A Wicked Snow

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.

BOOK TWO

Ashes

If Hannah Logan had shared any happy times with her mother, they must have been the warm evenings of Oregon’s all-too-brief summer. Just after 9 p.m., Claire Logan would summon her daughter, and they’d sit on a log that had been split lengthwise and shaped as a bench to watch their moon-flowers unfurl. Her father had created the bench with a chain-saw, during the off-season the year he thought he could sell “Lumber Jack Furniture.” But each evening, against a stump of a tree that had burned into a stubby snag, mother and daughter would sit and watch the flowers come to life. The white moonflowers, grown from seeds purchased from Burpee’s catalog, had always been Claire’s favorite. Their almost magical opening was a cherished reminder of her youth in Oregon. Hannah was equally enthralled. In front of their eyes, milky white tubes would twist and open into trumpets. From closed tight to open and swirling in fifteen minutes.

And while the pirouetting imagery was lovely, later, when she revisited those moments, Hannah could see that her mother was a bitter woman. She was a schemer, more than a dreamer.

“Hannah,” she said, “don’t let a man get in the way of your dreams. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t be what your heart tells you.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Remember my words. Carve them on my headstone with acid when I’m gone. I don’t care. As long as you remember.”

Hannah nodded, then nuzzled her mother and smiled at the laughter of her brothers as they played in their upstairs bedroom.

“I remember when Hannah told me about the moon-flowers,” childhood friend Michelle Masour later told a magazine reporter. “Her mother was weird, but she did have some good qualities. Hannah loved her mother. She never saw any of this stuff coming. Not at all.”

—From Twenty in a Row: The Claire Logan

Murders, by Marcella Hoffman