by Gregg Olsen
“Chamomile,” she said. “Let’s figure out what to do over some tea. Chamomile will relax you. Dear, you must relax. You know this is no good for your heart.”
Louise picked up the tomatoes and rhubarb, and the two went inside. Neither woman took off her shoes. Keeping Louise’s prized wooden floors free from garden grit just didn’t come to mind.
“I called my lawyer, like you said.” Louise turned up the flame under the kettle. “He’s not in. Out fishing until tomorrow.”
“I’m sure you won’t need him,” Morrison said, though she didn’t know why she offered such false assurance. The words just came out. “Now, tell me everything.”
The tea kettle whistled to signal the water was hot, and Wallace loaded a tray with a teapot, cups, and lemon cookies. They retreated to a powder-blue settee that overlooked the waters of the Pacific through ten-foot-high windows. Wallace was upset—more upset than Morrison had ever seen her. She kept a tissue crumbled in a ball and when tears came, she dabbed at them.
“There is something about me that you don’t know.”
“Of course,” Morrison said, “there are things we all keep private.”
“Well, this is certainly that kind of thing. I’ve never talked about it. I don’t particularly want all of Kodiak Island to know about it.” She hedged, carefully considering her words. “But it might be necessary, you know, for it to come out.”
Morrison was on the edge of her seat. She set her cup on a side table. She didn’t think that her friend could possibly be Claire Logan. Certainly not! Up to an hour ago, Morrison didn’t think Louise could have a dark secret of any kind whatsoever.
“Better than twenty years ago,” she began, “some-thing terrible happened.” Louise stood and looked out across the water. Her cup rattled in its saucer, and she turned to set it down. “I don’t like talking about this, but you are my friend.”
“Yes,” Morrison said. “Of course. Always.”
Wallace took another deep breath and steadied herself.
“All right,” she said. “Twenty years ago, I had some problems—some terrible problems that the doctors couldn’t help.” She stopped again, took another breath, and searched the horizon.
“What kind of problems?”
“Depression caused by a tragic loss,” Wallace answered. “There, I said it.” She turned to face Marge. “I lost my boys in a car accident. A terrible, terrible crash. I never got over it.”
Morrison felt tears come instantly to her eyes. “Oh, dear God, I had no idea,” she said. The First Methodist ladies had always assumed Louise had never been blessed with children at all. She had no inkling there had once been two boys who had died in some automobile accident. Morrison reached out to Wallace and felt her trembling hands. Her eyes had flooded by then.
Tears now rolled down her cheeks and collected under her chin. “I needed help. I just couldn’t do anything after the boys died. My husband couldn’t help me. He tried. I know he did. But I wanted no part of anyone. Not after the accident. I pulled the curtains and stayed in bed for months. Sometimes, even now, when I look back I can barely remember that time. I feel as though I lost a whole year.”
“Dear Lou, oh, my dear.” Morrison felt her throat tighten over the thought of her friend’s cruel ordeal. “I can’t imagine.”
“As much as I keep this inside—because I have to— there is something more that I haven’t told you. Something very important. And even though I know that it is nothing to be ashamed about, I am. I know in my heart that I’m all right, now. Best as I can be…”
“You are wonderful,” Morrison consoled. “You are very dear to all of us.”
Wallace smiled a little and gripped the ball of tissue even tighter and ran it under her chin. “Marge, I was hospitalized after my little boys died in the crash. It was a mental hospital called Evergreen State just south of Seattle. I was there for six months, and it helped me. I did many, many strange things as I coped with my grief. Lithium was good, and though I hate to admit it, shock treatments probably helped me, too. I was able to come to terms with what happened when my sons died. I grew stronger. Stronger than ever.”
While Morrison sat anguished and rapt, Louise Wallace sipped tea and told her friend that her husband left her during the hospitalization at Evergreen State. Few men could survive the loss of their sons. She could no longer face the world as she was.
“My doctor told me the best way to go out into the world—which I really didn’t want to do—was to start over. All over. He said I was reborn. I took it literally. I changed my name and moved as far away from Seattle as I could.”
“You came here to Kodiak,” Morrison interjected.
“Not at first, but eventually. I worked in the canneries for a short while, met Hank Wallace, and we fell in love. In a way, I was reborn,” she said.
“A beautiful butterfly,” Morrison said. “You are. And we love you.”
Wallace walked around the settee to the tea cart and poured herself another cup. “So you see, there is a bit of a problem. Or there could be. There is no Louise Wallace, not really. I mean I am here with you, of course. But there are no records of any Louise Wallace.”
Morrison refused to have any part of that kind of thinking. “You are our Louise—doesn’t matter when you became her. That’s who you are. Besides, you know what we’ve always said of Alaska.”
She smiled and said, “A good place to hide.”
“A good place to start over.”
“Marge?” Louise asked as she turned to the window. “There is one more thing.” Her voice started to crack on the last word.
Morrison stood. “Yes? What is it?”
“Marge, I was driving the car when I lost control…. I was the one driving. I was thrown from the car, but the boys were strapped in the car. There was an explosion and fire.”
“I’m sorry,” Morrison said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Look, Marge, I don’t think I can say this any more plainly. I think my past might be catching up with me. I won’t allow it. I’ve been through too much already.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Our Lady of Guadeloupe Hospital was Catholic to its core, having been built on the ruins of the Santa Louisa Mission after the turn of the century—the nineteenth century. Framed in stately date palms, it was three stories high, a buttery-colored form of stucco walls capped with red Mexican tiles. A clock tower was lost in a relentless windstorm that cut through the region a couple of days after John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, an occurrence the faithful thought was God’s way of grieving for the slain Catholic president.
Floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows depicting Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark were the focal point of the lobby. Adjacent to the windows, a small brass plaque was placed at eye level: A GIFT OF THE WILLIAM GILLIAND FAMILY. It was under those windows that Hannah Logan and Ted Ripperton conferred in the lobby a few days after Hannah returned from Cutter’s Landing. They reviewed the police reports. One held their attention in particular: Berto Garcia’s history of incarceration.
“This changes everything,” Hannah said. “I’ve been doing this a while, and I’m seldom surprised, but really, this is the topper.”
“I smell plea bargain,” Ripp said, almost gleefully. “I like it when we don’t have to do too much heavy lifting.” Ripp playfully flexed a muscle, but Hannah wasn’t amused.
“I don’t like a child killer,” she said. “Let’s go talk to Joanne.”
The Intensive Care Unit was up a flight of stairs on the third floor. Visitor elevators, a note taped over the call button indicated, were being refurbished. Nurses in cranberry scrubs and orderlies in smudged whites milled around by the nurses station. Silent portable fans blew cool air into the horseshoe-shaped group of desks, telephones, and computer terminals.
“We’re here to see Mrs. Garcia,” Hannah told a hefty woman basking in the manmade breeze. “County investigators,” she continued, nodding at Ripp. She didn’t use the word “c
rime scene” or “criminal investigator,” because of the baggage the words invariably brought.
“Sunshine 4. You’ve got five minutes,” the nurse said, indicating the fourth of the cluster rooms that provided the best in urgent care in Santa Louisa, which Hannah Logan, and others, didn’t think was much praise.
Joanne Garcia was under an octopus of clear hoses and white plastic tubing; a sky-blue sheet was pulled up to her neck. The bulge of her round, but empty, abdomen was still visible under the sheet. If only one thing in the world could be considered cruel, it was a woman who no longer had a baby inside her, but still looked pregnant. Stillborn. Given away for adoption. Whatever. Hannah couldn’t help but be taken back to the moment when she lost Annie, but she removed it from her mind and stared down at Mrs. Garcia.
If Mrs. Garcia had meant to kill herself or if she had only sought to numb the pain of one dead child, a husband in the slammer, and a daughter in protective custody, she had gravely miscalculated. Hannah didn’t tell the woman in the hospital bed that when she was released from Our Lady, she’d be arrested for the manslaughter of her unborn baby. Such cases were difficult to win, but worth it just to make a point.
Hannah’s gaze met Joanne’s puffy and jaundiced eyes.
“I’m sorry about your loss,” she said.
“Me, too,” Ripp muttered awkwardly.
Garcia shifted her weight in the hospital bed and made a slight movement with her eyes, but said nothing. Then she closed her eyes tightly. Ripp retreated near the doorway. A nurse’s aide with a cart of flowers scuttled by.
“You should be,” Garcia finally croaked, her stare hard and cold in Hannah’s direction. “You’ve made a mess of everything. You dug up my baby, my Ricky. And now you—” She cut herself off, before starting up again. “And now my baby, my new baby is gone. All of my children are taken from me.”
“You know,” Hannah said as gently as possible, “I did what was required of me, nothing more. I’m sorry for how it has turned out for you personally. But I didn’t kill your unborn baby, you did.”
Garcia winced and turned her head away, toward the window.
“My daughter Mimi had nothing to do with Ricky’s— Enrique’s—death,” she whispered, still not opening her eyes as tears rolled onto the thin, blue pillow that supported her head. “She never hurt anyone.”
“Of course not. She was just a little girl. What happened?” Hannah did her best attempt at being and sounding sympathetic, but under the surface she could feel hatred rise.
Garcia’s dark eyelids fluttered like two gray moths. “Berto can’t stand the noise kids make. Any noise at all. Even when they laugh or giggle, like happy kids do. I try to keep the kids from him, but you can’t always do that. They get into things, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I’m a mother, too,” Hannah said, though she sort of hated herself for using the fact that she had Amber in her work. She detested women like Mrs. Garcia. She was one of the horrible, eat-your-own-young breed. It seemed there were more of those women cropping up in Santa Louisa and beyond. Hannah admired the women who stood up for their children or themselves and left their abusers when there was still a chance. The women who shot abusive husbands in their backs or even the one who sliced off her no-good husband’s penis as if it were a Ball Park frank deserved, she thought, a lighter sentence than California law allowed. But not Joanne Garcia.
Garcia looked past Hannah for a moment at Ripp, and then closed her eyes once more. “Berto was watching television and Ricky was playing in the kitchen with his toys. He wasn’t even in the living room. Berto yelled at him a couple times to be quiet. My son was just having fun. You know little boys; they don’t always hear what you want them to.”
“Yes,” Hannah said, her own anger beginning to rage. “I know people, grown people, who are the same way. What happened? Please.”
“He went into the kitchen and picked up Ricky by the arms and slammed him to the floor.”
Garcia was crying now. Keeping her eyes shut didn’t block out what she said she’d seen that day. Instead of drawing sympathy, her tears irritated Hannah.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I mean, he wasn’t dead or anything. Berto was so sorry. So sorry.” The words stuck in her throat. “Sorry that his temper got away from him. We ran a cold bath and put Ricky in it. He was swelling up. We didn’t want to call the ambulance. We didn’t want somebody to tell us we were bad parents and take him away. I put two trays of ice cubes into the water to bring the swelling down. I even dumped packages of frozen corn in there. I…” Garcia stopped. Her convulsing sobs were audible from the nurses’ station, and the big woman with the clipboard made her way toward the open doorway of Sunshine 4.
“He said that if we told them Ricky fell down, we’d be okay. We wouldn’t get into trouble. Berto didn’t mean for it to happen. I didn’t think anyone would believe us. I prayed that they would. I did. An accident is an accident, right? No matter how it happens, right?”
Hannah had heard women like Joanne Garcia with their day-late, dollar-short fountains of sorrow spewing to the heavens, and she hated them. She also knew from years of working such cases, that sadly, not all children could be saved. The numbers of the littlest victims continued to grow. Despite all educational programs, the shrinks with their soliloquies on anger management, and the efforts of law enforcement, the number of battered, bruised, and even dead children grew by tragic leaps and bounds. For a second, Erik and Danny and their tiny charred Buster Brown shoes returned to her thoughts. How Hannah wished, as Joanne Garcia surely had, that time could be rolled back and things could be different.
“You ought to get a better lawyer,” Hannah said, her anger building like a kettle on high heat. She pulled a sheet of paper from a file folder that Ripp had brought along.
“I’ll see you go to prison for your son’s murder. Further if I can find a DA willing to stick his neck out a little, you’ll go down on a second murder-two charge.”
Joanne’s eyes were open wide in terror as Hannah sprang forward. “The baby girl in the basement morgue was close enough to term to survive if you hadn’t done what you did…and if someone had bothered to find you in time. That makes you practically a serial killer in my mind. Women like you make me sick.”
“What are you talking about?” Joanne croaked.
“Your husband was in county custody the day Enrique was injured.” Hannah held out the report and pointed to the date. “He couldn’t have killed the boy. You put your boy in the bathtub. You couldn’t stand the noise!”
Ripp stepped forward and tugged at Hannah’s shoulder, but she broke away and continued her rant. Garcia’s terrified eyes gleamed like a couple of bullets.
“You make me sick,” Hannah said, loud enough to reach the nurse’s station. “You women who snuff out your kids are the scum of this planet.”
“Better go,” Ripp said, grabbing Hannah and pulling her away from the hospital bed. In doing so, he accidentally popped Garcia’s IV line. Garcia screamed in pain.
“You’ll have to leave right now,” said a cranberry-clad nurse with her practiced, authoritative intonation as she scrambled into the room. “This is too much. The patient needs rest now, not the third degree.”
Hannah was stunned by her own rage. She was angry and embarrassed at the same time. She and Ripp walked to the stairway.
“What got into you back there?” he asked.
She shook her head in agitated disgust. “She killed her son. She killed him and tried to pull the battered, abused, cigarette-burned mother-of-the-year number on us. First she kills her boy, blames her daughter, and then poisons her body with pills and kills her unborn baby.”
Several nurses and an orderly stood by with their mouths agape. Two in the horseshoe whispered loudly.
Hannah touched her face. Her cheeks were warm. Her heart was thumping.
“She is the worst kind of human being and I’ve met some—known some—of the worst.”
“You lost it in there,” Ripp said, not really listening to what Hannah was saying. “I thought you were going to slap her or something.” He swung the door open, and the two started down the stairs. Hannah kept her mouth shut. She’d said enough.
“I guess this isn’t a good time to bring this up,” he said. “I told that writer Marcella Hoffman I’d talk to her at lunch today. I’d like a little recognition, too. She wants to talk to me. You know, not everything is about you.”
Hannah felt her skin grow hotter. She’d have slapped Ted Ripperton if he weren’t the son-in-law of the county attorney.
“Thanks for nothing,” she said stiffly.
“Judge Paine! What are you doing here?”
A Spruce County Clerk’s Office employee waved from across an ancient mahogany counter. Behind her was a warren of cubicles decorated with family photos and memos.
“That’s me,” Veronica Paine said warmly as she pulled up to the counter. “I’ve said it before, you just can’t keep an old lawyer from the courthouse. Seems like home around here.”
“We try.” The woman from behind the counter smiled back. Next to her, an enormous bouquet of lilies and gardenias with a plastic pick held a card that read: “Lordy, Lordy! Look Who’s 40!”
Veronica smiled. “Happy birthday.”
“I’d be happier if my sister hadn’t advertised my age!” She smiled back and both women laughed. “What can I do for you?”
“Just here to look at some old files in the vault. Some things niggling at me, after all these years.”
“Can I get you some files? What’s the case number?”
Paine shook her head. “No I can do it. I still know my way around here.”
The woman behind the counter handed her a ring of keys with a tape-covered oversized tag emblazoned with: VAULT KEY DO NOT REMOVE FROM CLERK’S DEPT. The keys clattered together as Paine started down the stairs to the basement. A woman making photocopies nodded in her direction.
The basement was well lit with fluorescent tubes— not the least bit creepy. It was filled with gray metal shelves that went from the floor to the ceiling. On each shelf were the saddest stories ever told in the annals of Spruce County’s history. The two little girls who had gone missing until their remains were found in the woods around Lake Joy. The farmer who had thought his wife had been cheating on him, so he took his life by throwing his body out in front of his neighbor’s tractor. A high school track coach who had sexually molested at least three of his students. All real. Boxes were filled with the manila files of depositions, court filings, and whatever paperwork told the tale of Spruce County’s most sordid chapters.
