A Wicked Snow (8 page)

"I don't want her to leave us."

"Hannah, you don't want her to stay. Trust me. You don't."

"You don't know how I feel. Where are my brothers?"

He shook his head. "Set that aside for now. Just for a moment. This is my chance to do something for you. I don't want anything to happen to you, Hannah. Bad things have been happening around here. I'm getting you out of here."

"What bad things?"

"You know what I'm talking about. You know about your mother. You've seen it for yourself. Remember the big jar?"

Hannah's eyes widened in the kind of full-out terror that comes with the realization that the mother who had rocked her as a baby, who had held her as a baby to her breast, was not really a mother. Not the mommy type. Hannah thought of the jar of bloody teeth she'd found when searching for ribbons above the wreath-fabricating bench. She thought the vessel held rusted screws or bolts. But it was lighter. She unscrewed the top and tilted the contents. It was a cache of blood-dried teeth her mother had put away like some grotesque souvenir.

Her mother asked her about it, after she noticed it had been disturbed.

"What were you doing in my things? I've asked you children to be mindful of what's mine and what's yours. My things are not toys--not to be played with. Don't you ever listen?"

"I wasn't playing with anything," Hannah had said. "I mean, I don't even know what you're talking about."

Claire shoved the jar in her face.

"This is what I'm talking about, and don't tell me again that you haven't seen this before."

"But I haven't." Lying was a necessity, and Hannah knew it. "What is it?"

Claire studied her daughter's face, but Hannah stayed cool, almost remote. The idea that her mother was some alien force was setting in, slowly, but it was coming.

"I almost believe you," Claire had said. Her eyes were ice. "But believing a practiced liar is a dangerous game."

"I'm not a liar."

"Don't make me laugh and don't make me mad. I've caught you before."

"I'm not lying. I don't know anything. Maybe someone else moved it?"

After she had said those words, Hannah would have done anything to retrieve them, reeling them in like a bed sheet knotted out a window for escape.

Claire smiled. She had caught the flutter of fear. It propelled her to push.

"Maybe Didi got into this. Like I've said a million times, she's always straightening things where we don't need it."

"I didn't see her here."

Hannah wasn't convincing, and she didn't really try to be. Later, she wished she'd been more careful in what she said and how she acted. She never saw Didi again after that day.

"Just what is that in that jar anyway?" Hannah hesitated. "Looks disgusting...like bloody teeth."

Claire laughed and spun the jar top and peered inside. "You watch too much TV. Just the bric-a-brac of buttons and sequins and pushpins... and some red paint."

But the odor was acrid and unmistakable. Hannah knew the smell of blood. She'd been there when her mother snapped the heads of chickens who no longer laid enough to justify the sack of scratch. She did it with a kind of flourish that indicated more enjoyment than resignation that the heads had to come off to kill the birds. She didn't even use a hatchet or a knife, but did it with her bare hands.

"Hands are easy to wash, and they don't rust," she said.

Hannah also knew the color of drying blood. It was a sienna tone on the edges, drying to a deep mahogany. What her mother had insisted was red paint could pass for the hue of blood.

Early the next morning the sky was indigo with stars popping from the darkness in a spray that looked like one of those fiber-optic bouquets that old ladies adore. Hannah Griffin was on the road, sans free pastry, by 4:15 a.m.

Just past the state line most of the conifers that had swathed the area had been reduced to a pillow fringe, as though one couldn't see beyond it to the stump-barnacled field of fireweed and blackberries. Alders, the first tree to arrive on the scene of deforestation, filled in like harried brush strokes where they could. Nothing about the landscape was particularly pretty, though Hannah had to admit the cool colors of green and blue were certainly pleasant on the eye, a change from the dusty palette of Santa Louisa County. She thought of Christmas trees and the evil, wicked snow that had ruined her life... and sent her to that place.

Eastern Oregon is nothing like the wet side--the western side--of the state. The mountains that divide Oregon into two distinct regions act as a barrier from the marine rainfall that keeps Portland and points south and west lush throughout most of the year. The eastern side is vast and dry--a landscape of craggy basalt formations and glacial moraines. Only through the lenses of a pair of sunglasses is it cool and green. But when irrigated, the soil produces the world's sweetest and most succulent fruits. Fruit stands clustered the roadside now and then, though most seemed abandoned or hopelessly unkempt. Where the ranch land crawled from one end of the horizon to the other was a dried basin, a crusty residue of earth and tumbleweeds.
Just add water.
Just keep driving. Just get the hell out of the east and run for the Pacific Ocean.

But Hannah was heading northeast, going away from the ocean. She was following the interstate to Cutter's Landing, so named for an old airstrip and not a body of water. It was three hours into the desert, a population injected into the dirt of Oregon's bleakest eastern territory. It was a place for losers. Cutter's Landing was a town of romance readers, ex-hookers, and do-gooders who lived in rundown frame houses and converted Quonset huts. The citizens were the women and the spawn of the killers and rapists who claimed 97337 as the zip code of the vile and depraved. Cutter's Landing was the home of Eastern Oregon's Correctional Facility for Men, and Hannah Griffin had a date with one of them.

A black-and-white sign with a flashing yellow light flew by the windshield:
APPROACHING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
:
DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS
.

Hannah lowered the volume of the Spanish language radio station she had endured for the last hour of her journey to the center of nowhere. The bombastic host went soft... then away. And once more she was alone.

Oregon's largest prison was also its oldest, having been built brick by brick in the mid-1920s by the descendants of Chinese coolie laborers, whose blood, some said, never dried. In fact, eighteen men and two women died when a load of dynamite unexpectedly detonated as they prepared to blast a two-story-deep foundation out of a basalt basin that had been the remnant of a great lava flow. When the workers weren't blasting, they were hauling brick from the tracks of what would come to be known as Cutter's Landing when an airstrip was laid on top of the dusty landscape. Some considered the work barely short of slavery.

The towering bricks of the prison cast a foreboding image on the craggy hillside. Four turrets sprang from the main building like razor wire-encrusted dragonheads. No trees grew around the site. The basalt formation on which the prison had been erected was a sterile stone dish the size of six football fields. The penitentiary housed upward of 400 men, though there had been more residing there in the recent past. When it was built, it had been designed to hold no more than 250.

Hannah followed little yellow signs to the parking lot adjacent to what some idiot bureaucrat had dubbed the "Visitor's Comfort Area." She wasn't sure if it sounded more like a bathroom or a motel. As she pulled her Volvo closer, she passed row after row of dust-covered old cars. Many of the cars' windows had the greasy fingerprints of children run amok. A few had tattered yellow ribbons tied to their antennae. It was sad, but clear: the exhookers and the do-gooders who populated Cutter's Landing had arrived in droves to see their men, to meet in the run-down visitors' area to play cards or maybe even sneak a little sex.

Hannah parked next to a boat of a car that had "government-issue" stamped all over it. A man, one of the two she'd come to see, was leaning against the driver's door, talking on a cell phone. His profile was familiar, and the sight of him brought a nervous smile to her lips. It was Jeff Bauer. Hannah turned off the ignition and reached for her right shoe. She was glad the drive was over, but she loathed the final destination.

Jeff Bauer had arrived at the prison parking lot an hour earlier. He'd actually stayed at the Landing Motel, thinking that getting a night's sleep before meeting with Wheaton might not be a bad idea. But it had not been a restful night. At about 3:30 that morning, he called the manager and told the twenty-three-year-old wisenheimer to get his ass out of bed to quiet the rumble that was going on in the room next to his. Pounding on the door, smacking the walls, and yelling hadn't stifled the noise. Up all night and smelling of bong water and pepperoni, the smart-ass told Bauer to fuck off. Bauer informed the manager he was a federal agent. Two minutes later, the party was over and silence returned.

Dressed in a gray chalk-striped suit, a white shirt, and solid red silk tie, he looked every bit the man he was. His hair had a few small glints of silver, and pale streaks highlighted the deepening fissures on his face. Whether deep in thought or wincing in pain when wrestling a suspect to the ground, Bauer had a habit of scrunching his face. He joked that it was his "concerned" look. In reality, that was exactly what it was.

He was older, Hannah could see, but then again, so was she.

He flipped off the phone and turned around, and for the first time in years, their eyes met.

"Hannah? Is that you?" he said. His smile was warm and familiar.

"Agent Bauer?"

"I got your message," he said, moving toward her. "I thought of calling you to tell you to forget it, but if you're anything like you were twenty years ago, you were packed by the time you called."

"I was," she said.

"You look great. I mean, considering the long ride across the shittiest landscape this side of Oklahoma."

"You look well, too." She retrieved her purse from the backseat and did a quick glance to ensure all the doors were locked. "And you're right. The drive was long, dusty, and boring."

"This won't be boring," he said, squinting at the sun as he sized her up. She was grown, beautiful. Her hair flashed golden in the sun.

"You think Marcus sent the package to me," she said.

"You must, too. Otherwise you wouldn't be here."

"I'd like you to read his note," he said. He reached into his pocket and handed her a folded letter.

She took it and read:

"Before I can do that, I need to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Maybe you do, too. I know things. I do."

"Is he talking about
her
?"

"Ghosts of the past? Honestly, Hannah, I don't know. I've wanted to see this nutcase for twenty years. I've wanted to slam him to the ground and hold a gun to his fat head to get him to tell me what he really knows." He motioned at a small bus coming toward them. "Maybe he will tell us something that we've all wanted to know for a very long time."

"I know that. And as much as I want to see him, I almost can't bear to do it," she said.

"Understood," he answered. "I can only imagine."

"Imagine is a good word. I've
imagined
talking to him over the years. I've
imagined
shaking him and pleading with him to tell me where she is...if he knows," she added softly.

Bauer moved closer and offered his hand. It was a kind of awkward attempt at reassurance. Hannah wasn't sure if he wanted to hold her hand, shake it, or carry her purse.

"I know I'll get through it," she said. "I've done all right. I've got a life, but I still want some answers."

Bauer nodded. "This is the time," he added. "I feel it."

The bus parked, and the pair followed a stream of prison groupies, wives, mothers, and fathers into a modular building that functioned as the processing center for visitors. After five minutes of what amounted to nothing more than rubber-stamp processing, they were on yet another small bus alone, headed for the warden's entrance on the eastern wall. There, Warden Thomas's information officer would take them to a private visitation room.

The minibus bounced over a speed bump and lurched forward.

"This thing needs new shocks," Bauer said.

"And a new driver," Hannah added.

There was no argument there. The kid at the wheel reeked of Brut and attitude. He was hell-bent on showing his two passengers just how fast he could get from point A to point B. Luck, for the time being, had likely spared him from the fate of being on the other side of the walls. Driving like he did, he was sure to end up in jail, or prison. Maybe he wouldn't mind. At least he knew his way around Cutter's Landing.

Inside the walls, a behemoth of a man was about to have the rare visitor--two, no less. He's been alone so long, not completely by choice, of course. Liz Wheaton had tried to visit her son, but he'd refused to see her. She sent at least one letter or card a month--some newsy, others full of bile--all doused in White Shoulders. Marcus Wheaton also refused to answer any, save for one letter he had sent his first week in Cutter's Landing. Liz Wheaton saved the single note and carried it in her purse.

I love Claire. She loves me. No one is perfect, but you should know that better than anyone. She and I will be together. And as long as you don't accept that, then you're nothing to me.

Miriam Thomas, the warden's wife, had done all she could to make her husband's office as homey as possible. Family photos in beautiful polished brass frames adorned one wall and a painting of Haystack Rock, a favorite of Oregon seascape artists, occupied another. Miriam had frequently told her husband of almost thirty years that just because he worked in a prison, it didn't mean his office had to look like a
cell
. Warden Rex Thomas, tough as he was, and as tough as he had to be considering his line of work, gave in to his wife and let her do her thing. The sole item he rarely put out was the pink Depression-glass candy dish that she picked up at a flea market in Roseburg. A candy dish didn't feel quite right to Thomas. Didn't fit the image. Besides, he didn't like the sugar-free hard candies Miriam had supplied in the first place. Even so, whenever she came to the prison to see her husband's environment, to make sure he made the best of it, he took the pink dish from the bottom drawer and set it out for her to see.

"I'd better get you more candy, dear," she'd say.

"Already have it on my list, Mir."

When the Portland FBI field agent and the CSI from California were escorted into his office, the warden had just finished reviewing the meal plans for the prison cafeteria for the month of November.

"Gonna be pressed turkey for Thanksgiving," he said with a wink, putting the sloppily typed menu aside. "It is every year. No surprise there, I'd say."

"And they say prisons aren't tough enough," Bauer said.

After exchanging introductions and innocuous pleasantries in a place where there are undoubtedly few, Warden Thomas outlined the rules for seeing the convicted arsonist Marcus Wheaton.

"The man hasn't had a visitor in some time, and while we might have relaxed the rules some years ago, for him we have not. You'll be in a visiting cell, with a guard stationed in the corner. We don't consider the prisoner to be violent, but considering why he's here, we just don't take any chances."

"Will he be restrained?" Hannah asked.

"Not that there is a need to, but frankly, he's put on so much weight that we don't have shackles or leg irons that fit him."

They signed the necessary disclaimers, the kind of legal scapegoat documents that every state and federal penitentiary puts before anyone dubbed a "slight risk contact visit."

"Corrections Officer Madsen will take you to him." The warden nodded at a young man with Elvis sideburns who had just appeared in the hallway.

Hannah and Bauer walked toward Madsen standing by the door.

"Any reason why he called for us now?" Hannah asked the warden. "I mean, anything I don't know?" She shot a look at Bauer.

"Don't look at me," he said.

The warden shook his head. "Your guess is as good as mine. His poor health? Lonely? Hell, maybe for a little drama? Who knows? But he's opened the door and, I'd guess, this is your chance. Maybe he'll finally answer that question you've always wanted to ask him."

With Jeff Bauer by her side, Hannah Griffin stared hard as she entered the small, seemingly airless room. There he was.
He must weigh 325 pounds.
He was honeydew-round in the face; his fingers were bloated rows of frankfurters with grille marks left by a fire long ago. He wore Day-Glo orange coveralls that could have doubled as a hunter's tent, so much fabric had been used. At first, nothing about him looked the same. She searched the man seated in front of her, hands clasped on the empty table, for any recognition that he was the man he said he was. He looked much younger than a man in his sixties.

An extra hundred pounds or so sure fills in the wrinkles,
Hannah thought to herself. When she took her seat, she noticed his left eye didn't track.

It was Marcus Wheaton.
It had to be. Wheaton had a glass eye thanks to a beer bottle shoved in his face during a bar brawl when he was twenty-one. It was so odd. The dead, lifeless eye always begged more attention than its mobile partner. Whenever Wheaton spoke, eyes would light upon the glass eye. It almost seemed as though the live eye would turn slightly to look at what it was that everyone focused on.

In seconds it started coming back. Hannah remembered how Marcus used to take the brown eye out to scare her and her little brothers. He'd pop it out and boom across the house that he was a cartoon superhero reject called "Mar-clops." He was "half man, all evil."

"I would know you anywhere," he said.

Hannah took a seat next to Bauer with Wheaton across the table. His pudding features were ashen. His hair was almost white, and his fingernails were long and paper thin; dark crescents marked each cuticle.

"Glad that you've come to see me," he said. He leaned forward and whispered to the guard that he needed a drink of water.

"I have wanted to see you for some time," she said.

The guard delivered a paper cup and stood, hovering like a blue uniformed wasp, until the last sip had been drained from the container. The cup was removed as if some how, some way, it could pose a danger to the inmate or his guests.

Wheaton cleared his throat. "Is that so? I can't recall a message from you in the past ten years."

"In the past ten years I've tried to forget."

"And forgive, I hope," he said.

Hannah bristled, though she tried to hide it. "How do you forgive a permanent nightmare?"

The fat man nodded very slowly. A sad mask slipped over his bulbous features. "How do you forget a broken heart? I don't deny that I set the fire, but I didn't kill anybody. In a way, I'm one of your mom's victims, too."

Bauer let out a breath of exasperation. "We get it. Today, everyone is a victim of something. Yes, we know. Now, why don't you just cut the crap," he said, his voice rising with each word. "And tell us what you've summoned us to hear?"

Wheaton fiddled with the valve on an oxygen tank that Hannah noticed for the first time. A thin tube ran to his left nostril.

"Special Agent Bauer, the past two decades have been good to you. Not so to me. I'm afraid. I'm morbidly obese. I have emphysema, and I don't have much time. Time is all I used to have. I used to count the days here. I stopped counting because it only made freedom seem more impossible." He paused and then a smile broke out over his face. "It's funny to think that after all these years, I'd be sitting in prison and you'd be wearing the same light blue dress shirt."

Bauer ignored the feeble dig.

"If you called us for a sympathy sob session, you misdialed, Wheaton."

"Call me Marcus," he said. "That's what they called me when I was a person. When I could walk free. Like you and others we know."

Hannah spoke, tentatively. "Like my mother."

The eye fixed on her. "Could be. But then we've just started our visit. Wouldn't want it to end so soon. The last visitor I had came at least ten years ago. A nun from Pittsburgh took the Greyhound out here to this godforsaken piece of shit country to see me. They let her stay four minutes."

"I saw it on the news," Hannah said. "She seemed a little obsessed."

"Yes, I understand she was interviewed by Diane Sawyer, too."

"Sorry, didn't catch that," Bauer said.

Wheaton looked at the FBI agent, then back at Hannah. "Neither did I. They took the television away from me after the riots of seventy-nine. That was a time. A terrible time when I didn't know if I'd be ground into dog food or raped by some big guy with a baseball bat. But, you know, I digress."

Bauer found it impossible to contain his irritation. "Why don't you tell us why we're here," he said.

The eye blinked once more. "Did I read you have a daughter, Hannah?"

Hannah didn't want to discuss any of that with Wheaton. "I'm not here--"

He cut her off. "--to talk about your personal life? I guess not. But I read in the Sunday
Oregonian
that you are the mother of a little girl. How nice. How is the husband? Still married to the fellow?"

Hannah put her palms on the table and started to get up from the yellow oak chairs. Her fine features went pink. "I'm leaving," she said. She didn't want to let on that she'd never been featured in the
Oregonian
.
Where did Wheaton come up with that?

Wheaton shook his head, and the room vibrated slightly. "No. You're not. Because I will tell you what you need to know."

"About my mother?"

"Yes."

"Is she alive?"

He held his lips together and looked around the room. Finally, like air escaping a bicycle tire, he spoke.

"She is. I'm sure of it."

Hannah felt woozy, and Bauer instinctively leaned closer to her.

"You all right?" he asked.

"I'm fine," she said. She always knew her mother had not fallen from the face of the earth, but to hear someone who might know something actually say so was hard to take. Marcus Wheaton could be lying, of course, and Hannah knew that. But there were many things that people could call Wheaton. A liar wasn't one of them.

She thought about the shoes and how they came to her office. "Did you send them?"

"No, I did not." Wheaton's tone was indignant, and both Bauer and Hannah thought he was either sincere or a practiced liar.

"Do you know who did?" Hannah asked.

Wheaton pondered her question. "I'm not at liberty."

Not at liberty;
Hannah and Bauer thought the word choice was strange.

"My mother," she pressed on, "did my mother send them to me somehow?"

Another man stood outside the door, and Madsen let him in. He said he was a doctor, and Wheaton had to be removed to the infirmary for medication relating to his emphysema.

The diagnosis seemed off to Hannah. Symptoms, at least overt physical ones, didn't seem to match Wheaton's physical embodiment. He was a two-ton load. Most suffering from the disease were staggering skeletons, hooked up to a tank that followed them everywhere like a precious little dachshund. She asked Madsen about Wheaton as they walked down the corridor to the warden's sanctuary.

"Just how sick is he?"

"Emphysema, cancer, the flu... you name it, he's had it all since I've been here," Madsen said. "No telling what he'd
suffered
from before my five years started here. He's what we call an infirmary moth. They bitch and moan about illness just to get out of their cells. I don't much blame them. The infirmary has the only window in the cellblock... the only source of natural light. But for God sake,
emphysema?
Jesus... he'd be better off claiming something like high blood pressure."

"Cholesterol poisoning," Bauer jumped in, trying to make a lighter moment while holding the door open for Hannah.

"The donut disease," she said, unable to even manage a smile.

Madsen said they'd be having lunch in the warden's private dining room. It would be only the two of them. The warden had a crown that needed replacing, and he'd driven down to the Landing to see the dentist-- though the prison had its own dentist, one who found a little too much joy in his work. Madsen led the pair into a cubbyhole of a room with a massive oak table.

"Not everyone gets this treatment. I've been in here only a dozen times in ten years," Madsen said.

A ceramic bowl of blown-glass fruit commanded the center of the table. Miriam Thomas had left her homey touch. Lunch was surprisingly elegant, consisting of salmon with dill (from the prison's pea patch), spears of late-season asparagus, and a pretty decent Waldorf salad.

"Wheaton's always more cheerful after eating," Madsen said, exiting the dining room. "Especially happy after a double serving of chili-mac."

"That's fine," Bauer said. "Feed the behemoth. We've got catching up to do."

"That's one way to put it. More like opening old wounds, I'd say," Hannah said. She tied to manage an ironic smile.