She closed the entry with a row of W’s, waves for the ocean. Underneath the waterline she carefully sketched the figure of a small girl, her arms waving through the Ws. From her mouth was a bubble with the words:
Bauer made several trips to Misery Bay before the trial—on the Spruce County Superior Court docket for the spring. He was drawn to her not only because his job demanded that he stay in touch, but Hannah had endured a terrible tragedy and he’d been there to pick up the pieces. They had bonded. One night he, Rod, Leanna, and Hannah played Monopoly until nearly 1 a.m. It was an evening of pizza, Dr Pepper, and kidding around—an evening without tears, guilt, or the specter of Claire Logan looming over them. For the first time, Bauer saw that Hannah was going to be all right. There was a chance that she’d not only survive her mother, but be able to move on.
“The way you laugh,” Hannah said, her eyes hooded from the late hour, “reminds me of my dad.”
“That’s nice,” Bauer said, touched by the remark, but a little embarrassed. Leanna watched him carefully and made a slight smile in his direction.
“It’s late,” she said. “Time for bed.”
“My dad was a wonderful man,” Hannah continued. “My dad didn’t deserve my mother.”
“You got that right,” Uncle Rod said, finally weighing in on Claire Logan.
Chapter Twenty-one
It would be charitable of anyone to say that the Spruce County Courthouse resembled an oversized hatbox as it squatted on Second and Lewis Avenues in downtown Rock Point, Oregon. It was such an intrinsically ugly edifice. It was a round, postmodern structure with tiled horizontal stripes and rows of windows the size of those found on a Boeing 727. For two weeks, it was to be the home of the Wheaton arson trial. Cars filled the parking lot hours before the first day of the trial—an occurrence not seen since the 1952 trial of a dentist who had drowned his mistress in Lake Joy and weighted her body with brick-filled potato sacks. She was discovered when her left arm tore from its socket and floated to the shore. A sportsman found the wayward limb. Her inscribed wristwatch was still attached to her wrist: I’LL LOVE YOU FOR ETERNITY.
The bricks retrieved with the rest of the body had been the tooth doc’s undoing. The bricks were the remainders of a special order he had used on a two-tiered outdoor barbecue pit built for his backyard. His wife had read the first article on the case that mentioned the yellow bricks and turned her two-timing husband in. The “Yellow Brick Murder,” as it became known, attracted immense press coverage.
But of course, in the world of media vultures that was to come, that level of coverage was dust bunnies. Claire Logan had put Spruce County on the map when she vanished and left twenty bodies on her Christmas tree farm. She had been transformed into an anti-folk hero. In the months since she pulled off the biggest Houdini in criminal history, Claire Logan had become a super-star of the infamous kind. And though she was not going on trial that warm spring day—Marcus Wheaton was—it was still all about her. And as far as most observers could tell, Wheaton was as close as anyone was going to get to Claire Logan.
Spruce County prosecutor Veronica Paine and defense attorney Travis Brinker narrowed the potential jurors from a field of fifty to twelve. Among those sitting on the jury were a high-school biology teacher, a convenience store clerk, an office secretary, a mill manager from Stoneway Paper, and a mill hand. A few smiled at the sight of the mill worker, a strikingly handsome man of twenty-five, and the manager, a cello-shaped fellow with a wisp of smoke-gray hair: Stoneway had just completed a drawn-out labor dispute in February that left both sides pointing the finger. The very idea that representatives from both sides would work together on anything was almost ludicrous. But that’s what they were to do. Seven women and five men were sworn to listen to the evidence and dispatch justice in the biggest crime to hit Spruce County in more than two decades.
As grotesque as the whole affair was and as close to the action as they were, no one in Rock Point really knew any of the victims. In its own bizarre way, that fact allowed them to give their stories, tell their tales, pose for pictures, and shake their heads for the TV cameras. As one high school student told the reporter from the
A single, hunched-over figure had come to watch the trial with the hope that Marcus Wheaton would leave Spruce County a free man. No one paid any attention to the woman in the long woolen skirt, though the day was too warm for such attire. She was in her fifties, with thin, gray hair, the color and texture of bread mold. Her breath smelled of cherry Lifesavers. Obviously the recipient of some kind of reverse makeover, Liz Wheaton, now looking older than her years, kept her head down when she entered the back of the courtroom. In her wallet, she carried grade-school photos of her only son, a man now accused of torching a farm house and setting off the chain of events that shocked the world. She stared at a little photograph of her boy. His eyes had gazed sweetly at the lens. Both eyes. He had not been transformed by tragedy into a one-eyed terror. He was thin, sweet, and, in short, an all-American boy.
“But, sir,” she had said in her only interview, a phoner with a reporter from Omaha who had found her in her old Craftsman-style house in Portland, “my son couldn’t have killed all those people. I raised him right. He wasn’t a bad boy.
The first glimpse of a defendant always brings a reaction. In the case of Marcus Wheaton, it was a muffled gasp from a courtroom. He had put on a few pounds. One reporter thought he might weigh upward of 250. He wore a dark blue suit with wide lapels and a bias-striped tie that most likely had been a loaner. Liz Wheaton stayed focused on her son as if she were sitting alone on a pinnacle and staring down a long tube. No one else was there to judge her for loving him. She didn’t care what anyone thought.
Wheaton lumbered to the defense table, wrists red from the too-tight cuffs that had been removed by the bailiff just before the jury walked in. From their seats, none of the twelve could see what everyone else could. The defendant was wearing leg shackles.
A yellow pad, a cup of water, a pencil, and an empty manila folder were on the table. Wheaton would never touch any of those objects. Not that day, and never as the trial progressed. For the most part, as he had during voir dire, he stared straight ahead with little discernable emotion. Once in a while he looked out of the courtroom toward the tiny airplane-like window panels.
“Maybe he’s looking for Claire,” one woman mused as she put away her crossword puzzle and fumbled for change for the vending machines during the morning break.
“Yeah, maybe he’s hoping she’ll show up,” her trial-watching companion said. “He loved her, you know, and my sister knows someone who briefly worked with him at Icicle Creek Farm, and he said the guy’s been in love with Mrs. Logan for years. Do anything for her.”
“Well he shouldn’t have done this!”
“Guess so.”
Defense attorney Travis Brinker was a young man, no more than twenty-six. His face had the kind of roundness associated with a fat person, though he was trim and physically fit. His skin was silky smooth with no evidence that decent whiskers could sprout from its glistening surface. But that didn’t stop the strawberry-blond Brinker—a wispy caterpillar rested under his ski jump nose. He was sweet and nervous. Pitted against Veronica Paine, the young man clearly had his work cut out for him.
Many thought Paine fit her name. The defense lawyers around the cavernous halls of the Spruce County Courthouse called her Veronica
