by Gregg Olsen
There was a short pause.
“In what way? What are you talking about?”
“I think you know,” the other’s voice cut in. It was deeper and had some kind of accent. “Why don’t you tell us what happened to your husband?”
The sink water ran for a second. Hannah figured that her mother was rinsing plates or something.
“I don’t know a thing about it,” she said. “Are you accusing me of something here, deputy?”
“Did I say I was?”
“You’ve implied as much.”
“Look, ma’am, please listen to me carefully. All I’m saying is that your husband’s injury indicates he had been hit in front and back of the skull. Both front and back. Now how could that have happened?”
Again, the sink water ran.
“I’m not a cop,” Claire said. “And I don’t know what causes what. But if you are suggesting for one second that I know anything more than I’ve told you, you’re as fucked up as your boss.”
The F-word. It sent a decisive shock wave. Hannah had never heard her mother utter it in her entire life. Her mother didn’t talk that way. Hannah found herself praying to God for her mother’s soul. The F-word wasn’t her mother’s choice of language, not even in hammer-on-the-finger anger.
“I’ll ask you to leave now.”
“We want to talk with you again.”
“Fine. Then call Marv Nelson’s law office. Now get out.”
“There’s no need to be hostile, ma’am.”
“Hostile is walking into a woman’s house and so much as telling her you think she kissed off her old man. That’s the very definition of hostile.”
Hannah made her way down the stairs one hand over the other on the rail her father had crafted from a single piece of maple, cut not far from their farm. She stood in her nightgown, its flannel hem brushing against the landing. She wanted to tell the men to get out, just as her mother had. She wanted to scream at them for making her mother so upset. But she didn’t. She didn’t say a word. No one saw her standing there, so still and so quiet. No one turned to look in her direction when all three stomped out the front door.
A few minutes later, Claire came back inside.
“How long you been up, honey?” she asked, seeing her daughter. Her voice was sweet. Sweeter than usual.
“Are they gone?” she asked.
Claire looked surprised. “Yes, dear. They’re gone.”
“For good?”
“I think so. I don’t think they’ll ever be back.”
And she was right.
Both Hannah and Bauer were exhausted by her disclosure. She, for what she had relived over coffee in the café, and he for the spinning wheels of a man who could do nothing to help the girl-turned-woman’s realization of a dark truth, something she simply didn’t want to believe.
“I’m talked out,” she said. “I’m checking into the motel and going to bed.”
“Want dinner?” he asked. He pointed to a placard on the table. “Pot roast is supposed to be their specialty.”
“I can’t eat.” She feigned a smile. “I doubt I can sleep. I’ll be up early and headed home at first light. Thanks for listening.”
Bauer stood and embraced her. He felt her warm, limp body, and whispered in her ear.
“This isn’t over, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “But someday it will be. I’ll… we’ll see to it.”
Bauer let go and Hannah walked to the door. Her skirt was wrinkled and her blouse hung on her like it no longer fit. She didn’t turn around. She didn’t want him to see that she was crying.
The morning after he returned to Portland, Jeff Bauer made the call that Peggy Hjermstad had been expecting for two decades. Peggy was in her late fifties by then, remarried and living on her small farm in Tillamook, near the Pacific Ocean. She and her new husband raised dairy goats and had developed a successful line of goat cheeses.
She’d kept her last name and was listed in the phone book, in case her daughter ever came looking for her again. “Though I don’t expect it,” she’d say to friends or acquaintances inquiring about it.
Bauer hated making the call not only because it hurt like hell to tell a mother her daughter was likely deceased, but also because he only had the word of a convicted arsonist that she was the victim.
“Ms. Hjermstad?” he asked when a sweet voice answered the phone.
“Some call me that,” she said warmly. “This is Peggy.”
He told her who he was, and he could hear the rattling of bits of metal against the phone. It had to be her charm bracelet. He’d remembered that she wore it when she came to the FBI office so many years ago. Among the charms she pointed out during that visit was a silhouette of a girl’s head with the name “Serena” engraved in curlicue lettering.
“I talked with Marcus Wheaton yesterday,” Bauer said. “There’s no easy way to say this. He identified your daughter as the female victim.”
Peggy let out a small gasp, but quickly recomposed herself.
“Does he,” she said, fumbling for words, “know where her head is? I mean, I know it doesn’t matter. I know that she’s gone. I’ve always known it. But I’d like to have her go to heaven in one piece.”
“No. He didn’t say.”
“Why did he kill her?”
“Said he didn’t. I don’t know if he’s a liar and an arsonist, but I believed him. He put the blame right on Claire Logan. Said your daughter went by the name ‘Didi.’”
“Oh my,” Peggy Hjermstad said, growing very quiet.
“I’m so sorry,” Bauer said.
There was silence.
“Ms. Hjermstad? I mean, Peggy. You still on the line?”
“I’m here,” she said. “The name caught me off guard, that’s all. Didi was the name of Serena’s poodle. A teacup. A pretty little apricot thing she loved to death. Wonder why she called herself that name?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” Bauer said. “Some things we never know.”
Peggy thanked the agent for calling. “I knew she was never coming home when she didn’t call for my birthday or Christmas. Even so… it still hurts after all these years. Funny how it hurts. It almost seems like she’s died all over again.”
“I’m sorry,” he said once more. “I’ll let you know if anything else turns up, but this may be all we will ever know.”
“No need. I know all I need to know. My darling girl is gone forever.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
It was easy to get the assignment. Jeff Bauer had lived in Anchorage for five years when he worked the stolen Russian antiquities sting. He’d even been to Kodiak Island to fish with his teenage nephews one summer when his sister sent the boys up from Idaho. The idea that it was possible that Claire Logan had been right under his nose was more annoying than infuriating. Bauer wasn’t completely sure that Wheaton was telling the truth or making a play for some attention before he was measured for a piano crate and converted into a worm smorgasbord. The supervising agent in Portland knew Bauer’s history with LOMURS, as the case was still known in FBI-speak, and made it easy to procure a plane ticket and a hotel reservation in his name.
“Talk about a feather in your cap,” the agent told him. “You nail that bitch and it would be right up there with bringing in D. B. Cooper.”
There was some truth to the remark. Cooper was the man who “skyjacked” a Northwest Airlines 727 in November 1971. With parachutes strapped on, Cooper jumped out of the plane at an altitude of 10,000 feet with $200,000 and was never heard from again. Some said he died. Others insisted he made his way to Margaritaville and was working on his tan. Though far less gruesome than Claire Logan, Cooper was in a weird way a male equivalent. Infamous and notorious, he had captured the public’s imagination. A tavern hosted annual parties; there were many books and even a movie. Cooper was never found, which, like Logan, had kept alive the possibility that he’d gotten away with the crime.
Bauer caught the fiv
e-hour flight from Portland to Anchorage and a commuter flight to Kodiak, 250 miles south of Alaska’s largest, and some alleged only “real” city. Although it was 10 p.m., it was still light out an hour later when he landed at the town with the same name as the island.
As pretty as it was with its gorgeous and grand expanses of green forests, meadows, and a navigator’s nightmare of a craggy coastline, Kodiak had seen its share of hard times. Pretty, of course, doesn’t account for much when money is hard to come by. Sagging motel rates were only one indicator that the island hadn’t fully rebounded from the last downturn. There was work, but not enough workers for the kind of positions offered. Cannery jobs were advertised in every edition of the Kodiak paper. Times had changed. The scrappy folks who drank most of their days away before sobering up for the cash that came with a good Tanner crab or shrimp season were in dwindling supply. The money didn’t flow as it once did. Even a decade before, a man could make as much dough in three months with shares from a decent salmon run as he could with a yearlong stint working a decent-paying job on the mainland.
Bauer picked up a rental car, loaded it with his luggage and fishing gear, and checked into a room at the Northern Lights Best Western Motor Inn. As a courtesy, he drove over to the Kodiak sheriff’s office to say hello to the sheriff, Kim Stanton. An Aleut, Stanton was thirty-eight with almond eyes and the thickest, darkest hair imaginable. He’d been elected to the post twice and was considered one of the most competent public officials on the island. Bauer did not say whom he was there to find, nor did the pudgy officer on duty inquire. Bauer knew the drill—a kind of don’t-volunteer-information protocol. Over the years, Bauer had learned much about local and federal law enforcement and how the two factions seldom forged a viable working relationship. Territory, he knew, mattered; getting something right wasn’t as important, it seemed, as who got it.
“You know,” the officer said, “we spend half our budget taking people back to the mainland for extradition to God-knows-where they came from. People think Alaska is the last good place to hide. Like we don’t bother to catch them because we’re too busy dog sledding or snowmobiling.”
“Or ice fishing,” Bauer said, continuing the joke. He looked out the window at the dusky and nearly deserted street outside. A car slowly passed, then sped up, its tail-lights glowed red. “I’ll let you go so you can skin a grizzly.” He winked. “Be back when Sheriff Stanton’s in. Thanks, deputy.”
Letting the door swing closed behind him, Bauer walked across the street and ordered a BLT and fries to go from the coffee shop and returned to his room at the Northern Lights. It was 10:40 p.m. He had one more call to make, but given the hour he decided to put it off until the morning. Maybe the afternoon. Just later, he thought. He watched the tail end of the Anchorage news, though he paid little attention to what was being reported. His mind was fully occupied with Claire Logan. Was she here? Her Social Security number had long since been abandoned. After Leanna Schumacher died, surveillance was discontinued on her place in Misery Bay. Bauer never told Hannah about the wiretapping on the Schumachers’ phone line in the event that Claire contacted her younger sister. It was never that the Feds didn’t trust the Schumachers; they just had no other idea about whom Claire might call. The wiretaps were an insurance policy. But, of course, Claire never did call. They were discontinued several years after the murders, but the court order was always in place just in case.
And so Claire Logan remained a phantom. The only known photos of her were from her Bellingham High School yearbook. Sitting on the bed of his Kodiak motel room, Bauer studied the scan of Claire Berrenger’s senior picture. Admittedly, it was black-and-white and that could account for some of his reaction. But, he thought, the woman looked so cold. In the photograph her eyes looked black—there was no differentiation between her pupils and her iris. Just two small puddles of blackness. He’d seen the photograph a million times before. An FBI artist had created a fast-forwarded image of what Claire Logan might look like in her sixties. Bauer didn’t think much of the effort.
“She’s not going to let nature take its course,” he told his supervisor back in Portland before he left. “First of all, she has the money to have whatever she wants done as she got older. Secondly, she knows the whole fucking world knows her mug.”
“Could be,” the agent said.
“I know this woman,” Bauer said. “She’s a total control freak. She’s been pinched and pulled tighter than a soap opera actress.”
It was almost 11 p.m. when Bauer dialed Hannah’s number at home. It was Ethan Griffin who answered. His voice was a little rough, a little sleepy sounding.
“Sorry this is so late,” Bauer said, realizing the time difference between Alaska and the lower forty-eight. He identified himself and asked for Hannah. “It’s about her mother.”
“I hope my mother-in-law is dead,” Ethan said.
“Every guy wishes that a time or two,” Bauer said. But the joke fell flat.
“Right. It would be better off for everyone. Hannah and Amber, especially. Amber doesn’t know anything about her grandmother, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“I’d probably feel the same way,” Bauer said, “if she was my little girl.”
“Trust me. You would,” Ethan said.
“It’s bound to come out. Hope you’re prepared.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Ethan said. “But if you guys hadn’t screwed up when this all went down in Rock Point, we wouldn’t be talking about it now. Am I correct?”
“We did the best we could. You know that the law isn’t perfect.”
“Right,” Ethan was annoyed. He was the law. He thought he could have done better if he’d have been handed such a case. “Nice talking with you. Here’s Hannah.”
She stared into her husband’s eyes and took the phone. “You’ve already found her?” she asked Bauer, sounding slightly panicked.
“Not so fast. I just got here. I just wanted to let you know that it might take a while. Go about your business. I’ll keep you in the loop, but it has to be unofficial. You understand?”
“Yes,” she lied. How could she not be involved? If anyone in the world deserved to be “in the loop” it was she. She had waited a lifetime for the moment to arrive where everything she’d have ever wanted to know would spurt forth like a geyser. She hated Claire Logan the infamous murderess. But she loved her mother—or at least the good parts of her she could still remember.
“If you find her, there will be no hiding it from anyone, you know,” Hannah said. “People—if you can call Marcella Hoffman that—are already sniffing around.”
“I know. If we find her, it’ll blow bigger than Mount St. Helens did in 1980,” Bauer said before giving Hannah the phone number of the Northern Lights.
“Take care of yourself,” he said.
“You, too,” Hannah replied, laying the phone silently in its cradle.
Ethan was undressed and in bed, holding the covers open for his wife. Hannah refused his gesture and sat down on the edge of the mattress.
“That means you want to talk about it?” he asked.
Hannah looked at her husband. “I think I should tell Amber something,” she said.
Ethan sat upright. “No,” he said. “We agreed. She doesn’t need to know anything about this. I don’t want her living with this. It’ll drive her crazy.”
“I’ve lived with it,” she muttered. “And I’m all right.”
“Are you? I mean, Hannah, look at you.” He held her by her shoulders, not really to shake her, but to snap her into some kind of awareness. “You haven’t slept in days. You’ve lost weight. …You aren’t the same person you were when you thought…” he stopped himself.
“Thought what?”
“Thought… she was probably dead.”
“Hoped. I had hoped all these years that she was dead. And you need to know, I’m still hoping. But I’ve got Jeff Bauer, Marcus Wheaton, and that cretin Marcella Hoffman reminding me that Cla
ire Logan lives. In one way or another. She lives. My mother won’t die. Like Sissy Spacek’s hand out of the grave grabbing at us all at the end of Carrie. My mother still lives.”
She was crying now.
He tried to comfort her, but she seemed resistant to his touch. “You need to rest,” he told her.
“No,” she said. “I mean, yes, rest would help. But I can’t sleep, because I keep thinking of her.”
Ethan pulled her into bed and turned off the light. He held Hannah and felt ripples of grief pass through her body. She was a wreck.
“I love you, baby,” he said.
“Love you.”
In a half hour Ethan allowed himself to drift off. Hannah’s eyes were wide open, staring at the clock as the digital numbers rolled from 2 to 3, then on to 4 a.m. Each hour now meant something. Each hour, each tumble of the lighted drums emblazoned with boldface numbers, meant Hannah Logan Griffin was that much closer to resolution. Closer to truth. She tossed and turned for another hour, battering her pillow and twisting the coverlet. Strangely, when she finally fell asleep that night, it was moonflowers she thought about. The creamy white, swirling blossoms, twisted open in the magic of an early evening. She and her mother sat on the log and watched while her brothers played inside the big yellow house. In her sleep, Hannah smiled.
Chapter Twenty-nine
It would take some time. Computers could only do so much. In the decades-old case of Claire Logan, computers were useful only for eliminating potential suspects. All Bauer knew—and that was if Wheaton was telling the truth—was that Logan ran a fishing resort on Kodiak Island in Alaska. There were no Logans listed, of course. But there were dozens of resorts of the type that Marcus Wheaton had described.
“Close enough to whatever roads they have up there, because she didn’t want to bother with seaplanes bringing guests in,” Wheaton had said, huffing and puffing in the penitentiary’s visiting cell. “She researched it. She did. Nice enough place that she’d be comfortable. Room for a dozen fishermen at any given time, because she wanted to make money.”