A Wicked Snow

In reality, Hannah had told the Halloween story so many times, she didn’t know if it was a genuine event or a memory that she had planted in her own mind through frequent recitation. As she grew older, the blend of hearsay, fiction, and reality was hard to break down into its purest elements. How does someone decipher the truth from what is stirred into their mind by television, radio, books, TV, newspapers? Hannah Logan tried. Very hard, she did.

She recalled it had been a Friday night and she had stayed up to watch Midnight Special because Leif Garrett was performing. She loved Leif Garrett. What girl didn’t? She had fallen asleep on the sofa when she awoke to the sound of voices in the kitchen. It sounded like her mother was laughing. It was so good to hear her laughter. When Hannah’s father was alive, her mother seldom laughed. After his death, she never did. A sleepy smile came to Hannah’s lips that night, and she got up to say good night before going upstairs to her own bed.

“I felt so stupid,” Hannah told Bauer later. “I wish I had knocked. I mean, my mother could have visitors. She could have a boyfriend. My daddy was dead. My mom worked hard and she deserved some happiness. She didn’t want to be alone and she said so several times. But I didn’t expect it to be him. Marcus Wheaton had his arms around her. She had her back to me. Marcus put on this really fake smile and said something like ‘Look what we have here, Claire.’ My mom turned around, pushed him away real fast, and almost as quickly went to me and slapped me kind of hard. Then she said in a mean voice, a voice I can still hear, ‘Why don’t you knock, Hannah?’ I told her I was sorry, but she wouldn’t have any of it. She wouldn’t accept my apology. I didn’t do anything wrong. It was the kitchen. Who knocks before going in the kitchen?”

And so, on the eighth day of the Wheaton arson trial, Veronica Paine and the People of Spruce County rested. Hannah and her brothers’ shoes had said it all. The defense put on a meager handful of character witnesses, but even Liz Wheaton couldn’t save her son, though she cried like a rainstorm and told the jury that her son was the victim of an evil woman.

“He was,” she said between sobs, “a really good boy. Deserved a lot better than Claire Logan.”

It took the jury less than three hours to bring back a verdict—and two of those hours were occupied with buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and the usual sides.

The Lumberman managing editor acted like an editor for the first time in his life. He held the front page of the next day’s paper to carry the headline that told the world that Wheaton was going away for a long time: FIREBUG GUILTY! WHEATON GETS 20 YEARS BUT QUESTIONS STILL UNANSWERED.

Wheaton, wrapped in shackles and wearing XXXL coveralls the screaming orange color of a hunter’s cap, was shipped off to the prison at Cutter’s Landing, and everyone else went home. Leanna Schumacher took Hannah back to Misery Bay. Bauer returned to Portland. Veronica Paine celebrated her win with her husband at their beach house in Cannon Beach on the Oregon coast. And though the years would pass, the people touched by what happened at Icicle Creek Farm would forever remain connected. They would not be able to forget what happened because Claire Logan could not be forgotten by anyone. She was the nightmare that didn’t go away even when the lights went on.

Bauer continued to work the case on the limited time allowed by the FBI. He clipped whatever he read about it and continued to run Logan’s Social Security number to see if she was living somewhere under a new name. She likely masterminded the murder of twenty, and the idea that she was using any of her old I.D. was the longest shot of many.

Bauer made a couple of trips to Rock Point, and he always went to the site of the fire. He felt sorry for Jim and Dina Campbell, the Portland couple who bought the Logan place from the bank a year after the trial. They were in their late thirties, refugees from the city with dreams of creating an income in the country. Jim had been a personnel manager for a frozen food company in Beaverton; Dina, a driver’s license examiner for the Department of Motor Vehicles. Their dead end brought them to Rock Point. Their finances brought them to Icicle Creek Farm. It was, Jim told his wife, too good a deal to pass up. They could overlook the tragedy and notoriety and build a new house and start over. Their dream was not out of line, but their hope that things would be restful was lost. By the time the Campbells had assumed ownership (paying only the balance owed and not market value), the Logan story had passed into a near mythical state of infamy.

The landowner next door cleared a two-hundred-foot-wide strip along the fence line and stuck up a sign advertising the place as a campground for RVs. For power, he went cheap and ran extension wires from the house to the pads. Water was provided through a garden hose. And, as if further proof was needed to affirm the bad taste of those with beer-can hats and crocheted toilet tissue covers, the RV crowd came. When a newspaper ran a story on the campground with a “front row seat to the nations’ most grisly mystery,” all slots—twenty in a row—were perpetually filled through the spring, summer, and fall. Only winter brought a reprieve.

Campsite No. 21 was cordoned off with a yellow plastic rope. A sign made out of a routed piece of cedar proclaimed the place permanently reserved.

“In case Mrs. Logan comes back,” the park owner said. “She’s gonna need a place to stay.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Outside his window, summer weather flirted with Portland, Oregon. Lilac blooms were faded and turning brown, and grass everywhere needed a good shearing. It was a half year after the Logan farm burned to the ground. Downtown in the offices of the FBI, a voice cut through a tinny-sounding speakerphone and Special Agent Jeff Bauer set down his tepid cup of coffee, an oil slick of powdered creamer swirling inside. He leaned forward and strained to hear. The sound resonated like a cheap citizen’s-band radio, and he shook his head for the thousandth time. The federal government could afford a four-hundred-dollar hammer, he thought, swallowing the last gulp of oily brew, but Uncle Sam couldn’t get the bucks together for decent communication equipment for the FBI.

“Bauer, there’s someone here to see you,” a female agent’s voice cracked for the second time. It was Special Agent Bonnie Ingersol, a twenty-five-year-old with a master’s degree in criminology, who begrudgingly filled in to work the phones during lunch when the “front-desk girl” was off to lunch with her boyfriend. The front-desk “girl” was fifty-six and more a grandmother than an in- genue. Ingersol hated the duty, but was too nice to fight it. Paying dues was part of the drill. Being pleasant was fine with her, as long as it wasn’t forever. She was as shrewd as she was beautiful, with long dark brown hair and ice-blue eyes.

“Says her daughter’s missing,” Ingersol said. “Might have something to do with the Logan case.”

“Huh?” Bauer responded, staring at the squawk box.

“The woman says her daughter worked for Claire Logan,” Ingersol said. “She hasn’t seen her in almost a year.” She lifted her finger from the “talk” button and waited for Bauer to respond. “Are you there? Jeesh, Bauer, she thinks her daughter’s Number 20.”

This time Bauer muttered back into the box that he’d go out to the lobby to meet her. Not again. Not another. It was only a few months after Marcus Wheaton had been sent to run the license plate paint-drying tunnel at the penitentiary in Cutter’s Landing. Liz Wheaton’s calls to the FBI had stopped by then. She no longer threatened to picket the front steps of the Spruce County Courthouse with her claim that her son had been railroaded by a conspiracy of local and federal cops. All but one of the military men had been identified and their bones returned to the earth in family cemeteries across the nation. Only two mysteries remained. Was Claire Logan really gone? And, if she was, just whose body was under the piano?

Bauer smiled at the woman in the waiting room. Peggy Hjermstad was thirty-nine and very pretty. Her eyes were the color of Navajo turquoise, and her skin was thin, milky white, almost translucent. She stood in front of the FBI—FIDELITY, BRAVERY, AND INTEGRITY—plaque that was the sole adornment of the waiting area, wearing a faded batik skirt from an import store. Silver-and-peacock-feather earrings fluttered from her earlobes. Bauer introduced himself and offered her coffee.