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:
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.”
Chapter Two
Erica Brink met me at the highway, where a dirt road led to the house they’d been renting for the last four months. She had a flashlight in her hand to signal me, because it was easy to miss the break in the trees on a snowy, pitch-black night. I pulled onto the shoulder, and Erica climbed into the passenger seat beside me.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” she said.
“Of course.”
I drove slowly toward the house. Erica and I didn’t speak, but I could feel tension radiating from her. Not that anyone could tell by how she looked. When I shot a quick glance across the seat, I saw that her wheat-field curls looked as fluffy as if she’d just come from the salon. She was nestled inside a fur coat that probably cost what I made in a month. We were the same age, twenty-six years old, but she made me feel much younger and out of her league. Her face had a perfect symmetry, and her cool-blue eyes didn’t hide the superiority she felt when she looked at someone like me. I was the girl at the Tanya Tucker concert, and Erica was Symphony Ball all the way.
But don’t mistake her for a squeaky-voiced blond toy. Erica was also savvy and tough, which you probably have to be to steal a corporate attorney away from his wife of fifteen years. It’s one thing to be the mistress. That’s easy work. But to get the ring? That takes a ruthless cunning you can’t help but respect.