A Wicked Snow

by Gregg Olsen

  Hannah had already packed and Amber was reading at the kitchen table by the time Ethan came home that evening. She’d told her boss, DA Bill Gilliand, that she needed a couple days off for personal reasons. And she’d be back in the lab on Monday. After some characteristic browbeating—mostly for show—he acquiesced. Gilliand considered Hannah among the brightest and the most dedicated of the county employees—lawyers and lab rats—in his office. He did not know her family background, even though there had been a hundred times when she wanted to talk to him about it. There were times when she wanted to talk to anyone besides Ethan about it. But outside of her aunt and uncle and a cousin in Georgia, no one knew. Until, of course, an unknown someone had sent the package.

  Hannah also double-checked the refrigerator to make sure Ethan would find something to eat, though she expected he’d take their daughter out to California Pizza Kitchen or another of the little girl’s favorite places. The last thing she did was to call a message in to Jeff Bauer. She knew he’d be at the office and he’d given her his home number. Voice mail picked up.

  “Jeff, this is Hannah Griffin. I’ll meet you at Cutter’s Landing in the prison parking lot at nine thirty tomorrow morning. I’m leaving as soon as I hang up, and I won’t have my cell with me. See you there. I want to see Marcus Wheaton, too. Bye.”

  When she hung up, she turned to find Ethan standing beside her. He knew what Hannah was going to say, so he spoke first.

  “You’re going to see Wheaton. Do you want me to go with you? We could get a sitter.”

  “No,” she said. She couldn’t do that to Amber. “I’ll be all right.”

  Amber rushed to her mother and wrapped her arms around her.

  “I’ll see you and Daddy on Saturday. I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.” She made the motion across her breast.

  “Be careful, babe,” Ethan said without looking at her.

  “You know I will,” she said.

  Amber hugged her a second time. “Love you, Mommy,” she said.

  “Love you more.”

  It was around 8 p.m, and the sky was blush with an impending sunset when Hannah started north to Oregon. She planned to drive until midnight, hopefully reaching Janesville, a speck just on the south side of the California/Oregon border. There was a truck stop with a small motel and café there. Coffee would fuel her; thoughts of Marcus, her mother, and Bauer would keep her going. Hannah loved the solitude and the strobe of the golden, then dusky, scenery that flashed by the wind-shield. She made decent time and arrived at the motel at 12:45. She’d driven almost 330 miles in four and a half hours. A woman with bird legs and a uni-brow checked her in and gave her a room key.

  “Free pastries in the morning,” she said. “Just pay your bill and you can take some eats for the road.”

  Hannah opted to prepay and gave the woman her Visa card and was charged $55. She’d try to get four hours of sleep before heading out for Cutter’s Landing and the penitentiary.

  The last thing she thought of before drifting off to sleep were the faces of Mimi Garcia and her dead brother, Enrique. His was lifeless, chalky white. His sister’s was full of fear.

  I’ll take care of you, she thought.

  Then thoughts of Erik and Danny came to her mind, and she tried to force them back to the darkness of her memory. She started to cry. There was nothing she could do for them—not then, not now. Even so, the memories came. It was snowy. She was only thirteen.

  “Hannah?”

  Her eyes opened. Marcus Wheaton held his finger to his lips. His eyes were wild, and the sight of his mammoth frame hovering over her caused Hannah to cry out. She thought of how her mother and he’d been yelling out in the yard earlier. What time was it?

  “Shhhhh. Don’t say a word. Not an utterance. Hannah, you understand? You must keep calm and be still.”

  To make his point, he pressed the palm of his hand over Hannah’s mouth.

  Fear seized her entire body. He’s going to mess with me, she thought. Mom warned me. He’s going to touch me in a way that is wrong. She wriggled and bit his hand. Wheaton winced.

  Not you, she thought. Not you. Don’t do this to me.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m here to help you.”

  Her eyes pooled, and she trembled. She had reason to, of course. Wheaton was an intimidating figure, swarthy and imposing. He was crouched over her bed like a monster of some kind. Big. Heavy. Smelly. Oddly so. Like gasoline or something.

  “I won’t harm you,” he whispered. “Promise, no matter what, you won’t say a word.”

  Hannah wanted his cold, fat fingers off her mouth. The smell from his hands was so overpowering she could barely breathe. She stared hard into his eyes; her own were awash with fear. They begged Marcus Wheaton to ease up, which is what he did.

  “Listen to me carefully. Your mother is leaving tonight. She’s going away. Far away. She’s never coming back.” He parceled his words in tiny batches as though he was acutely aware that the girl under her bedcovers would have a difficult time assimilating all that was going on around her.

  Indeed, Hannah was paralyzed. She said nothing. She managed a nod of understanding. No words. Just the nod.

  “I’m going with her,” he went on. “You aren’t. None of you are.” Wheaton’s good eye glistened with tears. Was he crying? “This is hard. This is nothing you should ever have to hear, but your mother wants no part of any of you. She’s not happy here and she’s going away. I’m afraid this…is…is forever.”

  Hannah didn’t believe him. “I want my mother,” she said, holding her voice to a whisper.

  “I know, but it isn’t what she wants.”

  “But I’m her daughter.”

  He shook his head.

  “She’s not made to be a mother. You know that. She doesn’t have it in her. Never has. She doesn’t even look at you like she even knows you.”

  “She is my mother and she loves me.”

  “Hannah, you know that she really cares for nobody.”

  She hesitated. The unspoken had to be said.

  “But you? Is that what you’re saying? She only cares about you?”

  “No. She probably doesn’t want me, either. But I am damned to love her until she tosses me aside. You’re too young to understand that sometimes things are bigger, stronger than what you know to be right.”

  “I don’t want her to leave us.”

  “Hannah, you don’t want her to stay. Trust me. You don’t.”

  “You don’t know how I feel. Where are my brothers?”

  He shook his head. “Set that aside for now. Just for a moment. This is my chance to do something for you. I don’t want anything to happen to you, Hannah. Bad things have been happening around here. I’m getting you out of here.”

  “What bad things?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. You know about your mother. You’ve seen it for yourself. Remember the big jar?”

  Hannah’s eyes widened in the kind of full-out terror that comes with the realization that the mother who had rocked her as a baby, who had held her as a baby to her breast, was not really a mother. Not the mommy type. Hannah thought of the jar of bloody teeth she’d found when searching for ribbons above the wreath-fabricating bench. She thought the vessel held rusted screws or bolts. But it was lighter. She unscrewed the top and tilted the contents. It was a cache of blood-dried teeth her mother had put away like some grotesque souvenir.

  Her mother asked her about it, after she noticed it had been disturbed.

  “What were you doing in my things? I’ve asked you children to be mindful of what’s mine and what’s yours. My things are not toys—not to be played with. Don’t you ever listen?”

  “I wasn’t playing with anything,” Hannah had said. “I mean, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  Claire shoved the jar in her face.

  “This is what I’m talking about, and don’t tell me again that you haven’t seen this before.” />
  “But I haven’t.” Lying was a necessity, and Hannah knew it. “What is it?”

  Claire studied her daughter’s face, but Hannah stayed cool, almost remote. The idea that her mother was some alien force was setting in, slowly, but it was coming.

  “I almost believe you,” Claire had said. Her eyes were ice. “But believing a practiced liar is a dangerous game.”

  “I’m not a liar.”

  “Don’t make me laugh and don’t make me mad. I’ve caught you before.”

  “I’m not lying. I don’t know anything. Maybe someone else moved it?”

  After she had said those words, Hannah would have done anything to retrieve them, reeling them in like a bed sheet knotted out a window for escape.

  Claire smiled. She had caught the flutter of fear. It propelled her to push.

  “Maybe Didi got into this. Like I’ve said a million times, she’s always straightening things where we don’t need it.”

  “I didn’t see her here.”

  Hannah wasn’t convincing, and she didn’t really try to be. Later, she wished she’d been more careful in what she said and how she acted. She never saw Didi again after that day.

  “Just what is that in that jar anyway?” Hannah hesitated. “Looks disgusting…like bloody teeth.”

  Claire laughed and spun the jar top and peered inside. “You watch too much TV. Just the bric-a-brac of buttons and sequins and pushpins… and some red paint.”

  But the odor was acrid and unmistakable. Hannah knew the smell of blood. She’d been there when her mother snapped the heads of chickens who no longer laid enough to justify the sack of scratch. She did it with a kind of flourish that indicated more enjoyment than resignation that the heads had to come off to kill the birds. She didn’t even use a hatchet or a knife, but did it with her bare hands.

  “Hands are easy to wash, and they don’t rust,” she said.

  Hannah also knew the color of drying blood. It was a sienna tone on the edges, drying to a deep mahogany. What her mother had insisted was red paint could pass for the hue of blood.

  Early the next morning the sky was indigo with stars popping from the darkness in a spray that looked like one of those fiber-optic bouquets that old ladies adore. Hannah Griffin was on the road, sans free pastry, by 4:15 a.m.

  Just past the state line most of the conifers that had swathed the area had been reduced to a pillow fringe, as though one couldn’t see beyond it to the stump-barnacled field of fireweed and blackberries. Alders, the first tree to arrive on the scene of deforestation, filled in like harried brush strokes where they could. Nothing about the landscape was particularly pretty, though Hannah had to admit the cool colors of green and blue were certainly pleasant on the eye, a change from the dusty palette of Santa Louisa County. She thought of Christmas trees and the evil, wicked snow that had ruined her life… and sent her to that place.

  Chapter Ten

  Eastern Oregon is nothing like the wet side—the western side—of the state. The mountains that divide Oregon into two distinct regions act as a barrier from the marine rainfall that keeps Portland and points south and west lush throughout most of the year. The eastern side is vast and dry—a landscape of craggy basalt formations and glacial moraines. Only through the lenses of a pair of sunglasses is it cool and green. But when irrigated, the soil produces the world’s sweetest and most succulent fruits. Fruit stands clustered the roadside now and then, though most seemed abandoned or hopelessly unkempt. Where the ranch land crawled from one end of the horizon to the other was a dried basin, a crusty residue of earth and tumbleweeds. Just add water. Just keep driving. Just get the hell out of the east and run for the Pacific Ocean.

  But Hannah was heading northeast, going away from the ocean. She was following the interstate to Cutter’s Landing, so named for an old airstrip and not a body of water. It was three hours into the desert, a population injected into the dirt of Oregon’s bleakest eastern territory. It was a place for losers. Cutter’s Landing was a town of romance readers, ex-hookers, and do-gooders who lived in rundown frame houses and converted Quonset huts. The citizens were the women and the spawn of the killers and rapists who claimed 97337 as the zip code of the vile and depraved. Cutter’s Landing was the home of Eastern Oregon’s Correctional Facility for Men, and Hannah Griffin had a date with one of them.

  A black-and-white sign with a flashing yellow light flew by the windshield: APPROACHING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY: DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.

  Hannah lowered the volume of the Spanish language radio station she had endured for the last hour of her journey to the center of nowhere. The bombastic host went soft… then away. And once more she was alone.

  Oregon’s largest prison was also its oldest, having been built brick by brick in the mid-1920s by the descendants of Chinese coolie laborers, whose blood, some said, never dried. In fact, eighteen men and two women died when a load of dynamite unexpectedly detonated as they prepared to blast a two-story-deep foundation out of a basalt basin that had been the remnant of a great lava flow. When the workers weren’t blasting, they were hauling brick from the tracks of what would come to be known as Cutter’s Landing when an airstrip was laid on top of the dusty landscape. Some considered the work barely short of slavery.

  The towering bricks of the prison cast a foreboding image on the craggy hillside. Four turrets sprang from the main building like razor wire–encrusted dragonheads. No trees grew around the site. The basalt formation on which the prison had been erected was a sterile stone dish the size of six football fields. The penitentiary housed upward of 400 men, though there had been more residing there in the recent past. When it was built, it had been designed to hold no more than 250.

  Hannah followed little yellow signs to the parking lot adjacent to what some idiot bureaucrat had dubbed the “Visitor’s Comfort Area.” She wasn’t sure if it sounded more like a bathroom or a motel. As she pulled her Volvo closer, she passed row after row of dust-covered old cars. Many of the cars’ windows had the greasy fingerprints of children run amok. A few had tattered yellow ribbons tied to their antennae. It was sad, but clear: the exhookers and the do-gooders who populated Cutter’s Landing had arrived in droves to see their men, to meet in the run-down visitors’ area to play cards or maybe even sneak a little sex.

  Hannah parked next to a boat of a car that had “government-issue” stamped all over it. A man, one of the two she’d come to see, was leaning against the driver’s door, talking on a cell phone. His profile was familiar, and the sight of him brought a nervous smile to her lips. It was Jeff Bauer. Hannah turned off the ignition and reached for her right shoe. She was glad the drive was over, but she loathed the final destination.

  Jeff Bauer had arrived at the prison parking lot an hour earlier. He’d actually stayed at the Landing Motel, thinking that getting a night’s sleep before meeting with Wheaton might not be a bad idea. But it had not been a restful night. At about 3:30 that morning, he called the manager and told the twenty-three-year-old wisenheimer to get his ass out of bed to quiet the rumble that was going on in the room next to his. Pounding on the door, smacking the walls, and yelling hadn’t stifled the noise. Up all night and smelling of bong water and pepperoni, the smart-ass told Bauer to fuck off. Bauer informed the manager he was a federal agent. Two minutes later, the party was over and silence returned.

  Dressed in a gray chalk-striped suit, a white shirt, and solid red silk tie, he looked every bit the man he was. His hair had a few small glints of silver, and pale streaks highlighted the deepening fissures on his face. Whether deep in thought or wincing in pain when wrestling a suspect to the ground, Bauer had a habit of scrunching his face. He joked that it was his “concerned” look. In reality, that was exactly what it was.

  He was older, Hannah could see, but then again, so was she.

  He flipped off the phone and turned around, and for the first time in years, their eyes met.

  “Hannah? Is that you?” he said. His smile was warm and fami
liar.

  “Agent Bauer?”

  “I got your message,” he said, moving toward her. “I thought of calling you to tell you to forget it, but if you’re anything like you were twenty years ago, you were packed by the time you called.”

  “I was,” she said.

  “You look great. I mean, considering the long ride across the shittiest landscape this side of Oklahoma.”

  “You look well, too.” She retrieved her purse from the backseat and did a quick glance to ensure all the doors were locked. “And you’re right. The drive was long, dusty, and boring.”

  “This won’t be boring,” he said, squinting at the sun as he sized her up. She was grown, beautiful. Her hair flashed golden in the sun.

  “You think Marcus sent the package to me,” she said.

  “You must, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  “I’d like you to read his note,” he said. He reached into his pocket and handed her a folded letter.

  She took it and read:

  “Before I can do that, I need to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Maybe you do, too. I know things. I do.”

  “Is he talking about her?”

  “Ghosts of the past? Honestly, Hannah, I don’t know. I’ve wanted to see this nutcase for twenty years. I’ve wanted to slam him to the ground and hold a gun to his fat head to get him to tell me what he really knows.” He motioned at a small bus coming toward them. “Maybe he will tell us something that we’ve all wanted to know for a very long time.”

  “I know that. And as much as I want to see him, I almost can’t bear to do it,” she said.

  “Understood,” he answered. “I can only imagine.”

  “Imagine is a good word. I’ve imagined talking to him over the years. I’ve imagined shaking him and pleading with him to tell me where she is…if he knows,” she added softly.