A Wicked Snow

Chapter Two

Her car still smelling of Ripp’s fast-food binge, it was after seven o’clock when Hannah returned to 1422 Loma Linda Avenue, the single-story stucco home she shared with her husband and daughter. It was a pretty little place with a thicket of bird-of-paradise by the front windows, twin date palms on the property line, and a sand-box made of old oil-soaked railroad ties that had somehow morphed into a cat box in the backyard.

A ten-year veteran of the Santa Louisa County P.D., Ethan Griffin had parked his police cruiser in the driveway, leaving the garage open for his wife. Ethan was thoughtful that way. He was loading the dishwasher when she came inside. French fries and ketchup marked two plates. Ethan had brown eyes and black hair that had just started to fleck silver. His mustache (“part of the uniform,” he joked) was a bit of a problem. It turned somewhat skunk striped the year before, and rather than shave it off or live with the indication that, at forty-two, he was growing older, he dyed it black with one of the so-gradual-no-one-will-detect products.

“I promise you,” he told Hannah then, “I’m not run- ning out to a gym or a tanning spa. I don’t have a girlfriend, and I don’t really care how I look. I could live with a little padding in the middle. It isn’t any of that. I just want to compete.”

Hannah smiled and warned Ethan not to let the concoction foaming above his lip drip onto the linens she kept folded by the sink.

“Stains like murder,” she had told him.

The Griffins had lived in the house on Loma Linda since Hannah’s first pregnancy, which, sadly, had ended in a miscarriage at a devastating twenty-one weeks. Amber, now eight, was conceived the year after her sister, Annie, had died. Despite their seemingly all-involving careers as a cop and a CSI, they made plenty of time for Amber. The little girl was never overindulged, but neither did she go without. Hannah was not among the growing group of mothers who sought to make her daughter into a “better me,” but she did want her child to have the opportunities that had eluded her.

Amber was engrossed in a television program when Hannah swooped down and pecked her on the top of the head. In her mind, Hannah repeated a phrase as she always did, “I’m sending all my love to you.” Amber murmured approval, but kept her eyes glued on the screen. A moment later, having heard his wife come in, Ethan emerged from the kitchen.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“Not really. Ripp made a stop at McDonald’s. I’m still dealing with the fumes.” She rolled her eyes.

Ethan thought his wife looked pale. “You okay?” he asked.

“Tough day, I guess.”

Ethan had heard about the Garcia mess over the weekend. Hannah, as always, was obsessed about nailing someone—the mother, the father—for the abuse of a child. The Garcia case was the most recent in a long line of cases that consumed her. She was tired; her eyelids hooded, and her smile was plastered on. Ethan served her a slice of pizza and a glass of wine.

“I just need to unwind,” she finally said. She wanted to tell her husband about the special delivery someone had made to her office, about the box she carried in her car trunk. But she couldn’t. The time didn’t seem right. Amber needed to be tucked in and there was a chapter of Oz to read.

It wasn’t that Ethan Griffin with his kind and expressive brown eyes and massive, prickly haired shoulders wasn’t a smart man. He was. He’d advanced several rungs up the ladder at the sheriff’s office, and although no longer a wunderkid once he hit his fortieth birthday, he was still seen by many around the department as an up-and-comer. But what Hannah loved most about her husband had nothing to do with his ability as a cop, his intellect, or his wit at a social service fund-raiser. It was that above all, Ethan was passionate man when it came to his family. His wife and his daughter were his world, the only world he needed. She admired Ethan for his total devotion. Sometimes she was even jealous of her husband’s capacity to be so devoted. She was always on the run.

In part, Hannah chose Ethan for her husband and the father of her children because she knew his family history was built on love and stability, things that despite the valiant efforts of her aunt and uncle, she had lacked for much of her growing years. Even so, though Ethan knew nearly everything about her life, there were still things she felt unable to share. Some things, she felt, were not to be disclosed. She did not view her refusal to tell him everything a betrayal or unjust secrecy. It was solely an issue of personal privacy. If things got difficult for her to deal with on the inside, she could always keep Ethan at bay by telling him that it was a case that was eating at her like a battery-acid drip. Now, following the receipt of the box in her office, Hannah found herself using such subterfuge. She was jittery and laconic whenever Ethan inquired about her frayed nerves.

Ethan saw that Hannah was preoccupied. But, he told himself, it was the Garcia case. He’d felt the brunt of such frustration over the years—be it the case of a seventeen-year-old slashed with a box cutter and raped in the back of a bookmobile. Or the time Hannah broke her seemingly ceaseless string of sex cases with the prosecution of a man who walked into a dry cleaner and forced two of the women facedown on the pressing machine while he robbed them at gunpoint. He knew that when a certain case came along, the kind in which an advocate was needed to work the details and press for justice, she’d be gone. She was the only one in Santa Louisa County who could do it.

“I know the Garcia thing is getting to you,” he told her as they slid under the covers. “Amber knows it, too.”

“I’m fine,” Hannah said. She kissed him and snuggled in his arms. For a second, she no longer seemed unsettled. She even appeared to relax. Hannah was somewhat adept at hiding her feelings. It came with practice.

This time Ethan wasn’t buying it completely. “You don’t look fine. You look like you’ve been drained. I’m half expecting that you’re going to keel over from stress or something.”

Hannah forced a slight smile. “You’re more likely to go into cardiac arrest than I. Twenty-to-one chances I’d say.”

“I’m worried, that’s all.”

“I know. Me, too.”