A Wicked Snow

Chapter Ten

Eastern Oregon is nothing like the wet side—the western side—of the state. The mountains that divide Oregon into two distinct regions act as a barrier from the marine rainfall that keeps Portland and points south and west lush throughout most of the year. The eastern side is vast and dry—a landscape of craggy basalt formations and glacial moraines. Only through the lenses of a pair of sunglasses is it cool and green. But when irrigated, the soil produces the world’s sweetest and most succulent fruits. Fruit stands clustered the roadside now and then, though most seemed abandoned or hopelessly unkempt. Where the ranch land crawled from one end of the horizon to the other was a dried basin, a crusty residue of earth and tumbleweeds. Just add water. Just keep driving. Just get the hell out of the east and run for the Pacific Ocean.

But Hannah was heading northeast, going away from the ocean. She was following the interstate to Cutter’s Landing, so named for an old airstrip and not a body of water. It was three hours into the desert, a population injected into the dirt of Oregon’s bleakest eastern territory. It was a place for losers. Cutter’s Landing was a town of romance readers, ex-hookers, and do-gooders who lived in rundown frame houses and converted Quonset huts. The citizens were the women and the spawn of the killers and rapists who claimed 97337 as the zip code of the vile and depraved. Cutter’s Landing was the home of Eastern Oregon’s Correctional Facility for Men, and Hannah Griffin had a date with one of them.

A black-and-white sign with a flashing yellow light flew by the windshield: APPROACHING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY: DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.

Hannah lowered the volume of the Spanish language radio station she had endured for the last hour of her journey to the center of nowhere. The bombastic host went soft… then away. And once more she was alone.

Oregon’s largest prison was also its oldest, having been built brick by brick in the mid-1920s by the descendants of Chinese coolie laborers, whose blood, some said, never dried. In fact, eighteen men and two women died when a load of dynamite unexpectedly detonated as they prepared to blast a two-story-deep foundation out of a basalt basin that had been the remnant of a great lava flow. When the workers weren’t blasting, they were hauling brick from the tracks of what would come to be known as Cutter’s Landing when an airstrip was laid on top of the dusty landscape. Some considered the work barely short of slavery.

The towering bricks of the prison cast a foreboding image on the craggy hillside. Four turrets sprang from the main building like razor wire–encrusted dragonheads. No trees grew around the site. The basalt formation on which the prison had been erected was a sterile stone dish the size of six football fields. The penitentiary housed upward of 400 men, though there had been more residing there in the recent past. When it was built, it had been designed to hold no more than 250.

Hannah followed little yellow signs to the parking lot adjacent to what some idiot bureaucrat had dubbed the “Visitor’s Comfort Area.” She wasn’t sure if it sounded more like a bathroom or a motel. As she pulled her Volvo closer, she passed row after row of dust-covered old cars. Many of the cars’ windows had the greasy fingerprints of children run amok. A few had tattered yellow ribbons tied to their antennae. It was sad, but clear: the exhookers and the do-gooders who populated Cutter’s Landing had arrived in droves to see their men, to meet in the run-down visitors’ area to play cards or maybe even sneak a little sex.

Hannah parked next to a boat of a car that had “government-issue” stamped all over it. A man, one of the two she’d come to see, was leaning against the driver’s door, talking on a cell phone. His profile was familiar, and the sight of him brought a nervous smile to her lips. It was Jeff Bauer. Hannah turned off the ignition and reached for her right shoe. She was glad the drive was over, but she loathed the final destination.

Jeff Bauer had arrived at the prison parking lot an hour earlier. He’d actually stayed at the Landing Motel, thinking that getting a night’s sleep before meeting with Wheaton might not be a bad idea. But it had not been a restful night. At about 3:30 that morning, he called the manager and told the twenty-three-year-old wisenheimer to get his ass out of bed to quiet the rumble that was going on in the room next to his. Pounding on the door, smacking the walls, and yelling hadn’t stifled the noise. Up all night and smelling of bong water and pepperoni, the smart-ass told Bauer to fuck off. Bauer informed the manager he was a federal agent. Two minutes later, the party was over and silence returned.

Dressed in a gray chalk-striped suit, a white shirt, and solid red silk tie, he looked every bit the man he was. His hair had a few small glints of silver, and pale streaks highlighted the deepening fissures on his face. Whether deep in thought or wincing in pain when wrestling a suspect to the ground, Bauer had a habit of scrunching his face. He joked that it was his “concerned” look. In reality, that was exactly what it was.

He was older, Hannah could see, but then again, so was she.

He flipped off the phone and turned around, and for the first time in years, their eyes met.

“Hannah? Is that you?” he said. His smile was warm and familiar.

“Agent Bauer?”

“I got your message,” he said, moving toward her. “I thought of calling you to tell you to forget it, but if you’re anything like you were twenty years ago, you were packed by the time you called.”

“I was,” she said.

“You look great. I mean, considering the long ride across the shittiest landscape this side of Oklahoma.”

“You look well, too.” She retrieved her purse from the backseat and did a quick glance to ensure all the doors were locked. “And you’re right. The drive was long, dusty, and boring.”

“This won’t be boring,” he said, squinting at the sun as he sized her up. She was grown, beautiful. Her hair flashed golden in the sun.

“You think Marcus sent the package to me,” she said.

“You must, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“I’d like you to read his note,” he said. He reached into his pocket and handed her a folded letter.

She took it and read:

“Before I can do that, I need to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Maybe you do, too. I know things. I do.”

“Is he talking about her?”

“Ghosts of the past? Honestly, Hannah, I don’t know. I’ve wanted to see this nutcase for twenty years. I’ve wanted to slam him to the ground and hold a gun to his fat head to get him to tell me what he really knows.” He motioned at a small bus coming toward them. “Maybe he will tell us something that we’ve all wanted to know for a very long time.”

“I know that. And as much as I want to see him, I almost can’t bear to do it,” she said.

“Understood,” he answered. “I can only imagine.”

“Imagine is a good word. I’ve imagined talking to him over the years. I’ve imagined shaking him and pleading with him to tell me where she is…if he knows,” she added softly.

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.