A Wicked Snow

by Gregg Olsen

  The last remark almost brought a grin to Bauer’s handsome face. Characteristic restraint, however, kept him from saying anything snide. But how did she plan on making her income? Fishing fees or murdering her guests?

  Out of what turned out to be a hundred and fifty names, two-thirds were discounted right away because their lodges, resorts, and gear shops had been in operation far longer than twenty years. A cross-check of Alaska game and fishing licenses indicated as much— though Bauer knew that record keeping in Juneau, while improved since the advent of computers, wasn’t the most reliable system.

  That left around forty-five possible havens for Logan. Another series of checks indicated that about twenty of those could be discounted for reasons ranging from ethnicity and gender.

  Claire Logan might be smart enough to make herself over, Bauer thought, but she can’t change her gender or turn herself into an Inuit.

  That left just twenty-five possibles, a more manageable but large number nonetheless. The FBI had gone through more possible Claire Logan expeditions than the higher-ups wanted to admit, so they’d send Bauer a backup only if an arrest appeared imminent. Bauer requested Bonnie Ingersol, the agent with whom he shared some of the first days of the investigation when they worked together in Portland in the late ’70s. They had been quite close back then; even dated a few times, though nothing came of it. Neither one had the time for romance.

  In the meantime, Bauer would have to pursue Claire Logan alone. He’d employ some old-fashioned nosing around, hopefully asking the right questions, as he trimmed the fat from the list. After four hours of phone calls, only one name remained on the list: Louise Wallace.

  Louise Wallace lived in one of the prettiest houses on the island. It was a Victorian more suited to New England than Alaska, with twin turrets and a widow’s walk that crossed the entire front side. Louise called it the front of the house, because it faced the choppy waters of Port Lion. The back side, as she termed it, faced the gravel road that ran up past the fishing cabins to the parking area adjacent to an enormous gazebo and fenced vegetable garden. The three-story house was painted seven colors, though the dominant hue was a creamy yellow that Louise called “shortbread.” The main floor was an open plan with gorgeous wood floors and a two-story river-rock fireplace, the only concession Louise made to her late husband’s desire for an Alaskan-style abode of rock, antlers, and peeled timbers. The furnishings were quite lovely. The majority were antiques the Wallaces had gathered throughout Alaska, though mostly from a trusted dealer on the outskirts of Anchorage.

  An oak box lined with slippers of varying sizes sat next to the door and admonished visitors to take off their shoes before coming inside. WE WOOD APPRECIATE IT, read a little hand-lettered index card affixed to the box. The O’s had been embellished into happy faces.

  Bauer pulled his rental car to a shady spot near a rustic gazebo framed with silvery driftwood logs, choked with trumpet vines. The setting was gorgeous. Alaska’s short growing season was short only in the number of days. In reality, the season was longer than points much further south, like Seattle or Portland. Eighteen hours of sunlight a day gave plants an extraordinary boost. Years ago, Bauer had been to the state fair in Palmer, not far from Anchorage, where “monster” vegetables vie for attention in one of the more popular gee-whiz exhibits. Three-foot zucchinis and cabbages with the astonishing girth of beach balls draw tourists from across the state to gawk in amazement. Bauer noticed that someone had been working in the Wallace garden that day. Sprinklers had been set to water the fluffy rows of vegetables and flowers that included everything from larkspur to delphinium to foxglove.

  He heard sandpipers and gulls squawk from the surf below the house. The bell of a distant buoy clanged.

  “Mrs. Wallace?” he called out as he knocked on the open door. No one responded. He called again and studied the splendor of leaded glass windows with maritime images inset into several panes.

  “Yes? Can I help you?” The sweet face of an old woman appeared in the doorway. She was tall, somewhat thin, and had ashy blond hair streaked with gray. Gold-framed glasses didn’t hide the fact that her blue eyes were the color of the cornflowers that stood high in the back of her garden border. Her lipstick was dark, a winy red that looked almost brown.

  “Louise Wallace?” Bauer asked.

  “Do I know you?” she said, brushing a wisp of silvery hair from her eyes. “Been out in the yard all morning. Must look like a fright.”

  “No ma’am. You don’t know me. But I know you.”

  “You do? That’s surprising to me, because I’m pretty good with faces. Names, not so much, but faces I never forget.”

  “We’ve never actually met,” he said. “I know everything about you. I know your name is Claire Berrenger Logan and, more importantly, I know what you did in Spruce County twenty years ago.”

  It was a bluff and Bauer felt relief that he’d pulled it off, because he really wasn’t that sure. She could be Claire Logan, but she didn’t look exactly like the computer-aged model photo. Her chin was more angular, her nose a bit more pointed. He kept his face from betraying any emotion, though his chest pounded beneath his jacket. This was the bluff. The big bluff. The assumptive interview. If you tell the suspect you know they did something or are someone, you just might get lucky. Attitude, he knew, was everything.

  “I’m sorry,” Wallace said, peering over her glasses. “You must have me confused with someone else. My name is Louise. Louise Wallace. I don’t know anyone by the name of Claire Morgan. Who are you?”

  Nice touch, Bauer thought, getting the name wrong.

  “Jeff Bauer, FBI,” he said, presenting his I.D. badge and photo.

  She took it and regarded it, then handed it back. “Oh my,” she said. “I’ve never seen one of those in person. Very official and kind of pretty isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for a response. “I’m going to move the water again. Wish I had installed that drip system my husband had wanted. Would have saved me hours and hours of time. ’Course, lots of time in Alaska, anyway. Want some rhubarb?”

  “No, thanks,” Bauer said. “How long have you lived here?”

  “Is this part of your official interview?” she asked with a wry smile.

  He ignored her. “How long?”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll answer a few of your questions. I’ll give you enough rhubarb for two pies. But you, Mr. Bauer, is it?”

  He nodded, but said nothing.

  “You will have to tell me who this Claire Morgan is and why you think I might know something about her. Is she in some kind of trouble?”

  “I’d say so. Claire Logan murdered twenty people. Surely you’ve heard of her.”

  “Can’t say that I have. We never got a satellite dish up here. My husband wanted one, but I kept saying no.”

  “The murders were discovered in Rock Point, Oregon. She killed nearly a score of lovelorn military men, plus her own two sons.”

  Holding a kitchen paring knife, Mrs. Wallace bent down and started cutting bright red stalks of rhubarb and arranging them in neat rows in the bottom of an antique vegetable basket.

  “These will make a delicious pie,” she said without looking up. “Does your wife bake?”

  “No. Don’t have a wife.” Bauer felt a little foolish. This woman wasn’t listening and she wasn’t reacting to anything he had to say.

  “As I was saying,” he began again.

  “As you were accusing,” she said, still intent on her slicing. “Well, I’ve never had any children. And, I’ve never dated anyone from the military. I’m a Democrat.”

  “Mrs. Wallace,” he said, stooping to face her directly. “Where were you living in the mid-70s?”

  “This stalk is particularly suitable—thick and without all those nasty fibers.”

  Bauer was frustrated, and his tone couldn’t conceal it. “Will you answer?”

  Wallace stood up gripping the knife dripping, by then, with the red juice of rhubarb. Her eyes wer
e cold, glacial blue.

  “I don’t talk about that part of my life,” she said harshly, the first shift in a demeanor that Bauer could only have described as sweet and kindly. “Not to anyone.”

  “You’ll need to answer to me,” he fired back. “I’ve waited two decades to find out what rock you’ve crawled under and your grandma-of-the-year act is as transparent as ice.”

  She bent back down and resumed slicing. She remained expressionless. “You, young man, are mistaken. Now, do you want the rhubarb or not?”

  “I saw Marcus Wheaton last week,” Bauer said. He stared at her, but nothing came from her in the way of a genuine reaction. Not even a flutter. “Saw him with your daughter, Hannah.”

  For a half second, Bauer thought he noticed a slight, very slight hesitation in the woman’s cutting of glossy red stalks. Perhaps it was merely his hope that he could find something in her manner, demeanor, and cadence of her speech—anything—that could suggest she was not being truthful.

  “I don’t have any children,” she said. “I’ve never had any children, sons, daughters, or any combination thereof. Mr. Wallace and I would have liked children and I suppose the fact that I couldn’t have any is my cross to bear. Satisfied? Furthermore, I don’t know anybody named Wheaton. Your accusations are very, very upsetting to me. I’m sure you didn’t mean for them to be, and truly I’m sorry I can’t help. I live my life being helpful to others.”

  With that she reached for her basket, turned abruptly, and started for the house, abandoning Bauer by the garden gate. There was no point in calling out to her to stop because Bauer really didn’t know what to make of her. Louise Wallace was one of two things, a sweet old lady or a cold-blooded killer. He aimed to find out just which she was.

  A half hour later and back in his room at the Northern Lights, Bauer used a handkerchief to carefully remove his photo I.D. badge from its protective leather and plastic sheath before sliding it into a glassine. It wasn’t evidence per se. But he was treating it as such. Louise Wallace had held it as they stood in her garden. She had touched it after Bauer had made sure it was perfectly clean. He had only held it on its edge. He phoned Bonnie Ingersol at the Portland office. She was out, so he left a message for her to sit tight until he called her back in about an hour. Bauer got back behind the wheel and drove to the Kodiak airport where he put the small package on a plane that would connect with an Alaska Airlines flight to Portland. With a layover in Anchorage, and a connection in Seattle, Ingersol could pick it up by six the next morning. Bauer looked at his Seiko. In a few hours, he’d know the truth. He scratched his head and smiled. A beer seemed like a good idea right then.

  Chapter Thirty

  The ladies of the First Methodist Church of Kodiak knew how to put on a wildly successful bake sale, no matter if the cause was directly related to the church or not. One time, the group of thirteen women raised almost a thousand dollars for Kodiak High’s choral ensemble’s trip to compete against school choir groups from Canada and the United States. (The Singing Grizzlies placed in the top ten and were greeted with a modest parade upon their return to the island, again courtesy of the ladies of First Methodist.) All but four were widows with grown children and scads of free time to devote to the cause—whatever it was at any given time.

  Harriet Wilcox was in her late eighties, the oldest of the group. The oldest always admits her age as a badge of honor for living longest and still being able to keep up with the younger gals, in their sixties and seventies. Marge Morrison, sixty-two, was the youngest and most active. Morrison was still working part-time at the local public utility as the secretary to the consumer services manager. She was an attractive woman with silvering hair that she wore in a low-slung ponytail held in place by a tortoiseshell barrette. Her only flaw was the fact that gum disease had taken her teeth and she wore a full set of dentures of which she was extremely self-conscious. Others of the group included a retired school-teacher, Beth Tyson; Annie Potter, a crabber’s widow, and Louise Wallace, the owner of a fishing resort.

  In early September the ladies of First Methodist met at the church for their fall planning session. A Thanksgiving coat and blanket effort, a food drive for Christmas, and the annual cookie exchange were on the agenda for the next three months, and preparations were necessary. Marge Morrison arrived first. She was chairwoman for the fall events. Beth Tyson followed her inside. Beth took the minutes for the newsletter, Divine Inspirations. Beth propped open the doors, letting the breeze blow in from the Aleutians. September was Kodiak’s second warmest month. Hitting a pleasant seventy degrees was possible, even with the summer wind blowing in from the north.

  “Anyone hear from Sandy?” Morrison asked as she settled her considerable frame into a molded plastic chair. “Sandy called me last night. Her son’s wife is ill. She flew to Anchorage this morning. Said she’d be gone for a week.”

  “Hope it isn’t too serious,” one said.

  “No. Got the flu, a dreaded summer flu.”

  “That’s just awful. Summer’s short enough ’round here. Hate to be sick.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Anyone hear from Louise?”

  When no one had, Morrison volunteered to make the call from the pastor’s office phone.

  “Be back in a jiff,” she said cheerfully. “Go ahead and sample those peanut butter squares. Just out of the oven this morning.”

  Five minutes later, Morrison returned to the table.

  “I couldn’t reach her,” she said. “She must be on her way. Let’s get started.”

  Two hours later the women, full of lime Jell-O cake, peanut butter squares, and decaf coffee, adjourned their meeting. Still no Louise Wallace.

  “It’s not like her at all,” Morrison said as she made her way to her car.

  The voice was shaky, but it was familiar even under splintering layers of worry and fear. The words “accused” and “Federal Bureau of Investigation” floated above the others. Marge Morrison grabbed the remote control and turned down the volume of her soap opera, General Hospital.

  “Louise, what did you say?”

  Morrison heard her friend Louise Wallace speak, but nothing computed.

  “I think I might need a lawyer,” she repeated. “Something terrible has happened. A terrible mix-up.”

  “They think you are who?”

  “I know it is ridiculous. But he—this FBI agent from Oregon—says he thinks I’m that horrible Claire what’s her-name. Claire Logan.”

  Morrison knew the name instantly. Most Americans over thirty did.

  “That woman from Seattle who killed those men? What in the world?”

  “Oregon or somewhere,” Wallace corrected, her voice cracking. She was crying now. And Morrison had never heard her friend weep before—not even during the black days of her husband Hank’s ordeal with inoperable colon cancer several summers before. “I think she lived down in Portland somewhere. I can’t believe this is happening. I’ve never even been to Oregon.”

  “Of course not,” Morrison said as she tried to process everything. “You’ve never been there.”

  Louise Wallace pulled herself together and gulped some air. “They don’t care. He wouldn’t listen. This could be bad. It has happened to others, you know. It doesn’t matter what the truth is anymore. Remember that guy they blamed for planting a bomb at the Olympics in Atlanta just because he found it?”

  “Dear Lord,” Morrison muttered, “if our FBI can screw up so badly, no one is safe.”

  Morrison remained clear headed in any catastrophe, which was why she made such an excellent chairwoman for the First Methodist fund-raisers. If Louise Wallace needed support and counsel, she’d dialed the right number.

  “Get your lawyer on the phone, dear,” Morrison said. “Would you like me to come over?”

  Louise said she didn’t want to be a bother. But before she hung up, she stated the obvious. “I could use some company, a little moral support. I have to admit I’m a little scared.”<
br />
  “Of course you are. Who wouldn’t be?” Morrison said, grabbing a blue-and-white down-filled jacket from the back of a kitchen chair. “I’m on my way.”

  Marge Morrison drove her two-year-old Dodge pickup like the proverbial bat out of hell. She didn’t even slow down to wave to neighbors out washing their car or stop to tell them that a running hose was a waste of water. Morrison had known Louise Wallace for years. As she spun around the corner to the highway, she tried to calculate the number. Was it a dozen years? More than that? Fifteen or twenty? After a while, she knew, numbers no longer mattered. At some point, friends become family. In her heart, she’d known Louise forever. A half hour after she spoke to a rattled Louise on the phone, Morrison was driving up the long gravel driveway that led to the Wallace place. As it always did, the sight of the grand yellow house took her breath away. There was no place lovelier in all of Kodiak Island.

  Wallace ran over to the pickup. It was obvious that she had been gardening because there were smudges of soil on her chambray blouse. A basket of baseball-size tomatoes and another of rhubarb sat on the steps of the gazebo.

  “Oh, Marge!” she called out. “Thank you for coming. This is just terrible. Terrible.”

  Morrison got out of the cab and hugged Louise. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “Tell me what happened? What is this balderdash they are saying?”

  “This agent from the FBI came today. Right here. Came here. And he asked me about those murders down in Oregon years ago. He said he thought I could be… no, he said he thought I was… that Claire Logan. I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t, he kept saying it. Said he knew. Knew it. Can you believe it?”

  Morrison was dumbfounded. While words of any real substance eluded her, she kept assuring her friend that things would be sorted out. When she noticed Louise shaking, she suggested they go inside.