“I’ve got everything you told me to put in there, Mom,” Nathan said impatiently, grabbing his backpack as he rushed out.
Sharon waved to the driver, and turned toward me. “I’ll be ready in two minutes, Cleo. I just got out of the shower.” She dashed off toward the back of the house.
I noticed some framed snapshots on a bookcase, so I walked over to take a closer look. One was of a younger longer-haired Donald Waycroft with a toddler in his arms, standing next to a dark-haired young woman in a long skirt holding a baby. Looked a lot like my own late-1960s baby pictures.
Next to that was a shot of Sharon, her dad, and a toddler-sized version of Nathan at a mountain lake that looked like Bear Lake in nearby Rocky Mountain National Park. A more recent picture showed a smiling Nathan in a soccer uniform, standing next to a broad-shouldered man in a gray sweatshirt who gazed at him proudly.
“Adam coached Nathan’s team. Did I tell you that?” Sharon said, coming up behind me, now dressed in white shorts and a turquoise tank top. Her shaggy auburn hair fell from its side part to frame her face as it dried. It looked like an expensive cut.
“Adam was such a great dad to Nathan,” she went on. “It’s so unfair to both of us that we lost him.”
“It is unfair,” I said, recalling one of my Grampa’s adages. When I would rail against an injustice, he would say, “Nobody ever promised that life would be fair, Cleo.” As a child even saying that seemed unfair to me. But he and Sharon were right—we don’t always get what we deserve. Certainly she’d scored very high on the unfairness meter lately.
“I know we need to look at Adam’s things and focus on him,” Sharon said. “But it’s hard for me. Mostly I’m trying not to think about him, because it’s so painful, and I miss him so much, and everywhere I look there are memories of him.”
“Sharon, maybe you’d like to put this off for a while. We don’t have to do this today.”
“No. I want to go ahead. Here, this album has a lot more pictures.” She handed me a fat blue photo album, walked over to the couch, and tossed the clothes over on top of the towels so we could sit. We looked at pictures of their wedding, held at a rustic outdoor theater made from local stone, located at the top of Flagstaff Mountain. Sharon and Adam looked radiant, Nathan grinned, and even Waycroft smiled in a couple of pictures.
“We had a wonderful wedding,” Sharon said. “Of course, my dad wouldn’t pay for any of it. I think he said something like, ‘Why would I want to reward you for making a foolish choice?’ So we used our savings. But it was worth it. After waiting this long and finally finding Adam, I wanted to celebrate with a fantastic party. And Adam didn’t really have a wedding for his first marriage, so he wanted to do it right this time.”
“Adam was married before?” I asked, running through details in my mind to see whether I’d glossed over that one.
“Yes, didn’t I tell you about crazy Natalie?”
“Um…not that I recall.”
She stared off into the distance. “Where do I begin? He was 20 and she was 18. Five years later they were divorced. Her looks and athletic ability were what attracted him. Her craziness was the problem. She was on a lot of anti-depressants and tranquilizers—fighting battles from growing up with an alcoholic mother and stepfather. Adam wanted to help her, and he thought he could. He supported her for a year in massage school so she didn’t have to take out any loans, and he paid for a lot of therapy, but I guess it didn’t do much good. One day a woman called him and said, ‘Your wife is in a hotel room with my husband right now.’ It turned out she had been cheating on him for almost a year with several men.”
“He must have felt very betrayed,” I said, thinking to myself that for all his sunny smiles, Adam had a bunch of bad karma.
“Oh, it got worse,” Sharon continued. “Adam didn’t want to give up on the marriage, so they went to couple counseling. But she kept on lying. She had more affairs and hid them from him. Then, after he left her, Natalie was abusive and nasty, even threatening to hurt him—showing up where he was—shouting, throwing things, calling him horrible names. Once she tried to run him over with her car. He had to get a restraining order. And then she finally left town.”
“Where is she now?” I asked, adding Natalie to my mental list of Adam’s possible enemies, which now also included Joel, Erik, Donald Waycroft, and Dr. Ahmed, not necessarily in that order.
“Actually, she’s here in Boulder—been back for about two years.
She goes by the name of Narmada—maybe you’ve heard of her. She’s a massage therapist and psychic, does aura cleansings, past life readings, and Chakra balancing. After she left Boulder, she studied in India. But in my opinion, she needs her own aura cleaned or whatever, because she’s still a nutcase.
“So you’ve met her?”
“Oh, yes. Not long after we got married and Adam’s business was doing well, she showed up all pissed because Adam had made money after their divorce, and she had missed out. She saw me as getting all the benefits and wanted her share. Had the nerve to tell him he owed it to her to give her money to get her business started here.”
“I’m guessing he refused and she didn’t take it well.”
“Exactly. And she’s still mad. She called me after he died and said, ‘That bastard finally got himself into a hole so big it swallowed him up. Mother Earth knows when to take revenge.’”
By then, I realized this focus on Natalie—Narmada, whatever—wasn’t doing much to get Sharon into the frame of mind to contact Adam. So I said, “Do you have any of Adam’s clothes? Like a favorite sweatshirt or jacket? The feel and smell of his clothes can help you move into his space.”
“In here,” Sharon said, walking down the hall to a bedroom with carpet and walls done in various shades of beige, oatmeal, and off-white—reminded me of a mushroom patch. Most of the room was taken up by a king-sized bed, covered with rumpled sheets, multi-striped in various shades of red, copper and brown. Pillows in similar shades lay on the floor next to the bed. Sharon opened the closet door and pulled out a red fleece jacket with a front zipper, and a long-sleeved Bolder-Boulder 10K white tee shirt with a picture of the Flatirons on the front.
“I can almost feel him when I touch these. Sometimes I wear that tee shirt to bed when I’m having trouble sleeping. It’s like having his arms around me.”
“Good. Let’s take those with us. Now, could we go out to Adam’s office?”
“Sure. It’s pretty much the way he left it.” She led the way through the kitchen. Above the sink, an amazingly long sheet of glass served as a see-through backsplash, revealing a stone patio shaded by maple trees. Adam’s office was in back of the patio, connected to it by a floor of the same rosy stone, which extended through glass doors into the office. Sharon unlocked the doors and we went in. The sound of falling water from a fountain at the edge of the terrace carried into the office.
Like the house, the old garage had been carefully remodeled to let in light and connect to the garden outside. Bookshelves lined the walls below the windows. A sleek desk held a computer monitor and a combination printer-scanner-copier. The computer tower sat on the floor under the desk, next to a bank of file cabinets. The computer somehow drew us in its direction, although its screen was dark.
“Have you found anything on his computer that gave you any clues as to what had been bothering him before he died?”
Sharon sat in a wicker chair next to a round table and motioned me toward the ergonomic computer chair. “Actually we haven’t been able to boot up Adam’s computer,” she said. “He has it password protected. I used to know the password but I guess he changed it. Both my dad and Erik have tried to boot it up. We’ve tried every password we can think of.”
“Is it possible he wrote it down somewhere?” I asked, pointing to the file cabinet next to his computer.
“We’ve looked but I never did think he wrote it down. Adam used what they call ‘strong passwords,’ which are at least eight characters combini
ng upper case and lower case letters with numbers or symbols. He would remember them with a passphrase—a sentence where the first letter of each word, combined with numbers or symbols makes the password.” She grabbed a piece of paper, wrote Il2hMSdy?, and handed it to me. “This was his last one—‘I love to hike Mt. Sanitas, don’t you?’”
“Wow, that opens a lot of possibilities. How will you ever figure it out?” I twirled around in the chair, checking out the rest of the office.
“I doubt we will. Erik looked into other solutions, and found out that we can get some kind of emergency boot disk to boot it up and somehow change the password but he keeps forgetting to get it. I reminded him again this week, so I’m hoping he’ll bring it in the next few days.”
Just then the office phone rang. We both jumped and looked over at it. “I’ll let the machine get it,” Sharon said. “I’ve kept the phone connected with a new message because I didn’t know who his customers were, and I need to get word to them if they haven’t heard.”
The machine picked up and played the message, in Sharon’s voice. “Adam’s Web Search and Design is permanently closed. If you have pending business, please leave a message and someone will call you back.”
We heard the beep, followed by a man’s slurred voice. “Adam, you son of a bitch! I’m still waiting for the stuff. You said you’d have it by July. Don’t think you can just leave town or whatever. You know I’ll find you. So you better call me back. You know where.” He banged down the phone.
Stunned, Sharon and I looked at each other and ran for the phone to check the caller ID. “Oops, it says ‘ID blocked’” I said. “Do you recognize the voice?”
“Nope,” she said. “I have no idea who that was or what it was about.”
We left and drove separately across town to my office. As I drove I thought about the phone message and wondered if it had any connection to the internet gambling debts Erik had mentioned. I didn’t want to bring that up with Sharon now—especially since I wasn’t even sure it was true.
I realized I was counting on Sharon contacting Adam, and possibly me getting new information from Tyler to find out more about any danger facing Sharon. And then I asked myself what it said about my faith in the law enforcement system that I relied on ghosts to tell us what was going on. Hmmm….maybe I mistrust Pablo’s way of working as much as he mistrusts mine.
Chapter 12
Once at my office, Sharon and I shared some lemonade and then went for a short walk over to the Boulder Creek Path to relax and clear our minds. The creek flows down the canyon from Nederland, splashing along a rocky bed that creates a series of tiny waterfalls enjoyed on hot days by kayakers and kids in inner tubes and rubber boats. We walked along the adjoining dirt trail to a shady bench that sits just off the path, on a promontory jutting out into the rushing water below. It’s one of my favorite calm places. Four large trees on the outcrop create a sense of privacy, and the soothing sound of water gurgling over the rocks masks the traffic sounds from nearby Canyon Boulevard.
We sat there a while and talked more about Adam—the sort of person he was and the relationship he and Sharon had. When we both felt relaxed, we ambled back to the office.
The apparition chamber at my office is the same as the one at home—a four-foot square mirror on the wall, surrounded by a black velvet curtain that creates a small booth. Inside the curtain, an easy-chair is inclined backward so the sitter can gaze into the mirror and see only darkness. I had Sharon remove her watch so she wouldn’t be focused on the time, then took her in and got her situated in the chair with Adam’s shirts on her lap. I told her to relax, clear her mind of everything except thoughts of Adam, and gaze into the mirror.
“Don’t try to rush it or make something happen, I cautioned her. “Just be here. You can stay as long as you want. I’ll be right across the hall in my office if you have any problems.”
I left her there and went to my desk to catch up on paperwork. Quite a few of my grief therapy clients are covered by insurance, which means I have to justify and label everything we do together so some bureaucrat can decide whether or not it’s appropriate. It’s a confusing system, but I’ve learned how to jump through the hoops and code my clients into insurance-approved categories.
After about an hour had gone by, I felt quite a sense of satisfaction at my shrinking pile of paper. When I heard the apparition chamber door open, I got up and walked to the door, just as Sharon came out slowly, blinking in the sunlight. She looked dazed. I led her into the counseling room, sat her in a chair and handed her a big glass of water. I sat in the chair across from her.
She gulped some water, put down the glass, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “Cleo, you’ll never believe what happened.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I sat there a long time and nothing happened. I was almost ready to give up and come out, when I started to notice color patterns and light flickers in the mirror. Then a big mist, like a fog, filled up the mirror, and I could see a light off in the distance. I saw a path, and I knew I should follow it. I don’t think I got out of the chair, but at the same time I went down the path and at the end of it, I saw a woman. At first I didn’t recognize her, but then I knew it was my mother! She didn’t look much like her pictures, but I was sure it was her, and I felt so happy to see her, and I knew she felt happy, too.” Sharon stopped for more water. I stayed quiet so as not to disrupt her recollection.
“She talked to me,” Sharon went on. “She said, ‘Sweetie’—that’s what she used to call me—I’d forgotten that, but as soon as she said it, I remembered. I wasn’t touching her, but I felt like she was hugging me. She said, ‘Sweetie, I came because Adam couldn’t come yet.’ Then we walked along the path together and talked about a lot of things. She told me she’s proud of me and Nathan.”
“Were you able to ask her about what happened to Adam?”
Sharon pulled out a tissue and wiped some tears from her eyes. “Well, I know I said we talked, but it wasn’t exactly like talking. I think I just said things in my mind, and she did too. But she didn’t talk about Adam after she said he wasn’t able to come. She did answer a question about Dad, though. I asked her why she let him raise my brother Will and me in such a rigid way. She said, ‘Sweetie, I had no choice. You know your father. When he sets his mind to something, nothing gets in his way.’ Then she reminded me that I can be a little bit that way myself—which I guess is true.”
“So how did it all feel to you?”
“Oh, Cleo, it felt wonderful,” Sharon jumped up and hugged me. “I’ve had dreams about my mom, but this was so different. She was really there.”
“How do you feel about not reaching Adam?”
“Well, you did warn me I might reach someone else. I still want to reach him, but now I know I can’t just order him up like a television program on Tivo. I’d like to keep trying, though. When can we do this again?”
We set up an appointment for the next Friday afternoon—the time I have set aside for the Contact project—and Sharon left.
Chapter 13
It was after 6:00 by then, so I decided to close the office and walk to the Pearl Street Mall to unwind. Six blocks of Pearl Street in downtown Boulder have been a pedestrian mall since 1977. The trees in the middle of the brick mall have grown taller than the two-story buildings and provide plenty of shade for the benches that dot the bricks here and there. Large raised garden areas and planters are filled with colorful impatiens for the shady areas, plus petunias, snapdragons, marigolds and such in the sunny parts.
I knew the mall would be crowded with tourists on a warm Friday evening in July, but I always find it relaxing to stroll around and people-watch there. Three blond girls in low-cut jeans and short tops asked me to stop and take their picture, posing themselves with the foothills as a backdrop. A street-person, holding out a cup for donations, told me he was taking up a collection for a down-payment on a cheeseburger. I’d heard the same line from him all spring
and summer, but panhandlers don’t exactly live high lifestyles, so I gave him a dollar
A few blocks further on, I watched a bunch of little kids play in the random jets of water shooting from a pop-jet fountain, made from 28 stone squares. Kids ran in and out shrieking, dancing between and around the jets—some ran directly into the water, others jumped to avoid it. In one corner of the square, two toddlers—a boy and a girl—faced off over one water spout. She planted her foot over the hole. He pushed her off and put his foot on—but quickly removed it. She jumped in and put her foot over the spout again. The boy picked up her leg with his hands, moved it off the spot, and put his foot there once more. The girl looked at him, grimaced, and ran off in tears to find her mother.
I thought about how the male-female patterns do start early, until a guy next to me said, “Cleo, right? You’re Sharon’s friend. We met at Wild Oats on Wednesday. I’m Joel.”
“Oh, hi,” I said, trying for a please-don’t-bother-me sort of voice. I was tired and not in the mood to make conversation with Sharon’s ex-boyfriend.
I guess my tone was too subtle for him, because he gave me a big smile and said, “Can I buy you a beer at Mountain Sun? Their Java Porter is amazing. And maybe a bean burger or a burrito? I’m guessing you’re a vegetarian because I saw you eating at Wild Oats”
I was about to brush him off, when I heard Tyler’s voice in my ear—just as if he were standing next to me—saying, “You be Nancy Drew.” A quick sideways glance showed me no Tyler, but I had gotten the message.
So I smiled back and said, “Sure, Joel. But I can’t stay long.”
The Sun is a hippie, tie-dyed sort of place decorated with original art and textiles. The laid-back atmosphere, inexpensive food and great beer attract locals of all ages. After we got a booth and ordered our beers and bean burgers, Joel said, “I want to talk to you about Sharon.”
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