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.”