A Wicked Snow

Chapter Twenty-seven

Hannah Griffin stared into Jeff Bauer’s eyes across a table in the Landing Zone, an incongruously cheery coffee shop with crisp white café curtains and a jukebox loaded with country music. It was in the heart of dusty Cutter’s Landing, the town that survived only because it was home to a penitentiary. Marcus Wheaton’s disclosure disturbed Hannah, but it also brought her a little relief. Although Wheaton revealed her mother could be somewhere in Alaska, possibly alive, Hannah didn’t think about that just then. She kept her thoughts on her father.

She nodded to a waitress that more coffee was in order. Hannah turned away and stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. A splash of cream from a dented, silver-lidded pitcher followed.

“Candy coffee, you have there,” Bauer said.

A smile came to her face, but it was fleeting. She looked into the mug as though it held some answers.

“Let’s go over it once more,” he said. “If you think it will help?”

Hannah agreed. Her mind traveled back in time to Rock Point, where she was a grade-school girl with no upper front teeth and a bad haircut, given to her by her mother.

“It was late in the day,” she began. “School would be out in an hour…. My mom came to school. My brothers were strapped in their car seats. They were quiet. Quieter than I’d ever seen Danny and Erik at that age. My mother’s face was ashen. Flour highlighted the edges of the short-sleeved shirtdress she wore to keep cool that muggy day. ‘Oh, Hannah, it’s bad. So bad. He’s gone, honey,’ Mom said. ‘Daddy’s gone.’”

“Gone” was the word grown-ups used for “dead.” It didn’t fully dawn on Hannah until the car came to a stop. Something hurt her. Hannah didn’t notice until her mother parked between the rutted and worn patch of grass in front of the house, but her hands had been clenched to the car-door handle all the way from school to home. It was a strange feeling, like her hand had been hammered into the chrome-plated lever. Like her hand was not her own. She turned her head to look at the door handle and hooked her fingers into the lever to command it to open.

Claire told her daughter how she and Marty had been working in the wreath maker’s shed hoisting up a heavy part for a wood chipper. At one point, according to Claire, a grinder slipped down from its wall-mount harness and struck Marty squarely on the head, nearly splitting his skull in two. Claire struggled to stop the bleeding—blood splatter indicated as much—but it was to no avail. Marty didn’t live long enough to see the volunteer paramedics when they arrived.

The Logans’s yellow and white–painted house filled the car window. Sun splashed the green shutters and flowed over the cupola with the Santa Claus weather- vane. The breeze of the day had been choppy, but Santa hadn’t moved. Hannah stared into the nothingness beyond, the sky, the clouds. Then feeling was lost to a voice.

“Honey, we have to go inside.”

The voice was her mother’s. Soft, yet firm.

“Yes,” Hannah said, once more turning to look at her frozen hand. “I’m coming.”

Her mother’s tears had dried; in fact, it later struck Hannah how there hadn’t been many tears from her mother. She clutched her schoolbooks, carried Danny, and walked to the front porch. Claire held Erik and cooed to him. Hannah’s flooded eyes swept over the yard, toward the work shed, over the back pasture where Bonnie, the family’s sole horse, grazed lazily under a bloom-bursting apricot tree.

“Mom,” she said. “I want to see Dad.”

Claire juggled her toddler son and held the screen door open with her foot, allowing Hannah to pass by. “Honey,” she said, “he’s at the funeral home already. We’ll go tonight.”

Hannah dropped her books on the bench by the door and let out a cry. She held her brother and sobbed into the top of his tousled head. Her mother patted her back and put her arms around her. Both shook as though their grief could not be contained. Yet only one of them wept.

The kitchen with its knothole-free birch cabinets and ten-foot-high ceiling gleamed as it always did. It was always spotless because Claire Logan insisted that it be as pristine as a doctor’s examining room. There was never a coffee ring on the counter, nor a water spot on the long chrome neck of the faucet. The curtains were white muslin, not because they added a stylish country touch, but because they could be washed once a week and not show evidence of fading.

On the afternoon that Martin Logan met his maker, Claire Logan had been baking bread—something she did on occasion because, she told her daughter, it relaxed her. The kitchen smelled heavenly, yeasty and sweet. Four loaves, shining with a coating of melted butter, were positioned on racks next to the sink.

“I came as soon as I could,” her mother had said.

But the bread, and the flour on her sleeve, spoke of less of a hurried—frenzied—exit.

We’d been out working all morning when it happened.

But bread takes time…

It was so terrible….I tried to help him, but I couldn’t. There was blood everywhere.

Claire, however, carried no trace of blood; only the white flour on her sleeves marked her clothing and hinted that the day had been spent doing something before her husband died.

“Mom, you’ve been baking,” Hannah said, staring at the crusty loaves nestled on a blue-and-white-checked towel.

Claire turned away and ran the faucet.

“You want some? It’s still warm. Some food might do you good.”

Hannah said no and left for her bedroom. Her pace quickened as she climbed the stairs. By the time she had reached the final riser she was in an all-out run, a race to the softness of her mattress—a place where she could hide and cry.

Through furnace vents that had always been a pipeline to the goings-on in the house, Hannah could hear her mother’s voice. She used to climb on the vent and, on the rare days when she wore a dress, she used to spread open her hemline over the metal grate to capture the warm air as it was forced from the basement to the rest of the house. In less than ten seconds, her dress would fill like a hot-air balloon, billowing in its fullness and keeping her legs warm.

But that morning the vents were a conduit for sound. Hannah overheard her mother talking with two men. The pair were from the sheriff’s office; at least Hannah supposed they were, based on their questions. They certainly weren’t friends of her mother’s. They couldn’t be friends with the kind of harsh and impatient tone they exhibited. She imagined two men. A short, fat man with a throaty voice and a taller, thinner fellow who said little other than to comment on what the other fellow said.

“You got that right,” he said. “That’s my understanding, too.”

The fat man was pushy and direct. “Mrs. Logan,” he said, “we’re just here to put the report to bed. No one is trying to do anything other than get this over and done with. This unpleasant stuff is just part of the rigmarole of the law. The fact is, the injuries don’t quite mix with what you’ve told us about your husband’s death.”

There was a short pause.

“In what way? What are you talking about?”

“I think you know,” the other’s voice cut in. It was deeper and had some kind of accent. “Why don’t you tell us what happened to your husband?”

The sink water ran for a second. Hannah figured that her mother was rinsing plates or something.

“I don’t know a thing about it,” she said. “Are you accusing me of something here, deputy?”

“Did I say I was?”

“You’ve implied as much.”

“Look, ma’am, please listen to me carefully. All I’m saying is that your husband’s injury indicates he had been hit in front and back of the skull. Both front and back. Now how could that have happened?”

Again, the sink water ran.

“I’m not a cop,” Claire said. “And I don’t know what causes what. But if you are suggesting for one second that I know anything more than I’ve told you, you’re as fucked up as your boss.”

The F-word. It sent a decisive shock wave. Hannah had never heard her mother utter it in her entire life. Her mother didn’t talk that way. Hannah found herself praying to God for her mother’s soul. The F-word wasn’t her mother’s choice of language, not even in hammer-on-the-finger anger.

“I’ll ask you to leave now.”

“We want to talk with you again.”

“Fine. Then call Marv Nelson’s law office. Now get out.”

“There’s no need to be hostile, ma’am.”

“Hostile is walking into a woman’s house and so much as telling her you think she kissed off her old man. That’s the very definition of hostile.”

Hannah made her way down the stairs one hand over the other on the rail her father had crafted from a single piece of maple, cut not far from their farm. She stood in her nightgown, its flannel hem brushing against the landing. She wanted to tell the men to get out, just as her mother had. She wanted to scream at them for making her mother so upset. But she didn’t. She didn’t say a word. No one saw her standing there, so still and so quiet. No one turned to look in her direction when all three stomped out the front door.

A few minutes later, Claire came back inside.

“How long you been up, honey?” she asked, seeing her daughter. Her voice was sweet. Sweeter than usual.

“Are they gone?” she asked.

Claire looked surprised. “Yes, dear. They’re gone.”

“For good?”

“I think so. I don’t think they’ll ever be back.”

And she was right.

Both Hannah and Bauer were exhausted by her disclosure. She, for what she had relived over coffee in the café, and he for the spinning wheels of a man who could do nothing to help the girl-turned-woman’s realization of a dark truth, something she simply didn’t want to believe.

“I’m talked out,” she said. “I’m checking into the motel and going to bed.”

“Want dinner?” he asked. He pointed to a placard on the table. “Pot roast is supposed to be their specialty.”

“I can’t eat.” She feigned a smile. “I doubt I can sleep. I’ll be up early and headed home at first light. Thanks for listening.”

Bauer stood and embraced her. He felt her warm, limp body, and whispered in her ear.

“This isn’t over, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “But someday it will be. I’ll… we’ll see to it.”

Bauer let go and Hannah walked to the door. Her skirt was wrinkled and her blouse hung on her like it no longer fit. She didn’t turn around. She didn’t want him to see that she was crying.

The morning after he returned to Portland, Jeff Bauer made the call that Peggy Hjermstad had been expecting for two decades. Peggy was in her late fifties by then, remarried and living on her small farm in Tillamook, near the Pacific Ocean. She and her new husband raised dairy goats and had developed a successful line of goat cheeses.

She’d kept her last name and was listed in the phone book, in case her daughter ever came looking for her again. “Though I don’t expect it,” she’d say to friends or acquaintances inquiring about it.

Bauer hated making the call not only because it hurt like hell to tell a mother her daughter was likely deceased, but also because he only had the word of a convicted arsonist that she was the victim.

“Ms. Hjermstad?” he asked when a sweet voice answered the phone.

“Some call me that,” she said warmly. “This is Peggy.”

He told her who he was, and he could hear the rattling of bits of metal against the phone. It had to be her charm bracelet. He’d remembered that she wore it when she came to the FBI office so many years ago. Among the charms she pointed out during that visit was a silhouette of a girl’s head with the name “Serena” engraved in curlicue lettering.

“I talked with Marcus Wheaton yesterday,” Bauer said. “There’s no easy way to say this. He identified your daughter as the female victim.”

Peggy let out a small gasp, but quickly recomposed herself.

“Does he,” she said, fumbling for words, “know where her head is? I mean, I know it doesn’t matter. I know that she’s gone. I’ve always known it. But I’d like to have her go to heaven in one piece.”

“No. He didn’t say.”

“Why did he kill her?”

“Said he didn’t. I don’t know if he’s a liar and an arsonist, but I believed him. He put the blame right on Claire Logan. Said your daughter went by the name ‘Didi.’”

“Oh my,” Peggy Hjermstad said, growing very quiet.

“I’m so sorry,” Bauer said.

There was silence.

“Ms. Hjermstad? I mean, Peggy. You still on the line?”

“I’m here,” she said. “The name caught me off guard, that’s all. Didi was the name of Serena’s poodle. A teacup. A pretty little apricot thing she loved to death. Wonder why she called herself that name?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Bauer said. “Some things we never know.”

Peggy thanked the agent for calling. “I knew she was never coming home when she didn’t call for my birthday or Christmas. Even so… it still hurts after all these years. Funny how it hurts. It almost seems like she’s died all over again.”

“I’m sorry,” he said once more. “I’ll let you know if anything else turns up, but this may be all we will ever know.”

“No need. I know all I need to know. My darling girl is gone forever.”