—A jump-rope verse from the 1970s
Prologue
The girl remembered the snow and the evil that had come with it. She shuddered at the very idea of the velvety white shroud over a mountaintop—the drifts of cream around fence posts on the country lane of a Christmas card. For many, such images brought to mind the beauty of the winter season and the holidays that hang from a frosty bow. But not for her. It wasn’t just the snow, of course. It was what came with it. Whenever she saw or felt the cold heart of winter, she thought of her mother.
A snow scene brought a thumping of her heart and the shadowy image of a woman in wine-colored cover-alls and a navy-blue down-filled vest. Vapors formed a halo around the woman’s head, though the girl knew the irony of the image. She knew it was her mother. And her mother was far from an angel in every way that could be imagined. The face, however, was blank in her memory. The girl was unsure what color eyes her mother had or if her nose was straight or slightly crooked like her own. She knew their coloring was the same, but nothing more. Nothing she could swear to. She had done a good job of trying to forget just what her mother looked like. She stopped wondering if, as she approached her mother’s age,
The girl would grow into a woman. She’d marry. She’d become a mother herself. Yet she’d hold everything inside. She’d tell no one. What happened could be squeezed from her brain only by the force of her considerable will. She alone could release it. Still, she took no chances. She’d live a life away from the snow that chilled her heart and brought tears to her eyes. She’d keep a house free of powdered sugar, white granular laundry detergent, and anything else that reminded her of the icy darkness that she fought so hard to forget. No snow globes from airport gift shops. No ski trips to Vail. Nothing to trip a memory from rearing its breathless visage and reminding her of what she knew she had to forget.
BEFORE IT PUT US ON the map, we were a county known for tight-grained lumber and the finest run of Chinook that the Northwest had ever seen. Our schools were good; our roadways safe. But a decade after the incident, we’re left with a reputation that belies our hearts and our way of life. For Spruce County, this has gone on too long. It is time to bury this story and move on. We urge a “no” vote on the annexation of the Logan property for a possible public park and memorial.
—Editorial,
BOOK ONE
Reunion
Chapter One
The sun cut over the jagged edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. Sharp and bright, its rays hacked through the haze from the millions who crawled to work on the hot, gummy freeways of the Los Angeles basin fifty-five miles away. Magenta clouds of bougainvillea softened the chain-link fences corralling the cinder-block homes lining Cabrillo Avenue, the busiest street into Santa Louisa. As Hannah Griffin drove to work on a sunny August morning, a newsman’s voice droned on about the date being the anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation. Even at that hour, Hannah was not the first to pull into the parking lot of the Santa Louisa County Courthouse where she had worked in the crime investigations unit for the past five and a half years. She guided the burgundy Volvo wagon into a spot east of a stand of eucalyptus that ran along the median.
Santa Louisa County was an hour and a half northeast of Los Angeles. It was a world away from California’s most imitated and chided city. Santa Louisa, the county and the town that shared the same name, was nothing but
