hemline. I don’t know if it was burned, but it was dark at the hemline. Could have been mud. She was screaming about her brothers. Over and over she was saying, “Danny and Erik, why? Why?”
INTERVIEWER: Did she ask about her mother?
REYNOLDS: Not a peep. She never said a word about Claire Logan. I think she knew what her mother had done. I think that little girl knew it. She was a tough little thing, tough enough to keep her mouth shut, you know. Hey, can I ask you for a favor?
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
REYNOLDS: Can you take the “fucking” out of this interview? I don’t want my kids to see me using that kind of language. You know, sounds kind of bad.
INTERVIEWER: No problem. Understood. What about Marcus Wheaton? Did you know him?
REYNOLDS: Saw him in Rock Point a time or two. You know those guys with tats that say
Marcus Wheaton’s run of bad luck started the day he was born with a cleft palate to a mother who vomited at the sight of her baby instead of cuddling him in her arms. It didn’t get better as he got older, reconstructive surgery notwithstanding. Liz Wheaton sold cosmetics and perfume at the downtown Portland Meier and Frank department store during the day and worked stag parties on the weekends until the dim light of a motel room could no longer hide her advancing age. Reeking of the melange of scents that permeated her workplace, Liz Wheaton never met a fragrance she didn’t try. Often, with a heavy hand. She was known by some of her after-hours customers as the “whore who smelled better than she looked.”
Marcus had been the result of Liz’s moonlighting. “The worst bonus I ever got,” she occasionally groused to her girlfriends. Marcus never knew his father because Liz was never sure which guy it had been. When he was seven, Liz told her only son that his disfigurement was God’s way of punishing her for her sins. By then, she’d given up the Saturday-night sex parties for Sunday church services at a suburban Assemblies of God.
When Marcus fled south to Rock Point, Liz followed her son, which was odd. After all, he was the baby she puked on, the one she’d have sucked into a sink had she not been raised Catholic. But Liz said she wanted to make up for all she had done. By then Marcus had forgiven her, though at thirty-one, he longed for another woman in his life. Marty and Claire Logan advertised for a helper on the tree farm, and Wheaton answered the ad. Wheaton needed to believe that despite his weight, the scar from his surgeries, and only one real eye, he could find a woman. It was too bad the woman was married.
The fire was one more bad moment in a man’s life corroded with disaster. It was, he would say later, the end of the big fall that started the day he was born.
On Christmas Eve night, a pair of sheriff’s deputies driving from Icicle Creek Farm found the mammoth handyman stooped over fixing a flat about a mile from the smoldering house. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The twin crescents of his buttocks caught the beam of the headlights and bounced a spray of white light into the black air. A radio was on, and the tune coming from the cab was the jangling sounds of Brenda Lee’s
Marcus Wheaton’s name and an outstanding traffic ticket from the previous summer turned up a little unexpected gold. His address was the same as Icicle Creek Farm’s—the cops had heard the dispatcher give it out more times than a television ad for a lip-synching hasbeen’s greatest hits. Each time it crackled over the wire reminded them that they weren’t on the scene of the biggest story coming out of Rock Point in years. Maybe ever.
The older deputy with the white-sidewalls crew cut made his way over to the truck, and Wheaton straightened his hunched spine. He blinked his puffy eyes in the beam of the officer’s flashlight.
“Step in front of the vehicle, please.” The deputy shone his flashlight over Wheaton’s face and traced his arms.
Sweat freckled Wheaton’s brow. His jacket was torn at the sleeves, and it appeared the spare tire he had hoisted from the bed of the truck had blackened his chest with a large, greasy smear.
“Marcus Wheaton?” asked the other deputy.
“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice raspy.
“You work for the Logans?”
He nodded. “For quite some time.”
“You know the place is burning tonight.”
“Yeah.”
“Know anything about it?”
Wheaton’s shoulders hunched and he sank into the ground. His eyes were fixed in an odd stare. He started muttering something about how tired he was and how he hadn’t really known what had happened on the farm. Then, strangely, he looked to the ground and told the pair of deputies that he didn’t know a damn thing about Icicle Creek Farm, the fire, or anything much at all. But his protestations were his undoing.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I didn’t kill anybody.”
The deputies exchanged looks, and the one with the head that begged for a “Firestone” tattoo coughed out the order that they were taking Wheaton in for questioning. “You’ve got something to tell us,” he said.
Then Wheaton turned his face and both cops lost their breath. His ear and the flesh from his temple to his jawline was shiny red and black. His hair was singed from the jaw line to the nape of his neck.
“Jesus, what the hell happened to you?” the older one asked.
Wheaton’s eyes evaded the cops. Finally, he answered, “I got burned.”
“Jesus,” the cop said, “you need a doctor.”
Inside of five minutes of the police request for medical help, Marcus Wheaton was on his way to the hospital for what appeared to be second-degree, possibly third-degree burns.
While the sirens caterwauled into the darkness of a landscape with no streetlights on the way to Rock Point General Hospital, no one had any inkling what was to be learned by the light of day. No one, save for Wheaton, probably had any idea that his world was about to be turned upside down. Only he knew that once the newborn baby bathed in the warm, wretched spew of his mother’s vomit, he was about to suffer the greatest indignity and betrayal of his life.
Early Christmas afternoon, Jeff Bauer surveyed what had once been Icicle Creek Farm. It was the initial of what would be dozens of visits, but it would always hold great power in his memory because it was the first time he saw the destruction brought by unmitigated evil. It was a large property, forty-five acres of Noble, Balsam, and Douglas fir. Some were only two feet high, while others had gotten away from the owners and hit twenty-five. A sign in front of a gorgeous Nobel proclaimed: RESERVED FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The noise of men, heavy equipment, steel shovels hitting rock and brick, and the sizzle of water on ash wove a dense fabric of sound. Bauer looked on in complete amazement at the destruction of what had surely been a lovely place. Only the wreath maker’s shed was completely unscathed. The house was gone. The building that had been used first as a chicken house, and later for storage, was partially burned. Bauer parked his car in a muddy patch in front of what had been the house but was now a smoldering grave. All that remained was a basketball hoop and a car with melted tires. On the orange hoop, someone had put up a wreath with pinecones and a red plastic bow. The car had a circle of wire affixed to the burned-out grille. It, too, had been festooned with a wreath. Drifting snow had melted and refroze, surrounding the enormous black holes where the various structures had collapsed into themselves.
Bauer had the gruesome responsibility of witnessing the recovery of more bodies. While it was not truly a federal case, it had the potential to be one—kidnapping was a possibility.
“They found the woman and two boys over there,” a cop in a black raincoat and stocking cap announced. The
