by Jance, J. A.
Hannah had been taking a wig-free nap when the call came in. With her wig back in place and her makeup reapplied, she drove the three blocks to the community center, which also functioned as the reception area, and marched inside with the confident air of a woman fully in charge.
The receptionist caught Hannah’s eye and pointed her toward two men in suits, one younger and one older, who were seated on a sofa in front of the room’s immense and entirely decorative gas-log fireplace. Even without the receptionist’s help, Hannah would have had no trouble spotting them. The two plainclothes cops stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs—to her as well as to everyone else in the room. The curious eyes of people supposedly reading books, playing cards, or working jigsaw puzzles were actually discreetly focused on the visitors.
Hannah approached the two investigators, stopping directly in front of them. “I’m Hannah Gilchrist,” she announced perfunctorily. “How may I help you?”
“Thank you for seeing us,” said the older of the two, hurriedly rising to his feet and holding out his ID wallet. “I’m Agent Bill Mansfield with the California Bureau of Investigation, and this is my partner, Agent Bob Owens. We’d like a word if you don’t mind.”
Hannah remained standing while taking her time to examine the ID.
“All right, Agent Mansfield,” she said at last, handing the wallet back to him. “What can I do for you?”
“Won’t you have a seat?” he asked.
Clearly he wanted to put her at ease, and Hannah wasn’t buying it.
“No, thank you,” she said, crossing her arms and speaking clearly enough that her words carried throughout the room. “I prefer to stand, and if this concerns my son, I should probably consult with my attorney before I say another word.”
“Your attorney’s presence won’t be necessary,” Agent Mansfield assured her quickly. “This isn’t about your son. It’s about Leo Manuel Aurelio. Do you happen to know him?”
“Of course I know him,” Hannah snapped. “He’s the man who testified against my son during Edward’s murder trial. I also happen to know he’s dead.”
Agent Mansfield looked surprised. That was precisely the news he’d come to deliver, and he obviously hadn’t expected Hannah to be aware of Leo’s death in advance of his announcement. “You do? How do you know about that?” he asked.
“Leo and I have been corresponding for some time,” an unblinking Hannah replied, “for years, in fact. The last letter I sent to him was returned marked ‘Deceased.’ ”
“Would you care to go somewhere else so we can discuss this in private?”
“That’s not necessary. I don’t mind having my neighbors hear what’s being said. Most of the people here at Arbor Crest are fully aware of my son’s situation.”
“Very well, then,” Agent Mansfield replied. “Your correspondence with Mr. Aurelio is actually the reason we’re here. A packet of your letters was found among his personal effects.”
“He kept my letters?” Hannah asked.
Agent Mansfield nodded. “Yes, he did. Did you happen to keep any of the ones he sent to you?”
Hannah shook her head. “No, I did not. Our exchanges were private conversations. I saw no need to preserve them. They were no one else’s business.”
“Since Mr. Aurelio’s testimony was largely responsible for your son’s conviction, I’m a little puzzled as to why you would write to him.”
“Are you a Christian?” Hannah shot back at him.
Again Mansfield seemed taken aback by the question. “Yes, I am,” he began, “but—”
“So am I,” Hannah interrupted with a superior smile that easily laid claim to the moral high ground. “If you are, too, I suppose you’ve heard all those things about turning the other cheek and forgiving those who trespass against us.”
“Yes,” Agent Mansfield agreed. “Of course I’m aware of those teachings.”
“They’re not just teachings,” Hannah corrected, moving in for the kill. “They are words to live by. At least they’re the words I choose to live by. I wrote to Leo for the first time shortly after my son was transported to the prison here in Folsom. I wrote to my son’s accuser offering my forgiveness and my friendship, and I’m happy to tell you that he accepted both. I don’t believe he had anyone else in his life. He was an orphan, you know.”
The younger agent, the one named Owens who had yet to say a word, nodded discreetly in Agent Mansfield’s direction as though verifying what Hannah had just said.
“Are you aware of the circumstances surrounding his death?” Mansfield continued.
Hannah indicated that she was. “After my letter was returned from the prison, I went online and did some checking. I learned that Leo committed suicide. That he was found hanging in his cell.”
“Although you may no longer have your set of letters, do you remember him ever mentioning to you anything about his being depressed?”
“Not at all,” Hannah replied. “According to what Leo told me, he was doing well. He had earned his GED, had started working toward getting an associate’s degree, and was looking forward to his first parole hearing. I believe he was going to be eligible for parole sometime relatively soon—in a couple of years or so.”
Mansfield asked, “Did he mention feeling as though he might be in any danger or that he might have gotten crosswise either with one of the other inmates in the facility or with one of the gangs?”
“He said nothing of the kind to me,” Hannah replied. “The Leo I knew was intent on serving his time, being released, and being able to live a productive life after paying his debt to society.”
“All right, then, Ms. Gilchrist,” Agent Mansfield said, holding out his hand. “I guess that’s all. We’ll be going. Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
Hannah allowed the two agents to get as far as the door before she said anything more. She hadn’t been inside a church in years, not since Dawn and Eddie’s disaster of a wedding. On this occasion, however, she was determined to out-Christian the Christians.
“Agent Mansfield,” she called after him, “one more thing. As I said, I’m aware Leo was an orphan. I’m sure that’s why he fell in with such a bad crowd long before he ever came to this country. Have you located any other relatives?”
“Not so far.”
“What will happen to his remains if you don’t find someone to claim them?”
“When bodies of prisoners go unclaimed, they are generally buried on the prison grounds.”
“If you’re unable to locate any other relatives, I’ll be glad to handle Leo’s final arrangements and any expenses those might incur,” Hannah said.
“Really?” Agent Mansfield asked in astonishment. “Are you sure? That’s incredibly generous of you.”
“As I told you before,” she said, “Leo and I became friends. It’s the least I can do.”
Agent Mansfield took out a notebook. “I’ll be sure to pass along your contact information. Someone from the morgue will be in touch.”
A month later a box marked “Human Remains” and addressed to Hannah Gilchrist arrived at the reception desk at Arbor Crest. From the surreptitious glances sent in her direction as she went to retrieve the package, Hannah realized that everyone in the room most likely knew exactly what the shipment contained. Back in her unit, after removing the sealed urn from its shipping box, Hannah put the urn on front-and-center display in the middle of the side table in her small living room—an action that set Arbor Crest tongues wagging for months to come.
The people who saw the costly bronze piece had only the nicest things to say about it and about the caring thing Hannah had done for “that poor man.” When those words came back to her, as they inevitably did, they always made her smile. As far as Hannah herself was concerned, the contents of that urn said nothing at all about the milk of human kindness and everything there was to say about Edward’s campaign of getting even.
In gaining possession of Leo Aurelio’s remains, Hannah Anderson Gilchris
t had successfully claimed her very first trophy.
One down on her watch, and now there were three to go!
25
Lyons, Oregon, December 2016
On December 22, 2016, feathery snowflakes were already falling as Kaitlyn Martin Todd Holmes maneuvered her father’s wheelchair onto the lift on the passenger side of his minivan and locked the chair in place before pressing the lift-gate button. With snow falling on her glasses and blinding her, it seemed to take for-damned-ever, but thanks to her husband, Jack, she no longer had to load her father in and out of a vehicle by hand. That had been a killer.
The van was old, bought secondhand from a poor woman whose husband had recently died. The best thing about it was the automatic wheelchair lift. The old rust bucket definitely wasn’t a thing of beauty, but it ran. The lift worked. As far as Kaitlyn was concerned, it got them from Point A to Point B, and wasn’t that all that mattered?
“There’s gonna be an ice storm later today,” Rex Martin announced to his daughter when she climbed in behind the steering wheel, slammed her door shut, and paused long enough to clean her glasses. “Arctic winds from Canada will be blowing in from eastern Oregon. Heard it on the radio just before you got here.”
Kaitlyn shivered when she heard the news. Storms like that were notorious in this part of the world, and they had the power to bring traffic in western Oregon to a complete standstill for days at a time. As for the radio her father had mentioned? It wasn’t anything like what most people thought of when they heard that particular word.
Rex’s home, the one Kaitlyn had grown up in, was a small, shingled frame dwelling—little more than a cabin, really—situated deep in a canyon in steep, mountainous terrain high above the town of Lyons, Oregon, which could easily have been called a village. The nearest city of any size was Salem, some twenty-five miles to the west.
The thing that set Rex Martin’s place on McCully Mountain Road apart from other houses in the near neighborhood was a towering ham-radio antenna that reached skyward from the end of his moss-covered shake roof. No ordinary radio or TV signals of any kind penetrated this far into the canyon. Cell-phone service was spotty at best, even if you walked as far as the end of the driveway, but navigating the driveway in his wheelchair wasn’t exactly an option, so Rex relied on an old-fashioned Princess phone from decades earlier, and the dial-up Internet access for his computer was slow as molasses.
As a consequence, Rex’s primary source of news from the outside world was through the ham-radio equipment that occupied a surprising amount of space in his tiny living room. From his remote outpost in the mountains of western Oregon, Rex had made friends with people all over the world. It was also where he got his morning weather reports, delivered each day compliments of an amateur meteorologist named Mort who lived in Mountain View, California, and whose greatest joy in life was providing individualized commercial-free weather reports for anybody who wanted one.
“Great,” Kaitlyn muttered, “an ice storm blowing in is exactly what I don’t need today. Buckle up, now,” she added. “Getting down the mountain won’t be a problem. The snow’s not sticking enough yet, but we’ll probably need chains for getting back up. Maybe we should leave the van here and take my RAV4 instead. It has four-wheel drive.”
“Naw,” her father said. “You learned to drive on these roads, girl, and it’s just like riding a damned bicycle—you don’t forget. If we have to use chains to get me back home, we’ll use ’em. But it’ll be too much trouble getting me out of the van and loaded into your little SUV. By the time we’re done, we’ll be late for that danged doctor’s appointment, and you know how that’ll go over.”
Kaitlyn did know how that would go over—it wouldn’t. In the seven years she’d been back home managing her injured father’s complex medical care, she’d dealt with more than enough doctors’ offices. This appointment happened to be a first visit with a brand-new physician—not a good time to turn up late. She shifted into gear and then, with a look of regret, drove out past the parked Toyota to get back on the road.
“It’ll be dark when we’re coming home,” she objected.
Rex dismissed her concern with an impatient wave of his hand. “Not to worry,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”
Six weeks earlier, when Kaitlyn had called for an appointment and been told that the doctor’s first availability was on December 22 at three thirty in the afternoon, darkness had been her primary concern. One day past the winter solstice, it would be dark by four thirty or so, just as they’d be heading back up into the mountains. If the doctor happened to be running late—as doctors often did in the afternoons—they would be that much later. At the time Kaitlyn hadn’t taken the possibility of bad weather into account. Today not only would it be full-on dark, there was no telling how rough the weather would be.
They drove most of the way into town in silence. Glancing in her father’s direction halfway there, Kaitlyn wasn’t surprised to see he had dozed off. Rex had probably been too concerned about his upcoming appointment to get much sleep. Ditto for his daughter—she hadn’t slept either.
Eight years earlier Rex Martin had been horribly injured in a logging accident out in the woods. He and his crew had been felling a tree—something he’d done hundreds of times over the years, but this time something went haywire. The tree zigged when it should have zagged, and Rex was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The accident left him with two smashed legs and a permanently damaged spine. The doctors had managed to jury-rig his legs back together with titanium plates, screws, and full-length casts, but there was nothing they could do for his permanently injured back.
Long divorced, Rex was accustomed to living alone. Once he was released from the hospital and rehab some two months later, he was confined to a wheelchair and his world had changed. The day of the accident, the youngest guy on the crew had been an inexperienced kid named Jack Holmes. The other guys on the scene were of the opinion that it had been a greenhorn’s error in judgment on Jack’s part that had caused the nearly fatal accident. None of them ever said that aloud, though, including Rex Martin.
“Not your fault, kid,” he had told Jack. “It coulda happened to anybody.”
The only one laying blame was Jack Holmes himself, and he dished it out in spades. Jack tried his best to convince Rex to sell out and move into town. When that didn’t work, Jack stepped up to the plate. He organized an army of volunteers—friends, neighbors, guys from the crew—who showed up, toolboxes in hand, ready to make Rex’s longtime family home wheelchair-accessible—installing ramps, lowering countertops, widening doorways, and putting in grab bars.
It had been in the middle of that remodeling effort when Kaitlyn’s life in California blew up and she came home to stay, ostensibly to look after her dad. Neither Jack nor Kaitlyn had expected what followed. Jack was busy trying to assuage his guilt over what had happened to Rex. As for Kaitlyn? Betrayed twice over, she was done with men. Just to make that point perfectly clear, she’d gone to court and spent some of her severance pay to take back her maiden name.
Given all that, it came as something of a surprise to both of them when the two fell hopelessly in love. They had married the following year, in Jack’s home church, St. Augustus Lutheran in Mill City. No longer willing to work in the woods, Jack hired on at the Home Depot in Salem, commuting the sixty-plus miles every day, rain or shine. Kaitlyn was able to find part-time work at a clinic in Mill City that was open three days a week. With their combined incomes, they were able to buy a small bungalow that wasn’t much bigger than Rex’s place up in the mountains. Between them they continued to function as Rex Martin’s primary caregivers. Jack generally stopped by on his drive home from work in the afternoons, bringing along the mail and picking up groceries as needed along the way. Kaitlyn’s more time-consuming part of the equation was to keep Rex’s house clean, look after his finances, and manage his health issues, including doctor’s appointments and medications. A visiting nurse stopped by once
a day to help with meal preparation and personal-hygiene issues.
Kaitlyn didn’t say much to Jack about her time in California, either before or even after they married, and Jack didn’t press her. He had some things in his own past—juvenile drinking, car theft, and a joyriding car wreck when he was fourteen—that he didn’t like discussing either. But in the spring of 2012, when an assistant district attorney from L.A. showed up telling Kaitlyn about Edward Gilchrist’s arrest and asking questions about his first wife’s death, she decided it was time to come clean and tell her husband about what had happened.
“Gilchrist told you straight out that he did it?” Jack asked when she told him about Ed’s drunken confession.
Kaitlyn nodded. “He was pretty much out of it at the time. He may not even remember that he told me, but I always suspected that was why he gave me that severance package. He didn’t have to. I ended up spending it, but it always felt like blood money.”
“You think he gave it to you to just to shut you up?”
“Yes.”
“Then you have to tell the cops what you know,” Jack concluded.
“What if they ask me to testify against him?”
“Then you testify,” Jack told her. “It’s as simple as that, because it’s the right thing to do.”
That was one of the things she loved about Jack—he was a straight arrow, and she did as he suggested. She flew down to L.A. to testify against Edward Gilchrist, looking him right in the eye as she did so. The Kaitlyn who showed up at the courtroom at Santa Clarita had been Kaitlyn Martin. Having spent good money to return to her maiden name, she hadn’t changed her name again when she and Jack married. After the trial was over and Ed was put away for good, she came straight home and changed her name once more, this time from Martin to Holmes.
The trial and all it had entailed was years in the past now. She seldom thought about it anymore, and she didn’t think about it that day either. To begin with she worried about the weather, and then she worried about traffic. Much later in the afternoon, though, when it was time to head home after the doctor’s appointment, she barely noticed the amount of accumulated snow on the ground or on the minivan’s windshield, nor did she worry that the world had been plunged into darkness, No, right then Kaitlyn’s only preoccupation was with her father’s health. She understood that they were in for the fight of their lives, and it would probably not end well for Rex Martin.