A Wicked Snow

They get into things, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I’m a mother, too,” Hannah said, though she sort of hated herself for using the fact that she had Amber in her work. She detested women like Mrs. Garcia. She was one of the horrible, eat-your-own-young breed. It seemed there were more of those women cropping up in Santa Louisa and beyond. Hannah admired the women who stood up for their children or themselves and left their abusers when there was still a chance. The women who shot abusive husbands in their backs or even the one who sliced off her no-good husband’s penis as if it were a Ball Park frank deserved, she thought, a lighter sentence than California law allowed. But not Joanne Garcia.

Garcia looked past Hannah for a moment at Ripp, and then closed her eyes once more. “Berto was watching television and Ricky was playing in the kitchen with his toys. He wasn’t even in the living room. Berto yelled at him a couple times to be quiet. My son was just having fun. You know little boys; they don’t always hear what you want them to.”

“Yes,” Hannah said, her own anger beginning to rage. “I know people, grown people, who are the same way. What happened? Please.”

“He went into the kitchen and picked up Ricky by the arms and slammed him to the floor.”

Garcia was crying now. Keeping her eyes shut didn’t block out what she said she’d seen that day. Instead of drawing sympathy, her tears irritated Hannah.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I mean, he wasn’t dead or anything. Berto was so sorry. So sorry.” The words stuck in her throat. “Sorry that his temper got away from him. We ran a cold bath and put Ricky in it. He was swelling up. We didn’t want to call the ambulance. We didn’t want somebody to tell us we were bad parents and take him away. I put two trays of ice cubes into the water to bring the swelling down. I even dumped packages of frozen corn in there. I…” Garcia stopped. Her convulsing sobs were audible from the nurses’ station, and the big woman with the clipboard made her way toward the open doorway of Sunshine 4.

“He said that if we told them Ricky fell down, we’d be okay. We wouldn’t get into trouble. Berto didn’t mean for it to happen. I didn’t think anyone would believe us. I prayed that they would. I did. An accident is an accident, right? No matter how it happens, right?”

Hannah had heard women like Joanne Garcia with their day-late, dollar-short fountains of sorrow spewing to the heavens, and she hated them. She also knew from years of working such cases, that sadly, not all children could be saved. The numbers of the littlest victims continued to grow. Despite all educational programs, the shrinks with their soliloquies on anger management, and the efforts of law enforcement, the number of battered, bruised, and even dead children grew by tragic leaps and bounds. For a second, Erik and Danny and their tiny charred Buster Brown shoes returned to her thoughts. How Hannah wished, as Joanne Garcia surely had, that time could be rolled back and things could be different.

“You ought to get a better lawyer,” Hannah said, her anger building like a kettle on high heat. She pulled a sheet of paper from a file folder that Ripp had brought along.

“I’ll see you go to prison for your son’s murder. Further if I can find a DA willing to stick his neck out a little, you’ll go down on a second murder-two charge.”

Joanne’s eyes were open wide in terror as Hannah sprang forward. “The baby girl in the basement morgue was close enough to term to survive if you hadn’t done what you did…and if someone had bothered to find you in time. That makes you practically a serial killer in my mind. Women like you make me sick.”

“What are you talking about?” Joanne croaked.

“Your husband was in county custody the day Enrique was injured.” Hannah held out the report and pointed to the date. “He couldn’t have killed the boy. You put your boy in the bathtub. You couldn’t stand the noise!”

Ripp stepped forward and tugged at Hannah’s shoulder, but she broke away and continued her rant. Garcia’s terrified eyes gleamed like a couple of bullets.

“You make me sick,” Hannah said, loud enough to reach the nurse’s station. “You women who snuff out your kids are the scum of this planet.”

“Better go,” Ripp said, grabbing Hannah and pulling her away from the hospital bed. In doing so, he accidentally popped Garcia’s IV line. Garcia screamed in pain.

“You’ll have to leave right now,” said a cranberry-clad nurse with her practiced, authoritative intonation as she scrambled into the room. “This is too much. The patient needs rest now, not the third degree.”

Hannah was stunned by her own rage. She was angry and embarrassed at the same time. She and Ripp walked to the stairway.

“What got into you back there?” he asked.

She shook her head in agitated disgust. “She killed her son. She killed him and tried to pull the battered, abused, cigarette-burned mother-of-the-year number on us. First she kills her boy, blames her daughter, and then poisons her body with pills and kills her unborn baby.”

Several nurses and an orderly stood by with their mouths agape. Two in the horseshoe whispered loudly.

Hannah touched her face. Her cheeks were warm. Her heart was thumping.

“She is the worst kind of human being and I’ve met some—known some—of the worst.”

“You lost it in there,” Ripp said, not really listening to what Hannah was saying. “I thought you were going to slap her or something.” He swung the door open, and the two started down the stairs. Hannah kept her mouth shut. She’d said enough.

“I guess this isn’t a good time to bring this up,” he said. “I told that writer Marcella Hoffman I’d talk to her at lunch today. I’d like a little recognition, too. She wants to talk to me. You know, not everything is about you.”

Hannah felt her skin grow hotter. She’d have slapped Ted Ripperton if he weren’t the son-in-law of the county attorney.

“Thanks for nothing,” she said stiffly.

“Judge Paine! What are you doing here?”

A Spruce County Clerk’s Office employee waved from across an ancient mahogany counter. Behind her was a warren of cubicles decorated with family photos and memos.

“That’s me,” Veronica Paine said warmly as she pulled up to the counter. “I’ve said it before, you just can’t keep an old lawyer from the courthouse. Seems like home around here.”

“We try.” The woman from behind the counter smiled back. Next to her, an enormous bouquet of lilies and gardenias with a plastic pick held a card that read: “Lordy, Lordy! Look Who’s 40!”

Veronica smiled. “Happy birthday.”

“I’d be happier if my sister hadn’t advertised my age!” She smiled back and both women laughed. “What can I do for you?”

“Just here to look at some old files in the vault. Some things niggling at me, after all these years.”

“Can I get you some files? What’s the case number?”

Paine shook her head. “No I can do it. I still know my way around here.”

The woman behind the counter handed her a ring of keys with a tape-covered oversized tag emblazoned with: VAULT KEY DO NOT REMOVE FROM CLERK’S DEPT. The keys clattered together as Paine started down the stairs to the basement. A woman making photocopies nodded in her direction.

The basement was well lit with fluorescent tubes— not the least bit creepy. It was filled with gray metal shelves that went from the floor to the ceiling. On each shelf were the saddest stories ever told in the annals of Spruce County’s history. The two little girls who had gone missing until their remains were found in the woods around Lake Joy. The farmer who had thought his wife had been cheating on him, so he took his life by throwing his body out in front of his neighbor’s tractor. A high school track coach who had sexually molested at least three of his students. All real. Boxes were filled with the manila files of depositions, court filings, and whatever paperwork told the tale of Spruce County’s most sordid chapters.

Veronica Paine walked to the southern corner of the basement, behind a partition of shelves used temporarily to store files that had been out for review. Behind the partition was a vault containing the most sensitive evidence held by the county. She turned the key, swung open the heavy door, and walked inside. It took only a moment to orient herself. She turned on the lights and walked over to a rack marked with the sequence of numbers where she