A Wicked Snow

“I have no idea why he’d go there,” the younger sister said of her father’s trip to Oregon. “He didn’t like the rain. He used to tell us he had enough of water from being on the Pacific all those years. He was stationed in San Diego.”

The women didn’t know if he had any friends in Oregon, but they suspected he probably did.

“He never knew a stranger. The men on the ship loved my dad. He was booked for fourteen weddings when he retired.”

“Did he know Marcus Wheaton? Claire Logan?”

The older of the two wrinkled her brow. “I read about them in the paper today,” she said. “But, no, he did not know them that we ever heard.”

“Even though he didn’t say that he was leaving town,” the other said, finally speaking up. “There is one thing that we always wondered about.”

“What’s that?”

“He sold his condo two months before he disappeared. We don’t know what happened with that money… and what about his pension? The navy wouldn’t tell us a thing about it, but I got the impression that he was still getting his checks. For the longest time I thought he was alive.”

“How much money did he have?” the agent asked. “I mean, was your father wealthy?”

“Not really. He spent most of his money on photography equipment. He bought two Nikons and a Hasselblad in one year. But the money from the condo was probably greater than two hundred thousand dollars. It had a view of the Hotel del Coronado. He loved that red peaked roof. My dad thought it looked like a circus tent. And it did. He was like that sometimes. He liked the circus.”

It was the box, or more accurately its contents, Barbara Layton had given Bauer in Deer Lake that gave the case an entirely new and, some would say, disturbing focus. It was true that Bauer gave the contents a cursory review before scrunching his six-foot frame into a seat on the flight to Portland and had fully intended to pore over the entire contents. But the bumpy ride and the queasiness in his stomach forced him to set everything aside. Upchucking into the box, he suspected, would be extremely poor form. It wasn’t until he got back to his apartment in Portland that he made a pivotal discovery.

The apartment building manager was lurking in the parking lot in the way he always did—giving young girls the creeps and making awkward conversation necessary from those who caught his eye. Bauer slung his bag over his shoulder and locked his car. And since conversation couldn’t be completely avoided, he told the lurking manager that he’d likely be “in and out” over the next few weeks.

The man nodded, his eyes hinting for more information in the transparently pathetic way frequently employed by bad actors and the very lonely.

“On assignment,” he said, though he felt like a jerk after the words slipped off his tongue. It sounded so… so… Mr. Big.

“The Rock Point slaughter?” asked the tiny man with bug eyes and slicked back hair, a style that made him amphibian or vaguely reptilian. His ever-present olive-colored turtleneck didn’t lessen the image.

Bauer brushed past him. “Can’t say,” he answered, wishing he hadn’t even opened his mouth. “Sorry.”

In his apartment, Bauer fished out an Elton John cassette from his collection, Madman Across the Water, stuck it in the machine, and put up his feet and went to work. What he had wasn’t evidence, per se, but the personal effects given to him by what had been a missing, now a dead, man’s sister. He was not, Bauer was sure, compromising any investigation. Instead, he was giving himself a head start on a case that he was sure would be the biggest of his career.

Inside the box with the foxed edges were photocopies of Social Security documents, discharge papers, medical history (including test results indicating the presence of prostate cancer), a passport, and several news clippings. There were no financial papers. This omission was surprising and he made a note to follow up on that. Barbara Layton had said her brother had closed his bank account before leaving San Diego. It was the sole thing about which she was utterly convinced.

A news article folded accordion-style before being placed in an envelope fluttered to the floor. It had been cut from a newspaper called something-Guard. Bauer thought the first word might be Honor, but he had never heard of it. An advertisement on the reverse side provided fodder for his thesis. It indicated it was a news- paper or magazine aimed at military retirees. Who else, Bauer wondered, would want a mock cover of Life magazine with their picture inserted and “VJ Day Hero!” emblazoned on the cover. A headline in block letters read GREAT FOR THE GRANDKIDS. The article was not trimmed in its entirety, so Bauer focused on the other side that appeared to be a portion of a classified ad section. Further inspection showed five notices circled in the skipping ink of a dying blue ballpoint pen. The marked section contained personal “Meet a Mate” ads from women. One advertisement stood out from all the others:

Searching for a Silver Eagle. Come soar with me on wings of friendship… and more. I am 42 years old and own my own business. I’m told I’m attractive and I’ve kept my figure. You’ll have to be the judge. Yes, I have three children, but they are young and well behaved. I have a beautiful farm in the woods of the Great Northwest and am looking for the right man to share it with. I have everything…but You? Write Ms. W, P.O. Box 111, Rock Point, Oregon.

It was the address that made Bauer sit up and slide his feet under him as if he was going to jump up, which in a split-second, he did. It also drained the blood from his face. Bauer went for the phone and made two calls, the first to Derek Saunders, the Special Agent in charge of the Portland field office. Saunders wasn’t in, but his secretary took down a message. The next call was to the Spruce County Sheriff’s office in Rock Point. The discourse was brief. The Sheriff said he was heading out for a smoke break.

“You need to find out who had Box Triple One— 111—at the Rock Point post office,” Bauer said, his eager- beaver voice as evident as it had ever been in his entire life. He caught himself and slowed down before adding, “I’m on my way down there.”

“No prob,” the sheriff said. “Don’t get your panties bunched up and I’ll get what you need.”

Bauer made a quick trip to the bathroom, picked up his bag, slung it over his shoulder, and left Elton to finish his songs alone.

The postmistress at Rock Point was a wiry woman with a one-color-all-over curly brunette helmet, which hugged her head as if it were a midget octopus. She also had the surly attitude that most agreed came with the inky territory. Della Holm had been working at the “new” post office for nine years. Before that, she worked a dozen years at what had once been billed as the “Smallest Post Office West of the Rockies” in the back of the Mullins Hardware Emporium in downtown Rock Point. But that was over when a bureaucrat who had never set foot outside the Washington Beltway decided Rock Point needed a new post office. A new facility— was how the memo referred to the place. Facility. It was such an iceberg way of talking about something as important as a post office. A post office, Della knew, was the heartbeat of any town—no matter its size. Della hated the new building, a modular structure with indoor-outdoor carpeting and a butcher block counter because “it looks like a bureaucrat’s idea of cost savings for white-trash America.” Della was bitter because she had no longer had a claim to fame; she no longer could boast at the annual regional postmasters’ conference in Portland that her station was the smallest, biggest, busiest, prettiest. Nothing. She was now in charge of a post office that resembled an RV, and, she readily admitted to anyone who asked, it hurt her.

“I’ve given my life to the government and I get this?” she would ruminate over and over. “Who ever heard of such an incredibly stupid idea as a carpeted meter work area? Those idiots!”

She pinned up a drawing of Uncle Sam holding a mailbag with the words SIZE MATTERS! She pretended it was a gift from a disgruntled customer who sympathized with her plight, and she didn’t have the heart to take the darn thing down.

On December 28, Della Holm was busy hating the world and fiddling with the Pitney Bowes label maker when Sheriff Bob Howe and the pleasant-looking out-of-towner, a young FBI agent named Jeff Bauer, arrived. She didn’t protest when the sheriff inquired about the holder of Box 111. She could have asked for a warrant. She could have said a flat-out “no” and told the cops to beat feet. The information was confidential. “Our patrons have a right— are guaranteed the right—to privacy,” she had read in the manual when she first started her so-called career. That was in the days when she was young enough to still believe the government gave a hoot