“Probably.” She spun on her stool. “The ballistics is good news in a way. If the gun matched the slug, we’d have to figure this out. Without a match, the gun is an artifact. We can leave Prado where it is. Manner stays undetermined. Life goes on.”
“Tell that to the broken trigger finger,” Sam said. “The twisted broken trigger finger. You were checking on the handgun registration. Anything? Background check?”
“Almost forgot. I found the original owner, but it doesn’t add much.” Lucy pulled another sheet of paper from the file. “Gun was purchased new from a reputable dealer in 1988 by a fifty-three-year-old woman in Iowa. I ran her. She had a couple of cute priors—one for shoplifting some fancy panties from a local ladies store, and one for disturbing the peace at a funeral—before she died in 1998.
“There’s no record of what happened to the gun after her death. Or to the fancy panties, for that matter. No hits on the weapon between the date of purchase and now.”
“She have a name?”
Lucy looked. “Beulah Baxter. Of the Donnellson, Iowa, Baxters.”
Sam snorted. No beer exited his nose. He said, “Second rule? Of guns?”
“Oh great, here we go,” said Lucy. She’d grown wary of Sam’s second rules.
Sam used his pronouncement voice. He said, “The lives of guns are like the lives of people. They often don’t get interesting until after they leave home.”
“You just come up with that?”
He said, “Ms. Baxter’s death in 1998? Cause? Manner?”
“Negative on the nefarious. I ordered a death certificate, which hasn’t arrived, but the woman at the county clerk’s office told me on the phone that Ms. Baxter’s demise was purely organic—some rare cancer.”
Lucy was holding the remaining sheets of paper from the thin file she had put together. Sam held out his hand. All of the records had originated in the predigital age. Lucy handed him the printed versions of records that someone had photocopied from the originals before somebody else had scanned them into cloud eternity. Included among the papers were the original handgun registration form and the amusing rap sheet from Iowa with the arrest for the fancy panties.
Sam shuffled through them twice. “Absent DNA or a miracle, we basically have a dead end on the weapon after it was purchased in 1998?” Sam asked as he scanned the pages. “Over a decade of dead air?”
“The purchase was in 1988. Beulah died in ’98. We assume she had the gun in between, but we don’t know that for sure. But we do know where the gun’s been since September of 2001, Sam. It’s been hanging in that damn fireplace on Prado.”
“Couldn’t the gun have been put in the chimney sometime after Doctor’s death?”
She made a face. “That’s possible, in the sense that anything is possible. Likely though? I think the big question is how the gun got from Iowa to Boulder after it left home to begin, you know, its interesting life back in 1998.”
He said, “I was hopeful on the ballistics.” He ran his hand over the top of his head as though it were a bowling ball and he was desperate to locate the finger holes in the dark.
Lucy could tell that Sam was contemplating the wisdom of a third beer. “Drop this, Sam. Let it go. And no more beer. You’re driving. Two’s enough.”
“What? A deal? Do me this: Go to the archives. In person. I want to see any photos we have from the scene. All of them. Autopsy, too. That finger? Definitely. Damn. Wait— No. No trail, Luce. No requisition. Take cell phone photos of the file. We can work from those for now. If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there. I’ll drop it.”
Lucy gave it some thought. Then she nodded. “Deal.”
“It’s better if people don’t know what we’re after. Be as discreet as you can be.”
“What are you thinking, Sam?” She waved the bartender off.
“There was some screwy stuff with this case. Until I know what it all means, until we decide to follow up on it or not, I don’t want anyone to know that we’re looking.”
“What was screwy?”
“Did I tell you I got reassigned after one day?”
“You didn’t. That explains all you don’t know.”
“Deputy DA Crowder got reassigned, too. One day. Now, the damn bungee. The broken finger? Mostly the whole disappearing gun thing. Screwy.”
“It was that week, Sam. Explains a lot.”
“And—and—the 911 call was anonymous, Luce. From a pay phone.”
“Somebody didn’t want to get involved. Happens all the time, Sam.”
“Or maybe somebody didn’t want us to know he’d already been there. That happens all the time, too. If we can find that person, we might have a witness. Maybe put this to bed for reals.”
Lucy packed up the evidence. Sam gazed around the room as though he had just sat down and recognized the peculiarity of his surroundings. He said, “Is this place like a yoga bar, Lucy? Is that what this is? Is that some new … thing I don’t know about? Half these people look like they’re dying for a chance to roll out their mats and break into a child’s pose. The other half look like they just finished meditating.”
She laughed. Then she said, “Shine is about nourishing, Sam. In all ways.”
“God help me,” Sam said.
“That too,” Lucy said. “That too.”
9
ALAN
SOFIE’S PRESENCE WAS A GODSEND. After the funeral she asked her adoptive parents and her birth father, Joost—he was the family emissary who had accompanied her to Boulder at the beginning of the visit—to permit her to stay through the end of the year so she could spend time with her American siblings.
The Dutch parental council unanimously consented.
I had wanted to dislike Joost, but I couldn’t. Sofie’s biological father was a decent, straightforward man who obviously loved his daughter. That he’d held my likely naked wife in his arms only a few years before was a definite limiting factor in any future friendship for him and me. In the grand scheme of my life right then? I would deal.
I couldn’t face them. No turkey for us. I grilled quail. I was amazed at how little meat there was on each quail. I should have marinated an entire covey. Or two coveys. If he were in the right mood Jonas could consume an entire covey in a sitting.
I began thinking that I needed to regroup in time for December’s celebrations.
I forced myself to find the resolve to try to mount a decent Chanukah for Jonas and a decent Christmas for Grace. I enlisted Sofie’s help; she got into the spirit with, to me, unfamiliar Dutch gusto. I surfed the wake of her enthusiasm as we decorated the house. Sofie highlighted some alluring cultural touches from the Netherlands.
By the first of December the family room was blue and white and red and green all over. Festive? Kind of. Confusing? Absolutely. In a good way.
Sinterklaas arrived in Spanish Hills before Chanukah, which arrived that year long after Santa Claus showed up in the malls, but well before Christmas morning. Black Peter’s arrival was a revelation to me—his dark Dutch holiday role felt custom-made for my mood—but I never really understood his cultural significance in Holland’s version of the Nativity. Sofie stayed up late with me on Christmas Eve. I drank. She didn’t. For me, it was an opportunity to get to know her better. That part was great. She saw the time as an opportunity to explain Black Peter and the role of Sinterklaas, but I’d had too much warm whiskey and I never quite got it.
Sofie baked a pastry called kerstkrans and a treat called letterbanket. Gracie assisted with the baking and spent an afternoon learning folk dances from her sister.
In another time, in other circumstances, the version of the holiday that we created that year would have been magical. But it wasn’t another time. The circumstances weren’t other; they were what they were. The holiday was interesting and ever distracting, but not magical. Better than I had any right to expect, but not magical.
Someone was missing. We didn’t pretend otherwise.
ONE MID-DECEM
BER EVENING as we built up toward the clash of observances by juggling a growing number of cultural and religious symbols, the family celebration became too much—too ecumenical, or too multidenominational, or too pan-cultural. The menorah was beside the tree under the mistletoe above the wooden shoes placed just so on the edge of the hearth a few feet below the stockings hung by the chimney with care.
Jonas, who was born with a gift of clarity that I cherished, stopped his sisters as they were singing a carol that night—Sofie had arranged the song partly in Dutch, partly in English, with the chorus in Norwegian. I asked about the Norwegian. She explained that she liked the way it sounded.
Jonas stood before the second chorus of the folk song. He waved his arms and he said, “Wait, wait. What exactly are we celebrating? Right now, this very minute.”
I opened my mouth to try to provide an answer and realized that I had no idea what we were celebrating. We just were. Because the calendar said it was time. And because we had a disparate but united family ensemble that allowed us to have a prayer of pulling it off. Together.
As our energy evaporated and the evening wound away, I got the kids to bed. Then I retreated to lie alone on the bed that I had shared with my wife. I was still prone there when I awoke in the middle of the night.
It was the first time I had fallen asleep in our bed since that morning. The one when Lauren was shot. I couldn’t get back to sleep.
The next morning I woke, as usual, in the guest room bed.
That was when I decided I needed to get back to work.
Or that I needed help. Most likely, I needed both.
My front-page notoriety, along with my long sabbatical from my practice, had left me with a fractured referral base and few active patients. I couldn’t manufacture new patients but I was sure I could find myself a therapist. I knew a lot of therapists.
But I wasn’t quite ready to be in therapy. That’s what I kept telling myself.
10
TWO DAYS AFTER CHRISTMAS Sofie found me in the master bedroom. The bedroom door was open, but she’d said, “Knock knock.” Actually I thought she said, “Klop klop.” When she stepped in I was standing in front of the open door to the walk-in closet.
I was tempted to ask her for a lesson about the differences in everyday onomatopoeia in English and Dutch. The inclination didn’t last. I knew I lacked the requisite brain cells, language skills, and attention span.
I didn’t have to say a thing to her about what I was doing in the closet. Or about how I was feeling. She recognized the hopelessness and the sadness in my eyes. She volunteered to help.
She was the perfect person for the job. She had a dog in the hunt. And that dog, as with all things Sofie, was well behaved. Sofie also possessed a natural talent to manage the other dogs already barking around my ankles.
Sofie was mine, yet she wasn’t. Her very existence expanded my idea of family. Technically, as my wife’s daughter from a time long before we’d met, she was my stepdaughter. But I was, at best, father number three to Sofie. Her birth father remained much involved in her life, and she continued to live with and be raised by adoptive parents I had never met, whose love for her was apparent in every breath she took. I felt such gratitude to all of them, the generous, loving people in Holland who raised her so well. I didn’t know how I could have made it through the crisis without her presence in Colorado.
Sofie devised a plan on the spot. One of the things I was learning about her was that she usually had a plan. The first step in Sofie’s plan involved making Lauren’s things visible. That meant emptying the closets and the drawers and the boxes. Sofie gathered Lauren’s hanging clothes and sorted them into categories that made sense to her. She set up tables in the bedroom for folded clothes and displayed all of my wife’s things so that I could see each item.
The most organized portion of Lauren’s closet had always been the section reserved for her footwear. Neat shelves below eye level displayed her current seasonal favorites. Well-marked boxes on high shelves identified other pairs—by date purchased, by type, sometimes along with a photo of the shoes. For our purposes, Sofie removed from the closet for display only the left shoe from each pair. She lined them, neatly nested together, against the floorboard on the longest wall in the bedroom.
I thought the many left shoes resembled a company of disembodied Rockettes in the midst of a right-leg high kick.
Sofie pinned Lauren’s jewelry on a big board of pine—she fell into Dutch to identify the specific lumber for me—that she pulled from Peter’s old wood shop. She hung the jewelry items with pushpins that became, for me, a connect-the-dots timeline of my marital relationship. I remembered every piece I had given to Lauren, when, and why.
Sofie neatly folded the lingerie. Altogether it took up remarkably little space. Seeing it in piles, with any anticipation of seeing it on my wife’s body gone, the lace and silk had no allure for me.
Lauren had owned two dozen hats. I hadn’t known that.
She’d had four canes. I had known that.
Sofie took a simple cardboard box and lined it with foil wrapping paper from the holiday just past. Some things went straight into that box. Sofie’s decision making was not clear to me. I was fine with that.
She proposed a strategy. First, I would choose the sentimental pieces that I wanted to save for sentimental reasons. Whatever I would like, for whatever reason I would like it. Next, Gracie and Jonas would get to pick some things for themselves. “How many?” she asked me. I chose the number ten. Each of the kids, Sofie included, would find ten things they wanted, alternating turns.
“No,” she said. “Grace first ten, then Jonas ten. Then me. Ten. That’s best.”
“A compromise. Alternate the first turn, so everyone gets a favorite. Then each of you pick nine.” Sofie assented.
When the time came to do the choosing, I knew Jonas wouldn’t select anything. I would pick some things for Jonas if and when he got stumped. Sofie volunteered to help me with that.
“Once the kids are done,” I said, “you may take what you would like. You are almost her size. Take whatever you like, whatever you will wear. Whatever you will treasure. Whatever will help you remember her the way you wish to remember her.”
“At the end,” she said, “there will be much, still. You and I, Alan, will select some things to go here.” She pointed at the foil-lined box. “This is for things that no one chooses, but that someone someday will wish that they had chosen.”
It made me want to cry. I signed off on Sofie’s plan.
What was left after Lauren’s sisters took some things would go to the women’s shelter and to Goodwill. It was a fine plan. But that was Sofie. She’d been born on another continent as the product of others’ passion, misadventure, and serendipity, yet she’d arrived in my life as an intuitive expert on helping me plan my next chapter, whatever it turned out to be.
SOFIE FOUND AN ENVELOPE in the inside pocket of Lauren’s only peacoat.
The peacoat was Sofie’s choice during round one. Sofie told me that her birth mother had been wearing the coat the time they met as adults. She named a canal in Amsterdam as the spot where they first saw each other.
The memory that the coat kindled for me was necessarily different from the joyful memory that it created for Sofie. My memories included the fact that Lauren had returned from that trip to the Netherlands partially paralyzed from an MS exacerbation. The exacerbation had occurred while she was in the arms—literally or figuratively I never knew only because I never asked—of Sofie’s birth father, Joost, in Hilversum. The rendezvous with Joost had been Lauren’s way of checking, up close and personal, to see if the flame still burned from the days of Sofie’s conception. My wife’s remorseful eyes had told me that for her, it did.
Lauren’s paralysis meant that the chore of unpacking her things upon her return to Boulder became mine. The peacoat was among the things that I found folded in her luggage. I would be happy to see the coat out of the house, back to H
olland.
Sofie read the name written on the outside of the envelope. “Elliot?” she asked me, placing the accent on the final syllable: elly-OTT. “Do you know Elliot?”
I nodded. My tongue was knotted. I was trying to find a good descriptor for Elliot. Lauren’s friend? Her boss? Her adversary?
My adversary? I ruled out friend. I said, “She worked with him.”
She handed me the envelope. “For him?” she asked.
“I guess,” I said. “I will pass it on.”
I tossed the sealed envelope on top of the box of Lauren’s office things that her assistant, Andrew, had dropped by after I brought Lauren home from the hospital. Since the handwriting on the Elliot envelope appeared to be Andrew’s, the general vicinity of the box from her office seemed like a fine place to let it age.
The envelope became part of the written record of Lauren’s life that I knew I would need to tackle and digest at some point. I was becoming complacent at kicking that point in time further and further into the future. Her desk was cluttered with her written records. With mail, opened and not, and paperwork of all kinds. Personal, work, receipts, statements. Bills. The list went on and on. That piece of furniture—hell, that whole side of that anteroom—was an expanding repository of things that would require my clearheaded attention sooner rather than later.
The thought of diving in to that morass and sorting out what parts were germane to the conclusion of Lauren’s life overwhelmed me. Of all the things I had to do to cope, I devoted most of my procrastination energy to that desk. Anything that involved paper and ink that could be put off, whether for a day, or for a month, or until tax season rolled around, went onto that desk. Or in its vicinity.
There I hoped it would spoil, or age, or even mature into irrelevance.
The elly-ott envelope became part of the list of potentially noxious things that I hoped would disintegrate into unimportance without my intervention.
I had always told my kids that procrastination has consequences.
The elly-ott envelope would prove me right.
11
JONAS AND GRACIE AND I drove Sofie to DIA on the eve of New Year’s Eve. Her flight was tucked between a big Boxing Day snowstorm and a more gentle snowfall that would arrive hours after she was in the air. She would fly nonstop to Reykjavík on Icelandair and connect from there for the final leg to her home not far from Amsterdam. She was excited to see Iceland in the middle of winter.
Compound Fractures Page 6
