A Wicked Snow

Chapter Eleven

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.