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.