I thought her words carried layers of meaning that weren't readily apparent, and I wasn't sure Lucy was even aware that there were stowaways on board whatever trip she was inviting me on.
Again I said something that I would ordinarily say in psychotherapy, and almost immediately I regretted it. "Intimacy isn't the same as openness, Lucy. It's not that simple."
She looked at me. Her eyes seemed smaller without makeup. She said, "What? What do you mean?"
I debated whether or not I should answer. Finally, I said, "Let's say you go to Denver and you meet somebody in a bar, and let's say they buy you a drink, and you tell them every deep dark secret in your soul-"
She sighed. "For me that would take more than one drink."
"Well, you do that, you open up like that to a stranger-that's not intimate behavior. That's not what intimacy is."
"I don't get it. It sounds like intimacy to me."
"Let me give you another example. You go to that same bar and meet the same guy and without telling him a thing about yourself, about what's in your heart, about what's dear to you, you go home with him. You sleep with him. Then you leave. You don't even know his name. He doesn't know yours. Well, that's not intimacy, either."
She bit her bottom lip. "Okay, I can buy that."
"But put the two experiences together, and you may-you may-have intimacy."
"You've lost me again, Alan. I'm sorry."
I sat back. "I'm not sure this is that important, Lucy. I'm digressing and you have something you need to talk to me about."
"No, go on, please. This is all part of… something."
"Intimacy requires two things to happen. Both are necessary. Neither, alone, is sufficient. One is openness. The other is vulnerability. In the first example I gave you, the openness is there, but there's no vulnerability. The guy you meet in the bar can't hurt you. He knows everything about you-every fact-but he can't really touch you in a way that could cause you any pain.
"In the second example, the vulnerability is there, but there's no openness. You're terribly vulnerable to the guy as you have sex with him. But it's anonymous; you never open up to the guy at all."
"What do you call that?"
"I don't know," I said. "Reckless?"
Lucy pulled both her legs beneath her and crossed her arms. For some reason, I chose that moment to scan the room for a cat. Lucy seemed like the type of woman who would have a cat.
She said, "I need to think about this some more."
"Of course."
It was about this time that I would be glancing at my watch and saying, I'm afraid our time is up.
Lucy stood and walked to the other side of the room. I could see her reflection in the glass doors. Her legs were exposed from mid-thigh to the floor; her robe was open from her throat to the middle of her chest.
I hoped the exposure was unintentional. But I wondered about her seductiveness. Could she be so unaware of her behavior with men?
Her lips parted as though she was going to speak, then she pressed them together again. Finally, she said, "It's starting to snow. I didn't even know a storm was coming. Did you?"
"I'd heard a front was coming through. But, no, I didn't know it was going to snow."
"I wonder if it will stick," she said.
I didn't reply. I hadn't left my wife in bed to discuss Boulder's springtime climate.
Lucy shifted her weight and lifted one leg from the floor so that it was bent at the knee at ninety degrees, like a stork. She said, "I don't know exactly how to say this. No, that's not true, I do know exactly how to say this. I just don't want to say it." Once more her mouth opened and closed.
"Take your time, Lucy." It was something I said to patients all the time in psychotherapy. For some reason, it usually made them seem to hurry.
"Susan Peterson is my mother, Alan."
I said, "What?" I knew exactly what she had said. My question expressed my befuddlement, not my failure to hear or comprehend.
Lucy returned her weight to both legs and turned and faced me. She'd pulled the robe closed at her throat with one hand. "Susan Peterson is… my mother. Or at least she's the woman who gave birth to me."
At her pronouncement, I stood. I don't know why. "Lucy, Lucy. My God. I had no idea."
"No one did. We are… estranged. That's a good word for it. Estranged. In fact, it couldn't be es-stranger."
"Royal knew?"
Again, Lucy spun and faced the glass. She'd released the shawl collar of her black robe. The reflection made it clear that it had again fallen open to the middle of her chest. "Of course Royal knew."
"Cozy and Lauren?"
She shook her head. "No one else in town knows." She found her own words humorous, or ironic, or something. "At least no one in town knew. Until tonight. Now that's about to change."
I tried to make sense of the implications of the news that Lucy had just shared. I had to assume that this was the reason she had been in the Peterson home the night that Royal had been murdered. A visit to her mother would explain all the fingerprints the police had found in the house. Lauren and Cozy could create considerable doubt with that revelation.
But Lucy had also told Cozy and Lauren that if the reason she was in the Peterson home that night was known, everyone would be convinced that she had a motive for Royal's murder.
I couldn't make sense of that.
And, of course, I hadn't heard anything yet that would account for the wet spot.
Lucy turned back toward the room. She wasn't holding the collar of her robe this time.
"We're intimate now, aren't we, Alan?"
I thought, Whoa. She saw the puzzlement in my face.
"I've certainly been open with you… and, God knows, I've never been more vulnerable in my life than I am right now."
CHAPTER 28
L ucy Tanner was the only child of a man named Charles Tanner and a free-spirited woman he'd met at a sit-in in a bank in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969. The woman's name was Susie Pine. Lucy's conception predated Charles and Susie's subsequent marriage by almost six months. Susie's friends were much more surprised that Susie Pine married at all than they were that she never adopted her husband's last name.
The Tanner-Pine marriage endured, at least as far as the state of Michigan was concerned, for seven years. The reason that Susie gave when she initially left her husband and daughter in Ann Arbor was that she felt she had to go to the bedside of her older sister, who was dying of breast cancer in Tucson. Six weeks later, two days after her sister's Arizona funeral, Susie Pine packed up the things she wanted from her sister's house and moved to Boulder. Within days, she filed for divorce from her husband, Charles.
She never returned to Ann Arbor.
The divorce was uncontested, and custody of the minor child, Lucy, was awarded to Charles Tanner. He remarried two years later and his second attempt at marriage was much more successful than his first.
Lucy's adolescence was less tumultuous than her childhood had been, and she considered herself to be a relatively confident, though shy, young person when she graduated high school near the top of her class and moved west to attend Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
L ucy told me that her move west for school had nothing to do with a desire to reconnect with the mother who had abandoned her during her childhood. She maintained that she chose Colorado College solely because of its unique curriculum.
The psychologist in me noted her resistance, but I wasn't in Lucy's flat to give her a boost up on some eventual psychotherapy, I was there to be her friend. I bit my tongue and kept my thoughts about unconscious motivation to myself.
S usie Pine became Susan Peterson a little more than a year after her divorce from Charles Tanner. She and her new husband, an ambitious thirty-year-old prosecuting attorney named Royal, had two children during the first two years of their marriage, and added a third three years later.
One year after the completion of his family Royal Peterson won his first term as dis
trict attorney of Boulder County.
W hen did you find her for the first time?" I asked.
"I didn't even know if she was still in town when I joined the police department. I figured there was as good a chance that she had moved away as there was that she was still here. I never looked for her. That's not true. I checked the phone book once-does that count? Then I went to a reception when they opened the new coroner's offices in the Justice Center. That was about, I'm not sure, four or five years ago. She was there with Royal."
"You recognized her?"
"Sure. Susan had aged well. But I grew up with lots of photographs of her. My father is quite the amateur photographer and he always wanted me to know who my mother was. But she didn't recognize me. And I didn't talk to her that night. Not at all."
A cuckoo clock chirped once. I'd been wondering what time it was. Now I knew. I was also wondering how people survived living with cuckoo clocks. I still didn't know that.
"I finally went and saw her after I heard rumors about her illness. You know, her MS. I don't know why, exactly. Compassion? More likely pity, I guess. That, or it was just a good excuse to see her so I could try to begin to understand how she could leave her daughter so cavalierly. It was probably a combination."
I was uncomfortable with the way Lucy was referring to herself. "Her daughter was you, Lucy."
"Yeah. Her daughter was me. But, let's face it, I'm not the only kid who's ever been left behind by a parent. I remind myself of that a lot. Being left behind by my mother is not an excuse to let myself be damaged for life. My dad raised me well. My stepmother is a sweetheart. Whatever mistakes my father made with women, he got them out of his system by marrying Susan."
"Does reminding yourself that you're not the only child who's been left behind by a parent help?"
"Not much." She sighed. "I was terrified that first time that I went to her house to see her. Not that she'd slam the door in my face. My biggest fear? My biggest fear was that I was going to adore her, like instantly, the moment I set my eyes on her. As a girl, I'd idealized her after she left. My father was always kind; he never criticized her and I was left to create this image of her that had almost no basis in reality. She was as pretty as a movie star, as kind as the best mother in the world. Anyway, going to see her that day, I felt that some angel was going to answer the door. And I was afraid that the more it turned out that I adored her, the angrier I was going to be that she'd left me behind. Does that make sense?"
"Of course."
Lucy's voice grew small. "But it didn't turn out that way. I didn't like her. I didn't like her at all. She was critical, belittling, selfish. She wasn't this benevolent soul who'd left me to tend to my ill aunt. She was Susan Peterson. You must have gotten to know her through the DA's office. Didn't you? Lauren worked for her husband for years. You had to have known her at least a little bit."
"I've known her socially, yes."
"Do you like her?"
I managed a complete inhale and exhale before I responded, trying to find an alternative way to answer Lucy's question than the one I ended up with: "She can be difficult."
Lucy shook her head. "Please," she said. "You're being diplomatic. Difficult? That's an understatement if I ever heard one. Susan Peterson is a very unpleasant human being. On her best days, she's a bitch."
I forced a small smile. "At least the problem of adoring her never quite materialized."
Lucy didn't crack a smile. "Right," she said bitterly. "At least there was that."
This was the point where Lucy sat all the way back on the sofa, crossed her legs, folded her arms, and told me that the whole story was going to be printed in the next morning's Daily Camera.
A good-sized chunk of an hour later Lucy seemed to have run out of words. It was time for me to head home. I told her so.
She nodded.
I said, "One more thing before I go. Lauren and Cozy were trying to get in touch with you tonight. Did they reach you?"
"I got a message from each of them. I wasn't in any mood to call them back. I'll talk to them in the morning. They'll have a lot of questions about the Daily Camera article anyway."
I nodded. If I hadn't been so tired, I would have been thinking more clearly, and I think I would have left things alone at that point. I didn't.
"The reason they were calling? Lauren told me when I went to pick her up after you left my office. The police found some laundry, Lucy, in the Peterson home. Some unwashed laundry, including a sheet-a bedsheet-with a stain on it. The lab has identified the stain as being dried vaginal secretions. They're working under the suspicion that when the DNA analysis finally comes back, they're going to discover that the vaginal secretions are yours."
For some reason I found myself contemplating when I'd last used the phrase "vaginal secretions" in a sentence. I decided that it hadn't been recently.
Her eyes widened. "Oh boy," she said. The words almost disappeared in a rapid inhale.
I waited a moment and stated the obvious. "You're not totally surprised, are you, Lucy?"
She was looking off to the side, into the dark room. "What am I supposed to say? That I can't believe it? That there's no way it's true? Okay, I'll say it: I can't believe it. There's no way it's true."
I'm supposed to be good at reading people and I wasn't sure whether or not she even intended for me to believe her.
She grabbed a pillow from the sofa, hugged it to her chest, and began rocking back and forth from the waist, slowly. "Alan, I'm being careful with you. You're not my attorney and you're not my therapist. There're certain lines I can't cross with you. Do you understand?"
"I understand. Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut about the sheets, Lucy. I thought you'd want to know what the police had found. But this could have waited till tomorrow. I'm sorry I brought it up. I should have left it to Lauren and Cozy. I apologize."
"Don't. I appreciate it, Alan. I appreciate all you've done. Coming over here tonight was kind."
"I'll tell Lauren I was here, Lucy."
"I know. It makes no difference. By this time tomorrow I won't have many secrets left. You know," she added, "I told you I was going to make the rest of the phone calls to the Ramps that are listed in the phone book. I did, reached three more. Two of them I'm not sure I can rule out, so I'm going to go track them down tomorrow in person. With all that's happened tonight… I know I'm going to feel like getting out of Boulder. Maybe I'll get lucky and find the kid."
I knew that everything Lucy was suggesting was true. Whatever scrutiny she had received from the media up until then was only a warm-up to the firestorm she could expect after the news of her relationship to Susan Peterson hit the wires in the morning. And, regardless of the press coverage, one of us did have to continue our efforts to try to find Ramp.
"You'll go in the morning?"
She nodded. "Yeah. One of them lives all the way out near Agate."
"Where's Agate?"
"Out east on I-70, just before you get to Limon."
I blurted, "Limon is where Ramp and Paul played around with the explosives."
She cocked her head. "You didn't tell me that."
"I thought I did."
"Well, you didn't."
"My patient told me that Paul went out to some ranch near Limon and he and Ramp blew up a car or something."
"You didn't tell me any of this." The suffix "you idiot" was understood by both of us.
"I'm sorry."
"There's a listing out near Agate for a man named Herbert Ramp. Herbert's dead, but his widow, Ella, answered the phone. When I asked about a son or grandson, she kind of hung up on me."
"So it may be him?"
"You say the two boys played around with bombs out there? Damn right it may be him. I'm definitely going to go talk to her tomorrow."
"Maybe I should do it instead, Lucy. She may be wary of a cop showing up at her door."
"But a shrink from Boulder won't raise her suspicions at all?"
The t
endons in the back of my neck felt like rebar. "I'm not sure what's best, which one of us should meet her. Let me think about it overnight, okay? We'll talk in the morning?"
"Yeah. Call me around nine; I think I'm going to try to sleep in a little bit. Use my cell; I'm not going to be answering my phone."
I stood to leave and opened my arms to give Lucy a hug. First, she dropped the pillow, then she leaned into the embrace with a hunger I didn't expect. When she finally released me, I turned toward the door. My hand on the knob, I stopped and asked, "Lucy, were you having an affair with Royal?"
The silence that followed was eerie. For the first few seconds, I suspected that she wasn't going to respond, and I wasn't surprised. I was already questioning my judgment in asking the question. Finally, I turned my head to look at her to examine the impact of my question.
The cuckoo clock chirped twice.
Lucy had spun away from me. Although I couldn't be sure from the reflection she made in the glass doors, I thought she was crying.
Our eyes met in the black glass. She said, "I wish it was that simple, Alan. I wish it was that simple."
O utside, the snow wasn't sticking to the streets, but the sidewalks were wet. The tree buds and flowers looked as though they'd been frosted.
CHAPTER 29
T he alarm clock cracked me awake at six-thirty. Lauren was already up with Grace. Before I climbed in the shower, I wasted a minute trying to decide how many hours of sleep I'd had. Before I reached a number that felt correct, I concluded that the answer was simply "not enough."
After a quick shower and shave I joined my family in the kitchen. I was most of the way through a condensed rendition of the previous night's events for Lauren's benefit when my pager went off. Moments later, I was back in the master bedroom closet trying to simultaneously get dressed and maintain a conversation with Naomi Bigg.
She wasted no time. "Can I see you today? Any time at all. I'll leave work. Please."
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