by Gregg Olsen
“First I’ll tell you how, then why and where. I’m absolutely certain of the why and the how, but the where is something you might have to do some actual work on.”
Wheaton went on to restate how much he loved Claire, how he’d have done anything for her.
“Claire wanted me to pick her up at the five-way. But she didn’t come. I waited. Five minutes turned into ten, ten to twenty. I could hear the sirens and see the glow of the inferno more than a mile away. I didn’t see any footprints in the snow on the roadside. I thought something was wrong.”
Wheaton took a drink, gulping loudly, before continuing.
“I mean, this was planned to the minute. I panicked and got back behind the wheel. When I pulled forward to find her, I ran over something and I felt it pierce the tire.”
He said he got out and found a two-by-four with a row of nails running down the center like the spine of a dragon. He’d punctured only one tire, and that could be changed.
The recollection brought an odd look to Wheaton’s doughy face. Hannah couldn’t make out his affect, though she wanted to desperately. Was it regret? Anger? The prisoner’s good eye blinked rapidly. “She set me up. I didn’t want to believe it.” Wheaton looked down at the table again, searching for the words. “And I didn’t for a long time. We had plans. She loved me. It sounds so pathetic, I know. Anyway, the cops came as I was fixing the tire and wondering how in the hell I was going to get out of there.”
If Wheaton had hoped his story would bring sympathy from either Bauer or Hannah, he was mistaken. Maybe if he had said so a little earlier? Maybe if he had said so when it mattered? Wheaton fidgeted with the clear cord of his portable oxygen tank.
“I’ve had twenty fucking years to think about how stupid a man can be for the love of a woman. A fat man. A man with one eye. I mean, who was going to want me?”
As Hannah saw it, Wheaton’s words were in defense of why he had stuck by the woman for so long.
“Where is she?” Hannah asked. “Where did she go?”
“Alaska,” he answered. “Kodiak. If I know anything about your mother, she’s up there. Running a fishing lodge on the southern end of the island. It was her dream. Rock Point wasn’t remote enough. And God knew she had the money. Claire didn’t want…” he stopped for a moment. “She didn’t want nothing to hold her back. Not you or your brothers. And I guess, I mean, now I know, not even me.”
Hannah had another question. There was one victim she had always wondered about.
“My father,” she said. “Do you know? Was it an accident?”
“You know the answer,” Wheaton answered, his voice low and tired. “You’ve probably known it all along.” He paused, once more evaluating what he’d say. He started wheezing and coughing, a fit that lasted almost a minute. But Wheaton waved his big, meaty hands, indicating he’d continue. “Your dad was in the way. Your dad was a roadblock to your mom’s desires. I think we all were. I mean I think she loved us for what she could get from us… and when we were used up, she didn’t give a flying fuck.”
There didn’t seem to be anything more to say. Even so, Marcus Wheaton cleared the phlegm from his throat and spoke one more time.
“You know, Hannah. When I tell you you’re nothing like your mother, I mean it.”
Hannah muttered thanks, but nothing more.
She and Bauer walked almost in complete silence after saying good-bye to Madsen and leaving their best wishes for the warden. So frazzled by what she’d heard, Hannah almost forgot she’d left her purse—and car keys—in the visiting checkpoint. They walked to their cars. Dust swirled from exiting parents and wives, smudged windows catching the sun, low in the sky.
“Hannah,” Bauer said, “I almost said, ‘a penny for your thoughts’ but you know that sounds so stupid… I want to know what you’re thinking.”
“I hate her,” was all she could come up with. “I’m going home.”
Bauer looked puzzled. “What did you expect?”
“I guess I hoped that he’d say she was dead. That, in fact, she was Twenty.” Hannah inserted her key into the lock and opened her car door.
“Maybe he’s lying. He’s got plenty of reasons to put the blame on her.”
She stared at Bauer and shook her head. “He loved her. He’s bitter. I guess he’s a lot like me.”
“That’s funny,” Bauer said, and, looking at her, amended his words with, “as in strange funny.”
Hannah let out an irritated sigh. “What’s that?”
“Wheaton says you’re nothing like your mother… and you think you’re more like him, huh?”
Hannah shrugged. “I guess so. I’d rather not be like either one of them, if it’s all the same to you.”
Ethan Griffin was not, as he liked to say, “a happy camper.” Still in his police uniform, Hannah’s husband’s blocky physique occupied the space like an over-heated Kenmore as he stood in the kitchen in their home on Loma Linda Avenue. A mad Kenmore. He turned his head from Amber, who was busy moving her broccoli and a somewhat gray noodle casserole around her plate, and stepped away from the table. He held the phone firmly enough to break it in two. Hannah was on the line and she was about to get an earful, and as far as he could see, she deserved it. Freak-show mother or not.
“You left without saying much more than a word, and now you’re not coming home,” he said, doing his best to keep somewhat calm while his wife went off with some hot-shit FBI ghostbuster. “This is just perfect,” he snapped, the sarcasm giving him some relief from his anger. “You don’t know what you’re messing with. And that idiot Ted Ripperton keeps calling looking for you. I’ve told him that you went to see a friend in the Bay Area.”
“Thanks. I’ve already talked to him. He’s been paging me all day.”
“Amber and I want you home.” Ethan softened when he saw that Amber was listening. “I’m worried about you.” Ethan threw their daughter’s name into his plea, knowing that a child’s heart carries more weight than a husband’s. In reality, he was more lonely and tired than angry.
“It’s just for one more night,” Hannah said, ignoring Ethan’s brewing anger because there was no time to talk it out. “I’m not happy about it either,” she said. “I’m going to stay in Cutter’s Landing tonight, and I’ll be home sometime late tomorrow. If I could leave right now, I’d do it. Believe me, I want out of here.”
Ethan sighed, letting out an over-the-top noise that sounded like a leaking truck tire. The sound meant he loved her, but hated the situation. “I’ll put your daughter on,” Ethan’s voice regained its characteristic understanding tone. He knew his anger had more to do with worry about her than any personal inconvenience.
Amber took the receiver and cooed into the phone. “Hi, Mommy!”
“Hello, darling. I miss you.” Hannah realized that her words sounded flat, and she told herself keep the mood lighter.
“Miss you, too. Got a hundred on my spelling test,” the little girl said, oblivious to her mother’s somber tone. “I got extra credit, too.”
“That’s wonderful. I knew you could do it.”
“I know. Daddy cooked tonight. I mean you cooked and Daddy reheated in the micro.”
Hannah brightened for the first time during the conversation. “Good, I hope.”
“I might have seconds,” Amber lied. A lie she knew she could get away with because her mother wasn’t much of a cook and her father loved both of them so much that he would never spill the beans.
“Honey, I’ll be home tomorrow. Give Daddy a big sloppy kiss for me.”
Amber laughed. “Okay. Bye.”
Ethan got his kiss and picked up the phone.
“This is very bad,” Hannah said. Her voice broke a little. “This is very hard.”
Seeing the exchange between mother and daughter, the sweetness of the little girl’s lie, calmed him somewhat. “Are you all right? Sorry about being a jerk just now.”
“I am, in fact, frightened as hell. I wish to God you we
re here. There is so much that needs sorting out.”
Ethan was tense, but he didn’t want to scare her anymore. She was hanging by a thread, and he knew it. “Can I help now, babe?” he asked. He pulled up a chair from the kitchen table and sat down. Amber continued to pick at her food. He’d heard worry in his wife’s voice before, but not connected with anything associated with herself. Not directly. Nothing personal. When anxiety crept into Hannah’s voice, it almost certainly was over a heavy caseload or the result of a desperate search for phantom evidence at the rebuttal phase or some other key point in a trial to prove a witness is lying.
“I don’t know,” she said, wanting to present what she had learned in that visiting room in a way that wouldn’t worry Ethan. Instead, she just blurted it out.
“Wheaton says my mother is alive. And Marcella Hoffman is nosing around the lab asking questions and making a nuisance of herself. That’s why Ripp was calling so much. She wants an interview. She’s got some pretext about women investigators, and thank God, Ripp is too dense to figure anything out.”
Ethan went blank. The name didn’t quite track. “Who’s Marcella Hoffman?”
Silence fell for a second. “Twenty in a Row.”
“Oh, that Marcella Hoffman.” When recognition came, the name jolted like a radio in a bathtub. Ethan had read the book before he met Hannah. He saw the TV movie. “You’re right,” he said, his adrenaline pumping. “This isn’t good.”
“Wheaton says my mother is alive. Thinks she’s up in Alaska somewhere. And you don’t react to that?”
There was a short silence on the line.
“No. Hannah,” Ethan finally said, “I didn’t react because I’ve always thought she was out there somewhere. I’ve always believed your mother got away with murder.”
And for that I could kill her with my bare hands, he thought, although he wisely didn’t say the words.
“I don’t know what to think,” Hannah said, her voice growing very quiet. “I need some time.”
Across the Cascades in Spruce County where it all began, Veronica Paine felt her stomach flutter and her blood pressure rise. She paced over sumptuous Oriental rugs that she and her husband had collected over the years. She looked out the window at her garden. She turned on the TV. But nothing could distract her from her own thoughts. It had been long enough. She realized it when she replayed the obvious anguish in Hannah Griffin’s voice. Certainly, Hannah presented a brave face, but for what? What had seemed like a good idea, the right idea… the sanctity of the law, long ago, no longer felt as right to the former prosecutor and judge. She snuffed out a cigarette, let out the cat, and set the intruder alarm that her husband insisted they get the month before he died. Opening the front door was like a blast from a heater. No jacket was needed. She got into her red Chevy Blazer and started driving, heading in the direction of the Spruce County Courthouse.
She didn’t know it, but a driver in a late-model car slipped behind her Blazer, staying just out of view.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Hannah Griffin stared into Jeff Bauer’s eyes across a table in the Landing Zone, an incongruously cheery coffee shop with crisp white café curtains and a jukebox loaded with country music. It was in the heart of dusty Cutter’s Landing, the town that survived only because it was home to a penitentiary. Marcus Wheaton’s disclosure disturbed Hannah, but it also brought her a little relief. Although Wheaton revealed her mother could be somewhere in Alaska, possibly alive, Hannah didn’t think about that just then. She kept her thoughts on her father.
She nodded to a waitress that more coffee was in order. Hannah turned away and stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. A splash of cream from a dented, silver-lidded pitcher followed.
“Candy coffee, you have there,” Bauer said.
A smile came to her face, but it was fleeting. She looked into the mug as though it held some answers.
“Let’s go over it once more,” he said. “If you think it will help?”
Hannah agreed. Her mind traveled back in time to Rock Point, where she was a grade-school girl with no upper front teeth and a bad haircut, given to her by her mother.
“It was late in the day,” she began. “School would be out in an hour…. My mom came to school. My brothers were strapped in their car seats. They were quiet. Quieter than I’d ever seen Danny and Erik at that age. My mother’s face was ashen. Flour highlighted the edges of the short-sleeved shirtdress she wore to keep cool that muggy day. ‘Oh, Hannah, it’s bad. So bad. He’s gone, honey,’ Mom said. ‘Daddy’s gone.’”
“Gone” was the word grown-ups used for “dead.” It didn’t fully dawn on Hannah until the car came to a stop. Something hurt her. Hannah didn’t notice until her mother parked between the rutted and worn patch of grass in front of the house, but her hands had been clenched to the car-door handle all the way from school to home. It was a strange feeling, like her hand had been hammered into the chrome-plated lever. Like her hand was not her own. She turned her head to look at the door handle and hooked her fingers into the lever to command it to open.
Claire told her daughter how she and Marty had been working in the wreath maker’s shed hoisting up a heavy part for a wood chipper. At one point, according to Claire, a grinder slipped down from its wall-mount harness and struck Marty squarely on the head, nearly splitting his skull in two. Claire struggled to stop the bleeding—blood splatter indicated as much—but it was to no avail. Marty didn’t live long enough to see the volunteer paramedics when they arrived.
The Logans’s yellow and white–painted house filled the car window. Sun splashed the green shutters and flowed over the cupola with the Santa Claus weather- vane. The breeze of the day had been choppy, but Santa hadn’t moved. Hannah stared into the nothingness beyond, the sky, the clouds. Then feeling was lost to a voice.
“Honey, we have to go inside.”
The voice was her mother’s. Soft, yet firm.
“Yes,” Hannah said, once more turning to look at her frozen hand. “I’m coming.”
Her mother’s tears had dried; in fact, it later struck Hannah how there hadn’t been many tears from her mother. She clutched her schoolbooks, carried Danny, and walked to the front porch. Claire held Erik and cooed to him. Hannah’s flooded eyes swept over the yard, toward the work shed, over the back pasture where Bonnie, the family’s sole horse, grazed lazily under a bloom-bursting apricot tree.
“Mom,” she said. “I want to see Dad.”
Claire juggled her toddler son and held the screen door open with her foot, allowing Hannah to pass by. “Honey,” she said, “he’s at the funeral home already. We’ll go tonight.”
Hannah dropped her books on the bench by the door and let out a cry. She held her brother and sobbed into the top of his tousled head. Her mother patted her back and put her arms around her. Both shook as though their grief could not be contained. Yet only one of them wept.
The kitchen with its knothole-free birch cabinets and ten-foot-high ceiling gleamed as it always did. It was always spotless because Claire Logan insisted that it be as pristine as a doctor’s examining room. There was never a coffee ring on the counter, nor a water spot on the long chrome neck of the faucet. The curtains were white muslin, not because they added a stylish country touch, but because they could be washed once a week and not show evidence of fading.
On the afternoon that Martin Logan met his maker, Claire Logan had been baking bread—something she did on occasion because, she told her daughter, it relaxed her. The kitchen smelled heavenly, yeasty and sweet. Four loaves, shining with a coating of melted butter, were positioned on racks next to the sink.
“I came as soon as I could,” her mother had said.
But the bread, and the flour on her sleeve, spoke of less of a hurried—frenzied—exit.
We’d been out working all morning when it happened.
But bread takes time…
It was so terrible….I tried to help him, but I couldn’t. There was blood
everywhere.
Claire, however, carried no trace of blood; only the white flour on her sleeves marked her clothing and hinted that the day had been spent doing something before her husband died.
“Mom, you’ve been baking,” Hannah said, staring at the crusty loaves nestled on a blue-and-white-checked towel.
Claire turned away and ran the faucet.
“You want some? It’s still warm. Some food might do you good.”
Hannah said no and left for her bedroom. Her pace quickened as she climbed the stairs. By the time she had reached the final riser she was in an all-out run, a race to the softness of her mattress—a place where she could hide and cry.
Through furnace vents that had always been a pipeline to the goings-on in the house, Hannah could hear her mother’s voice. She used to climb on the vent and, on the rare days when she wore a dress, she used to spread open her hemline over the metal grate to capture the warm air as it was forced from the basement to the rest of the house. In less than ten seconds, her dress would fill like a hot-air balloon, billowing in its fullness and keeping her legs warm.
But that morning the vents were a conduit for sound. Hannah overheard her mother talking with two men. The pair were from the sheriff’s office; at least Hannah supposed they were, based on their questions. They certainly weren’t friends of her mother’s. They couldn’t be friends with the kind of harsh and impatient tone they exhibited. She imagined two men. A short, fat man with a throaty voice and a taller, thinner fellow who said little other than to comment on what the other fellow said.
“You got that right,” he said. “That’s my understanding, too.”
The fat man was pushy and direct. “Mrs. Logan,” he said, “we’re just here to put the report to bed. No one is trying to do anything other than get this over and done with. This unpleasant stuff is just part of the rigmarole of the law. The fact is, the injuries don’t quite mix with what you’ve told us about your husband’s death.”