I’ve been with the Flathead County Sheriff’s Department for a dozen years, and I made detective a year and a half ago, but already I’m beginning to wonder if one day I’ll see every piece of this valley like it’s a crime scene. Some of it’s to be expected, right? Like I’m not going to respond to a trailer court in Evergreen or some end of the road tumbled-down cabin outside Hungry Horse and not find some meth-heads. But more and more I’m beginning to think that the neighborhoods full of Mercedes and Audis in our cute tourist towns, like Bigfork, where I live, or Whitefish, which is a ski town that’s home to what my husband likes to call “the pretty people”, will just be more places I remember for the yellow police tape.

I guess that’s the job. I’m no wimp, but I think it’s different for me than my husband, who’s also a cop. He’s Kalispell PD. We like to compare shops, but I think we’ve got a harder beat in the County, not only a whole lot more ground to cover but more folks who have reason to hide away in the woods. Having kids makes the job harder. Of course, both of us being on the job makes it harder still not to have a tainted vision of people. Easier to think we live in a place that’s changing. But then maybe the whole world is changing and cops and nurses and social workers are the ones walking the point.

Flathead County is in Montana. To put it in perspective, there’s only a dozen flights a day coming into Glacier Park International (the “International” always makes me laugh—six gates and they typically use two of them). I hear the planes come up the lake and I always look up. I suppose if you live in a city, it’s such a common thing, like sirens, you don’t pay any attention. Here, even if you’re in law enforcement and off duty, you hear a siren and the hair on your arms goes stiff. You listen and wonder where it’s going. I look up at an airplane and I imagine who is on board, hikers headed into Glacier, skiers to Whitefish, people on lake vacations. I wonder what they see. This fairytale place of perfectly clear water, big sky, pristine mountains. They can’t imagine what we see. They can’t picture a beautiful place can have people doing ugly, evil things to each other.

This case I’m working now—a Lakeside teenager there one day, gone the next. Not a clue to chase. Her dad a bozo who turned off location services on all their phones ‘cause he’s worried about Big Brother. It’s a case that’s got me worried. One not headed to a good place. I can tell that’s what Steve is thinking, even if he doesn’t say much. Steve, Steve Wendell, is the detective who pulled me in on it. Said he wanted me ‘cause he likes my attention to detail. Steve’s that way. Dutiful. Sincere. Listens. Might actually want me ‘cause he knows I put my nose down and work even if I’m green when it comes to interviews and the like. Other guys see the painted nails and think I can’t contribute or else they think they might try and have a little go. Steve’s not at all like that. So much so I like to poke at him, get a little rise out of him, so to speak. He’s too damn serious. People are uneasy around him ‘cause he doesn’t fit the puzzle—no wife, no kids, no dangerous habits that I’ve seen. So smart it makes other dicks uncomfortable. Like I do, but for other reasons.

The teasing and the jokes—it’s a habit. A bad one I suppose. But I figured I’ve got three choices: 1) shut up and be the meek little girl who never second guesses anything, 2) make a big stink and alienate the whole department and find myself sent to animal control, 3) have a little fun and call people out in a way they can’t see as combative—playing the boy’s game without them seeing it that way.

If you can’t crack a joke, then the job really will get to you and going home to hug your babies at night gets that much harder. If helps to compartmentalize things. And I tell you, some of the guys we’re pullin’ on this case, you can feel their eyes climbing down your blouse and reaching past your waistband, like them knowing you carry a badge just makes them want to teach you a lesson. It’s a funny thing, this case, on paper at least, is still the low level “missing person” that bosses throw to the guppies, but it’s taken us places in the Valley and introduced us to interview subjects that have me taking a lot of showers. I guess the tourist board won’t be asking me to do any promo spots.

The Other Side
Genre: Traditional Mystery
Release: June 2021
Purchase Link

How do you start an investigation when you have no evidence that a crime has been committed?

When a seventeen-year-old girl abruptly disappears, the ensuing investigation probes dead-ends seemingly as deep as Montana’s Flathead Lake—the geographic and investigative center of The Other Side. The search to find her unearths crimes, but none that can explain her disappearance. When Detectives Steven Wendell and Stacey Knudson grow suspicious that Britany Rodgers has been murdered, they have scant evidence and no body. Their investigation takes them into starkly contrasting environments, from spectacular lakefront mansions to gritty trailer parks, and into the lives of those who exhibit motivations as murky as the fog-choked Montana woods and mist-shrouded Flathead Lake bays.

Meet the author
The Other Side, a contemporary mystery novel, is the crime fiction debut from Mark Leichliter. Writing as Mark Hummel, he is the author of the contemporary literary novel In the Chameleon’s Shadow and the short story collection Lost & Found. His fiction, poetry, and essays have regularly appeared in literary journals including such publications as The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, Fugue, Talking River Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, and Zone 3. A former college professor and writing program director, he has served as a teacher in an independent high school, directed a writers’ conference, worked as a librarian, and taught on the faculty of several writers’ conferences. He is the founding editor of the nonfiction magazine bioStories. A native of Wyoming, Mark lives in Montana’s Flathead Valley.

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