the southwest side of the place, I saw him.”
“Him?”
“Yes,” he said. “The defendant. I saw the defendant, Marcus Wheaton.”
“The defendant?”
“Objection. He’s already said so,” Travis Brinker said, standing. “Asked and answered.” Brinker’s client was impassive. Some wondered if Wheaton had any other expressions at all. His good eye was as blank as a sprayed and wiped chalkboard. Judge Wells sustained the objection and prodded Paine to move on.
“What, if anything, was the defendant doing?” she asked.
“He was throwing things in his truck and gunning it out of there.”
Over the next six days, Paine called her witnesses as though she was creating one of those construction- paper chains; each person was linked to the one before him or her and all led back to Wheaton. The manager from the Portland floral supplier who had sold the flocking material; the FBI chemist who identified the traces found on Wheaton and the charred piano; the firemen and the sheriff’s personnel who had recovered the evidence of arson; the deputies who picked up Wheaton the night of the blaze; and others. Link after link, a connection was made. Point A was Wheaton and point B was the fire.
And then there were the exhibits. The crashed piano had been reconstructed by a team of scientists and carpenters in an FBI lab in Virginia. Its appearance brought gasps when brought into Judge Wells’s courtroom. Blackened keys, wires spraying forth like a broken box spring. It had been marked with small white-and-red self- adhesive tags with letters and numbers indicating where evidence had been logged. Its broken and missing keys looked like a hillbilly’s malicious grin.
But nothing matched the final piece of evidence, which had been argued over by the lawyers for weeks. Brinker thought that State’s Exhibit No. 25 was exceedingly prejudicial. Paine argued that she wasn’t bringing the exhibit for any other reason than the lab analysis, which recovered cellulose fibers that matched what had been vacuumed from Wheaton’s clothes.
Two pairs of boy’s shoes that had burned and melted were entered into evidence as State’s Exhibit No. 25. She called upon Jeff Bauer to identify the Buster Browns as being among the items removed from the arson site. Bauer, dressed in a fashionable gray chalk-stripe suit and black wingtips, looked handsome and confident. He spoke in a clear, decisive voice.
“Yes,” he said, “these are the shoes that I recovered from Icicle Creek Farm.”
“How can you be sure?”
He poked his forefinger into the interior of a shoe. Triangular pieces the size of a dime had been snipped from the leather for the lab.
“I can see my initials and the date,” he said, pointing to inside one of the shoes. “Right
Nothing was admitted about who specifically had worn the shoes. It wasn’t necessary. Those familiar with the case, which included just about everyone with a TV or newspaper delivery, knew that they had belonged to Danny and Erik Logan. Everyone knew that the boys had been incinerated and only the piano’s shield-like form had protected their shoes from complete annihilation.
The same chemist who had authenticated the lab work on the piano returned to the witness box to go over the microscopic and chemical analysis of the shoes. Traces of a fake snow product were found on both pairs.
“We determined the brand—Mighty White,” he said. “It was recalled two years ago because of its extremely flammable nature. It had been the suspected source of fires in fourteen states. Four deaths, only, thank God.”
If the shoes were bullets aimed at the jury’s hearts, they scored a direct hit. One woman, Juror Five, let a tear roll down her cheek.
Paine had one more witness. It was the girl who had lost everything: her mother, her brothers, and her home.
“Call Hannah Logan!” she said.
Chapter Twenty-two
No one could have ever confused Leanna Schumacher of being frivolous. She and her Rod had lived quiet, steady,
“Can’t I wear jeans?” she asked.
“I know this isn’t fun,” Leanna said, “but it’s important you look your best; folks will be watching. Even though we’ve got no say in how people think, they’ll be judging you.”
On the morning of March 30, everything seemed to be speeding around Hannah like the faces on the other side of a carousel. Aunt Leanna had placed a tan-and-light-blue Gunne Sax dress on the motel room bed. She took a few minutes to smooth out the fabric with her long, slender, and very freckled fingers.
“You’ll look just beautiful in this,” she said. “The color will pick up the lovely hue of your eyes.”
Hannah had forgotten what color her eyes were, and the fabric’s subtle mix of blue and brown did little to clue her in. She hadn’t looked at her own face for weeks. She hated to see her eyes staring back at her from the silvery field of a mirror.
“I think I’ll look stupid, Auntie,” was all she could come up with, though she put the dress on. They watched television while they got ready to meet their escort to the courthouse. Leanna called Rod at the Speedy Mart, and the two talked while she waited for hot curlers to warm. She burbled something about how Hannah seemed to be holding up “despite the pain of the hour.” She whispered an I-love-you and disappeared into the little foyer in front of the hotel bathroom.
“Hannah,” Leanna called out from the noise of the hairdryer, “you’ll be just fine, honey. I know it. You’re from tough stock.”
Hannah flopped on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, and the world around her spun. Little bits of silvery glitter clung into the dried cottage cheese surface. She started counting the glints of glitter, regarding each as a star in the Milky Way. She wondered what it would be like to be anywhere else just then. She had a duty, and she’d been told so nearly from the day she had been rescued from the farm. Ten minutes later, the pair was headed for the door. Aunt Leanna put the plastic MAID SERVICE PLEASE hanger on the doorknob and pressed the steel door shut.
“Hungry?” she asked as she slipped her room key into her purse.
Hannah shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“You have to eat. You have to put some fuel in that tummy of yours.”
Hannah put her hand on her stomach. “I’m gonna barf,” she said. Her pale skin color backed up her words.
“That doesn’t surprise me one iota,” Leanna said. “If you don’t eat, you won’t feel better. You need something to settle your stomach.”
The Rock Point Inn coffee shop was crowded, though it might have been less so if the area roped off with a PARDON OUR MESS, WE’RE PREPARING TO SERVE YOU BETTER! sign had been in use. Smoke hung in the air mixing with morning scents of frying bacon, perked coffee, and Listerine.
Jeff Bauer waved Leanna and Hannah to a booth in the back. He looked tired, his blue eyes puffy from lack of sleep, his hair askew. While the federal government was not prosecuting the case, they were there to help nevertheless. The men murdered at the Christmas tree farm had been the victims of interstate robbery, and some speculated, kidnapping. Pending the outcome of the Wheaton case, there was always the possibility of filing federal
