Too Near the Edge (10 page)

Suddenly I remembered I had wanted to ask
Pablo about police investigations after hiking accidents. “Hey,
before you go can I ask you a question?”

He stopped. “I’m in a rush. Can’t it
wait?”

“No, I need some information right away.” I
stood up and walked over to stand in front of him. “When someone
falls in the mountains and dies, how do the police or sheriff or
whatever know if it’s an accident, or suicide, or maybe someone
pushed the person over a cliff?”

“Hmmm…they look for a note? Ask witnesses
what happened? Check out the hiker’s state of mind. There’s no
simple answer to that question, Cleo. We can talk about it more
when I have more time.” He turned and opened the front door.

“Well what kinds of things might make them
suspicious that it wasn’t an accident?” I wasn’t going to let him
blow me off, even if he was in a hurry.

“Give me a break, Cleo.” He walked out onto
the front porch and turned back in my direction. “I don’t have time
to talk about this right now.”

“Come on, Pablo, another few minutes won’t
make that much difference. Just give me a quick picture of what the
police would think was suspicious.”

“I have to go. Can’t you learn to be a
detective some other day?” I heard his
I-have-important-police-work-to-do-don’t-bother-me-with-stupid-questions
voice. All of a sudden I remembered I was mad at him.

“Okay, never mind,” I said, with an
ever-so-slight edge to my voice. “I’ll ask someone who’s not too
busy and important to answer my questions.”

“Hey, maybe you could ask that Tyler dude. He
can look down from the afterlife and tell you what happened.”
Oops—Pablo had remembered he was mad at me, too.

“Didn’t you say you had to be somewhere? I
wouldn’t want you to be late,” I wasn’t even trying to be civil
anymore.

“Okay, Cleo. Goodnight.” He walked across the
yard, got into his car, slammed the door, and drove off.

Wow. My karma was really off for males that
Wednesday. Dr. Ahmed, Joel, Erik, Pablo. And of course Tyler, who I
hadn’t seen that day but who I was sure could give me some answers
if he wanted to. I was definitely hoping Sharon would make contact
with Adam at our Friday session, and that he’d be one male who
would actually help.

I woke up on Friday to one of those gorgeous
sunny summer days that brings tourists flocking to Colorado in July
to escape the heat and humidity back home. I took a cup of freshly
brewed Columbian coffee out to my back patio to enjoy the sweet
peas, delphiniums, and columbine sparkling in the sunlight. A
fabulous day—but to be honest, I couldn’t sit still. A lot was
riding on today’s contact session. If I could believe Tyler, Sharon
was in danger. But I had no idea what sort of danger, or from whom.
I didn’t even know what had happened to Adam. This is a lot of
pressure for a contact session and not the way I usually set them
up.

I decided to take a short but steep hike up a
trail in Boulder Canyon’s Settler’s Park behind my house to a rocky
ridge that overlooks the whole city of Boulder. Tourist photo-ops
everywhere I looked. Our most famous landmark, the Flatirons—1,400
foot tall sandstone formations that jut up from the tree-covered
foothills at Boulder’s west end—glowed red against a brilliant blue
sky. That view always refreshes me and restores my perspective. And
it worked its usual magic that day, so when I arrived at Sharon’s
at 1:00, I felt relaxed and ready to start preparations for her
contact session.

Nathan answered the door wearing a grubby
Beckham 23 white tee shirt and dark shorts. He was grinning, but
his face fell when he saw me. “Mom, that woman Grandpa doesn’t like
is here. You’ll be in big trouble if he finds out,” he yelled into
the house at Sharon. I was sorry Nathan had already decided I was
trouble.

“Come in, Cleo,” Sharon yelled from a back
room, and Nathan backed off so I could. In the daylight, I was able
to take a closer look at Sharon’s house. The windows had all been
redone to let in the maximum light, which was enhanced by faux
painted walls in shades of copper, crimson and amber. The
contemporary furniture looked new. Someone had put a lot of energy
into remodeling and decorating this house.

But the living room was as big a mess as it
had been on Saturday. The hardwood floors sported large dust balls.
A pizza box lay in one corner, with three shoes and a baseball
glove on top of it. Newspapers, mail, and dirty glasses covered the
round glass-topped coffee table. Sweatshirts and jackets were
strewn over the couch, and a black leather camp chair was draped
with a couple of light brown towels. I wondered whether Sharon kept
her house this way to show Waycroft his training didn’t take, or
whether she liked it this way, or whether maybe she just didn’t
notice the mess.

However, I noticed Nathan’s herbs had been
repotted and were neatly arranged on a tile table by the window.
“How are your plants doing, Nathan?” I asked hoping I could get him
to soften toward me a little.

“They’re okay,” he said looking down to avoid
meeting my gaze.

“Erik wants me to grow some, too,” I said.
“Do you have any advice?”

He perked up. “I gave them all names—and I
talk to them every day. I heard that makes them grow faster.”

Just then a car honked out front. Sharon ran
in from the bathroom wearing a white terrycloth robe, her hair
wrapped in a towel. “That’s Jeanne. Do you have all your stuff
packed, Nathan? Don’t forget sunscreen.”

“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 combining 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?’”