about her tiny post office and doing things the right way. Instead, tired of hand stamping half the stuff that came through the slot in the counter, pissed off because her pension wasn’t going to be enough, Della brushed her creatures-of-the-deep hair from her eyes and told the sheriff what he wanted to know.
“Claire Logan,” she said, “rented that box for years. Icicle Creek Farm has a separate box, though. This one’s for her ‘personal’ mail. All addressed to Ms. Logan. Ms. Shoot, who is she fooling? She’s a
“Lot of mail for Ms. Logan? Her private box?” Bauer asked, ignoring the commentary.
Della Holm looked at the young man, for what probably was the first time, and nodded an acknowledgment. He was about the same age as her own son, a history teacher at Rock Point High. If his appearance hadn’t been so pleasant and his manner so earnest she’d have likely been a bigger bitch.
“That’s what I thought I said. Though to be fair, her mail came in fits and starts,” she said. “Sometimes she’d get four pieces in a day. Sometimes she’d come in and bitch when I didn’t have any for her. Like it was my fault or something. The woman was a piece of work.”
Bauer nodded. He expected that Claire Logan was many things; a piece of work was at the top of the list.
“Not that I paid too much attention, and I never read any of it for sure—a violation of USPS codes. But I did notice that the mail came in cycle-like. At the end of each month.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Holm. By chance is there any mail in her box?”
Her response was lightning quick. “No,” she said.
“Would you please check?”
“No need to check. She doesn’t have a box anymore. Closed out both on Monday.”
“Closed them?”
“That’s what I said.”
Bauer was extremely interested in the timing. Claire Logan gave up her post office boxes two days before the fire, two days before her purported death. Sheriff Howe didn’t seem quite so interested. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and let out a sigh.
“Did she say why?”
“Yes, she did. She said she was going traveling after the holidays. Didn’t say where and I didn’t ask. I’m not the nosey type.”
She slammed another stamp on a parcel and muttered something about how people never put enough postage on anything.
“Got what you need?” Howe asked Bauer, jamming his hand in his pocket in search of his car keys. “Wife’s got French dip makings for lunch, leftovers from our Christmas prime rib, and I want to get home.” He patted his round belly as if it were a baby that needed feeding. Bauer just smiled. And like a petulant child left out of a conversation, Della pounded the rubber of a “hand-cancel” stamp against a manila envelope addressed to someone in Eugene.
“I’ve got work to do,” she said. “Short week, you know.”
Bauer had one more question. “Did she leave a forwarding address?” he asked.
Holm kept her head down and slammed her rubber stamp with rapid, machine gun–like emphasis.
“Nope,” she said. “Good riddance, I say. I always had to hassle her about paying for her box.”
The days following the fire were both seamless and numbing for Hannah. Like the small globe calendar that sat on her father’s highboy dresser before her mother put it away in a sock drawer, each day just rolled by, clink- clink, to the next. Leanna came from the coast to take care of her, but Hannah didn’t know her aunt that well. Claire didn’t have much room in her life for her sister. In fact, Hannah had only met her mother’s sister one other time— when she was almost five. Leanna and her new husband, Rod, came to visit one Sunday afternoon, but they argued with her mother and father and left in a tearful huff. Her mother never talked about Leanna after that visit.
Hannah stayed in her motel room bed, curled in a ball. She felt numb, like when she and Erik and Danny used to play in the paraffin vat their mother used for sealing the ends of Western cedar branches used for garlands. With the hot wax coating their fingertips, they would tap against the big wood worktable, but couldn’t feel a thing. Leanna gave her a candy cane and Hannah sucked on it for three days. Her mouth was so dry, so cottony, she was sure it was because she had cried so many tears. She was dried up.
She imagined that the fire hadn’t happened at all. She and Danny and Erik were on vacation. The boys were at a motel and their mother and father were in an adjacent room watching television or putting quarters into the Magic Fingers machine. In a moment, they’d be pounding on the wall telling all of them to go to sleep. “
Chapter Seventeen
As the third day of the investigation drew to a close, Spruce County resembled a law enforcement convention with more uniforms and mustaches swarming the place than had ever been seen there. Oregon State Police, Spruce County Sheriff’s deputies, reserve officers from neighboring Cascade County, and of course, the agents from the FBI vied for parking spaces, restaurant tables, and hotel rooms with members of the media. And though he was probably the youngest of the lot, Jeff Bauer had the kind of amiable (“Let me work with you”) presence that made him a natural focal point. His good looks didn’t hurt either. When the camera went to him, it captured the image of a young man who knew what he was talking about even when he wasn’t supposed to say something. Such a performance meant a lot to the higher-ups back in Portland and even more so to the big guys in Washington, D.C. In fact, not saying anything at all while appearing to answer a question was an enviable skill, one others seldom achieved. Some cops could talk; and some couldn’t without making room in their mouths for a foot. Sometimes two.
Bauer wasn’t the special agent in charge of the Rock Point case, though he felt he should have been. That honor and responsibility fell on the slightly stooped shoulders of a nearly retired agent named Sam Ross. Ross was named agent in charge of LOMURS as the bureau tagged it—for Logan Murders. It was an exciting case to most everyone but Ross, who was burned out and bored and more than ready to move on. He’d been in the bureau twenty-five years and didn’t give one whit about going out in a blaze of glory on January 18, his retirement day. He kept a pocket calculator and counted down the days and hours toward his gold Seiko watch, his retirement home on Loon Lake west of Spokane, and his none-too-great government pension. Ross met up with Bauer after the interview with the postmistress. They shook hands and Ross went to lunch. They met a second time at the motel, where the older man simply hung around and stayed on the phone with agents at the Portland field office. When it came time to talk with Marcus Wheaton, Ross pretended to be interested.
“Important interview,” he said of the Wheaton interrogation. “Key, I’d say. Why don’t you handle it?”
The offer caught Bauer off guard. “You want me to take the lead on it?”
“That’s what I said. Got a hearing problem?”
“No. I can do it.”
“Good. I’m not really sure if we have any jurisdiction here anyway. Seems this is shaking out like a county case. But we’re here. Might as well work through this.”
Inside, Bauer disregarded Ross’s comments. This was
“We want to talk to Wheaton.”
“He lawyered up a couple of hours ago. Brinker’s the name. A good guy, but court-appointed and you know what they say.”
“You get what you pay for?” Bauer said.
“You got that right.” Howe chuckled as though he’d heard the remark for the first time.
