A Wicked Snow

If Hannah Logan had shared any happy times with her mother, they must have been the warm evenings of Oregon’s all-too-brief summer. Just after 9 p.m., Claire Logan would summon her daughter, and they’d sit on a log that had been split lengthwise and shaped as a bench to watch their moon-flowers unfurl. Her father had created the bench with a chain-saw, during the off-season the year he thought he could sell “Lumber Jack Furniture.” But each evening, against a stump of a tree that had burned into a stubby snag, mother and daughter would sit and watch the flowers come to life. The white moonflowers, grown from seeds purchased from Burpee’s catalog, had always been Claire’s favorite. Their almost magical opening was a cherished reminder of her youth in Oregon. Hannah was equally enthralled. In front of their eyes, milky white tubes would twist and open into trumpets. From closed tight to open and swirling in fifteen minutes.

And while the pirouetting imagery was lovely, later, when she revisited those moments, Hannah could see that her mother was a bitter woman. She was a schemer, more than a dreamer.

“Hannah,” she said, “don’t let a man get in the way of your dreams. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t be what your heart tells you.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Remember my words. Carve them on my headstone with acid when I’m gone. I don’t care. As long as you remember.”

Hannah nodded, then nuzzled her mother and smiled at the laughter of her brothers as they played in their upstairs bedroom.

“I remember when Hannah told me about the moon-flowers,” childhood friend Michelle Masour later told a magazine reporter. “Her mother was weird, but she did have some good qualities. Hannah loved her mother. She never saw any of this stuff coming. Not at all.”

—From Twenty in a Row: The Claire Logan

Murders, by Marcella Hoffman