A Wicked Snow

Chapter Five

The exhumation at Green Lawn Rest Memorial Park in nearby Landon was delayed from two to three that afternoon because another family was burying their grandfather six plots down from two-year-old Enrique Garcia’s grave. Hannah arrived ten minutes late and parked by the chapel. The memorial park was a ten-acre emerald patch in the middle of an industrial compound adjacent to a ticky-tacky apartment complex that had sprung up around it. It was an old-fashioned cemetery with headstones that rose from the ground, instead of being flush mounted in that style the penny-pinching owners of such places prefer for easy mowing. A gentle breeze blew through the rows of granite markers. Crows called from the phone lines strung from the road to the apartments abutting the west side of the patch of green.

By the time Hannah joined the others gathered around the backhoe, Joanne Garcia had arrived. She bolted from her VW bug and ran toward the group of police officers, lawyers, and cemetery personnel. She didn’t even take the keys from the ignition or shut the car door.

“You’ll rot in hell for this,” she yelled at a cop blocking her from the grave site. Her veins popped as expletives convulsed into tears.

“Why would she want to be here?” muttered Ripperton. “Why would any mother want to see her kid after he’d been planted for a couple of years?”

“Ripp, you’ve got to be kidding. Haven’t you done this job long enough to know?” Hannah shot him a chilly look. “Because she’s his mother.”

Ripperton said nothing more. He smoked and kept his hand on his pager, as if holding it would make someone call and he could leave. There were a lot of things that could be said about Ted Ripperton. Strong-stomached, however, was not among them.

A yellow backhoe gently scooted a headstone affixed with Enrique Garcia’s name and a faded photograph of a sweet, but somewhat sullen, little boy. Hannah stood close to the wound in the lawn as the wheelbarrow-sized claw peeled off the sod. A few feet down, the big machine backed away, and a couple of cops felt the top of the cement liner with their shovels. A half hour later, the tiny casket was chained and strapped in preparation for its removal from the hole.

“I want video,” Hannah said, “every step of the way.” An officer with an overly eager-to-please manner framed the scene with the camera lens as he ambled closer to the slash of soil.

“As long as I have juice in the battery, you’ll have your video,” he said.

The casket had been flocked with a pattern of daisies, but groundwater or runoff from the sprinklers had weakened the glue. Sheets of fabric hung like a little curtain around the grimy edges. The box dripped fluid as it hung in the air for ten minutes. The county arranged for a hearse to take Enrique Garcia’s remains to the coroner’s office in Santa Louisa, but it never showed. In- stead, after scrambling about, a cemetery pickup truck was loaded with the box holding the boy’s body. Hannah nodded to Ripp and walked to her car. A police escort blared sirens and flashed blue lights, and two hours after they arrived at the cemetery, they were gone.

Joanne Garcia yelled from the other side of the parking lot as Hannah got into her car. Her blue eyes flashed hatred and her mouth spewed vulgarities that had been absent from her exceedingly coarse vocabulary when they met at her mobile home. Joanne also looked older; her blond hair seemed white, almost gray.

“You have no fuckin’ right to do this!” Joanne yelled. “You have no idea what you are doing!”

Hannah felt a jolt of adrenaline and looked over at the red-faced woman with the battered daughter in foster care and the dead son just plucked from the earth like a turnip.

“We have every right to do so. The judge’s order says so. You’re making this more difficult than it has to be— and it’s damn difficult.”

“How would you like to have your baby pulled from his rest with God? You don’t know how this feels!”

Hannah shook her head. “But I do,” she said quietly, more to herself than to Joanne as she clicked the shoulder harness of her seat belt. In a few moments, she turned to look, maybe even to say something, but the woman with the dead baby was out of view.

“I really do,” she said once more inside her head.

An exhumation and the scientific, the clinical, procedures that follow it are nothing short of ghoulish. No one with a heart could say otherwise. The very idea of waking the dead with the scrape of a shovel is a revolting affair. No matter if it is part of one’s job. No matter whether it is clinical. Ripperton made an excuse, and Hannah stood alone with medical examiner Lina Kent as she and her assistant, an Asian man with the singsong name of Ron Fong, went about the business that was Enrique Garcia. Halogen lights blasted the boy’s little figure, a mummified body with sunken eyes and reptilian lips, drawn tightly in a peculiar smile. Body fluids had stained the shiny polyester fabric that had cushioned his lifeless frame. While M.E. Kent recorded each observation into a shoulder microphone, Fong, chomping on a mouthful of peppermints, snapped photographs with a Polaroid camera. Images spat out of the camera.

“Looking at the original autopsy report I see no mention of the crescent-shaped contusion on the subject’s right forearm…. Ron, take a close-up, please.”

The M.E., a sixty-ish woman with snowy hair and dimestore bifocals on a chain around her corrugated neck, stepped aside while Fong reloaded the camera and took three shots in rapid succession. Dr. Kent was so nonchalant about her request for the close-up that Hannah nearly missed its importance. She looked through the report. Nothing had been written about a crescent-shaped mark.

“What is it?” Hannah asked.

“Hard to say for sure,” the M.E. said slowly. “But I’d be willing to bet a cup of coffee that it’s a bite mark.”

“There’s no mention of any bite trauma,” Hannah said, flipping through reports and stepping closer to the little body stretched and pinned out like a butterfly on a corkboard.

Dr. Kent looked at the clock with the red sweep second hand. They’d been picking apart Enrique’s remains for two hours—longer than they thought they’d need, given the fact that he’d been autopsied before.

“So there’s no mention of bite trauma,” she said, repeating Hannah’s remarks. “That’s not really surprising. Dean Wallen was about the worst pathologist that ever made a Y incision on a cadaver.” She tossed her latex gloves into an empty stainless-steel drum marked for hazardous waste. “Cases like this make me wonder how many more we’ll have to dig up and review. Whenever something like this happens it invites more prisoners with half-good lawyers to call the evidence into question. I’ve done seven of these and I don’t want to do any more.”

“Retirement is next year,” Fong reminded her.

“Six months,” she said, pausing and adding with a smile, “and twelve days. Give me a calculator and I’ll give you the hours and minutes.”

While the M.E. and her young assistant refocused on the work at hand, Hannah stared at the body. She hadn’t noticed it before in the blinding light of late summer’s day, but the child’s skin was covered with the milky white of mold spores that resembled baby powder, or a light dusting of snow. She felt a chill deep inside. The eyes had sunken into their sockets, but other than that he was remarkably preserved. Though the image was oddly sweet in its own peculiarly horrific way, Hannah felt her stomach churn. The baby was a beautiful boy, she thought. Beautiful, and stiff, like some waxy doll no one wanted anymore. Beads of sweat collected at her temples, though the room was kept on the cool side. Rather than touch her hands to her face, she turned her head to her shoulders and wiped the perspiration. And though the stench of death hung in the air, it wasn’t the smell but the sight before her that gave her pause. It was familiar in its own cruel way.

Back in her office later that day, Dr. Kent phoned Hannah. Enrique Garcia had not only been bitten and bruised, but evidence found in his lung tissue indicated he had most likely drowned.

“Drowned?” Hannah asked.

“Yes. A wetting agent, some kind of soap residue, was present in the tox report.”

“Soap?”

Dr. Kent paused a moment. “I’d say Mr. Bubble, if I had to guess without a full analysis. I’ve seen it before.”

With her husband asleep, making the kind of muffled snores that had never irritated her until that night, Hannah grabbed her pillow and dragged her tired body to the sofa. Couldn’t sleep. So tired. It ran around her head like a pinball in one of those old-school arcade machines Amber liked to play. The mantel clock chimed at one. She knew that in an hour the numbers would increase. There would be no sleep, only the wait for the chimes. She took the clock from above the fireplace and carried it to the kitchen, sliding the pocket door as she returned to the couch. There, she thought, at least that will silence the clock. She pulled a knit throw around her shoulders and slumped against the arm of the camel-back. She scrunched up in a ball as the tears began to fall. She remembered the smoke, and like the flash of a camera an image of cedar boughs and piles of gilded pinecones came to her. She pressed her palms into her eyes to stop the images. And for a second, it worked. But when the images resumed, it was the box in the Safeway bag that came to her mind. She remembered unfolding the brown paper and lifting the lid to peer inside. She hadn’t touched the contents, but had stared at two pairs of little shoes that nestled in the folds of tissue and packing peanuts.

She turned on the television. In a half hour she was able, somehow, to escape her memories. She heard the toilet flush and her husband’s footsteps come down the hall. He turned on the light.

“Honey, are you all right?” Ethan stood over her in his Jockey shorts and T-shirt. His whisker-stubbled face was awash with concern.

“Can’t sleep, that’s all,” she said quickly.

“Headache?” Ethan turned on the lamp, running past the brightest wattage back to the lowest light.

“A little,” she said, flinching as the light took over the room. Her face was red and blotchy and her eyes puffy from her tears. She turned her head away, but it was too late.

Ethan moved closer. “Hannah, you’ve been crying.” His words were full of concern. “What is it, honey? Is it Garcia?”

Hannah wanted to speak, but she couldn’t. She felt a strange tightness in her throat that prevented her from saying anything. The thought of her speechlessness nearly caused her to smile, in that odd way people sometimes do when they are frightened or unsure, but her lips did not move. Ethan put his arms around her. He smelled of sleep, and his warm skin was comforting.

“Please talk to me,” he said quietly as he held her.

“I can’t,” she finally answered. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m falling down some dark hole, deeper and deeper. I don’t want to go, but I can feel myself being sucked in. Taken back to Rock Point and my family’s tree farm.” Tears started to fall again and she buried her face in his chest. “I feel so out of it. So alone.”

“But you’re not alone,” he said tenderly. “You have us.”

Her gaze shifted from her hands to her husband’s face. His eyes glistened with emotion. “Sometimes I don’t know what I have, Ethan. Sometimes I don’t know who I am and where I’ve been—” She put her fingertips to his mouth to stifle him from speaking. “Before you say anything,” she said, “I’ll admit it sounds completely crazy and it could be, but it is the truth. So much has been said about my life, or my mother’s, that I don’t know what’s real.”

“None of that matters. You know what does.”

With that, he took her by the hand and led her down the hall to Amber’s room. He said nothing. He didn’t have to. He didn’t even point to emphasize the connection. Hannah knew it. The two slipped back under the covers of their antique pineapple-post bed and held each other close and kissed. As the early-morning sun crawled over the saw tooth of the mountains, Ethan and Hannah made love, and for at least a little while, she set aside what haunted her.

The glow of their closeness, their much-needed love-making, was shattered the next morning at the breakfast table. As Ethan ate a bagel that had seen better days, Hannah poured milk into a cereal bowl as their daughter dropped a bomb.

“I met a lady that knows your mommy,” Amber said.

Hannah felt the blood drain from her face. She steadied herself and looked at Ethan. He, too, sat in stunned silence. Milk splashed on the floor, spraying the dark wood white. Hannah stared at it for a millisecond, then grabbed a paper towel. She thought she was going to vomit.

“You did?” Ethan asked. His tone was calm, but as a cop he was a pretty good actor when he needed to be. “What do you mean? You know that Mommy’s mother is in heaven.” He hated the euphemism, but at Amber’s age it would be harder to explain that Grandma was in hell, or at least he hoped she was.

Hannah set the milk carton on the table, unspooled some paper towels, and spoke. “Tell us what happened. Was it at school?”

Amber knew her parents were upset, and a flicker of fear came over her face. Not because she knew exactly why she should be afraid, but empathy nevertheless set in. Something was wrong and she didn’t know what, exactly, she had done. She didn’t get in a car with some man with a sack of candy.

“We just talked. I didn’t do anything.”

“Honey,” Hannah said. “No one’s mad. Sorry. Just interested in learning more about the lady.”

Amber looked satisfied. “Outside. Yesterday. The lady was walking her dog and came over when I was sidewalk-chalking with Maddie. She came over, we petted her dog, and she said she knew Mommy, and Mommy’s mother. She said, you and Grandma were ‘peas in a pod.’ She was nice.”

Hannah’s stomach turned once more. She leaped to cruel conclusions, none of which she could voice or needed to voice at that moment. Ethan patted her arm and dismissed what Amber had just said.

“Must have been a mistake,” he said. “Mommy never really knew her mother. Aunt Leanna raised her. You know that, Amber. Right?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, clearly confused.

Hannah’s memory loss wasn’t a soap opera case of amnesia, the kind that is brought back with a bump on the head by the evil twin sister. It certainly wasn’t the result of Alzheimer’s or some other disease that steals the mind of the happy and sad times that make memories worth visiting. It had been a studied effort. One that she had accomplished on her own. Hannah never talked about anything from those days, especially once the nightmare became real. She shuttered the pictures in her mind so handily that when she needed to recall the face of her mother there was nothing there. A shadowy form. A face devoid of features. Not even a voice.

And now her little girl had forced her hand. She needed to remember.

“What did the lady look like, honey?”

“Just a lady. She was old, maybe forty or seventy.”

Amber’s ability to pinpoint age needed work.

“That’s a big gap,” Hannah said softly. “Did she have gray hair?”

She shook her head. “It was dark, but it didn’t match her face.”

Hannah looked at Amber quizzically; her daughter was untouched by the past and she wanted it to stay that way.

“Match her face?”

“I don’t know. She had a grandma face, but mom hair.”

Amber slid from the table to scurry for her backpack.

“Don’t even think it,” Ethan said.

Hannah pretended not to be bothered. “She must have heard wrong, because this isn’t happening.”