A Wicked Snow

Chapter Twenty-five

The salmon served in Warden Thomas’s dining room was a little dry, which was odd because it was poached in very good white wine with scallions and should have been moist. But the Waldorf salad was exactly as Hannah Griffin preferred it, light on the mayonnaise dressing, with large pieces of walnuts and grapes among sweet-tart apples. She wondered fleetingly if a serial killer or some notorious rapist had been the chef, but she dismissed the thought because she knew no inmates could wield a knife at the prison, at least not official cutlery in the kitchen.

Polite conversation filled the first few minutes as Hannah and FBI agent Jeff Bauer worked past the awkwardness and the bizarre circumstances of their reunion. They had time to kill after their interview with Wheaton had been cut short by the prisoner’s mealtime requirements. The break was welcome. Bauer could see that Hannah was a grown woman now, beautiful and intelligent. She was a mother. A wife. And she had sought a career in law enforcement as a CSI.

No surprise there, he thought. Any psych student could have pegged that choice.

Bauer was older, wiser, maybe even a little jaded by the years. But Hannah saw him as he had been to her that terrible day, twenty years before: a hero. He’d kept himself in good shape, and though he was in his forties, his features were still taut and his jawline crisp. Jeff Bauer still appeared as he did when they met in the Rock Point Inn almost two decades before.

Hannah speared a bite of salad. “I knew we’d see each other again one day,” she said.

“I thought so, too.” Bauer smiled. “I tried to keep tabs on you, best I could. You know, without getting in the way of you living a life.” His demeanor changed and the smile disappeared. He had meant to mention Leanna sooner. “I’m sorry about your aunt. I heard she passed on a while back.”

“It’s been five years,” Hannah said. She put down her fork and on her lap, she folded her napkin in an accordion fold. She was nervous. “Aunt Leanna was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in March and was dead before Memorial Day. Not much can be done for the disease, no matter what they say.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Your uncle?”

“Uncle Rod’s doing all right. Still running the store. Still missing the only woman he ever loved. We’re close. He loves Amber.”

Bauer looked interested. “That’s your little girl?”

“Yes,” she said. Hannah reached for her purse, but, of course, it wasn’t there. It was with the guards at the visitors’ screening room. No purses, wallets, nothing could be brought inside. She’d show a picture later. They talked a while longer about her family life with Ethan and Amber. Bauer was a good listener, and in a way, Hannah felt as though he needed to hear every bit of what had happened to her over the years. She knew his own personal life had been a disaster—and he had grown up with everything going for him. Loving family, an excellent education, good job, great personality, but all of that added up to nothing. No wife, nor any children.

Hannah, who had lived under the insidious shadow of a murderous mother, seemingly inexplicably, had achieved everything.

In a stream of consciousness rambling that only served to heighten her own nervousness, Hannah told Bauer about her life as a crime scene investigator and her love for gardening. She talked about the drive up from California and how she hadn’t eaten anything all day. She’d skipped the free pastry at the motel in Janesville. And as she talked, so rapid and seemingly without the need for air, only one disclosure surprised the FBI agent.

“I don’t mention this to anyone, of course,” Hannah said, “but Ethan and I don’t use a real tree at Christmas-time.” She stopped and studied Bauer’s handsome face. “It appears to be the only residual aspect of what happened that remains with me to this day. The weirdest part is that I love trees. I love the woods. But I can’t have a fir or pine in the house.”

“Few could blame you for that,” Bauer said, gently interjecting a word into the nearly one-sided conversation. “A lot of us never thought about Christmas in the same way after that day.”

Hannah sipped her water. “We didn’t even have a tree at all until Amber was three,” she said. “Some things you have to do for your children.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, but I can imagine. You know, I guess, that I never had children.”

She nodded. “So I gathered.”

And so the conversation went, catching up, touching on the points of two lives that had once intersected, and were now reunited. After a while—after Madsen brought in coffee and a plate of cookies piled like a pyramid— they turned their talk to the reason she had come to Cutter’s Landing from Santa Louisa, and he from Portland.

“Warden’s wife made them.” Madsen indicated the chocolate chip cookies. “Instead of tollhouse, she calls them ‘jailhouse’ cookies.” He rolled his eyes before turning to leave.

“They look delicious,” Hannah said. “Tell her thank you. We never knew prison could be so—”

“Civilized,” Bauer broke in.

“Hospitable,” Hannah corrected.

Madsen nodded without turning around. He called over his shoulder as the door shut behind him. “About half an hour and I can take you back to see Wheaton. Warden said so.”

“He looks terrible,” Hannah said of Wheaton after Madsen disappeared. “I’d seen him on that TV interview a few years back, and he wasn’t nearly so heavy.”

The show to which she was referring was a prime-time special hosted by one of the morning news anchors, a blonde with a clipped nose and reshaped brows. The show breathlessly promised an inside look at America’s most infamous criminals. The Wheaton interview had been one of the hyped bits. It was broadcast seven or eight years ago. The Wheaton interview was a complete joke. All he talked about was some acrylic paintings he was creating on small oval-shaped stones. Each was the image of a curled-up sleeping cat.

“I saw that,” Bauer said. “The last few years haven’t been so terrific for Wheaton, that’s for sure.” He was referring to the inmate’s hideous girth and the clear tubing that ran from his oxygen tank to his nose, a plastic lifeline that kept him somewhat mobile.

“He knows where she is,” she said. “I know it. You know it. And he knows we are all members of the club that still gives a whit. The information is ours for the taking,” she said, reaching for a second cookie, then stopping herself as her gut did another somersault.

“The fact of the matter is, Hannah, that Wheaton is on his last legs and he’s looking to jerk a few chains before he goes. I’ve seen this before. ‘Come on gather near my deathbed and I’ll tell you who took the money and where they put it.’ Except it never comes. Nothing ever comes. All they want is someone to talk to because their family flushed them down the toilet.”

Hannah didn’t feel that way.

“He’s going to talk,” she said. “He has to.”

Madsen returned to the dining room. By now his visits to the room with food, coffee, cookies, and a half smile made him seem more a waiter than a prison employee. He told the pair that Wheaton had been returned to the visiting cell and they were free to see him again.

“If you want to finish your coffee, I’ll tell him it’ll be a while.” Madsen actually smiled. “Joking, of course.”

Marcus Wheaton sat behind the scarred wooden table, his hands folded over his ample, nearly breast-like chest, and his battered oxygen tank at the ready.

“How was the salmon?” he asked as Bauer and Hannah entered the room.

Hannah didn’t want to know how he knew the menu. She didn’t want to think he might have had a hand in making the meal. She was already queasy.

“Fine,” she said.

Wheaton looked surprised. “Looked a bit dry to me,” he said.

“We’re not here to talk about prison cuisine,” Bauer said, a little annoyed. “We came to talk about Claire.”

“I’m sure,” Wheaton shot back, fixing his good eye completely on Bauer. “But I’ve invited you here and I’ll tell you what I want you to know. Claire”—he stopped and looked deep into Hannah’s eyes—“your mother is only part of it.”

Hannah felt a wave of nausea and bolstered herself by pressing her knees under the table, with such force she nearly levitated it.

“Fine. Start talking, Wheaton,” Bauer instructed. “Or we’ll leave.”

Wheaton’s face bubbled with mock indignation. “Then go.”

Hannah wanted no part of leaving, not then, so she spoke up. “We’re not going anywhere, Marcus,” she said. “You want to tell us something, so please do.”

Wheaton leaned back in what Hannah noticed for the first time was an office chair reinforced with steel. He seemed satisfied that he had their rapt attention. “First things first,” the big man said. “I don’t really care if you believe me or not. I’m going to die soon anyway,” he said, regarding his oxygen tank. “I’ve wished my own death for twenty fucking years here, and now, the wish is about to come true. A little late, though. I’d have rather died inside. Prayed for it. But no such luck. I’m just alive enough to be booted out of here to make my mother’s life miserable. Sweet, isn’t it?”

No one said anything. The big Buddha was talking like there was no tomorrow.

“I did not kill any of those men. I did not kill your brothers.” He fixed his eye on Hannah. She pressed her hands into her abdomen to quell the uneasiness. “You know this, don’t you, Hannah?”

“I don’t know what I know. I was a child then.”

Bauer instinctively reached over to her, but she refused his gesture. Whatever comfort Hannah needed, she’d find it within herself. Leanna had taught her that. When you have no one, you find you need no one.

“And, though this seems to mean very little to anyone out there, I did not murder the girl, the one the media calls ‘Number 20.’” His tone was indignant, as if he had nothing to do with any aspect of the crime. “It sickens me that she’s nothing more than a number. It has for a long time. Long as I’ve acknowledged that she’s got a name. She was a sweet kid named Serena. I don’t recall her last name.”

“Hjermstad. Serena Hjermstad was her name,” Bauer said. His mind flashed to his visit with Peggy Hjermstad not long after the murders were discovered and how she had wanted to believe that her daughter had been killed at Icicle Creek Farm. Killed anywhere. Anything to stop the cruel hope that looped inside her that her daughter was out there. The woman’s peacock earrings came to his mind. And so did the drawn-to-the-point-of-breaking faces that had belonged to the other dozen or so mothers who had made what must have been the most wrenching drive of their lives—to the Portland offices of the FBI. All sought the same thing: to find closure to the mysteries of their own daughters’ disappearances.

“I don’t know any Serena Hjermstad.” Hannah searched her memory. “I don’t know her.”

Wheaton disagreed. “But you do. You called her by another name, Didi, I believe.”

“That was not her,” Hannah said, her voice slightly wavering. Going to hold it together, she thought. “Didi left weeks before the fire. She was gone. I know that. I remember my mother telling me that Didi had to get back to Seattle or Portland. I think she left for Thanksgiving.” Hannah’s voice quavered slightly before she found her reserves and bucked up. “She could not have been Number 20.”

Wheaton didn’t acknowledge Hannah’s comment. He simply barreled on. He stopped only to drink water, more than a quart by Bauer’s estimate. He talked about Serena and how Claire had hired her late in the season before the fire. According to Wheaton, Serena/Didi worked in the wreath shed with four other women from Rock Point. He described her as a cute, but unreliable, young woman who came to work late wrapped in a veil of rose-scented perfume applied in the morning to obscure pot smoke from the night before. She was angry at her mother for not understanding that her life was her own.

“I’m not living for anyone but me,” she had told Wheaton one evening when she hitched a ride back to the Johnny Appleseed Motel where she was staying just outside of Rock Point. “I’ve had my parents tell me what to do and I’ve had a dumb-shit boyfriend run me like a clock. Forget that. I want to figure out my own way,” she had said.

Wheaton said he liked the young woman.

“She was nice to me, friendly-like,” he said. “She was pretty, too. A little ditzy, but you couldn’t have asked for a nicer girl. Too bad what happened.”

“Can we get on with this?” It was Bauer. He followed his question with a loud sigh. He wasn’t as annoyed as he sounded—in fact, he was fascinated—he just wanted to keep Wheaton on track. If they had to hear every little thing, all of his thoughts and feelings, then, by God, it ought to be done at a decent clip.

Wheaton glowered. “I don’t like to be rushed,” he said. “You know you are only here because of my good nature and sense of fair play.”

“Fine. Can we move on? Please?”

“Don’t pressure me. I don’t like to be pushed, either.”

Bauer disregarded the comment and Wheaton gulped down more water. He went on to say that Claire came across Serena/Didi in the back of the supply building adjacent to the wreath maker’s shed. It was two days before Thanksgiving, 1976.

“Didi was freaking out. She had found the jar of teeth,” Wheaton said, stopping not for dramatic reasons, but because the idea of it repulsed him even two decades later. The teeth to which he was referring belonged to the seventeen men Claire Logan had smashed with a carpenter’s hammer.

“She smashed them out herself, trust me on that. I had nothing to do with any of it. Claire told me that her biggest fear was that one day, long after she was gone, someone would dig up one of the victims and identify him by dental records.”

Hannah put her fingers to her mouth. It was an unconscious gesture of horror for the cadavers that had been brutalized by the force of her mother’s hammer.

“Jesus Christ,” she said softly.

“I didn’t do anything but cover up for your mother.” He blinked his good eye.

“What happened to Didi?” she asked, staring back at Wheaton.

“She erased her. Like I’ve said, I wasn’t there and I didn’t see it. But from what she told me, Claire swung at her with a chainsaw. It wasn’t on,” he said, as though that were somehow beyond possibility. “She bashed Didi so hard she damn near cut off her head. When she told me what she’d done she used the old saying, you know the one where kids pick dandelions and flick off the flower tops? Mama had a baby and the head popped off? That’s what she said. I thought it was funny back then,” he said, showing for the first time an indication of remorse.

Now Bauer’s face was pale. Even Madsen who had lingered on the other side of the room looked ill. Hannah steadied herself while Wheaton continued, oddly smiling as he recounted the details of his story.

When Claire had first told Wheaton about what had happened, he said that he assumed she’d want help with the burial. But when he went out to the supply building, there was no body. Not a drop of blood could be seen anywhere. The place was cleaner than a hospital room.

Hannah remembered the supply building; it came to her as though she was standing inside it in a dream. It was in perfect order. Her mother was fanatical about having a place for everything… “and keeping everything in its place.” In her mind, she searched the rows of spools of grosgrain and French ribbons, the floral tape, the wire in various gauges. There was shelving to the ceiling in that drafty little room, and yes, a row of jars at the very top.

Wheaton licked his lips and went on. He was a steam engine now. A big, Day-Glo orange, stinking steam engine with chili-mac dried at the crusty corners of his mouth, and there was no stopping him.

“She told me she took care of Didi all by herself. You know what? I admired her for that. I thought, what a wonderful woman. She’d have been leader of the pack with the survivors of the Donner Party. Claire was the kind of woman who could shoot, skin, and cook a bear and make love to you on the fur rug she tanned herself—all in the same day. That’s what I thought then.”

Wheaton said he knew nothing more about Number 20 until the night of the fire.

“I helped set the fire that night. Yeah, I did pretty much everything the Spruce County prosecutor said I did. But I didn’t kill anyone. After the fire Claire was going to meet me at the five-way stop.”

Hannah knew that location. Two miles from the farm there was the only other sign of civilization—the convergence of two logging roads and the highway. Locals knew it as “the five-way.”

“She told me that she loved me,” he said, and saying those words brought a wave of emotion. His good eye seemed to water. “She said, ‘no matter what happens, Marcus, we’ll be together. You’ve proven your love and I’ve proven mine.’ No one was supposed to die,” he said.

Wheaton cleared his throat. It was followed by a loud hack. Hannah thought he was fighting back emotion, but she wasn’t sure. Bauer urged him to continue.

“When I left that night, when I took my lighter and started the fuse just as we’d planned, there was no one in the house. No one—not Danny and Erik, not you, Hannah. I swear to God. And I do believe in God. Always have. I found out about them after the sheriff’s deputies picked me up.”

The steamroller was in overdrive. Hannah and Bauer pushed back and listened. Neither said a word.

“And I was so happy,” Wheaton said. “I know it sounds so stupid now, but I was. I was so grateful for two things. That you,” the good eye went straight to Hannah, “were spared and that your mother had vanished.”

Hannah said nothing. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She had no air in her lungs.

“But the body?” Bauer asked. “The body of the woman—how do you know that it wasn’t Claire’s for sure?”

“Because she’s too smart. She fucked you. Me. Her kids. The men she slaughtered. She fucked us all. I know now that Didi’s body had been kept in the freezer and brought out like a roast for the night of the fire.”

“You saw her there?” Bauer asked.

“Two days after she whacked the girl’s head off, she told me she hit a deer and butchered it herself. Very Claire. I saw the meat in the freezer. It was the biggest hindquarter I ever saw, all wrapped in white paper. ‘It was a buck,’ Claire said to me. ‘Rack the size of a Vega hatchback, eight points.’”

But when Wheaton looked at the Icicle Creek Farm truck he could find no evidence that Claire hit anything, let alone a Kong-size buck. No hair, nor any blood. He rubbed his big hands over the front fenders and stared at them. Clean as could be.

“I can put two and two together,” Wheaton told his visitors. “And you probably could have, too, if the funeral home hadn’t cremated poor Didi’s body—I mean, torso. I know Claire. I know what she’s capable of. She kept that body in the freezer until she needed it. She planned it. She planned everything to get away. She planned making the world believe that she’d died. She’d have her money. Her new life. I was supposed to be part of her future. I wanted to be. I’d have done anything for her.”

As Wheaton reached for the water, Madsen stood from his seat in the corner and acknowledged another of the warden’s assistants. The sergeant in the visitors’ processing station had asked the other officer to get a message to Hannah Griffin.

“Your pager’s been going off every five minutes,” he said. “Got to be urgent. You want to use a phone?”

Still stunned into silence by what Wheaton had told her, Hannah could not speak. She wanted to get the hell out of there. She was back in the waters of Misery Bay with a line of W’s rolling to her neckline. She was drowning.

“Okay,” she said. She needed the relief. She needed the break.

Wheaton did, too.

“Time for his meds, anyway,” Madsen said. “Make your call.”

Bauer reached over and this time Hannah took his hand. She was trembling. In a flash, the moment when everything changed had come back. Time stood still, and a million pieces of her shattered memory came to her. It all flooded back, a torrent of images. It was that Christmas Eve night in her bedroom—the beginning of the end.

Marcus Wheaton was nearly manic, which was unlike his lumbering, big-guy persona.

“We need to get you out of here, Hannah, now!”

“What’s happening? You’re scaring me.”

“You ought to be scared. I am. But I’m gonna get you out of here.”

She noticed the red metal can for the first time.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t ask. Just keep your mouth still. Let’s go.”

He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the bedroom door, leaving a trail of what smelled like kerosene or gas behind.

“What are you doing?” Hannah asked.

“The same thing you’re about to do. What you’re being told to do.”

Wheaton swung open the door and tucked his head around the corner. When he moved to the side, the scene came into view. It was white. There was white sprayed everywhere.

“What?” she asked, barely able to get the word out.

He yanked on her hand and pulled her into the hall, spreading kerosene like holy water on the walls, soaked in white. It was tree flocking, the texture of fake snow.

“If you don’t come and come quietly, you’ll die. We’ll both die.”

He pulled her past her mother’s bedroom, past the boys’ room. The doors were shut. With each step more kerosene hit the walls, the floor as it splashed against the ghostly spray of white.

“Where are Erik and Danny?”

Wheaton faced her dead-on. His face was stone.

“You don’t want to know,” he said. “Let’s get you out of here.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Say another word and we’ll both die.”

Wheaton led her down the stairs, past the Christmas tree, still lit and packed underneath with presents, but oddly and hastily sprayed with flocking. Hannah said nothing. She could barely breathe. Her feet were wet; her nightgown damp. Across the yard, to the potting shed; by then he was carrying her.

“Stay here,” he said.

She managed a nod.

What was he doing? Where is everyone?

Wheaton, looking over his shoulder, ran toward the front door, still open and flooding the front yard with light. He tossed a match or lighter into the doorway and an enormous flash shot across the yard. Near blinding in its brightness, explosive in its suddenness.

Hannah opened her mouth to scream, but nothing but the empty white of her warm breath emerged. Not a real sound.

Say a word and you will die, he had told her.

Across the yard, the house burned and shot smoke into the leaden sky. Snow fell. Hannah retreated to the corner of the shed.

Wheaton returned a minute later, puffing and agitated. His eyes wild and full of the fear, maybe even for the first time the realization of what he’d done.

“They are all gone,” he said. “Erik and Danny are gone. Your mother is gone. I didn’t want it this way, you know me. You know how I feel about the boys. I got them dressed, ready to go, ready to get out of here. But she wouldn’t have it. She wouldn’t allow any of it.”

Ribbons of tears streaked her face. Her fists clenched. It passed through her mind that she had to get past Marcus Wheaton, and that wasn’t happening.

“I want to get them.” Her voice was a whisper.

He held her, first to stop her from hurting him, then to comfort her.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “I’m going now, but know this forever: I never hurt the boys. I never hurt anyone. I could never hurt you.”

“Why is this happening?”

“Because Didi’s mother keeps calling.” Wheaton disappeared around the corner of the shed. Hannah heard his truck start and rumble down the driveway. And from then on her life was no longer her own, not really.