“That was not her,” Hannah said, her voice slightly wavering.
Wheaton didn’t acknowledge Hannah’s comment. He simply barreled on. He stopped only to drink water, more than a quart by Bauer’s estimate. He talked about Serena and how Claire had hired her late in the season before the fire. According to Wheaton, Serena/Didi worked in the wreath shed with four other women from Rock Point. He described her as a cute, but unreliable, young woman who came to work late wrapped in a veil of rose- scented perfume applied in the morning to obscure pot smoke from the night before. She was angry at her mother for not understanding that her life was her own.
“I’m not living for anyone but me,” she had told Wheaton one evening when she hitched a ride back to the Johnny Appleseed Motel where she was staying just outside of Rock Point. “I’ve had my parents tell me what to do and I’ve had a dumb-shit boyfriend run me like a clock. Forget that. I want to figure out my own way,” she had said.
Wheaton said he liked the young woman.
“She was nice to me, friendly-like,” he said. “She was pretty, too. A little ditzy, but you couldn’t have asked for a nicer girl. Too bad what happened.”
“Can we get on with this?” It was Bauer. He followed his question with a loud sigh. He wasn’t as annoyed as he sounded—in fact, he was fascinated—he just wanted to keep Wheaton on track. If they had to hear every little thing, all of his thoughts and feelings, then, by God, it ought to be done at a decent clip.
Wheaton glowered. “I don’t like to be rushed,” he said. “You know you are only here because of my good nature and sense of fair play.”
“Fine. Can we move on? Please?”
“Don’t pressure me. I don’t like to be pushed, either.”
Bauer disregarded the comment and Wheaton gulped down more water. He went on to say that Claire came across Serena/Didi in the back of the supply building adjacent to the wreath maker’s shed. It was two days before Thanksgiving, 1976.
“Didi was freaking out. She had found the jar of teeth,” Wheaton said, stopping not for dramatic reasons, but because the idea of it repulsed him even two decades later. The teeth to which he was referring belonged to the seventeen men Claire Logan had smashed with a carpenter’s hammer.
“She smashed them out herself, trust me on that. I had nothing to do with any of it. Claire told me that her biggest fear was that one day, long after she was gone, someone would dig up one of the victims and identify him by dental records.”
Hannah put her fingers to her mouth. It was an unconscious gesture of horror for the cadavers that had been brutalized by the force of her mother’s hammer.
“Jesus Christ,” she said softly.
“I didn’t do anything but cover up for your mother.” He blinked his good eye.
“What happened to Didi?” she asked, staring back at Wheaton.
“She erased her. Like I’ve said, I wasn’t there and I didn’t see it. But from what she told me, Claire swung at her with a chainsaw.
Now Bauer’s face was pale. Even Madsen who had lingered on the other side of the room looked ill. Hannah steadied herself while Wheaton continued, oddly smiling as he recounted the details of his story.
When Claire had first told Wheaton about what had happened, he said that he assumed she’d want help with the burial. But when he went out to the supply building, there was no body. Not a drop of blood could be seen anywhere. The place was cleaner than a hospital room.
Hannah remembered the supply building; it came to her as though she was standing inside it in a dream. It was in perfect order. Her mother was fanatical about having a place for everything… “and keeping everything in its place.” In her mind, she searched the rows of spools of grosgrain and French ribbons, the floral tape, the wire in various gauges. There was shelving to the ceiling in that drafty little room, and yes, a row of jars at the very top.
Wheaton licked his lips and went on. He was a steam engine now. A big, Day-Glo orange, stinking steam engine with chili-mac dried at the crusty corners of his mouth, and there was no stopping him.
“She told me she took care of Didi all by herself. You know what? I admired her for that. I thought,
Wheaton said he knew nothing more about Number 20 until the night of the fire.
“I helped set the fire that night. Yeah, I did pretty much everything the Spruce County prosecutor said I did. But I didn’t kill anyone. After the fire Claire was going to meet me at the five-way stop.”
Hannah knew that location. Two miles from the farm there was the only other sign of civilization—the convergence of two logging roads and the highway. Locals knew it as “the five-way.”
“She told me that she loved me,” he said, and saying those words brought a wave of emotion. His good eye seemed to water. “She said, ‘no matter what happens, Marcus, we’ll be together. You’ve proven your love and I’ve proven mine.’ No one was supposed to die,” he said.
Wheaton cleared his throat. It was followed by a loud hack. Hannah thought he was fighting back emotion, but she wasn’t sure. Bauer urged him to continue.
“When I left that night, when I took my lighter and started the fuse just as we’d planned, there was no one in the house. No one—not Danny and Erik, not
The steamroller was in overdrive. Hannah and Bauer pushed back and listened. Neither said a word.
“And I was so happy,” Wheaton said. “I know it sounds so stupid now, but I was. I was so grateful for two things. That you,” the good eye went straight to Hannah, “were spared and that your mother had vanished.”
Hannah said nothing. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She had no air in her lungs.
“But the body?” Bauer asked. “The body of the woman—how do you know that it wasn’t Claire’s for sure?”
“Because she’s too smart. She fucked you. Me. Her kids. The men she slaughtered. She fucked us all. I know now that Didi’s body had been kept in the freezer and brought out like a roast for the night of the fire.”
“You saw her there?” Bauer asked.
“Two days after she whacked the girl’s head off, she told me she hit a deer and butchered it herself. Very Claire. I saw the meat in the freezer. It was the biggest hindquarter I ever saw, all wrapped in white paper. ‘It was a buck,’ Claire said to me. ‘Rack the size of a Vega hatchback, eight points.’”
But when Wheaton looked at the Icicle Creek Farm truck he could find no evidence that Claire hit anything, let alone a Kong-size buck. No hair, nor any blood. He rubbed his big hands over the front fenders and stared at them. Clean as could be.
“I can put two and two together,” Wheaton told his visitors. “And you probably could have, too, if the funeral home hadn’t cremated poor Didi’s body—I mean,
As Wheaton reached for the water, Madsen stood from his seat in the corner and acknowledged another of the warden’s assistants. The sergeant in the visitors’ processing station had asked the other officer to get a message to Hannah Griffin.
“Your pager’s been going off every five minutes,” he said. “Got to be urgent. You want to use a phone?”
