Dead Silver

46

Renee and I left there about an hour later. I couldn't say that Mrs. Gerhardt had warmed to us, but she'd opened up and told us a story of quiet heartbreak.

When Tina had gotten the devastating news that her boyfriend had been murdered-Brent Hoffey was his name-she'd suffered the additional shock of learning that he'd been cheating on her with the town's Public Enemy Number One. That created a huge wound in her life, and nothing arrived to heal it. She stayed in Phosphor and worked at the grocery store, with occasional new boyfriends who weren't going anywhere, either.

She started partying hard. The night came when she was out drinking with two guys, maybe going somewhere or maybe just riding around, and the driver misjudged a turn coming down a steep twisty road. The vehicle plunged more than a hundred feet down the almost vertical mountainside, with nobody wearing seat belts. Tina and one of the men were killed in the crash. The other died in the hospital soon afterward.

Blaming that on the affair between Astrid and Brent Hoffey was something of a stretch, but Mrs. Gerhardt's anger was entirely understandable. I'd also started to see that her initial rebuff wasn't either personal or political. Instead, it was another phenomenon I'd come to recognize as fairly common in places like this-a mind-set with quasi-religious tones. She was a proud, rigid woman, who viewed life in concrete terms. Everybody should fit neatly into pigeonholes, know exactly who they were, and do exactly what they were supposed to. That would keep the universe operating in proper order. When trouble occurred, it was because somebody had dropped the ball, and more often than not, the victims brought it on themselves.

Thus, along with the other heartaches that fate had brought to her and her family, she keenly felt a loss of dignity. Locking the door against any further intrusions was an attempt to salvage that; it gave her a measure of control.

As Renee and I drove homeward along Phosphor's main drag, the patina of charm that I'd imagined earlier was missing. Maybe it was only because the sun had dropped behind the mountains, and that sporadic warmth had given way to the cloudy, chilly reality of the late afternoon.

But there were too many weathered FOR SALE signs, and they had the hopeless air of scruffy hitchhikers that nobody would ever pick up, stranded in the middle of nowhere. The streets were empty of shoppers or moving vehicles, although the parking spaces in front of the town's two bars were full. The only customer at the little burger drive-in was a middle-aged man in a beat-up old station wagon, who appeared to be just sitting there.

A group of teenagers had clustered at the high school athletic field, but these had a different look than the daypack-toting crowd we'd seen earlier; they were sitting in their pickup trucks or leaning against them, some smoking, but otherwise inert. Maybe it was that same gunmetal sky that gave their faces a hard, hungry cast as they watched us strangers pass by. It seemed clear that they were well acquainted with having nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no expectations of anything better-easy prey for alcoholism, the new Black Plague of methamphetamine, and aimless rage that often led to violence.

The ripple effect of the Dead Silver Mine's failure was the single major point that I had taken away from talking with the Gerhardt women. They hadn't preached or even talked openly about it, but it had seeped out through their words again and again.

The mine's promise of prosperity had lured people to move to this area, buy and build homes, start and expand businesses. Most were betting on the income and borrowing over their heads. When the economic house of cards collapsed, it fell hard. People simply packed up and disappeared. Store windows got boarded up and buildings abandoned. Banks were left holding dozens of properties they had no hope of selling. The tax base plummeted, taking support for schools and public services along with it.

The situation got still worse a few years later, with the closing of the sawmill that was Phosphor's only other mainstay industry. The cause involved the usual conflict-corporate greed for quick profit versus environmental sanctions and lawsuits-complicated by murky political issues like lumber tariffs with Canada. The mill owners, longtime local residents, cut their own profit margin down to subsistence, but finally couldn't afford the soaring price of raw logs, and sometimes couldn't get them at all.

In practical terms, that seemed insane. The surrounding forests were full of trees ready for harvest, including large tracts damaged by fires or insects which would rot if they weren't taken soon. Phosphor Country was full of experienced loggers who would gladly do the work.

But, like the old joke went, you couldn't get there from here.

It was all too easy to understand the anger and frustration-not just in Phosphor, but in other places all over the country with parallel situations-at being pawns in a giant Monopoly game, controlled from distant boardrooms and government agencies and universities, but played out on their turf and to their loss.

Renee and I had steered the conversation unobtrusively toward whether that might have motivated Astrid's murder, but the Gerhardts seemed to genuinely believe not. They knew everybody in the area and had heard every scrap of gossip. Without doubt, there were men around Phosphor who'd had both the motive and the temperament. But, like Buddy Pertwee, Janie and her mother had never made any solid connection. Tina had felt the same way-the killer was a stranger.

Of course, that didn't mean they were right.