A Wicked Snow

by Gregg Olsen

  Bauer moved closer and offered his hand. It was a kind of awkward attempt at reassurance. Hannah wasn’t sure if he wanted to hold her hand, shake it, or carry her purse.

  “I know I’ll get through it,” she said. “I’ve done all right. I’ve got a life, but I still want some answers.”

  Bauer nodded. “This is the time,” he added. “I feel it.”

  The bus parked, and the pair followed a stream of prison groupies, wives, mothers, and fathers into a modular building that functioned as the processing center for visitors. After five minutes of what amounted to nothing more than rubber-stamp processing, they were on yet another small bus alone, headed for the warden’s entrance on the eastern wall. There, Warden Thomas’s information officer would take them to a private visitation room.

  The minibus bounced over a speed bump and lurched forward.

  “This thing needs new shocks,” Bauer said.

  “And a new driver,” Hannah added.

  There was no argument there. The kid at the wheel reeked of Brut and attitude. He was hell-bent on showing his two passengers just how fast he could get from point A to point B. Luck, for the time being, had likely spared him from the fate of being on the other side of the walls. Driving like he did, he was sure to end up in jail, or prison. Maybe he wouldn’t mind. At least he knew his way around Cutter’s Landing.

  Inside the walls, a behemoth of a man was about to have the rare visitor—two, no less. He’s been alone so long, not completely by choice, of course. Liz Wheaton had tried to visit her son, but he’d refused to see her. She sent at least one letter or card a month—some newsy, others full of bile—all doused in White Shoulders. Marcus Wheaton also refused to answer any, save for one letter he had sent his first week in Cutter’s Landing. Liz Wheaton saved the single note and carried it in her purse.

  I love Claire. She loves me. No one is perfect, but you should know that better than anyone. She and I will be together. And as long as you don’t accept that, then you’re nothing to me.

  Chapter Eleven

  Miriam Thomas, the warden’s wife, had done all she could to make her husband’s office as homey as possible. Family photos in beautiful polished brass frames adorned one wall and a painting of Haystack Rock, a favorite of Oregon seascape artists, occupied another. Miriam had frequently told her husband of almost thirty years that just because he worked in a prison, it didn’t mean his office had to look like a cell. Warden Rex Thomas, tough as he was, and as tough as he had to be considering his line of work, gave in to his wife and let her do her thing. The sole item he rarely put out was the pink Depression-glass candy dish that she picked up at a flea market in Roseburg. A candy dish didn’t feel quite right to Thomas. Didn’t fit the image. Besides, he didn’t like the sugar-free hard candies Miriam had supplied in the first place. Even so, whenever she came to the prison to see her husband’s environment, to make sure he made the best of it, he took the pink dish from the bottom drawer and set it out for her to see.

  “I’d better get you more candy, dear,” she’d say.

  “Already have it on my list, Mir.”

  When the Portland FBI field agent and the CSI from California were escorted into his office, the warden had just finished reviewing the meal plans for the prison cafeteria for the month of November.

  “Gonna be pressed turkey for Thanksgiving,” he said with a wink, putting the sloppily typed menu aside. “It is every year. No surprise there, I’d say.”

  “And they say prisons aren’t tough enough,” Bauer said.

  After exchanging introductions and innocuous pleasantries in a place where there are undoubtedly few, Warden Thomas outlined the rules for seeing the convicted arsonist Marcus Wheaton.

  “The man hasn’t had a visitor in some time, and while we might have relaxed the rules some years ago, for him we have not. You’ll be in a visiting cell, with a guard stationed in the corner. We don’t consider the prisoner to be violent, but considering why he’s here, we just don’t take any chances.”

  “Will he be restrained?” Hannah asked.

  “Not that there is a need to, but frankly, he’s put on so much weight that we don’t have shackles or leg irons that fit him.”

  They signed the necessary disclaimers, the kind of legal scapegoat documents that every state and federal penitentiary puts before anyone dubbed a “slight risk contact visit.”

  “Corrections Officer Madsen will take you to him.” The warden nodded at a young man with Elvis sideburns who had just appeared in the hallway.

  Hannah and Bauer walked toward Madsen standing by the door.

  “Any reason why he called for us now?” Hannah asked the warden. “I mean, anything I don’t know?” She shot a look at Bauer.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said.

  The warden shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine. His poor health? Lonely? Hell, maybe for a little drama? Who knows? But he’s opened the door and, I’d guess, this is your chance. Maybe he’ll finally answer that question you’ve always wanted to ask him.”

  With Jeff Bauer by her side, Hannah Griffin stared hard as she entered the small, seemingly airless room. There he was. He must weigh 325 pounds. He was honeydew-round in the face; his fingers were bloated rows of frankfurters with grille marks left by a fire long ago. He wore Day-Glo orange coveralls that could have doubled as a hunter’s tent, so much fabric had been used. At first, nothing about him looked the same. She searched the man seated in front of her, hands clasped on the empty table, for any recognition that he was the man he said he was. He looked much younger than a man in his sixties.

  An extra hundred pounds or so sure fills in the wrinkles, Hannah thought to herself. When she took her seat, she noticed his left eye didn’t track.

  It was Marcus Wheaton. It had to be. Wheaton had a glass eye thanks to a beer bottle shoved in his face during a bar brawl when he was twenty-one. It was so odd. The dead, lifeless eye always begged more attention than its mobile partner. Whenever Wheaton spoke, eyes would light upon the glass eye. It almost seemed as though the live eye would turn slightly to look at what it was that everyone focused on.

  In seconds it started coming back. Hannah remembered how Marcus used to take the brown eye out to scare her and her little brothers. He’d pop it out and boom across the house that he was a cartoon superhero reject called “Mar-clops.” He was “half man, all evil.”

  “I would know you anywhere,” he said.

  Hannah took a seat next to Bauer with Wheaton across the table. His pudding features were ashen. His hair was almost white, and his fingernails were long and paper thin; dark crescents marked each cuticle.

  “Glad that you’ve come to see me,” he said. He leaned forward and whispered to the guard that he needed a drink of water.

  “I have wanted to see you for some time,” she said.

  The guard delivered a paper cup and stood, hovering like a blue uniformed wasp, until the last sip had been drained from the container. The cup was removed as if some how, some way, it could pose a danger to the inmate or his guests.

  Wheaton cleared his throat. “Is that so? I can’t recall a message from you in the past ten years.”

  “In the past ten years I’ve tried to forget.”

  “And forgive, I hope,” he said.

  Hannah bristled, though she tried to hide it. “How do you forgive a permanent nightmare?”

  The fat man nodded very slowly. A sad mask slipped over his bulbous features. “How do you forget a broken heart? I don’t deny that I set the fire, but I didn’t kill anybody. In a way, I’m one of your mom’s victims, too.”

  Bauer let out a breath of exasperation. “We get it. Today, everyone is a victim of something. Yes, we know. Now, why don’t you just cut the crap,” he said, his voice rising with each word. “And tell us what you’ve summoned us to hear?”

  Wheaton fiddled with the valve on an oxygen tank that Hannah noticed for the first time. A thin tube ran to his left nostril.

 
“Special Agent Bauer, the past two decades have been good to you. Not so to me. I’m afraid. I’m morbidly obese. I have emphysema, and I don’t have much time. Time is all I used to have. I used to count the days here. I stopped counting because it only made freedom seem more impossible.” He paused and then a smile broke out over his face. “It’s funny to think that after all these years, I’d be sitting in prison and you’d be wearing the same light blue dress shirt.”

  Bauer ignored the feeble dig.

  “If you called us for a sympathy sob session, you misdialed, Wheaton.”

  “Call me Marcus,” he said. “That’s what they called me when I was a person. When I could walk free. Like you and others we know.”

  Hannah spoke, tentatively. “Like my mother.”

  The eye fixed on her. “Could be. But then we’ve just started our visit. Wouldn’t want it to end so soon. The last visitor I had came at least ten years ago. A nun from Pittsburgh took the Greyhound out here to this godforsaken piece of shit country to see me. They let her stay four minutes.”

  “I saw it on the news,” Hannah said. “She seemed a little obsessed.”

  “Yes, I understand she was interviewed by Diane Sawyer, too.”

  “Sorry, didn’t catch that,” Bauer said.

  Wheaton looked at the FBI agent, then back at Hannah. “Neither did I. They took the television away from me after the riots of seventy-nine. That was a time. A terrible time when I didn’t know if I’d be ground into dog food or raped by some big guy with a baseball bat. But, you know, I digress.”

  Bauer found it impossible to contain his irritation. “Why don’t you tell us why we’re here,” he said.

  The eye blinked once more. “Did I read you have a daughter, Hannah?”

  Hannah didn’t want to discuss any of that with Wheaton. “I’m not here—”

  He cut her off. “—to talk about your personal life? I guess not. But I read in the Sunday Oregonian that you are the mother of a little girl. How nice. How is the husband? Still married to the fellow?”

  Hannah put her palms on the table and started to get up from the yellow oak chairs. Her fine features went pink. “I’m leaving,” she said. She didn’t want to let on that she’d never been featured in the Oregonian. Where did Wheaton come up with that?

  Wheaton shook his head, and the room vibrated slightly. “No. You’re not. Because I will tell you what you need to know.”

  “About my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she alive?”

  He held his lips together and looked around the room. Finally, like air escaping a bicycle tire, he spoke.

  “She is. I’m sure of it.”

  Hannah felt woozy, and Bauer instinctively leaned closer to her.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. She always knew her mother had not fallen from the face of the earth, but to hear someone who might know something actually say so was hard to take. Marcus Wheaton could be lying, of course, and Hannah knew that. But there were many things that people could call Wheaton. A liar wasn’t one of them.

  She thought about the shoes and how they came to her office. “Did you send them?”

  “No, I did not.” Wheaton’s tone was indignant, and both Bauer and Hannah thought he was either sincere or a practiced liar.

  “Do you know who did?” Hannah asked.

  Wheaton pondered her question. “I’m not at liberty.”

  Not at liberty; Hannah and Bauer thought the word choice was strange.

  “My mother,” she pressed on, “did my mother send them to me somehow?”

  Another man stood outside the door, and Madsen let him in. He said he was a doctor, and Wheaton had to be removed to the infirmary for medication relating to his emphysema.

  The diagnosis seemed off to Hannah. Symptoms, at least overt physical ones, didn’t seem to match Wheaton’s physical embodiment. He was a two-ton load. Most suffering from the disease were staggering skeletons, hooked up to a tank that followed them everywhere like a precious little dachshund. She asked Madsen about Wheaton as they walked down the corridor to the warden’s sanctuary.

  “Just how sick is he?”

  “Emphysema, cancer, the flu… you name it, he’s had it all since I’ve been here,” Madsen said. “No telling what he’d suffered from before my five years started here. He’s what we call an infirmary moth. They bitch and moan about illness just to get out of their cells. I don’t much blame them. The infirmary has the only window in the cellblock… the only source of natural light. But for God sake, emphysema? Jesus… he’d be better off claiming something like high blood pressure.”

  “Cholesterol poisoning,” Bauer jumped in, trying to make a lighter moment while holding the door open for Hannah.

  “The donut disease,” she said, unable to even manage a smile.

  Madsen said they’d be having lunch in the warden’s private dining room. It would be only the two of them. The warden had a crown that needed replacing, and he’d driven down to the Landing to see the dentist— though the prison had its own dentist, one who found a little too much joy in his work. Madsen led the pair into a cubbyhole of a room with a massive oak table.

  “Not everyone gets this treatment. I’ve been in here only a dozen times in ten years,” Madsen said.

  A ceramic bowl of blown-glass fruit commanded the center of the table. Miriam Thomas had left her homey touch. Lunch was surprisingly elegant, consisting of salmon with dill (from the prison’s pea patch), spears of late-season asparagus, and a pretty decent Waldorf salad.

  “Wheaton’s always more cheerful after eating,” Madsen said, exiting the dining room. “Especially happy after a double serving of chili-mac.”

  “That’s fine,” Bauer said. “Feed the behemoth. We’ve got catching up to do.”

  “That’s one way to put it. More like opening old wounds, I’d say,” Hannah said. She tied to manage an ironic smile.

  BOOK TWO

  Ashes

  If Hannah Logan had shared any happy times with her mother, they must have been the warm evenings of Oregon’s all-too-brief summer. Just after 9 p.m., Claire Logan would summon her daughter, and they’d sit on a log that had been split lengthwise and shaped as a bench to watch their moon-flowers unfurl. Her father had created the bench with a chain-saw, during the off-season the year he thought he could sell “Lumber Jack Furniture.” But each evening, against a stump of a tree that had burned into a stubby snag, mother and daughter would sit and watch the flowers come to life. The white moonflowers, grown from seeds purchased from Burpee’s catalog, had always been Claire’s favorite. Their almost magical opening was a cherished reminder of her youth in Oregon. Hannah was equally enthralled. In front of their eyes, milky white tubes would twist and open into trumpets. From closed tight to open and swirling in fifteen minutes.

  And while the pirouetting imagery was lovely, later, when she revisited those moments, Hannah could see that her mother was a bitter woman. She was a schemer, more than a dreamer.

  “Hannah,” she said, “don’t let a man get in the way of your dreams. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t be what your heart tells you.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Remember my words. Carve them on my headstone with acid when I’m gone. I don’t care. As long as you remember.”

  Hannah nodded, then nuzzled her mother and smiled at the laughter of her brothers as they played in their upstairs bedroom.

  “I remember when Hannah told me about the moon-flowers,” childhood friend Michelle Masour later told a magazine reporter. “Her mother was weird, but she did have some good qualities. Hannah loved her mother. She never saw any of this stuff coming. Not at all.”

  —From Twenty in a Row: The Claire Logan

  Murders, by Marcella Hoffman

  Chapter Twelve

  Patty Masour knew the scanner codes better than anyone in Rock Point, Oregon. She was the part-time dispatcher at the Spruce County She
riff’s Department, a job she shared with her sister, Sandy. The code sputtering over the scanner next to her davenport meant trouble, big trouble. Multiple homicide in the woods of the county. She turned off her TV and told her husband she felt uneasy about what she had half heard crackle, and she dialed her sister.

  “County Sheriff. Merry Christmas and hello,” a woman’s voice answered. Her voice was flat, her words sounded as though they were read from a card, not words from the heart.

  “Sandy?”

  “Yes, Patty? Oh dear,” she said when recognition came. “Have your heard? They’re hauling bodies out of the Logan family’s tree farm. I haven’t had time to call you; things have been off the meter over here for the past two and half hours!”

  “Logan?” Patty’s heart sank. She knew the family. Everyone in Rock Point did. The Logan place had been their destination just ten days before when she and her children went to get their tree, a perfect, pyramidal-shaped Noble fir.

  “Claire and her two little boys are missing. It’s real bad out there. I mean real bad! Place is burning to the ground and the girl…”

  “Hannah?”

  “Yeah, she’s the only survivor we know about.”

  Patty’s knees weakened, and she slid into the soft folds of her velveteen davenport. “Michelle goes to school with Hannah,” she said. Michelle was her daughter, thirteen. Patty hung on every word while her sister went on about the investigation under way. She remembered how Claire’s daughter had rung up the sale for the Christmas tree in the little kiosk set up outside of the wreath shed. She was a pretty girl, big brown eyes with thick, ash-blond hair, held in a ponytail. Michelle and Hannah had been in the same second-and fourth-grade classes. They were best friends back then. By seventh grade, though, they’d stopped seeing each other outside of the classroom. Michelle told her mother that Hannah was no longer much fun to be around. Patty thought it might have had to do with what was going on at home with the girl’s mother.