Snow Creek(39)

“Mr. Turner, I’m Detective Megan Carpenter from Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in Washington. I have some news I need to tell Mrs. Ruth Turner. There’s some urgency here.”

“Tell me,” he says.

“She reported her sister missing, so it’s my duty to speak with her.”

“You can tell me. I’ll tell her.”

“It’s the law, sir.”

It wasn’t but Mr. Turner was acting like the biggest ass in the Gem State. Maybe the whole Pacific Northwest.

“It’s not the way we do things in Idaho, miss.”

“Detective, please.”

There’s a slight pause. He says something under his breath, but the refrigerator hum cancels his epithet.

“Ruth, get over here. Some detective in Washington is on my phone. Be quick about it. Someone might be calling for me.”

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Turner,” I say, “there is no easy way to give news like this to anyone.”

“Yes.”

“Is there someone there to be with you?” I purposely act like Mr. Turner isn’t even an option, because honestly, in my heart I doubt that he is.

“My husband and my oldest daughter are here.”

Her voice is cracking. She knows part of what’s coming. The other part, I doubt she could even conceive of it.

“Ruth…” I say.

She starts crying before I can say any more, and I hear a young woman hurrying to her, asking what’s wrong. I also hear Mr. Turner telling her to lower her volume. It’s interfering with whatever he’s watching on TV.

Her questions come in bursts between guttural sobs.

“What happened? Is Merritt in the hospital?”

I wish with all my heart that I was there with her.

“I’m sorry, Ruth. The evidence is that she was murdered. Merritt is still missing.”

Silence.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes,” she says, trying to pull herself together. “I am. I am. This is such a shock.”

The phone drops to the floor.

“I’m here, Mother.”

It’s the girl’s voice.

“Oh Eve,” Ruth answers as she gets back on the phone.

“Do you think Merritt has something to do with her… her… death?”

“We’re searching for him now. Yes, we do.”

I let that soak in a moment and she doesn’t react to it. The walls around the Wheatons and Turners are high and seemingly impenetrable.

“Joshua and Sarah?”

“A social worker is with them now. They are in a world of hurt, but they are being looked after until things get sorted out with the judge.”

She doesn’t ask about any of that.

Again silence.

I fill the pause with a change in topic.

“They’re arranging a green burial for your sister.”

“I don’t know what that is,” she says.

I tell her, seeming like an expert, when I knew nothing much about it until a few hours ago.

“Oh,” she says. “My sister,” she says, before letting out a cry, “would have liked that. She loved nature and all of God’s wonderments.”

It is an odd response; however, these are odd people.

“All right then,” I say.

“Eve and I will be there. Nothing—and no one—could stop me. She was everything to me.”

I say goodbye and hang up.

No one. She meant her husband, of course. Everything to her? And she hadn’t seen her in years?

I haven’t seen my brother in years. It’s not for lack of trying. Maybe Ruth’s husband forbade it, and only now did she have the courage to break away.

Good for her.



The county plat map of the Snow Creek area stares up at me from my desk. I take a yellow marker and circle where the body was found on the logging road. I put an X through the locations of the various neighbors’ land holdings. I find a pink marker and I draw the only way that Merritt Turner could have taken his truck to dump his wife’s body. The properties are not that far apart as the crow flies. In reality, they bunch up at the logging road. I ponder that. I’d been thinking that he had brought a bike or something to ride away from the scene. Or had another vehicle stashed up there.

The kids said there was no car missing other than the pickup.

He easily could have walked out of that remote area and worked his way down through the forest and even into town. The plat map shows that, if he did, he passed through property owned by Dan Anderson or Amy and Regina Torrance.

I weight that for a moment. Dan never mentioned anything. So I scratch him off the list. But the women. No one has seen either Amy or Regina for awhile.

I take a deep breath. Having done what he did to his wife, literally from head to toe, I doubt there’s nothing Merritt Wheaton wouldn’t do.

Steal a car.

Break in a house to hide out.

Or maybe something worse.

As I’m pondering all this, a news alert from the Leader appears on my phone. I click the link.

Murder Mystery in the Woods of Snow Creek





A woman’s body was found by two Bigfoot hunters in the vicinity of the abandoned Puget Logging tract north of Snow Creek.