A Wicked Snow

Bauer listened intently. “Wouldn’t it leech out anyway?” he asked.

“In time… Special Agent…”

“Bauer,” he said.

“In time, Agent Bauer, but not nearly as rapidly. By keeping the lime next to the corpse, it eats away at the flesh ten times faster. At least. Who’s to say, really? It is only an estimate. Not every vile and disgusting thing known to man has been cataloged and measured. But the quick lime and the water and the enzymes present in the human body turn the corpse into a slurry. It’s like a churning, a Waring blender of—for lack of a better word— gunk.”

Ignoring signs posted over the doorway, Dr. Wilder lit up a cigarette and looked about the gym for a place to drop his match. When he found none, he let it land on the floor before rapidly grinding it out.

Bauer spoke up. “Are all the victims in uniform?”

“All, insofar as we can tell, are dressed in some kind of a military uniform. There’s another similarity, or so it seems. While we can’t be sure given their decomposed condition, most appear to be older gentlemen. I’d say fifties and sixties.”

“Any I.D. made?”

Dr. Wilder drew a deep breath through his Camel and shook his head. The filterless end of the cigarette was wet and mashed from his clenched lips.

“That’s the kicker. None of these guys have any teeth.” The bald-headed doctor blew two channels of smoke out of his nose and watched warily for the agent’s response.

Bauer’s face remained stone. “No teeth?”

“Yes, it appears whoever murdered these fellows knew how to work a sledge hammer or something of the sort. I’ve never seen anything like it, except maybe in cases in which a face is bashed in by a steering wheel in the course of a head-on. But not deliberate. Postmortem, I’m sure. It’s strange. All of the corpses are missing their smiles.” Wilder touched his lips and let out a short, peculiar laugh. It was the kind of embarrassed laugh some- one makes when they know they’ve said the wrong thing.

A small group of uniformed county personnel swarmed the scene. They were worker ants and the bodies were their blue egg cases. Moving from one to another, officers took pictures and cataloged whatever seemed pertinent.

A young cop came up and offered a cup of coffee. Bauer happily took it. The stench had permeated everything, even his taste buds. The coffee was lousy, but at the same time it was the best he ever tasted. At least, Jeff Bauer needed something in his mouth and throat.

“You want to see the survivor?” the officer asked as Bauer gulped. “Hannah Logan, Claire Logan’s daughter. She’s thirteen or fourteen. They’re processing her now and taking her to the Inn and Sheriff says you can see her there. It would be better for her, less threatening than the county building, I guess. Poor kid’s really shaken up. Got no family, no place to stay.”

It was only years later that Hannah Logan would piece together details of what happened in Rock Point that Christmas Eve night and the very early morning hours of Christmas Day. Some things were stored in memory, like smelly, moldy trinkets in a lead-lined box. She couldn’t get to all of her memories, even if she had tried. In fact, she said little about what happened during the first hours, and not surprisingly, even less as the years went by. She remembered how a fireman had given her his coat back at the farm. She would flash on that image time and again as she surveyed that copy of Life magazine that featured similar photographs— along with the horror of that snowy night. She remembered how they took her to a small room at the department they called the “Victim Assistance Room” or the—in cop-speak buzzing around her—”VAR.” She had a vague recollection that she looked terrible. A crust of blood on her hair had dried, leaving it matted to her head. She wore the Bobcats sweatshirt and jeans given by the sister of the sheriff’s dispatcher. She sat with her arms folded, to conceal her budding breasts. No one had thought to bring her a bra.

VAR officer Sheila Wax was a wiry woman with a pack-a-day smoker’s baritone and glasses that hung on a chain around her neck and moved to and fro as she walked, the bony plate of her chest rising and falling with each step. Part of her strategy for dealing with the shell-shocked victims of crime was called “whisking.” She had to keep the victim’s thought processes stirring from one idea to the next. Dwelling on a thought, on a task, could mean a breakdown. No one wanted to deal with the screams of someone falling apart, no matter how justified such a response might be. Those who said they didn’t mind, that they wanted to be needed by the fragile and the cracked, were liars. Sheila Wax wasn’t compassionless. She cared about doing a good job. But Wax also had a twenty-two- pound Tom turkey in the oven and a house full of relatives milling around a table that she still had to set. She handed Hannah a can of pop and a bag of chips.

“Want some Christmas cookies, hon? They have some Mexican wedding cakes and cherry bars out there,” she said, indicating the spread of holiday treats fanned out in front of the dispatcher’s command center.

Hannah shook her head. Her lips were dry and her throat felt tightly constricted. Food was far from her mind. She couldn’t think of anything but what she’d seen and heard that night. For the next three hours she sat in that little room, a radio playing Christmas songs and the noise of running feet and lowered voices pass- ing by the doorway. The VAR lady brought her a pillow and a blanket, but she couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she could see what she wanted to forget.

“What about my brothers?” she asked.

“I’ll let you know as soon as I hear something, hon,” Wax repeated.

But Hannah was insistent. “I want to see my mom.”

“Soon, I’m sure,” Wax said. “Soon.”

A two-inch, second-degree burn on her right forearm was the only injury recorded by an ER doctor, who prescribed a mild topical painkiller and dressed her arm in gauze. He gave Hannah a Charms sucker—sour apple flavored, green in color. The smell of that candy, apple and sugar, made her sick. She clutched her stomach. It was an odor that she would always associate with the “incident.” Green apple candy was one thing Hannah could avoid fairly easily. Escaping the fact that she was Claire Logan’s daughter was another matter. Of course, she didn’t know that then.

Chapter Fourteen

1986 Save Our History project,

Rock Point High School, transcript

DARWIN REYNOLDS: When I got there the fire was nipping at the treetops. It was a fucking—excuse me—a freaking explosion, fully engulfed. It was around 2 a.m. on Christmas morning. I’d rather have been in bed. But it was bad. Real bad. Right off the roof of the main house the flames shot like a cannon. I could feel the blast of heat from the back of the truck.

INTERVIEWER: Were you scared?

REYNOLDS: Scared? That’s a dumb question. It was my job to put out the fire. None of us were scared.

INTERVIEWER: (embarrassed): Sorry. Was anything else burning besides the house?

REYNOLDS: Everything was on fire. When my squad got there, we were divided into three teams of two each. Rick [White] and I went out to the house. It was fully engulfed. We yelled for survivors. Nothing. Sam [Collingsly] and Scott [Armstrong] went to the barn and it was burning. Livestock had already been set free. Matt [Jared] and Myron [Tanner] covered the area by the wreathmaker’s shed. That’s where they found the girl.

INTERVIEWER: Hannah Logan? That’s where they found her? Describe what you saw.

REYNOLDS: I saw Myron and a kid, a girl. She was in a flannel nightgown that had been singed at the