Dreams of the Dead

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Changing direction, desperate, they traversed frantically, trying to sidestep the onslaught of snow, of fate, of death, somehow.

  The air around Nina darkened with snow crystals. Her hair whipped around her face. Something hit her in the back. They were moving faster! She threw herself at her husband, held him in a fierce embrace, bracing herself.

  No sound. No air. Knocked forward by a wall of snow, she somersaulted down the mountain, wiped out in a tidal wave.

  She slammed into something, a rock or a tree, and a mountain slid past. She continued free-falling, out of control, struck over and over by rocks, conscious in spite of the awful pain. As if struggling in the ocean, she tried to swim up, get her head up so she could breathe—but the snow was so deep, and she was drowning . . .

  “Mom! Mom!” Bob shook her awake.

  She clutched a pillow tightly to her chest, unable to control her sobs.

  “It’s okay, it’s all right, you’re okay, Mom. You had a nightmare. I’m here to tell you it’s over, and look, here’s Hitchie.” The dog had jumped up beside them and begun to lick her arm. “See, Mom? Good old Hitchie. Big old slobbering Hitchie.”

  She tried to get a grip and found herself safe in her bedroom. The LED display on her clock read 5:20 a.m.

  “Look out the window, Mom. See?”

  She blinked and looked.

  “Late snow. Maybe I can snowboard a couple more times before they close the lifts for the season.”

  The black window shifted like a screen saver, marshmallows drifting softly down over a changing landscape.

  “Are you crying?”

  She wiped her eyes on the pillowcase.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  While Bob ran down to the kitchen, Nina turned on the bedside light and pulled on her kimono. She sank down under the covers to stop the shaking. A wonder I never dreamed about his death before, she thought.

  Bob came back, holding a glass. She took a big gulp and choked, holding the glass up to the lamp. “I thought it was water.”

  “I figured wine might work better.”

  The impact was already fading fast. “Sorry to wake you, honey. I had a nightmare.” She thought of the great painting by that very name, which she had seen at an exhibit at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum, by the symbolist precursor Henri Fuseli. In that painting was a ghost horse with white eyes. A maiden, disheveled. Something awful was about to happen.

  “No shit. I heard you through Opeth and two doors.”

  She put the wine down and found her bedside water glass.

  “Was it a bad one?” he asked. “Was it about Collier? The avalanche?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t tell me details and give me a nightmare, too.”

  “Okay. I’ll only tell you the good part: there was no ghost horse in it.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Thanks for the—drink. Who’s Opeth?”

  “A Swedish metal band.”

  “You were listening to music at this hour?”

  Bob smiled. He seemed to have a shadow on his cheeks.

  Nina reached out a hand and felt the beginnings of a beard. “We need to get you a razor.”

  “We need to get you to sleep.”

  “You know why I’m awake. Now I want to know why you were awake.”

  He sighed. “It’s a twenty-four-hour clock these days, Mom. People in Sweden are ahead by nine hours. It’s afternoon there. Everybody’s up.”

  She shook her head, feeling thick. “And?”

  “And we can communicate in real time.” As always when they discussed such things, he seemed to chafe at her ignorance.

  “You’re on the computer? Listening to music? Writing to people in the middle of the night? Writing to Nikki?”

  “Yep.”

  Nikki was a few years older than Bob, a Tahoe native and accomplished musician he had met, who now lived in Sweden. “No wonder you’re grumpy in the morning.” She felt too tired to come up with a lecture.

  “I’m okay in school, not using drugs. Quit worrying.”

  “Ha. That will never happen.”

  Bob petted Hitchcock while Nina pushed up pillows behind her and sat up higher in bed.

  “What’s Paul doing up here?” Bob asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “What’s the difference? The point is, why is he here?”

  “Humor me. How’d you know?”

  “Wish has a blog. He said Paul was going out of town. I guessed he came up here.”

  Well, Bob had known Sandy’s son, Wish Whitefeather, for years. No doubt they tracked each other in the ways that younger people did.

  She had plucked out three gray hairs that morning. She had wondered before if people her age, midthirties, okay, late thirties, could get gray hair. Now she had proof positive they did.

  “Mom, how come Kurt didn’t come over tonight? We were going to watch Sherlock Holmes at nine.”

  She felt her lack of sleep as irritating as bugs on her skin. Now she wanted nothing more than to put her head down and conk out. But she said briefly, “Some problems have come up.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “He has professional options he’s considering. Work.”

  “Aha! In Europe, huh? Not here.”

  “Right. A tour.”

  “Well. I guess you don’t like that.”

  “Do you think he’ll go?”

  Bob shrugged. “I don’t know. It makes sense.”

  Was that what it meant to be male? Men looked at options in list form. They weighed them, assigned points perhaps, and made their decisions according to a logic any woman would find troubling and inadequate.

  Bob lay on the thin rug beside her bed, petting the dog. Hitchcock lay sprawled beside him, his damp black fur exuding smells best left undescribed.

  “If he goes to Europe, I want to go.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  “I know you get lonely without me. But you need to think about me and not you for a change.” Bob got up. “Yo, I have to get back online.”

  She punched her pillow as the door closed. Bah, she thought. I have lived for you, punk.

  Her mind went back to the dream; she couldn’t stop it. She remembered her first meeting with Jim Strong, so fit and healthy in his red, white, and black ski jacket. She wondered, as she often did in her criminal defense work, how it was that people with such severe psychosocial impairments made it to adulthood without intervention.

  This night was turning into some kind of summing-up that had been building for a long time. Her mind wandered to Eric Brink-man with his cool eyes and his macho posturing, then on to Paul.

  Paul had proposed to her a few years before. She ground her teeth at the memory of her reaction, not that there’s a graceful way to turn a man down when he’s taken a big risk, laid out his heart before you. All you can do is cut, and she knew her refusal had cut deep. Upset, angry, he avoided her for a while, but now, here, she sensed nothing from him but the usual deep affection and friendship. She felt the same exasperated, playful love for him she had always felt, and worry for him, and—the same complexities.

  And Kurt? Aside from his being Bob’s father, how did she really feel about him? Where did love come in? Did it? Shouldn’t she be devastated about their latest conversation? She searched the crannies and found—

  Found she was up for good, ruminating as if she had any kind of control over any of it, or as if there were a solution, a nice clear solution that would work for everybody. Rationality, though, is a veneer. We are not in control of our thoughts.

  She got the dog up, bundled in her warmest coat, and took a walk at dawn, wary of bears, watching the sun come up and the snow diamonds melting.

  CHAPTER 11

  Lynda Eckhardt called Nina at the ripe old hour of 6:00 a.m. Stars shone through the big window that looked into the backyard, and all the lights in the cabin were on as Nina and Bob p
repared for their day. The outside thermometer read twenty-eight degrees. The nightmare and lack of sleep had left Nina feeling fragile, but she intended to ignore that.

  “I know I said I’d be there this morning to introduce you and so on, but I’m calling to ask if you’ll take over completely,” Lynda told her. “I have stage fright. My IQ drops by half in a courtroom. I freak out. Can’t do it. I didn’t sleep last night. I’m getting out of law if I can’t find a way to keep my deals from turning into litigation. Is there any chance you would, Nina? I’m really sorry about the notice.”

  “Sure, no problem.” Nina wondered which of them, Lynda or herself, had gotten the least sleep the night before. Nina dabbed on concealer to hide the circles under the eyes squinting at her in the bathroom mirror.

  “You have to get Eric some time for his trip.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t like this escrow notion. I don’t like any of it. The sale has to go through.”

  Nina tweezed a man-hair that was stalking the soft little female hairs of her brow. She picked up a light brown pencil and began outlining her lips. “I’ll take care of it, Lynda. Drop off the Association of Attorneys at the clerk’s office on the second floor by eight and leave me a couple of copies to pick up and give to Michael Stamp. And don’t worry. Nothing big will happen today.”

  “You need time. This is turning into an international matter. The notice period wasn’t long enough to talk to everybody, make a decision, find the investigator, file responsive papers, get him down to Brazil—”

  “Not to worry.” Nina hung up and reconsidered her face. One should not wear dark eyeliner to court, especially at an early-morning court appearance, especially using the kind of eyeliner that starts at the tear ducts and traverses the entire pink interior lining of the eyes and remakes them to look like the eyes of Lady Gaga. Not to mention pale pink lipstick.

  Although Paul would be there. And Eric Brinkman. That called for a certain ladylike sultriness. Not that she was looking for anything, she just wanted to keep up her end.

  Nowadays, a lot of women skipped the eyeliner in favor of false eyelashes so realistic men never knew, so feminine and glamorous, but too many had fallen in this very bathroom and wedged forever in cracks in the floor. She didn’t have the time or fine-motor skills.

  Conflict, conflict, always this conflict for a woman lawyer. Nina wiped off some of the eye makeup and observed the more serious-looking result. Her lips she recolored with a deep pink. Her hair she left to hang, as it would anyway. At the last moment, she rubbed a little pink lipstick onto her cheekbones.

  It was getting late.

  She dressed in a red push-up bra, bikini panties, black slacks, turtleneck sweater, and the usual tidy blazer, all over sheer black tights.

  At least one person would register that she was sexy. Kurt might not notice it anymore, the judge might not give a damn, and opposing counsel had other things to worry about. Eric and Paul would see only her lawyerly jacket and slacks. No, she might not demonstrate it to anyone else, but by golly when she was arguing this matter today, she herself would know she was hot. One does what one needs to do for confidence when one is a female entering the judicial bastion. Her attitude would be better and impact the proceedings favorably for her client.

  Now—the Louboutins? She could bring them in a bag and put them on at the top of the stairs to the second floor—there was much to be said for trivialities of this sort. They distracted one from the real pressure of the hearing. And other, more personal things that weighed upon the mind. If she started thinking about all that now, she’d get so upset she wouldn’t be able to—

  One more look in the mirror. Spiffy, if sleep-deprived. She zipped downstairs to make scrambled eggs for Bob, whose bus left at seven twenty.

  “I don’t see how you can sell the business with a new claim like this pending,” Judge Flaherty said. “On the other hand, an affidavit from a foreign jurisdiction signed by a fugitive from justice who isn’t willing to risk extradition by appearing today might not be enough to settle the claim. Seems we have a conundrum, gentlemen. And lady,” he added, nodding at Nina.

  The courthouse was almost deserted this morning. More snow had fallen in the night, and Nina had followed a snowplow along Pioneer Trail, arriving, even so, fifteen minutes late. With supernatural luck, all the other participants—Philip Strong, Paul, Eric Brinkman, the lawyer who was representing Jim Strong, Michael Stamp, and Judge Flaherty and his clerk—had apparently made it right on time. The prospective buyers had sent a representative, a young Asian man in a blue suit who was sitting in front of an older African-American man who appeared to be texting, something the court frowned on but found it difficult to control.

  Kelly Strong, freckled and scowling, a real contrast to everyone else in her family, wore a battered brown leather jacket. She sat a row behind Philip and, other than for a perfunctory greeting to him, sat alone and said nothing. She nodded to Nina when she saw her, then turned back to look at the empty court beyond.

  Kelly’s sister-in-law Marianne Strong, and Marianne’s half brother, Gene Malavoy, sat across the aisle near the prospective buyers’ rep. They had been pushing for the sale of the resort ever since Jim’s brother, Alex, died and Marianne inherited his one-sixth of the resort. How close were Marianne and Gene to the potential buyers? Close enough to converse familiarly, Nina noted, observing smiles, nods, and bows with the man from Korea. Look into that later, she told herself.

  Petite Marianne looked the same as she had the first time Nina had seen her: all black clothing, styled to show off her sublime athletic body. Her dark hair was cut short and shiny. Gene, the younger of the pair, had a boyish, long, angular face, his hair shorter these days. His broad shoulders dwarfed Marianne’s tight physique. They both looked upset at the turn of events.

  Nina dredged up what she could remember about Marianne and Gene. Their father was a ski instructor in France, in Chamonix? Yes. Marianne had told Nina her mother left her when she was six.

  But—as Nina sat down at the counsel table and quickly unpacked her laptop and files—she recalled that Marianne had also told Nina her mother was born in Florianópolis, Brazil. Now, wasn’t that something to ponder? Her half brother, Gene, shifting in his seat, obviously as uncomfortable as his sister to be stuck here instead of flying down slopes or doing something physical, anything at all, shared the same French father.

  Gene wanted to own a resort of his own someday. He had told many, many people that. Right now he ran only the dining room at Paradise.

  Judge Flaherty had a certain regard for Nina. Notorious for his apoplectic moods, he had never exploded at her, and he appeared relieved as she explained that she’d associated with Lynda and would be handling the litigation aspects of the sale. He must have known about Lynda’s dread of court. He seemed to be in unusually fine spirits, actually, which would have pleased Nina except that some of his geniality appeared to be due to the presence of his sports buddy, attorney Michael Stamp. She suspected Stamp and the judge spent many a lunchtime regaling each other with their skiing exploits at Heavenly. They looked as cozy as a couple of aunts by the time Nina rushed in, the straps on her fab shoes not yet properly fastened.

  Stamp had been in practice in South Lake Tahoe for twenty years and had served as a city councilman for twelve of those. He had attended law school at UC Davis, and before that he had been an undergraduate track star at Cal State Hayward. He had a new baby and a lot of business clients who paid their bills. He was on his third wife, and his quest, Nina believed, was to be forever young. She got along with him and had never thought he was dirty, but now he had produced these papers, and that was making her wonder.

  Brinkman, Paul, and Philip Strong sat together behind the lawyer’s bar, the two PIs flanking Philip like bodyguards. Philip seemed to languish between the younger, bigger men, and Nina wondered if he had some illness he wasn’t telling her about. Maybe it was the chronic emotional turmoil his son had put him th
rough. She found it hard to look at him without feeling a pang of empathy.

  No testimony would be taken today—the judge would make his decisions based solely on the paperwork filed by Lynda and Michael Stamp, and on legal arguments.

  Through the tall windows a few stubborn snowflakes drifted through the firs. The courtroom was drafty and yellow-lit. At eight thirty in the morning, almost all of them had brought in a mug of coffee, including the judge. Nina began scanning Lynda’s responsive papers again. They were fine, no technical problems, and Lynda had left Nina plenty of room to wiggle through the legal argument; that was the main thing.

  Stamp got up and in conversational tones made his argument. Jim Strong, son of Philip, owned a one-sixth interest in Paradise Ski Resort and had apparently belatedly learned of the plan to sell it. He had gone to a Brazilian lawyer named Kraft, who had advised him that, due to the extradition treaty between Brazil and the United States, he should not provide any information regarding his location and business in Brazil and should submit all paperwork through his counsel. This had been accomplished by associating in the South Lake Tahoe, California, law firm of Caplan, Stamp, and Powell.

  “As you can see from our Points and Authorities, Judge, his attorney has opened a bank account for him in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the sales proceeds can be wired. The corporate papers as well as the copy of the probate-proceeding papers clearly establish his ownership interest—there can be no issue about that.

  “Therefore, an order is respectfully requested confirming the ownership share based on the corporate papers submitted previously, and further ordering that the net proceeds be distributed by wire to the bank account as stated.”