A Wicked Snow

name. Ten minutes later, she was in the driveway of their house on Loma Linda. Ethan’s car was not out front, and her heart sank even lower.

Where was Amber?

“Honey!” she called out, but no one responded. “Amber, honey! Where are you?”

Hannah was frantic by then. She ran through the house, swinging open doors and pulling the covers from her daughter’s unmade bed. She fell to her knees and peered under the bed.

“Let’s not play the hiding game!” she called out. “If we are, then I give up. Come out.”

She knew that was a ridiculous hope. They hadn’t played that game for months, maybe longer than a year.

For any parent, the moment when a child is thought to be missing is the longest moment of a lifetime. Guilt, shame, fear, and hope converge in a stunning force that squeezes the breath from a person’s lungs, male or female. Catch a breath. Take a second. She’s here. She’s with her father. She’s at Maddie’s.

Hannah dialed Maddie’s house, and Elena Jackson answered, her voice annoyingly chirpy, given the circumstances.

“Hi, Hannah. How are you? Saw your name in the paper about that terrible case you’re working.”

“Oh yes,” she answered, glad for the chance to calm her voice. “Is Amber over there?”

“No. Is everything all right?”

“I’m sure she’s with her dad. Sorry. Got home late. A million things on my mind and I forgot to call Ethan.”

She thought of the woman walking her dog. Maybe she’d come by again. Maybe this time, she took Amber from the day care. Setting the phone down, Hannah noticed the red eye of the answering machine blinking at her. She pushed the button.

“Four new messages,” the auto voice intoned.

There were three hang ups, each one ratcheting her fear to a new level.

Not more. Not her?

Hannah felt the warm flow of tears down her cheeks as she strained to hear. The last call was Ethan’s voice. In the background she could hear the sounds of a public place, the clatter of dishes. Maybe music.

“Hannah,” he said, with an irritated tone that she barely knew, “I’m trying to be understanding. But this is too much. You have too much on your mind. Or something. Amber’s with me. We’re getting something to eat. You know if I’d have left our daughter waiting alone, you’d have filed for divorce. Pull yourself together.”

Ethan was right, of course. He almost always was. At that moment, she hated him for his cool head. She was floundering; a big messy mix of worry and fear had consumed her and held her hostage. There is a moment of truth for everyone, and Hannah knew hers had been squandered long ago. But knowing this only made her sick to her stomach at what she’d done—what she had somehow allowed to happen. She’d heard Ethan talk about family members, mothers mostly, who’d done nothing to save their children from unspeakable horrors of men with damp, sticky fingers, probing under the covers. She’d seen cases of her own come through the lab—the fragments of lives interrupted before they’d begun. Hannah had a sixth sense about cases like that. The Rorschach of bloodstains on a sheet. The minute tear in a child’s underpants. A man’s pubic hair under a murder victim’s broken nail. Each spoke to her in a loud and menacing voice. They told her the words she hadn’t heeded when she could have.

Stop it. Only you can save them.

Chapter Nine

Hannah sat up and stared into the darkness. Ethan rolled away, as though moving to allow her space to get in and out of bed. But she sat there, still. Her breathing so labored, so slow, she could see her nightgown rise and fall like a malevolent tide. In her sudden lurch to awakening, the memories she had sought to hold deep inside flooded her consciousness. There was no escaping them. As the foggy memory of the worst of days came into sharper focus, the words played in her head like the backbeat to a song that refused to die. She turned to Ethan, afraid she was saying them in a voice loud enough to be heard.

I should have killed her myself, she thought. I should have killed her when I had the chance.

A partial memory played…

It was about half an hour before midnight when an unexpected noise outside converged with the chill of a snowy December night and woke Hannah. She was only a thirteen-year-old girl then, but even so, she held a kind of strength within her that kept her both caregiver to her brothers and unwitting confidant to a mother she had ceased really trusting. But that night, more than ever, something was wrong. Certainly, she could feel and taste Christmas. Yes, there was the anticipation of a morning of surprises. All of it. But whatever spell the season had held in years past was annihilated by voices outside. It was her mother and Marcus Wheaton. Their declarations and murmurs overlapped, and it took Hannah a minute or two to grasp what they were saying.

She heard her mother first. It sounded as if she was calling out from across the snowy driveway in front of the wreath maker’s shed.

“Get moving! We have about ten minutes, and as you know, ten minutes is barely a breath of time to do anything right. If you can’t do it, I’ll take care of the boys myself.”

Marcus said something, but Hannah was unsure what it was.

Then her mother called out. “Pull yourself together. Jesus! Act like a man.”

Hannah strained to hear. Although the words were incongruous with the holiday, she allowed herself to think that they were arguing over the assembly of gifts or something. Maybe for the boys? A pair of bikes? She got up and quietly crept to the window.

She knew, despite his job as her mother’s so-called handyman, Marcus Wheaton wasn’t mechanically inclined.

Then Wheaton called out, but his voice remained lower and therefore harder to decipher. Snow was falling and the wind sent a breeze that snapped the Santa banners that were hanging in the yard. Molly, the Logan’s black lab, barked. There was commotion out there, but the two figures in the yard were maintaining some kind of control. This wasn’t, thankfully, a knock-down, drag- out fight like they’d engaged in in the past. Hannah peeled aside a window shade to get a better view. Light seeped into the room, and she rubbed her eyes. She stared down from her window to the odd and snowy scene.

Vapors of white puffed from Marcus Wheaton’s mouth. She’d tease him tomorrow about being a dragon or something. She waited to see bikes or whatever wheeled across the white yard, but nothing happened. Her mother was nowhere in sight, and Wheaton disappeared. Whatever they were doing was over. Whatever they’d been up to had to be some kind of Christmas surprise for her brothers. Hannah crawled back in bed, pulled the covers up to her neck, and fell asleep.

And Hannah, now grown, a mother herself, still couldn’t let the rest of the story play in her mind. She finally fell asleep. It was after two.

The next day was filled with paperwork for Hannah, though interrupted more than occasionally with thoughts of Jeff Bauer. Hannah examined documents she hoped would prove that little Enrique Garcia had been murdered by his violence-prone father, Berto. Each line needed to be examined. Tedious, to be sure, but necessary. It was difficult and slow going, with eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. A visit from Ripperton didn’t make it any easier. He sauntered into her office like he owned the place. There was boldness in his manner, more exaggerated than usual. It was obvious that he was still proud of his investigative work on the Garcia case. Hannah noticed that the white circles around his eyes were pronounced. He had been tanning again.