A Wicked Snow

Berto and Joanne Garcia’s mobile home was set amid the squalor of human-inhabited aluminum loaf pans called a “trailer-made community” by the owner/operator of the ten-acre tract that had once been a birdhouse gourd farm. Because the plant had readily reseeded, most of the hot boxes that residents called home were festooned with the bulbous gourds cut with portholes for swallows and, for the luckier, purple martins. It was flat land—the bottom of a broad valley. It had, at most, seven or eight palm trees to bring up the vertical space. They were the spindly kind of palms, each collared with aluminum bands to stop rats from nesting in their fern-like crowns.

Ripperton lurched his two-year-old Town Car in front of Space 22. They knew Joanne was home alone; Berto was a guest of the county—in jail on suspicion of child abuse.

“I’ll go in first,” Hannah said, swinging the passenger door open and brushing against a Big Wheel tricycle bleached to pale amber by the Santa Louisa summer.

Ripp pulled out a smoke. “I’ll sit tight and play radio roulette. Better not be long.”

As if his advice mattered. The fact was she wouldn’t be long regardless of Ripperton’s demands. Hannah wanted to interview Mrs. Garcia about her daughter and husband, and she knew if Mrs. Garcia was indeed ready to talk, Ripperton would be called inside anyway. He was as good a witness as she had to ensure the woman couldn’t back out of her story later. He provided the kind of pressure they’d need to take her into the courtroom.

A woman met Hannah at the door. She peered through the wire mesh of a tattered screen and introduced herself as Joanne Garcia. She was thirty years old, unemployed, a few months pregnant. Mascara clumped at the tips of her spiky eyelashes. She pressed her face close to the aluminum doorframe and warily regarded her visitor.

“Mrs. Garcia, I’m Hannah Griffin. I’m with the county, here to investigate your daughter’s case.”

“Oh, Miss Griffin,” Garcia said, pausing before muttering something that went nowhere. Her eyes traced Hannah from head to toe, lingering on a jade silk blouse and creamy white linen skirt that was the well-dressed CSI’s summer uniform. Not that it mattered. Inside the confines of the lab, Hannah was shrouded with a dingy lab coat anyway.

“I don’t think I have anything to say to you,” Garcia finally said.

Hannah inched closer. “That surprises me,” she said. “Yesterday you told me you had a lot to say. I understand that this is very, very difficult. But you know,” she paused, “you—more than anyone—can ensure that what happened to Mimi never happens again.”

Joanne Garcia’s tongue ran over cracked lips. “Yeah, but—”

“Don’t you realize that you are running out of options here? You have no choice but to do the right thing. I think you know that. Can I come in?”

Joanne Garcia hesitated as if she didn’t want to say much, but Hannah knew the woman in the trailer wanted to spill her guts. She knew it from all of the child rapes, the molestations, the neglect and abuse cases—the “chick cases,” as the jealous in the lab called them to de-mean her work. Guys like Ripp figured no case was worth working on unless it was murder with special circumstances—the grislier the better. Throw in a few sexual elements and they’d be in CSI nirvana, stomping around the lab like sand-kicking macho men.

“You’re letting all the air conditioning out of the house. Come inside for a minute,” Joanne said, flinging the screen open with her foot pressing against the metal spring that kept it shut. Light fell on her features with a blast of white. “Then you’ll have to go.”

Joanne wore a halter top with black-and-white cows printed on it, blue jean shorts that were doing battle with her fleshy thighs. Hannah didn’t doubt that the fabric—that odd kind of denim that looks too thin to be the real thing—and the woman’s increasing girth would be fighting to the finish. She led Hannah into an overloaded family room separated from the entry by a turned-knob room divider resembling Early American furniture. A spider plant spilled variegated green-and-white foliage over the salmon-colored laminate counter-top. A shiny yellow Tonka truck positioned on a shelf served as magazine holder. Old issues of Dirt Biker filled the back end of the toy.

“Sit here,” Joanne said, pointing to a pillow-strewn sofa. “But only for a minute. Like I said, I don’t have anything to say.”

Photos in Plexiglas frames lined a shelf behind the fake log fireplace that served as the focal point of the small room. Hannah recognized the face of the little girl with corkscrew pigtails. All of the photos were of Mimi.

“She’s a very pretty girl,” Hannah said. “How is she?”

Joanne made a face. It was a hard, angry visage, and it made her look older than her years. “How should she be? You’ve taken her from her home! Her father is in jail!”

The words were familiar to Hannah. A few said them with more conviction than Joanne Garcia did that morning in her mobile home. Some recited the words as though they’d rehearsed them in front of a mirror and knew that practiced indignation and outrage were but a small and necessary step in the direction toward a defense of some kind.

“How in the hell should she be? Her daddy didn’t do nothin’ and you’ve taken her away, lady!”

“To save her life.”

Joanne’s face was now blood red. “Her life didn’t need saving. It was an accident.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think so. Listen to me very carefully,” Hannah said, fixing her eyes on Joanne’s. “Woman to woman, mother to mother—I am a mother, too—your daughter’s life is in danger. Your job is to protect her.”

Joanne stood and spun around, grabbing a photograph of her daughter.

“You don’t know me, my husband, or anything about us.” She punched her empty fist into the air and held the photo to her bosom.

Hannah felt her stomach flutter slightly as though the woman was going to hit her. Instead, Joanne started to cry and held out a picture of the little girl that had brought Santa Louisa criminal investigators into her life.

“She is all I have. All we have! Don’t do this to us. Do not ruin this family. People like you are always trying to judge people like us.”

She set the picture back on the top shelf of the room divider.

“We’re not trying to ruin anything. We’re trying to help you and your daughter.”

“Right. Like I’m going to believe anything you say,” she said. “Get the fuck out of my house! Now!”

Hannah let the front door swing open on its squeaky spring and returned to the car. Her heels clacked on the cracked and patched sidewalk.

“Handled that one real smooth, Hannah,” Ripp said. His words dripped with his own brand of malevolent sarcasm. “Maybe I could coach you sometime?”

Hannah didn’t want Ripp to know that she’d been unnerved by the encounter in the trailer. She didn’t want to him to know what was really on her mind, what she had boxed up in her trunk. Eat shit. She didn’t say the words, but she thought them. And she smiled back at him once more.

“Glad I got out of bed today,” she muttered.

The Santa Louisa County sheriff had been dispatched to Mucho Muchachos Daycare Center on the south end of Valle los Reyes the day before. An employee there had indicated a little girl had showed evidence of abuse. It was reported around noon, though the telltale signs of abuse had been evident at six in the morning. Mimi Garcia’s bottom had been hemorrhaging; a bloom of crimson had spotted her panties. The little girl paid it no mind, but a caregiver—a girl of seventeen named Nadine Myers—had noticed the bleeding when she served her breakfast snack.

“Did someone hurt you?” asked Nadine, a high school dropout with a smile that begged for braces and hands scarred from filing ragged edges while working in her father’s sheet metal shop.

Mimi shook her head as she picked out the shriveled black fruits in the raisin bran growing soft in a pink Tupperware bowl. Two other kids, a boy and a girl, both four, argued over the sugar bowl, and Nadine went to settle the dispute with promises of a frosted Pop-Tart.

A couple of hours later, Nadine was up to her neck in acrid disposable diapers when she returned to Mimi. She sat on the floor, Indian-style, crying. When Nadine pulled her to her feet, she revealed a small smudge of congealed blood.