A Wicked Snow

Chapter Twenty-three

Outside his window, summer weather flirted with Portland, Oregon. Lilac blooms were faded and turning brown, and grass everywhere needed a good shearing. It was a half year after the Logan farm burned to the ground. Downtown in the offices of the FBI, a voice cut through a tinny-sounding speakerphone and Special Agent Jeff Bauer set down his tepid cup of coffee, an oil slick of powdered creamer swirling inside. He leaned forward and strained to hear. The sound resonated like a cheap citizen’s-band radio, and he shook his head for the thousandth time. The federal government could afford a four-hundred-dollar hammer, he thought, swallowing the last gulp of oily brew, but Uncle Sam couldn’t get the bucks together for decent communication equipment for the FBI.

“Bauer, there’s someone here to see you,” a female agent’s voice cracked for the second time. It was Special Agent Bonnie Ingersol, a twenty-five-year-old with a master’s degree in criminology, who begrudgingly filled in to work the phones during lunch when the “front-desk girl” was off to lunch with her boyfriend. The front-desk “girl” was fifty-six and more a grandmother than an in- génue. Ingersol hated the duty, but was too nice to fight it. Paying dues was part of the drill. Being pleasant was fine with her, as long as it wasn’t forever. She was as shrewd as she was beautiful, with long dark brown hair and ice-blue eyes.

“Says her daughter’s missing,” Ingersol said. “Might have something to do with the Logan case.”

“Huh?” Bauer responded, staring at the squawk box.

“The woman says her daughter worked for Claire Logan,” Ingersol said. “She hasn’t seen her in almost a year.” She lifted her finger from the “talk” button and waited for Bauer to respond. “Are you there? Jeesh, Bauer, she thinks her daughter’s Number 20.”

This time Bauer muttered back into the box that he’d go out to the lobby to meet her. Not again. Not another. It was only a few months after Marcus Wheaton had been sent to run the license plate paint-drying tunnel at the penitentiary in Cutter’s Landing. Liz Wheaton’s calls to the FBI had stopped by then. She no longer threatened to picket the front steps of the Spruce County Courthouse with her claim that her son had been railroaded by a conspiracy of local and federal cops. All but one of the military men had been identified and their bones returned to the earth in family cemeteries across the nation. Only two mysteries remained. Was Claire Logan really gone? And, if she was, just whose body was under the piano?

Bauer smiled at the woman in the waiting room. Peggy Hjermstad was thirty-nine and very pretty. Her eyes were the color of Navajo turquoise, and her skin was thin, milky white, almost translucent. She stood in front of the FBI—FIDELITY, BRAVERY, AND INTEGRITY—plaque that was the sole adornment of the waiting area, wearing a faded batik skirt from an import store. Silver-and-peacock-feather earrings fluttered from her earlobes. Bauer introduced himself and offered her coffee.

Peggy Hjermstad grimaced. “Tea would be better,” she said. “Herbal would be best. If you have it. Honey would be nice, too.”

He smiled and led her to a waiting room while Bonnie Ingersol, a woman smarter than two-thirds of the men in the office, scuttled off to look for tea. Just as Ingersol turned the corner with tea bags flailing and an enamel hot pot to heat water, Peggy started talking. As she spoke, her arms moved and her silver charm bracelet tinkled like small wind chimes.

“You know I had an inkling, a feeling, about this for some time. When my daughter didn’t call me on my birthday, well, that was the first clue she was in trouble of some kind. But I dismissed it from my mind.”

Ingersol, thankfully relieved of her phone duty, took a seat next to Bauer. “When was that?” she asked.

“February 2nd. Groundhog’s Day. Oh, I know the jokes, but that is my birthday. Serena didn’t call and unless she was strung out on something, I just couldn’t fathom why. It wasn’t that we even had a falling out. Not really.”

“Let’s back up,” Bauer said. “Tell me about your daughter.”

She reeled in her sodden teabag like a miniature anchor, rolling the string around a red-and-white plastic stir stick.

“It’s all here,” Hjermstad said, rifling through her purse. “I made a flyer to post around town. Saw one up on the way over here. Still up. I know it should have made me sad to see it, but you know, I actually smiled. There are still decent people in this world. They left it up!”

Bauer and Ingersol reviewed the smudged flyer that had been folded so many times, it nearly split into quarters. Serena Moon Hjermstad was nineteen, five-foot-six, and 120 pounds, her hair was brown, and her eyes green.

“When the sun shines in her hair, she has—had—red highlights.”

Hjermstad had come from her home on the Oregon coast to the FBI offices to discuss the possibility that her daughter was the headless corpse under the piano that had first been thought to be Claire Logan. In that case, the color of her eyes and her hair had little relevance; both agents thought it, but they didn’t say so.

“Last time I heard from her,” she went on, “she was hanging around a sandwich shop in Cutter—not far from Rock Point. Said she was going to get a job at a tree farm.”

“Did she say it was Rock Point?” Ingersol asked.

She shook her head. “But she did say she could bike there. Rock Point is in biking distance from Cutter.”

“Yes,” Bauer answered, though he didn’t want to be dismissive. By that time he’d talked to at least fifteen, maybe twenty, other mothers who thought their daughter might be the one pinned under the piano. He urged her to be specific. “You know, Mrs. Hjermstad, we have chased down a hundred or more tips from people who thought their daughter, sister, mother, cousin, neighbor, biology teacher… someone could be victim twenty.”

Hjermstad put down her tea and faced Bauer.

“But I just feel it has to be her. She wouldn’t drop off the face of the earth. She really did love her family. Didn’t always see eye to eye, but she loved us. I just know it deep in my bones that she’s gone. Her light has gone to heaven.”

“Couldn’t she have just gone off somewhere? Maybe met someone?” he asked.

Hjermstad wouldn’t hear of it. Her body stiffened. “No, I don’t think so. Serena had no reason to do that. We accepted all of her soul mates—every one of them,” she said, forcing a smile as she realized the irony of her words. “She’d have no reason to run off and leave us to worry.”

Bauer could tell she was beginning to tear up. “How do you know she worked for Logan?” he asked.

“I don’t know for sure, but she did send me a beautiful holiday swag. Spruce and balsam, I think. It was in a gift box from the Logan farm. I just know she had to have bought it because she worked there. Maybe had an employee discount? You’re the FBI. Can’t you find out if she worked there?”

“Wish we could, ma’am,” Bauer said. “But there are no records left. Everything burned up. And there’s no paper trail, either. Claire Logan didn’t pay taxes for her employees. No record. Nothing.”

Mrs. Hjermstad finished her tea and got up to leave. Her hands trembled slightly, and for the first time Bauer understood something that had eluded him in training: Peggy Hjermstad, like so many mothers, would rather know that her child was dead, and where she was, rather than not know anything at all. She didn’t want her to be a Bundy girl, dumped like roadkill on some mountain-side; bones scattered by animals and bleached by the filtered rays of a Pacific Northwest sun. Peggy had lived with that image every night when she closed her turquoise eyes to sleep. Sleep, she found in the months after Serena stopped calling, would never came easily until she had answers.

“I just want to know,” she said. “You understand?”

“I’ll let you know,” he said, catching Ingersol’s eye and corrected himself, “We’ll let you know if we, if I, can tie her to the crime scene.”

“Thanks. I just want to know that she’s gone. Gone for sure.”

With that, she pressed a slip of paper, the flyer she had folded like a Chinese fan, into Bauer’s open hand.

“Call me if you find out anything. I mean anything.”

He nodded once more.

“Mr. Bauer,” she asked timidly, as though she was treading in a private area, “has Hannah Logan ever said who she thought was Number 20? I was thinking maybe she knows my daughter.”

“I’m sorry. She believed the corpse was her mother’s in the beginning. She couldn’t even guess who it was if it”—he stopped and corrected himself—“if she was an imposter, a stand-in.”

Ingersol offered to walk Hjermstad to the door.

“Thank you, dear. And thank you so much for the tea. It was delicious. How old are you? You look about my Serena’s age…”

A moment later, Bauer cornered Ingersol to let off steam. Serena Hjermstad’s mother would never get the final word that she needed because Spruce County had screwed up and the body was cremated before processing for forensics. There had been so much finger pointing, even an FBI agent couldn’t pinpoint who exactly had made the blunder of all blunders when the headless body was cremated before autopsy.

“I’d like to have those fools in Spruce County face Mrs. Hjermstad and tell her that they are sorry for what they did, and if the body was her daughter’s—and no one will really know for sure—well, sorry about that, too.”

Ingersol noticed Bauer’s face redden. His ears, the bridge of his nose, even his lips grew darker as his anger and frustration swelled.

“From what I heard,” he said, “they don’t own up to anything.”

Bauer was mad as hell and knew that he and Peggy Hjermstad would both be cheated because of the incompetence of a couple of buffoons from a small town no one cared about until twenty people were found dead there.

“We’re never really gonna know,” he said bitterly, “if the victim is Serena, some other girl, or Claire Logan.”

Ingersol disagreed. “We’ll find out. It might take a while, but we’ll get there. I have faith in us. You know, the whole concept that got us to the academy in the first place, good over evil?”

“Catching the bad guys and carrying the badge, I remember,” he muttered. “I just think Claire Logan was a lot smarter than we imagined. Maybe even smarter than us.”

“Smarter than you? Stop a second. I need to write that one down,” Ingersol said.