A Wicked Snow

didn’t do what they could to help Hannah Logan get on with her life. They did so very quietly and behind the scenes. Rod made sure that the driver for the periodical distributor made his store the first stop whenever any of the tabloids came out with a Claire Logan update.

When People magazine featured Claire’s photo on the cover and the headline: WHERE IS SHE? Rod dipped into the petty cash drawer and bought every copy delivered for resale. He trashed all but one, which he and his wife read in their lemon-scented bedroom after Hannah went to bed. Then, like the other magazines and newspapers he collected, Rod encased the People in Saran wrap and put it in a trunk for the day when Hannah might want to know everything that had been written about her mother—right or wrong.

When Rod Schumacher had enrolled Hannah in school, he improperly prepared the paperwork and accidentally put his own surname for Hannah’s. The office administrator, who knew the Schumachers from church, assumed that Hannah was the daughter of Rod’s brother, whom she had heard had died with his wife in a car crash in Seattle. No one bothered to correct her. Hannah Logan became Hannah Schumacher.

In the beginning, at least to the other students who were clueless about her circumstances, she was sullen, a zombie, shy, a weirdo from some unknown place back East. But in time she made friends and even joined the school volleyball team. It wasn’t that Hannah didn’t think about her mother, her brothers, her father, her life before Misery Bay; she just knew that by keeping busy, by acting normal, she’d be able to be normal.

But Aunt Leanna noticed that night after night, Hannah was up reading, studying, writing. Doing something. She worried that her niece was not getting enough sleep.

“You need to get some rest,” she said after 11 p.m. one evening when she saw the light still on.

Hannah looked up from her Oregon history book. “Test tomorrow,” she answered. “Just a few more minutes and I’ll turn off the light.”

“All right. Just tonight.”

“Aunt Leanna,” Hannah said, “it works better for me to just drift off thinking about something that really matters to me. When I do that, I’m sure it sounds stupid, but I can almost pick my dreams. I pretend that my mind is a TV and I can turn the channels of my thoughts to something that will keep me from thinking about any of what happened to my brothers or my mom. I’m always turning the channels.”

“That’s a great idea,” Leanna said. “I’ll have to try that, too. But with my luck I’ll end up only getting commercials.”

Both laughed and it felt good.

Misery Bay, Hannah would later tell her husband, Ethan, probably explained how she’d survived the first months after the fire. While the rest of the world felt sorry for her, the people of Misery Bay never gave what happened in Rock Point much thought. As isolated as they were in their windswept coastal location, as busy as they were with the real concerns of their own lives, they just didn’t seem to care much about the story that was preoccupying the rest of the country.

For the most part, Hannah suffered in silence while the adults who watched over her did the best they could. She had several counselors, a guardian ad litem, a court-appointed social worker, and the Rock Point chapter of the Jaycees, who quietly collected money for her college education (by the time she was ready for college, their donations with interest totaled $71,000).

As her time on the witness stand approached, all associated with the case knew Claire Logan’s daughter was the key. If she could deliver testimony as compelling as she had when she made her first police and FBI statements, Marcus Wheaton was not going to leave Spruce County a free man.

Hannah knew that. “It’s up to me,” she told Bauer one afternoon in late February, two months after the fire when the special agent came out to see the Schumachers. The four of them—Rod, Leanna, Hannah, and Bauer— sat around the maple kitchen table that faced the ocean. Sideways rain splattered the windows, and Leanna rolled up a towel to catch the drips that seeped onto the window ledge.

“Not completely. There is other evidence tying him to the fire. Mrs. Paine has other witnesses,” Bauer said.

Leanna spoke up. “But they aren’t enough to send Marcus to prison,” she said.

“They could be,” Bauer said as he consumed the last swallow of coffee.

Hannah looked up from her cocoa.

“But the other witnesses aren’t enough, not all by themselves,” she said, a slight quaver in her voice. “I mean, without me they aren’t going to convict Marcus. Am I right?”

Leanna reached over and held her niece’s hand while Uncle Rod looked on with concern.

Bauer leaned forward from the other side of the table. “Yes, Hannah, I guess they couldn’t convict. I wish that your testimony wasn’t needed. Sometimes we have to do things that we don’t want to do.”

“I’ve told her that, I have,” Leanna said, still holding Hannah’s hand. “I’ve also told her that by telling the truth, Hannah will be able to put some of this behind her. Not all, but some.”

“True. But even so, I suspect it will take a long, long time.” Even after saying that, Bauer felt compelled to offer her an out. As I expect the court psychologist has told you,” he said, “you don’t have to do this.”

“I know.”

“And you know, it isn’t really about your mother. This is about something you can do, for yourself, for your brothers.”

Hannah looked away. “You have said that before. So have Uncle Rod and Aunt Leanna. But I know better. Mom’s not here, but whatever she did is the reason we are here. She’s the reason Marcus did what he did.”

Although a well-meaning psychologist without a clue about adolescents had suggested “putting things on paper helps with the healing process,” the fact was, long before the tragedy, Hannah had kept a diary. She had written her thoughts in a padded vinyl book she kept under her bed. That diary had been lost in the chaos that had consumed Icicle Creek Farm, the FBI with their German shepherds in search of flesh and bone, and the media with their rabid hunger for any tidbit of news. The fire had devoured all the belongings that would have linked Hannah with her past.

As a matter of course—growing up, changing tastes— the diaries evolved. Some had locks; others did not. Two were written on steno pads. In time, she graduated to yellow legal pads. Aunt Leanna always assumed her niece was writing notes for composition class, so firm were her commitment to the endeavor of writing. Hannah wrote notes upon notes.

Each entry began with the same three words: Today I remember.

Today I remember—Something gnaws at me as if to tell me that I had been told to go to the supply shed where the ribbons and shears were stored. I was told to go there and get something. Wire? Ribbons? A tool? I remember walking across the snowy path that the boys and dogs and I had made from the house to the shed. The spot in front of the door was muddy and trampled. Icy footprints marred the surface of the landing like the plaza in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in L.A. where Mom and Dad took us for vacation the year before he died.

When she wrote those words she was in a lock-hold battle with herself and her memories of what had happened on that particular Christmas. She remembered it had snowed heavily. From late afternoon to early evening, white nestled against the green of the trees outside. In her mind’s eye, Hannah could rerun the images. She watched as the white come after her like a million moths drawn to the light of the wreath maker’s shed.

Hannah kept her diary in the top drawer of the 1930s blond-wood nightstand that had been the sole survivor of her aunt and uncle’s first matching bedroom set. Before bed, Hannah pulled a Bic pen from the drawer and began to write. First impressions she knew were important. Her mother had said those very words many times before one of her “visitors” came to the farm.

It almost scares me, this open sky over the ocean. In the woods, we had the cover of the trees. When it rained we could still stay dry. My brothers and I—I can’t even write their names yet—we used to make forts out of fir boughs and sword ferns, and no matter how much it rained, we stayed dry. Here there is no place to hide. No place to run for cover. I look out at the ocean and I just want to put an umbrella up and stare at my feet. I don’t know why. I don’t know why the water and the sky scare me. I wonder if it is because here at the ocean there is no