Lot’s return to Sodom Page 4

  The house was cool and dark and inviting after the rough day I’d had so far.

  I hadn’t had the heart to burden Jens with the awful scene I had witnessed before he came back to the truck to get me. I hadn’t even processed it. If he hadn’t noticed that I was a little quiet, it was only because he was too absorbed in his own thoughts. He was driving on autopilot.

  “Mom,” I called again, heading toward the garage to see if her car was gone.

  Jens had dropped me off and was heading back to work. Dad had told us he was heading to Pierre for a meeting. And with no Subaru in the garage, which left only the spare pickup, otherwise known as “the Gray Ghost,” I speculated that Mom must be out running errands, which meant I had the house to myself. A Monday afternoon with nothing to do. This was such a rare moment for me, I wasn’t sure if I should be sad, mad, or glad about the predicament. I knew Mom had insisted I see Dr. James tomorrow at nine and that I had to do my physical therapy exercises as outlined by my doctors in Fort Collins, but other than that, I was left with nothing to do but dawdle.

  After standing in the garage for several minutes contemplating my next move, I decided to retreat to the kitchen, grab a bite to eat, treat myself to a hot bath, and take a long nap. Mom’s refrigerator and pantry were both still stocked for the army she raised, even though all of us had left home, so I had no trouble finding a snack. After thoroughly checking out the main floor and upstairs bedrooms one more time to make sure I was alone, I grabbed my snack and disappeared downstairs to the guest bedroom suite to draw a bath. Balancing my tuna sandwich on a plate and a glass of milk, I nearly dropped the entire quarry as the peal of the phone startled me. I carefully turned around in the circular staircase and trotted up the stairs and around the corner, setting my feast aside on the kitchen table to answer the nearby phone.

  “Bergen residence. This is Liv speaking,” I said. Clearly I never answered the phone at my house with such formality, but it was habitual to do so in my parents’ house. Sometimes I didn’t show it, but I was raised with impeccable manners.

  “Liv, this is Clint White.”

  Not counting all the summers I worked while I was a student, my very first real job with the family business was working for Clint at our Nemo Quarry, crushing, shoveling, and sampling the iron ore we were producing at that site. I loved my work there, not least because Clint had shown an infinite amount of patience teaching me how to weld, load trucks, drill, and blast.

  “Hi, Clint. How are you? Gosh, it’s been too long since I’ve seen or talked with you. I missed you at the Christmas party last year,” I gushed.

  “Belinda was sick. We had to miss it.” His voice was uncharacteristically stilted. “Listen, Liv, is Garth there by any chance?”

  Then I realized something was wrong. “No, he had to go to Pierre.”

  “And Ole’s in Fort Collins, right?”

  A pang of guilt twisted my gut. “Yeah. He’s still covering for me. What’s the matter? Is there something I can do for you?”

  Clint paused.

  I knew that either someone was badly hurt at work or Clint was facing a more challenging situation than usual. “Really, Clint, I’m fine. No matter what you’ve heard. What’s happening?”

  “I tried reaching Ed and had to leave a message for him.”

  Ed Meyer was my counterpart at the Rapid City area mining operations.

  “And I wasn’t sure who else to call.”

  “Is someone hurt?”

  “Well, no, not really. Someone’s dead.”

  “Dead? Oh no, who? What happened? Are you okay?”

  “Not one of our employees. And not quite on our property. Tommy Jasper, the guy who has the grazing lease on our land and on the neighbor’s land to the southeast, found a body near the creek late this morning.”

  My gut twisted again. “Dead?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The place is crawling with police and emergency technicians, and none of them seems to give a darn about the MSHA rules we have to abide by. I just don’t know what to do, you know?”

  “What have you done so far?” I asked, checking my watch. It was nearly two.

  “I sent the crew back to Rapid City and told them to sit tight until this place clears out. I told them to report to Lenny in Rapid City tomorrow morning if they don’t hear from me, and I gave Lenny a heads-up to find extra work for them. But I have my hands full up here, if you know what I mean.”

  I detected an unfamiliar quiver in his voice and imagined he’d been dealing with this for hours while I was off enjoying myself at Gunners. Another pang of guilt.

  “Look. I can be up there in twenty minutes. I suppose you’re still loading out trucks, too?”

  “I didn’t see any other choice.”

  “You’ve done great, Clint. I’ll be up in twenty and I’ll bring you a sandwich. I bet you haven’t eaten.”

  “Thanks. Bring two. Tommy’s been up here since he found the body and he looks like he’s about to pass out.”

  It took me less than a minute to slap a batch of sandwiches together, throw a jar of pickles, a bag of chips, and a box of cookies into a sack, and head out the door, my bath and nap long forgotten. The old Gray Ghost started up on the first turn and I let her run while I ran back inside to leave my mother a note.

  As always, the drive up Nemo Road west of Rapid City was breathtaking and I wondered if my overwhelming sense of contentment arose from returning to the Black Hills or to work. Probably both. I was enjoying my euphoria, forgetting all about the young girl and the bikers I’d witnessed earlier. The two-lane highway snaked through the pine-covered hills with occasional views of Boxelder Creek along and under the road, and my smile grew wider than the stretches of acreage between the occasional small clusters of houses.

  About fifteen miles into the drive, I had just polished off my tuna sandwich and was popping a piece of mint gum to combat my fishy breath, when I noted that Steamboat Campground was nearly full with tents and campers. Just beyond that, I could see that Bill Pulman’s field had been freshly cut and his airstrip exposed, and I wondered if Tommy Jasper was responsible for that acreage as well, since it was adjacent to Broken Peaks and Bergen Construction Materials acreage that he grazed and hayed.

  As I rounded the bend near the Lazy S—the tiny spot of acreage on the right that someone a while back had turned into a private campground between Pulman’s and Broken Peaks—I noted that it, too, was fully occupied. I gasped at the long line of vehicles parked along Nemo Road and the crowd in the valley to my right. I had never seen so many people gathered in this sleepy little valley, even during the rally, because most of the acreage was held by a handful of private owners, like our mining company. The estimated twelve hundred acres of valley, surrounded by National Forest Service property and with the Boxelder lazily twisting and turning down the center, were rarely graced with anything but herds of resident deer or cows and an occasional curious elk or fox.

  I slowed as I eased past the line of vehicles precariously parked along the nearly nonexistent shoulder of Nemo Road, hugging the double yellow line more closely than I cared to do. The entrance to Broken Peaks was barricaded by two police cars and staffed by half a dozen officers. The entrance to our property was protected by a metal swing gate, which was always chained shut to deter anyone who wasn’t properly trained and shouldn’t be there from entering our mining site. I pulled off Nemo Road onto our entrance road and up to the gate a few yards off the highway. I could see the loader up on the hillside about half a mile farther expertly scooping up a few buckets of iron ore and carefully distributing the load into the trailer and pup of a Williams Transport truck. I spun the combination, unchained the gate, and swung one side of it open wide. As I did, three vehicles turned onto our entrance road and tried to dart around my truck through the gate.

  “Hey, hey there,” I shouted, swinging the gate into place just in the nick of time, nearly clipping the first vehicle’s grill. “What are you doing?”

&n
bsp; The man behind the wheel flashed a toothy smile and jerked a thumb back toward the white van and car that trailed him. “We’re with KDSD.”

  “So?”

  “The television station?” he added, stunned that I was unaware of how many doors, or gates, swung wide with that simple proclamation.

  “Aren’t you lucky,” I quipped.

  “We’re trying to get a closer vantage point to the crime scene. And that spot right there will be perfect for us,” he said, extending a long, manicured finger toward an area just below where I could see Clint was working the loader back and forth from the pile to the truck, the job he had asked me to help with since all of his guys had been sent back to town.

  I decided to swallow the words I wanted to say and opted instead for the more diplomatic approach. “Well, I greatly appreciate your interest, but we have rules to follow, so unless you can show me a current MSHA certification, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “Em what?”

  “MSHA. Mine Safety and Health Administration. One of the many federal bureaucracies that outline the rules for us to follow in the mining industry. So again, if you would please turn around, I need to let that truck out, and since his load weighs a heck of a lot more than your car does, I suggest you take my advice.”

  It was my turn to jerk my thumb over my shoulder at the loaded truck bearing down on me from behind, headed directly toward the KDSD convoy.

  The reporter’s eyes widened and he whipped his car around in a U-turn and led his entourage back to Nemo Road. I once again swung the gate wide and waved at the driver as the truck pulled out along the road and fell in behind the entourage. I jumped in my pickup, pulled through the gate, and chained the gate behind me.

  Maybe it was because I’d just been assaulted with a television camera, but I was suddenly aware of how neglectful I’d become with my appearance. I stole a glance at myself in the rearview mirror, curious about the outcome. Paleness had all but disappeared and my faintly olive skin tone had returned to normal. My freckle-spattered nose sported a new bump where it’d been broken. No more bags, bruises, or sickly dark circles under my green eyes, the whites, clear and bright. Hell, even with my hair pulled back in a ponytail and without an ounce of makeup, I didn’t look half bad. Nowhere near the athletic supermodel comparison one mooning boyfriend suggested. We had argued over the connotation of “big boned gal” that I called myself in response; me, suggesting that it best described my healthy, athletic Scandinavian frame and he, suggesting that it was to “the girl with a great personality” as fat was to ugly. I deflected any acknowledgment of the word “supermodel” because it might lead me to divorce from my love of food to keep up the image.

  As I stared at myself, assured that I had neither lost nor gained weight over the years since playing college basketball nor in the past month in my neglectfulness, I had to admit, I could do better. It probably wasn’t appropriate for me to dress like a college coed anymore, and it was entirely my fault how often I got carded in bars. But at least I didn’t look sick or emaciated.

  By the time I had driven up the hill to the parking area and donned my personal protective gear, hard hat, safety glasses, and leather gloves that I knew Dad stored behind the bench seat of the Gray Ghost, Clint had already parked the loader in the shade and had crawled down the ladder.

  I gave him a quick hug. “How are you holding up?”

  “Better now,” he said, a weary smile spreading across his lined face. Handsome and rugged, like the timeless Marlboro Man, he was aged beyond his years from too much sun and too many smokes. “Thanks for coming up so quickly. And I’m glad to see you’re all right. I heard some pretty nasty things about what had happened to you down there.”

  Nasty. I’d have to grill him later about that.

  I turned toward the road I just came in on and the field below and gazed at the circus to our left. “What’s all this about?”

  He started walking down the hill along the road and detoured right, toward the small trailer we used for our lunchroom and office. “I’ll let you hear it firsthand from Tommy. You said something about bringing some sandwiches?”

  I held up the paper sack filled with goodies.

  “Thanks for coming, Liv.”

  “No problem.”

  “I was starting to panic when I couldn’t rouse Ed, Garth, or Jens. I even saw Jens this morning, but it was before Tommy found the woman.”

  “Woman? The dead body was of a woman?” The news of this hit me like a fist for some reason. I wondered about the girl I had seen earlier and what might have happened to her if I hadn’t called 911.

  “Yup,” he said, flipping a cigarette between his lips and shakily lighting up.

  I thought I’d better avoid the subject for the moment and have him focus on something more benign. The crime scene technicians were arguing over some procedure, and considering that most of them were huddled near the corner next to our property, we were a stone’s throw from and within earshot of them.

  “You saw Jens this morning?” I whispered. I couldn’t imagine how early that must have been, considering I met Jens and Dad around ten thirty or so up at Gunners in Sturgis. Maybe Clint and Jens both had a meeting to go to or something in Rapid.

  “At the Nemo General Store,” he said.

  “Jens was here? In Nemo? When?”

  “Yup. Early, around six or so.”

  “But that’s impossible,” I said, thinking that I had been with Jens for hours today, and he never mentioned it.

  WE DUCKED INTO THE small trailer, which opened up into the large lunchroom I remembered. To most it wouldn’t be much, sparse and unappealing as it was. But to those of us who worked in the elements year-round, it was an oasis.

  I took off my hard hat, stuffed my gloves and safety glasses in the overturned hat, and skidded it across the table. I slid onto the bench against the wall before I noticed a tall, older man laying flat on his back, his cowboy boots touching my thigh, his lanky arm draped over his eyes as he slept.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, extending my hand as he raised his sleepy head.

  “What time is it?” he stammered, offering me a limp-fish hand. Not very cowboy-like, I thought.

  “Two thirty,” I answered.

  A horn sounded and Clint put on his hard hat and headed toward the door. “This is Tommy Jasper. He’s waiting for the authorities to stop over and talk with him. They wanted to see both of us and told us not to go anywhere, to stay here until they had time to come meet with us here.”

  “Oh,” was all I managed.

  “Tommy’s the one who found the body late this morning,” Clint continued, lowering his chin and giving me a look that I understood quite clearly. “Tommy, this is my friend Liv Bergen. She’s here to keep you company until they arrive. I’ll be back as soon as I finish loading this truck and when they get freed up to talk with us, okay?”

  He nodded again, looking quite puny.

  Clint was halfway through the door when he turned back, saying, “Liv, you know where to find the pop. Help yourself and make sure Tommy eats something. Been at work since the crack of dawn, I suppose.”

  I managed to toss a sandwich to Clint before he hurried back to the loader.

  I smiled at Tommy, who lifted his aged eyes warily at me and struggled to lift his lanky body off the bench, hesitating as each joint moved. Arthritis, I thought. Or lots of rodeos. I slid off the bench and stepped into the kitchen area to give him privacy as he worked through his aches.

  “They have the coldest pop,” I said, sure Tommy must have thought I was crazy.

  It felt good to be back in this corner of the world. Sitting at a desk in a controlled environment solving engineering problems for Boeing was not for me. Some might think I was totally crazy to give up such a prestigious, high-paying job to work in extreme temperatures shoveling material that weighed more than I did, a hundred forty pounds per cubic foot—crushed. But I’ve never had a moment of regret choosing instead to work
at an iron ore quarry in the Black Hills of South Dakota, eventually earning my way to manage the limestone operations in Livermore, Colorado.

  Although this trailer was an upgrade from the small shack we started out with as the employee lunchroom, the old-fashioned refrigerator stocked with pop and water was the same. And I was thrilled to reach inside and find the cans and bottles chilling to the perfect temperature. I handed Tommy a Coke and pulled a Diet Coke out for me.

  I returned to the table and slid onto the bench across from him, pushing the Coke across the table and reaching into the sack I’d brought to retrieve a couple of sandwiches, which I also placed in front of him. I twisted off the cap of the pickle jar, opened a bag of chips, and started nibbling away at them, placing both the jar and the bag between us.

  “If you don’t like tuna, I bet they have some cold pizza or something.” I jerked my head toward the refrigerator. “But a betting man would lay odds that the tuna salad I made an hour ago is much fresher than whatever they’ve got in there.”

  I think I earned a grin, albeit slight.

  I popped open the tab of my Diet Coke and swallowed. “I’m telling you, this pop is amazing.”

  He looked at me with an expression that I could only describe as part annoyance, part incredulity, mixed with a healthy dose of disdain.

  “Seriously,” I added, tipping my can to him and wolfing down my second sandwich.

  I knew guys like Tommy. He was proud. Too proud to eat other people’s food, particularly from people he didn’t know really well. And too proud to reveal that maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t planned for this eventuality and had come ill-prepared.

  Truthfully, I wasn’t all that hungry since I had eaten a sandwich in the truck on the way up here, but I had the sneaking suspicion he wasn’t about to eat unless he was forced. Or unless he had company who was willing to take the time to talk while eating.

  Within seconds, I discovered I was right. His annoyance faded away into resignation and he lifted the sandwich to his lips, nibbles turning into gobbles. His sandwich was gone before mine and he chased it with the Coke.