The Deep Dark by Gregg Olsen

Author:Gregg Olsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307237309
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2005-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

JOANNE STROPE REICHERT SPENT THE AFTERNOON PLAYING COUNTRY music records and puttering around the Big Creek house she shared with her common-law husband, Jack Reichert. For the first time, the pretty twenty-eight-year-old, with hazel eyes and her dishwater-blond hair ratted into a “bubble,” felt settled. After a year and a half of living on the creek, they had finally set a wedding date—July 3. The road to marriage had been complicated. The pair had met in early 1968 when Jack was Smelterville’s chief of police and she was coming off a bad marriage. Reichert had told her he, too, was unhappy in his marriage. He wanted something more. Reichert wasn’t classically handsome; his eyes were pinpoints and his ears were fins. All the same, Strope fell hard. Sometimes she even walked ten miles along the railroad tracks from her Wallace apartment to Smelterville on the mere chance she’d be able to see him.

Reichert’s wife eventually issued an ultimatum—either he dropped Joanne or she’d divorce him and take their four kids away. What Mrs. Reichert didn’t reckon on—what she couldn’t possibly have calculated—was Joanne’s remarkable perseverance. She was incapable of letting him go. In turn, Joanne hadn’t considered the resilient pull of a determined wife. The next thing she knew, the entire Reichert family—including Jack—had moved to Edmonton, Alberta. Joanne swallowed the entire contents of a pill bottle. After word about her attempted suicide made its way to Reichert, he telephoned to say he still loved her and wanted her to come to Canada, where he was working as a welder in the oilfields. She went. The pair went from motel to motel, from so-so to rat-trap, until their funds dried up. They ate cold soup from the can and slept in his car. When cold weather exacerbated the pain of Reichert’s varicose veins, he phoned pal Gene Johnson.

“Come back down,” the Sunshine foreman said, “and I’ll have something for you.”

The couple moved to Big Creek in 1970 with only their clothing and a guitar. Joanne immediately started using Reichert’s name. Jack’s divorce, she believed, was only a formality. Life was good. When he strummed his guitar and played his favorite song, “Under the Double Eagle,” she was swept away.

On the afternoon of May 2, Joanne drove the new Buick Skylark they’d bought off Nickerson’s lot in Smelterville up to the mine. She had been oblivious to what had been happening up there. It surprised her when she ran into a traffic jam a hundred yards from the parking lot. She waited a moment and found an empty space and parked.

Sure are a lot of people waiting for the guys today, she thought.

She sat in the car, but none of the men came off shift. There were more people arriving in the parking lot, though. Lots more. It was strange. She asked a man waiting for his son what was going on.

“Fire in the mine,” he said, indicating the smoky tower.

“Oh God, no,” she said, really aware of the smoke for the first time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.