A Wicked Snow (5 page)

"Uh-huh," she said, clearly confused.

Hannah's memory loss wasn't a soap opera case of amnesia, the kind that is brought back with a bump on the head by the evil twin sister. It certainly wasn't the result of Alzheimer's or some other disease that steals the mind of the happy and sad times that make memories worth visiting. It had been a studied effort. One that she had accomplished on her own. Hannah never talked about anything from those days, especially once the nightmare became real. She shuttered the pictures in her mind so handily that when she needed to recall the face of her mother there was nothing there. A shadowy form. A face devoid of features. Not even a voice.

And now her little girl had forced her hand. She
needed
to remember.

"What did the lady look like, honey?"

"Just a lady. She was old, maybe forty or seventy."

Amber's ability to pinpoint age needed work.

"That's a big gap," Hannah said softly. "Did she have gray hair?"

She shook her head. "It was dark, but it didn't match her face."

Hannah looked at Amber quizzically; her daughter was untouched by the past and she wanted it to stay that way.

"Match her face?"

"I don't know. She had a grandma face, but
mom
hair."

Amber slid from the table to scurry for her backpack.

"Don't even think it," Ethan said.

Hannah pretended not to be bothered. "She must have heard wrong, because this isn't happening."

Amber had a loose tooth and Hannah was unable to take her eyes off it. She watched her daughter work the tiny tooth with her tongue at the dinner table and wiggle it with her fingertip in the car. It swung like a little white tombstone. When it finally fell and Amber ran to her, Amber held her hand out as if she were presenting the gift of all gifts. Most children think so. Most mothers agree.

But not Hannah Griffin.

"Those go under the pillow, honey. Better do it fast. You never know when the Tooth Fairy will show up."

"Sure I do. She comes at night. Don't you want to see my tooth?" Amber kept her hand outstretched.

"No, not now. You know how I feel. It will never be more beautiful than when it was in your mouth. You know, Mommy loved it most when it was part of your smile."

Amber smiled proudly, the empty space in her grin a black trap door.

"Go put it under your pillow, baby."

And so she did.

Ethan thought that for someone who had worked with the grisliest of evidence, had talked to the vilest of criminals, and had examined the most intimate areas of the human body with a microscope, a kid's tooth wouldn't or
couldn't
repulse.

"I can't play the Tooth Fairy," she said flatly. "Not now, not ever. And you know that. I have a thing about it. A phobia for which there's no name."

"Odontophobia," Ethan shot back, his dark brown eyes sparkling with the satisfaction of coming up with the perfect word. He smiled. He had trumped his wife, and that always felt good.

Hannah knew what he was doing and suppressed a smile.

"That's the
fear
of teeth. I'm just disgusted by teeth that have been excised from the human body."

"So you've said, but Jesus. It's just a tooth."

"Yeah, but they creep me out."

"Just a tooth. Don't you want to fetch it from under her pillow and leave a dollar tonight?"

Hannah refused. "I can't explain it. But nothing makes my stomach turn more than the idea--not even the sight of one--but the idea of a little piece of human enamel with a tail of bloody pulp."

"Just a little baby tooth."

"Just a
no
. You do it."

Veronica Paine was sixty-seven and retired from a long career on the bench, serving her last four years as a Supreme Court Justice in Salem, Oregon. She had expected to be carried out of the temple of justice on a stretcher as a very old lady, so consumed with being a part of the judiciary was she. But when breast cancer struck at age sixty-one and a radical mastectomy was the course of treatment, Paine decided that puttering around in her lilac and fern garden, and visiting with her seven grandchildren were too precious to miss. Besides, she told colleagues, she didn't have a taste for the legal profession anymore.

"Too political," she said. "I liked it better when I
thought
it was about right and wrong and not about how much money either side had."

She was watching the
Today
show and working the
New York Times
crossword puzzle when her phone rang. It was just after 8 a.m.

"Mrs. Paine?" The caller's tone was cautious. "
Judge
Paine?"

"Who's calling?" she demanded. Her voice had a kind of harsh, gravelly timbre that was intimidating, especially to defense lawyers. Judge Paine was not tentative in her words; she never had to be. She commanded a conversation just as she had once held dominion in her courtroom before a small lump took away her breast and her career and, with its own twist of irony, gave her back her life.

"Judge..." Again hesitation came from the voice. "This is Hannah Griffin."

Hannah knew her last name wouldn't bring any particular recognition. How could it? Before the retired judge could respond with irritation or confusion, she jumped back in with, "I used to be Hannah Logan."

There was a quiet gasp followed by silence, then a deep, husky-sounding breath.

"Is this a joke?" Paine asked.

"I wish. But this is very real."

"Our Hannah Logan? Claire's daughter?"

"Yes," she said.

"I don't believe it."

"I wish I wasn't, but I am."

A flood of questions followed and Hannah informed her that she was a criminal investigator, married to a wonderful man--a police officer. She told her about her daughter, Amber, and even about the baby she had lost. She was glad she had years of background to share. She was grateful because each detail kept her from the purpose of the call. She talked about her life in California and how she had never returned to Rock Point or Spruce County.

"Never saw a reason to," she said.

Judge Paine understood. She told Hannah she had hoped her life had turned out well.

"We all wished the best for you," she said. "We've--
I've
--thought of you often. It has been what? Eighteen, nineteen years?"

"Twenty this December," Hannah said. "We're coming up on twenty."

After a few more minutes of small talk about their lives, Rock Point, the fact that the younger woman had followed in the footsteps of the woman she had telephoned out of the blue that morning, Hannah explained she had something important to ask.

"What is it, dear?"

"I couldn't think of anyone else to call," Hannah said. "I need some help and I thought of you." She explained about the package she had received and what was inside. Judge Paine was stunned into silence, then anger hit. The very idea of someone picking at a scar healed so long ago was such a cruel prank.

"What is wrong with this world these days?" she asked. "Why on earth do some people feel compelled to engage in this kind of nonsensical harassment?"

"I don't know and that doesn't concern me right now. Two things do. Who sent the shoes to me and how did they get them? They look like the ones you might have used in court. They look very genuine."

Paine processed the information and remained resolute. "They can't be. That evidence is in a vault. No one can get in there...we bought the vault because of your--your
mother's--
case," she said. "You know, souvenir hunters and other ghouls who think they can make some money by selling stuff to the tabloids or some Japanese collector of criminal memorabilia."

"I guess," Hannah said, realizing for the first time there could be someone out there collecting artifacts from her mother's case. "They appear to be Erik's and Danny's," Hannah said, referring to the shoes. "They have your identification number written inside--in one shoe of both pairs. State's Exhibit Number 25."

Paine hated being wrong, and it was a good thing that she seldom was. "I can't imagine who would take something like that from the vault," she said, feeling for a cigarette and her silver-plated lighter, etched with her name and
LAWYER OF THE YEAR
. She rolled the flint-striking gear against the callused edge of her right thumb. The flame came and she drew on a cigarette, talking all the while.

"This breach of security is very troubling," she added.

"I'm concerned," Hannah said, "not so much because the evidence vault was violated, but that someone could find me after all these years. I thought I'd faded off the radar screen for good."

"I'll go down to the courthouse myself if I have to. I'll get to the bottom of this."

Hannah thanked the judge and gave her her office telephone number.

"Unfortunately, it isn't a direct line," she said. "Please don't tell anyone we spoke. If you miss me, don't leave a message, other than that you've called."

It felt very strange, very unsettling, to hear Veronica Paine say her mother's name. After all the notoriety, all the
infamy
, that had attached to her mother, the name
Claire Logan
seldom came from Hannah's own lips. It was curious and she knew it. God knew that
Claire Logan
had been a Jeopardy answer and a Trivial Pursuit question more than a time or two. Yet it was peculiar to hear "Claire Logan" uttered by someone who actually
knew
her. Hannah had certainly heard her mother's name mentioned countless times, but when others had spoken of her, she'd seemed a figment, a bedtime story, and a
ghost
story.

Most who knew Hannah assumed that she'd been orphaned as a little girl, which was only partially true. Her father had indeed died when she was in grade school. Her mother? That was the subject of great debate. Hannah wasn't quite sure.

Not an hour later, Hannah's phone rang. It was Judge Paine, and she sounded slightly unhinged.

"Hannah," she said, "I'm terribly sorry. This is very, very bad. I truly am at a loss for what has happened."

"Just what has happened?"

Paine chose her words carefully. "It turns out the evidence vault has indeed been compromised. Can you imagine that? It appears that some things are, in fact, missing." She sighed heavily, and air escaped her lungs like a balloon stuck with a railroad spike. "I really don't know what to say. This is very upsetting."

"What else is missing? And," Hannah said, before allowing a response, "who could have done this?"

Judge Paine admitted--
hated
to admit--she had no idea. No one she spoke to had a clue. The evidence review log, volume no. 4, was still in pristine condition. The Logan file hadn't been looked at for more than eighteen months when a criminology student from the University of Oregon came to review it for a term paper. The retired judge was insistent that the college student couldn't have taken the shoes.

"This girl was very nice. Very smart. She interviewed me and several other 'old timers'--even sent me a copy of the paper she wrote. Because of the sensitivity..." the judge continued, searching for words and drawing on a cigarette, "the magnitude of your mother's case, I think you should get the authorities involved. At least talk to
somebody
."

When she hung up, Hannah did so knowing that there was only one person to call, an FBI agent named Jeff Bauer.

Jeff Bauer used to think about the Claire Logan case every day. Every night, too. It was like a leaky faucet dripping incessantly in the night down some hallway laid out with razor blades and broken glass; he could do nothing but just keep coming after the irritating and omnipresent noise.
Got to shut it off.
Thoughts of the woman simply couldn't be extricated from his mind. They became a part of his every routine, from shaving in the morning (the white peaks of Gillette shaving foam sometimes reminded him of the snow banks) to eating an English muffin for breakfast (he'd had one that first morning on the case), it had always been there. For a time, whatever he did, wherever he went, Claire Logan was a kind of permanent memory tattoo. For a time, he marked his success on how many days had elapsed that he
hadn't
thought of her. After ten years, his personal best for staving off thoughts of Logan was a mere nine days. After nearly twenty years, a month or two would pass before she came to mind. The relationship (some thought "obsession" was a more accurate description) with a woman whom he'd never met had cost him, too. Though he disputed it, his fixation on the Logan case had helped ruin two marriages.

Some two-plus decades after Claire Logan became a part of his life, Special Agent Bauer was back in the Portland field office of the FBI following a five-year stint in Anchorage, Alaska. In Anchorage, the handsome six-footer with a rangy physique and ice-blue eyes had been the case agent in charge of a sting operation that resulted in the arrest of forty-four men and women who had smuggled stolen artwork and other antiquities from Russia to the United States. Most of the arrested were baggage handlers and ticket agents, though two had been top pilots with a major U.S. airline. It was a great assignment--the second best, he told reporters when he made the rounds, of his career. He threw himself into it with utter devotion. He earned a commendation from the Justice Department and a divorce petition from his second wife.

Two events had come together within a week of each other that brought forth a torrent of memories. The first was a brief letter and a notice sent by officials at the Oregon Bureau of Prisons and Rehabilitation Facilities and the state's star prisoner. The second was a phone call.

The notice was for a parole hearing for Marcus Wheaton, the sole individual convicted in the Logan tragedy. The hearing would be a formality and would end with the former handyman's release. He'd earned more good time than any man in the history of the state, but because of his crime--and its notoriety--he'd been passed by a dozen times. State law would not permit incarceration a single day beyond his twenty-year sentence.

Bauer wouldn't have bothered much with the notice if a message from Wheaton himself hadn't accompanied it.

Dear Mr. Bauer:

Soon the state will set me free. My lawyer tells me there is no possibility that I can be held beyond my sentence, despite the debate raging in Salem. I plan on disappearing and living the rest of my days away from the spectacle that has become my existence here in prison. Before I can do that, I need to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Maybe you do, too. I know things. I do.

In our Savior's arms,
Marcus James Wheaton

The debate to which Wheaton had referred was a hastily crafted resolution that a legislator from southern Oregon had pushed before colleagues and media at the state capitol earlier in the year. The representative was a known publicity seeker, a woman who piously harangued against violent crime and was swept into office three terms prior as "a mom who cares." Fading into the crowd of lawmakers was not to her liking and every once in a while she climbed back onto her soap-box. She had sought the spotlight by attempting to bar Wheaton from release by applying present-day sentencing standards for his crime. No one thought it would go anywhere, and in the end, it didn't. Justice, no matter how unfairly administered, cannot easily be rewritten.

At five minutes past nine, Bauer set down his coffee and reached to stop the ringing of the phone on his desk.

"Bauer here," he said.

"Special Agent Jeff Bauer?" The husky voice of a woman was somewhat familiar.

"You're talking to him," he said.

"I wasn't sure I'd be able to reach you so early. This goes under the heading of what I guess we used to call a blast from the past, Agent Bauer. This is Veronica Paine. We need to talk."

"
Judge
Paine?" He asked, though he knew there could be only one--the one he'd once called "Veronica Paine-in-the-ass."

"Retired, thankfully," she answered, letting a touch of levity break the tenseness of her voice. They extended a few pleasantries, though no mention was made of the investigation and trial that had given them their connection for life. Paine told the federal cop that she'd followed his career and congratulated him on the sting in Alaska. He returned a similar favor by telling her how happy he had been when she'd been appointed to the bench.

Paine told Bauer that her husband had died following an afternoon of pruning the apple trees they'd espaliered along a fence. They had been blessed with two daughters, both of whom were living in southern California. Bauer shared nothing of a personal nature. He didn't really have anything to say. His marriages had gone belly-up and neither of his wives had given him any children. At divorce time, buddies at the Bureau had told him he was lucky to be without the burden of child support payments. He went along with their congratulations, but deep down, he was as sorry as a man could be.

Then it was the judge's turn once more. She told him of the call from Hannah Griffin.

"Hannah?" he asked. "
Our
Hannah?"

"Yes," she said, "Claire Logan's daughter.
Our
Hannah."

She went on to tell him Hannah had been the recipient of some evidence that had been stolen from the Spruce County property vault.

"Her brothers' shoes," she said. "Exhibit Number 25."

Bauer tilted his head toward the phone and held his chin with his free hand. He sank into his chair like a melted chocolate. "Jesus," he said, "why would anyone want to do something like that?"

"Because people are basically fuckheads," Paine answered. The coarseness of her language seemed appropriate; though he'd never heard a woman, a judge of all people, say the term
fuckhead
.

"Speaking of which," Bauer said, "Marcus Wheaton's getting out of prison soon."

Paine let out a loud sigh. "So I heard. I doubt it, but anything's possible these days."

"I got a note from him. Says he's willing to talk. He wants to tell us what we've always wanted to know. Or so he says."

Paine lit a cigarette. Bauer could hear her suck the smoke deep into her lungs.

"He's had plenty of time to think of a story. I wouldn't bank on him saying much, other than he loved Claire and blah, blah, blah... she done him wrong, like some crying-in-your-beer country song."

"I guess so," Bauer said. "But I'm going anyhow. I still like Willie Nelson. By the way, did Hannah say if there was a note?"

"She didn't. And I didn't ask. Should have, I know. I was just so startled to hear from her and so angry that someone would dredge up the past and shove it on her doorstep in such a cruel, outlandish way."

"Like a fuckhead," he said.

"You got that right."

Paine declined Bauer's request for Hannah's contact information.

"She's started a new life and she can contact you if she wants to," she said. "I know that you can find her if you wanted, anyway. But don't. Stay away from your databases. Let her come to you."

The house on Loma Linda should have been quiet at that hour. It should have been still as the warm summer night. At 2 a.m., the sprinklers hissed outside in the backyard, kicked on by a timer that ensured the Korean grass would never scorch to brown. Amber's guppy tank sent a pool of light across the hall. Aunt Leanna's Seth Thomas ticked the hours like a bomb. Ethan snored softly, oblivious to Hannah's unhinged torment. She pressed her face against a pillow, trying to suppress the recollections that were coming after her in a nightmare that had been absent for years. It was no use. She shivered. It was cold. Even awake, she could still see the nightmare. The woman in the coveralls was there. The woman--a nearly gauzy figure, though Hannah knew it was her mother--wore coveralls that were not blue. They were wine colored, she had long thought as the ephemeral memory took shape. She bent closer to the figure she saw in her mind's eye. The fabric was blue, mottled with splashes of red, a color that her brain had blurred and processed and whirled into a reddish hue. Hannah knew why it was that color and the realization nearly stopped her heart. As if she could control the memory, she focused on the vest. It had been slashed somehow and was leaking bits of white fluff, floating above her mother's head, mixing with a light snowfall.

A voice called out. It was a harsh, but controlled whisper. It came from the faceless woman in the cover-alls.

"Now that you're here, Hannah, you might as well be helpful. Get a shovel."

The girl of Hannah's memory did as she had been taught. She obeyed the strident command without hesitation. Mechanically, she spun around, ran across the snow, and returned from the potting barn. Her fingers froze around the staff of a shovel. She stepped closer to her mother, noticing for the first time that they were standing in front of an open trench.

"Are you going to help me? Start filling it in."

In her jagged memory, Hannah tried to see what was in the trench, dirt falling from the shovel onto something in the dark of a deep hole. Something gleamed. As dirt fell, the movement sent light to brass buttons. But it was more than that. The figure in the hole stirred slightly.

The man in the hole was still alive, maybe barely so. But his chest heaved. Hannah could not see his face. Her mother had already covered it in a white powder.

"Hurry up," she said, her tone decidedly impatient. Not unnerved at what they were doing. Just annoyed that Hannah wasn't doing what needed to be done.

"I have a mess to clean up tonight and three pies to bake in the morning."

The red of blood oozed and bloomed against the snow.

Hannah broke down and cried into her pillow. She had
helped
her mother. She had done so without question. But that wasn't the worst of it. And deep down, she was sure that God would never forgive her for what she had done.

Hannah sat up with a start. The nightmare was bad enough, but it wasn't what woke her. A pair of headlights glowed from behind the blinds, splintering the light like a moonlit picket fence. She could barely breathe. Just as she was about to rouse Ethan, the lights dimmed slightly as the driver pressed the accelerator and drove off into the California night.