Humboldt by Emily Brady

questions around the death caused Emma’s friend to move away. Then a girl at school hanged herself in her bedroom. Craig Eichen died in a car accident. It began to feel to Emma that if you were a young person and went out to party and drove on dirt roads, there was a good chance you were going to get killed. Emma figured it was what every person who lived in a rural community experienced, that growing up anywhere was like growing up in Southern Humboldt. As a child, she just assumed that her surroundings were normal. A few years later, she would prove herself wrong.

Chapter Seven
Bob
    E arly one Sunday morning, Bob Hamilton sat at the secretary’s desk in the sheriff’s substation in Garberville and surfed the Net. Outside, the rain fell heavily and steadily, as it had for days, giving new meaning to the term rain forest . Bob hated the substation, a squat cinderblock building located next to the fire department on Locust Street. He found it shabby and embarrassing. He also suspected that it contained asbestos and lead paint, which is one of the many reasons he preferred to be out on patrol. Bob’s office was his car, but sometimes he needed to swing by the substation to fill out paperwork or, in this case, check the news online.
    After a quick glance at the headlines, he headed for a white sedan parked out front. He began his rounds while most of the town was still asleep. Normally, he rolled in an Expedition, but it was being upgraded to a new model—much to his chagrin, during the rainy season, when the SUV’s four-wheel drive was particularly useful on the dirt roads that turned to mud. After he swung a left onto Main Street, Bob pulled over to send a quick text to his wife, who was visiting their daughter, who was in her junior year at the University of California at Davis.
    â€œHave a good day, dear,” he wrote.
    Main Street in Garberville, otherwise known as Redwood Drive, is about four blocks long. Considering its reputation as the epicenter of America’s marijuana industry, it is an underwhelming place. It has no stoplight, and only one stop sign. The street is lined with three gas stations, a handful of motels, a movie theater, a grocery store called Ray’s Food Place, and an array of small businesses, none of which is a national chain—except for the Radio Shack on Maple Lane, which may well be the only electronics store in America with a fabric store attached. Among Garberville’s other institutions are a barbershop that sells guns, a coffee shop called Flavors, and the Eel River Café, whose neon sign, featuring a man in chef’s whites flipping a pancake, is as much a symbol of the town as the pot leaf sign at the Hemp Connection across the street.
    The way Bob saw it, everything in town revolved around the dope industry. Businesses catered either to the sale and production of marijuana directly—like Dazey’s Supply, a commercial grow store that sold millions of dollars’ worth of soil every year—or to the women who dated wealthy growers, which was the reason there was a day spa on Main Street. Among its services, Humboldt Hunnies offered Brazilian waxes and organic skin care products to a clientele that included what Bob liked to call “potstitutes,” attractive young women whose social uniform consisted of skinny jeans, long hair, and fake breasts. Bob hadn’t coined the term potstitute —it was local slang—but using it made him cackle with glee.
    At the top of the street near the Umpqua Bank, Bob waved to an older man in an orange sweatshirt.
    â€œHi!” Bob yelled out his window.
    Robert Firestone was in his eighties and had dementia. He was known to wander. Bob tried to keep tabs on him so that when Firestone’s family called, he could tell them where he’d last seen the old man. The following month, Robert Firestone would wander off for good, and his face would become a familiar one as he peered out from