Lynn Osterkamp - Cleo Sims 03 - Too Many Secrets Page 2

  “I’m not sure the contact process can answer that question,” I said. “You could try to reach her, but if you do, it wouldn’t constitute legal proof of her death, and if you don’t, that doesn’t mean she’s alive.”

  Bruce broke in. “Actually I’d already thought of that,” he said. “I want you to do a thorough job. If Gayle can’t reach Sabrina, then the other women who were up there should try. In fact, why not start by meeting with all of them and telling them about the process. Get some of that group consciousness going. I’ll pay for your time—whatever it takes.”

  Before I had a chance to think about how else to voice my reservations, Bruce slid out of the booth, stood up, and picked up his coat. “I have to go. You two can go on from here. Gayle can keep me updated.” He nodded at us and headed for the door.

  “Oof!” Gayle said. “That’s my brother. Makes his point, and ducks out before the discussion gets complicated. But I suppose you’re used to his tactics.”

  I shrugged. I’d have to go along, at least for a while. Not only had Bruce been very generous in funding my Contact Project, all he’d asked of me was that I operate professionally and that he remain anonymous as a funder. So even though the timing wasn’t ideal for me to get involved in a situation that smelled like trouble, I didn’t see any other options. “No problem,” I said. “Here’s my card. Call me and we can set up a time to talk more.”

  Chapter 2

  Back at my office for the afternoon, I was busy with grief-therapy clients until 5:00. Exhausted, I grabbed a ginger ale and flopped down on my couch to try to get some perspective on my miserable morning with my boyfriend, Pablo.

  The morning’s squabble had started at my kitchen table. I was focusing on the sunlight streaming through my kitchen window as I took deep breaths and tried to ignore the nausea the smell of Pablo’s coffee brought on. I didn’t want to turn into a whiny pregnant lady, so I didn’t mention the nausea even though my stomach was rising into my throat. Then out of the blue he said, “Cleo, living in two places makes our lives so complicated. I feel like we’re always negotiating about where we’ll spend the night. I want to get this settled.”

  I gagged. I couldn’t summon the energy for yet another Longmont vs. Boulder debate. I thought he might drop it if I didn’t respond, so I just sipped my herbal tea and said nothing.

  He spread some blackberry jam on his English muffin and waited, his intense brown eyes boring a hole in my forehead. I ignored his gaze, focused inward and stayed quiet. He continued staring as he finished his food and coffee, then got up and headed for the bathroom. “Fine,” he said in a quiet strained voice, “I’m going for a shower. We can talk about it while you’re taking me to the airport.”

  Not if I can help it, I thought. But of course I couldn’t stop it.

  Don’t get me wrong, I give Pablo credit for trying to be supportive. We didn’t plan this baby, but when I told him, he was as excited about it as I was, and wanted us to get married and live happily ever after in Longmont. But I wasn’t ready to do that. I was ready to be a mom, but I had well-founded reservations about how happy Pablo and I would be as a married couple, and I definitely didn’t want to move to Longmont. Fighting about our future got so intense, we agreed to a moratorium on the marriage discussion until after the holidays. But we continued to haggle about where to hang out.

  I love living in my grandparents’ cozy old historic house nestled against the Boulder foothills. Its sloping hardwood floors, small closets and noisy plumbing are more charming than annoying, and memories of my grandparents and the happy childhood summers I spent with them fill every room. When I need comforting, I snuggle into this house. It hugs me and holds me safe like Grampa used to do before he died.

  But Pablo doesn’t really get my attachment. For him a house is just a place to live. He rents a generic two-bedroom ranch in Longmont. Only his artwork makes it interesting and he can easily move that to another place.

  We’d compromised on spending some nights together—either in Boulder or Longmont—and some nights apart. That worked for me. I love him and I especially love spending nights together. Now Pablo was leaving for a weeklong training session in California and suddenly he wanted to settle our living arrangements.

  § § §

  We took my car, but I let him drive hoping that would distract him from the conversation. It didn’t. Once we were on the highway, the argument picked up for real.

  “Cleo, we can’t keep putting off making decisions. You don’t even want to talk about it.”

  “True. But that’s because every time we talk about it, we end up at the same place. I want to stay in Boulder in my grandparents’ house. You want us to live together in Longmont.”

  Pablo sighed and rolled his eyes. “Look Cleo, I want to live with you. But not in Boulder, because I’m a detective with the Longmont Police Department. I’ve told you over and over that a huge part of what our department does involves working with the community. It’s important that I live there. You know the surrounding communities think Boulderites are new-agey tofu eaters who are too rich and flakey to understand real life. Longmont residents won’t take me seriously as part of their community if I live in Boulder.”

  Pablo pulled out to pass a long U-Haul truck. As we went by, I saw the phrase “America’s moving adventure” on the side. No. I didn’t want that adventure. I didn’t want to move. Tears welled up. “I get that you want to live in Longmont, Pablo. But I love Boulder and I love my house and my office is right down the street. Nothing would be convenient for me if I lived in Longmont. Plus my house is really still Gramma’s house.”

  Even though Gramma’s Alzheimer’s is at the point where she has to live in a sheltered assisted living home, I feel good that I’m keeping her house safe for her. I don’t want to sell it and I definitely don’t want to rent it to college students. I was sick of this argument. “Can’t we just drop it until you get back?” I begged.

  “You’ll just have another reason to drop it then.” Anger filled his voice. “But you’re alone in that old house and it’s winter and you’re pregnant. I’ll be gone all week.” His voice softened. “What if something happens? What if you get snowed in? If you were in Longmont, all my family is nearby to help you.”

  Yikes! Now he wants me in Longmont even when he’s not in town? And he wants his family to take care of me? I’m a thirty-seven year-old licensed therapist with a doctorate in psychology and a thriving private practice. Does he see me as weak, friendless, and incompetent? My sadness morphed into anger. “You don’t need to worry,” I said crossly. “I can take care of myself. I’m not going to get snowed in. And even if I did, I have friends I can call.”

  “Fine,” he said crisply. “I give up, Cleo. You’re impossible. I don’t know why I try to have a reasonable discussion with you.” He turned his full attention to the road without uttering another word until we got to the airport.

  I stayed silent as well and kept my tears inside until I was back in the car driving away from our awkward goodbye hug. Then I let my tears flow freely as I drove. I knew I had decisions to make. But I felt stuck. I wanted all of us to have good lives—Pablo, the baby and me. But I had no idea how to work that out.

  § § §

  While reliving my traumatic morning there on my office couch, darkness had closed in on me and I had almost dozed off. When my phone rang. I jolted awake, hoping it was Pablo calling to patch things up now that his plane had landed. I wanted to do that too. I wanted to hear a sweet loving voice from him to erase my memory of his anger. But when I grabbed the phone, it wasn’t Pablo after all. It was Gayle wanting to set a time for a meeting.

  Chapter 3

  “Nothing about Sabrina’s disappearance is what it seems. I can’t even begin to tell Bruce and I probably shouldn’t be telling you. But I have to tell someone.” Gayle frowned and bit her lower lip. “This is all confidential, right?”

  She was perched on the edge of the brown sofa in my office, leaning
forward as if about to jump and run. When she called for this appointment yesterday, she insisted we needed to meet ASAP. Was she having second thoughts now that she was actually here?

  I answered in a calm reassuring tone. “Yes, what we say here is confidential. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Bruce anything you don’t want me to tell him.”

  Gayle fiddled with her purse and pulled out several crumpled papers. She glanced down at them, then up at me, then down again. “I brought a few notes so I’d remember the most important things to tell you,” she said, her voice breaking. “I’m having some trouble lately keeping my thoughts organized.”

  “That’s not surprising,” I said softly. “Grief makes your thinking confused. It can be hard to concentrate and easy to forget things.”

  Tears dripped from Gayle’s dark brown eyes. She grabbed a tissue from the box on the table and wiped her face. Then she shook her head. “I’m not here to cry. I’m here to talk.” She took a deep breath and sat up straight, her shoulders down and back. “Okay. I’m going to jump right in. There’s no way Sabrina just wandered off into the wilderness. She’s capable and careful and used to taking care of herself.” Gayle’s voice rose several notches in intensity and volume and she clenched her fists. “Sabrina’s a nurse for God’s sake—a hospital nurse. She takes care of other people. She can certainly take care of herself. I’m sick and tired of hearing the so-called experts run on about how hikers make careless mistakes.”

  Anger at the searchers. Not surprising. Often a bereaved person looks for someone to blame. It’s a way of displacing anxiety over being left and guilt over surviving, but it’s not helpful in dealing with the loss. I diverted her focus to the reality of the situation. “Do you have a theory about what happened to Sabrina?”

  Gayle squirmed around, but her posture was still ramrod straight. She looked me in the face with an unwavering gaze. “I’ve gone over and over that day in my mind and I do have some ideas. But I’d rather just go into your apparition chamber and try to reach her. If her spirit shows up, then I can ask her what really happened.”

  Here was a woman who knew what she wanted and was used to taking charge. I sighed. This was going to be tricky. People tend to think that talking to the dead is just a matter of connecting—like finding the phone number for a friend you’ve lost touch with—and then you can get all your questions answered. But it’s actually a process that requires preparation. “I know that sounds like the quickest, easiest way to go,” I said gently. “But the process is more complicated and less clear than you may think.”

  “It didn’t sound very complicated when Bruce told me about it,” she snapped back.

  Uh, oh. That sounds like Bruce. Skip over the details, go right to the point. I’d have to set her straight. “Did he tell you he’d been coming for grief therapy for more than a month before he went in the apparition chamber, or that we’d spent several sessions preparing for his contact session, or that he didn’t reach Charlene on his first try?”

  She shook her head. “He may have. I was so blown away that he’d ever try something paranormal that I probably didn’t take in all the details.” Gayle leaned closer, still with the fixed glare. She spoke sharply. “Are you saying I have to wait months to try out this apparition chamber? That’s not going to work for me. I need to get some resolution now.”

  We sat, eyeball to eyeball, until Gayle’s phone rang. She grabbed it out of her purse. “Oops, I have to take this,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  While she talked to her real-estate customer, I considered my response to her request. Every client who’d gone into my apparition chamber had spent time dealing with the reality of the loss of the loved one before trying the contact process. I’d never had someone in the Contact Project trying to find out whether someone was dead or alive. I wanted to be careful. If Gayle went in and did contact Sabrina, the sudden realization of the reality of the death could hit her brutally.

  Gayle ended her call and looked inquiringly at me. “So how soon can I do it?” she asked.

  I took a deep breath to calm myself before I spoke. “I’m not saying you have to wait months, but I am saying you can’t do it today.” Gayle clenched her jaw and flicked her gaze upward.

  I continued determinedly. “I know that’s not what you want to hear. You want to find out right away whether Sabrina’s alive or dead. But to have the best chance of the contact process working for you, we need to spend some time preparing for your session before you start.”

  “What kind of preparation?”

  “Part of it is getting clear about your expectations. The main purpose of the contact process is to work through grief and make peace with the person who died. In your case, you’re thinking she may still be alive. You said that nothing about her disappearance is what it seems. Can you talk more about that?”

  Gayle sighed and cast her eyes down toward her papers, which rustled in her shaky hands. “We didn’t go there just to celebrate Sabrina’s fortieth birthday,” she said. “There was so much more going on. The six of us had a lot to work out.”

  Suddenly she lost it. Burst into tears. “Moxie had turned into a nightmare,” she sobbed. “Sabrina was determined to change that.”

  I didn’t try to stop her crying. Tears are good stress reducers. She wept deeply for a few seconds, then grabbed a couple of tissues and mopped her face. “Sorry,” she said, “Everything sets me off these days.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” I said. “Who’s Moxie?”

  She looked at her notes again, then launched into what sounded like a prepared speech. “Moxie is our women’s group—the six of us. Sabrina and I started it seven years ago. When we first met we were both single moms in our early thirties. Our kids were almost the same age. Her Ian was eight and my Nicole was seven-and-a-half. We shared so much, our stories were so similar that we bonded right away. It was almost like we knew what each other was thinking and feeling.” She gazed wistfully off into that faraway time.

  I waited silently, giving her time to return to the present.

  After a minute or so, she turned back to me and continued. “We got the idea for Moxie—of course we didn’t call it that then—at the same instant. Like a bolt of lightning hit us with the message that we needed to do this. We needed to bring other women like us together—divorced single moms who were moving forward on our own, getting no help from our kids’ dads. We were strong, could support each other.” She stopped, as if waiting for a reaction.

  Instead I responded with a prompt to keep her story on track. “So you’ve all known each other for seven years?”

  “Yes.” Now that she was explaining what she apparently came to talk about, Gayle was much more collected. “Once we got the idea for the group, we each brought in two others. Sabrina got Lark and Diana. I found Paige and Hana. So then we were six. We decided six was the perfect number. We had chosen carefully, found women who were compatible on every level. After divorce, we all wanted a new start. We wanted strong single friends.”

  “And you named your group Moxie. Is there a story behind that?”

  “We called ourselves Moxie because it means grit, gumption, and guts—contradicts the stereotypical traits of women. We saw ourselves as bold, determined, audacious, willing to take risks, and as shameless advocates for single moms.”

  Sounded like my kind of women. “You must have had some great times over the years.”

  “It was fun in the beginning. We met weekly for potluck dinners, and hired teenagers to entertain our kids so we could enjoy dinner in peace. We made it special for the kids with pizza, games, movies, ice cream, stuff like that. We all looked forward to Wednesday nights. We talked about everything, shared it all. Our ex’s, men we dated, our jobs—whatever came up. And we supported each other as we managed as single moms. We made agreements about confidentiality. What is said in the group and what happens in the group stays in the group.

  Her face crumpled as she broke down again. “But now
I wish we’d never started Moxie,” she sobbed. “And I can’t keep that confidentiality agreement anymore. Because I think something Moxie set in motion ended up killing Sabrina.”

  Chapter 4

  A cold wave of foreboding swept over me as I tidied up my office after Gayle left. She’d insisted that I meet with all the members of Moxie as soon as she could set that up. I’d swallowed my misgivings and agreed. But now I realized I was headed down a familiar slippery slope. Clients in my Contact Project had already involved me in two messy murder investigations this year that ended up in life-threatening situations for me and other people I care about. Why would I want to do that again? Especially when I had my baby to think about. How could I risk putting him or her in danger? Plus it’s Pablo’s baby too, and he had warned me many times that a grief therapist has no business getting involved in crime investigations.

  But I was so indebted to Bruce. How could I refuse to help his sister? He funds my Contact Project and he had said he wanted me to meet with all the women. He’d even said he would pay for my time.

  I sagged into the tan leather armchair in my counseling room, staring into a dark corner.

  “Yo, Cleo. Looks like you hit some punchy waves.”

  There, perched on the counter next to the microwave, was the first dead person I had ever talked to—Tyler, a blond blue-eyed surfer dude spirit who’s been visiting me from time to time over the past couple of years, usually to offer cryptic advice when I’m grappling with a problem.

  “Tyler! I feel like I’m being swept up by one of those punchy waves and I’m going to crash. I might drown. You have to help me.”

  I don’t know why I ask Tyler for help. I guess it’s because he’s a spirit, so he should be able to see the big picture and know what matters. But his answers are always confusing, because he talks in surfer slang and I’ve never even been surfing. And when he shows up, he has his own agenda. Today was no exception.