mrs. Mannheim, slathered on her knees. I turned on the office lights, which flickered on the water-stained ceiling, and I made my way past the desks of the other deputies.

My desk was the smallest. It was located immediately next to the men’s bathroom, with an unobstructed view of the urinals whenever the door opened. The sheriff hadn’t put me there by accident. He was sending me a message: See what we have that you don’t? You’re missing a vital piece of equipment to work here, and it ain’t your gun.

I dug in the bottom drawer of my desk for my hidden stash of fudge, which was my weakness. Chocolate, with walnuts and dried cherries. I popped a cassette of Synchronicity into my tape recorder and listened to Sting, who was watching me with every breath I took. I lit up a Marlboro and relaxed. I eased back in my chair and thought about calling my father, but I didn’t even know where he was staying that night. It was silly, but I wanted him to tell me the poem he’d made up for me, to make me feel better after my mom died. I could still remember it word for word.

Things like that stick with you through the years. The good things and the bad things—I know that, sweetheart.

Because Dad wasn’t around, I recited the beginning of the poem out loud to myself:

Rebecca Colder, Rebecca Colder

She’s a little stronger

She’s a little bolder

Rebecca Colder, Rebecca Colder

The world can’t stop her

The world can’t hold her

Of course, I wasn’t Rebecca Colder anymore. I was Rebecca Todd, married to Ricky Todd. The rhymes of the poem didn’t really work for me in my married life. Even so, I recited it a couple more times in the quiet of the office, and I thought for a long, long time about the woman I’d become.

I had finished my third cigarette when the phone rang. When that happens in the middle of the night, it’s never good news.

“Deputy Todd,” I said when I picked it up.

“Deputy, this is Erica Brink.”

I was distracted and didn’t say anything immediately. In fact, I was silent for so long that she said it again.

“Deputy? Are you there? It’s Erica Brink.”

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Brink?” I replied finally.

“I just got back to the house. I’ve been away ever since—well, since the incident with the pig’s blood. I went to visit my parents.”

“All right.”

“The thing is, I can’t find Gordon,” she went on. “I couldn’t reach him on the phone last night, and he’s not in the house. His son, Jay, hasn’t seen him either. His car is here, all of his things are here, but he’s missing. I’m worried that something has happened to him.”