She knew the answers to her questions. But I responded anyway.
"You can't see the barn from here, but yes. On the other side of that stand of aspen is where it is. You can see a little bit of the house from here. The sun is still reflecting off the windows. See? There? To the left?"
"Yes, I think I see it." She had already stopped looking up the hill. Her gaze was focused straight down the highway, as straight as the parallel lines of yellow paint down the center of the road. Her voice was soft, but adamant as she said, "We won't ever let things like that happen to our baby, will we?"
I checked my mirrors for traffic and touched her on the cheek.
"No way, sweets.
No way." Neither of us was naive enough to believe we actually had the power to protect our baby from life's hurts-big or little-but to embark on this journey as parents we knew we needed whatever talismans bravado could provide.
So I conspired with her to parental assurance. Although it was relatively new behavior to me, I found it to be a totally natural act.
I eased the big car from the shoulder back onto the asphalt and pressed hard on the accelerator. The car lurched. Behind us a pair of headlamps was gaining ground too quickly for my comfort.
The sun had already disappeared behind the Gore Range and the narrow valley that hugged the Blue River was quickly losing its luster. The daylight that remained was bruised black and blue. We stopped in Kremmling and ate at a bakery that sold pizza. The Colorado River flowed nearby. We'd cross it in the final light of dusk. I was thinking that it would be swollen with snowmelt.
Over bitter coffee, I became conscious of the images that this journey along Highway 9 was foisting into my awareness. Bruising, swelling, tragedy, tumult.
Snowmelt.
The reason, I knew, was simple. The next morning Lauren and I were scheduled to meet with Catherine and Wendell Franklin to talk with them about their dead daughter, Tamara.
The drive up County Road 129 into the Elk River Valley outside Steamboat Springs had taken a little more than a half hour. The road hugged the river as it climbed gently through a gorgeous high-country valley that was blessed with wide expanses of pasture and rolling hillsides that were covered with spruce, fir, and aspen. It was difficult to believe that we were high in the Rockies.
This didn't even feel like the same mountain system that spawned the Gore Range, the Maroon Bells, or the Sanjuans.
I didn't get lost on my way to the ranch.
"Go until you almost get to Clark.
You'll see the ranch on your left. If you get to Clark, you missed us. The barn has a new roof," Dell Franklin had explained on the phone. Lauren spotted the new roof and I pulled off the road. The Elk River was at least a half mile to the west of us at that point. The deep meadow between the river and us rippled as gentle breezes brushed the silky tops of the alfalfa crop.
I'd been expecting to greet a couple on the verge of retirement. But the Franklins weren't too many years older than Lauren and me. I guessed that Cathy must have been only eighteen or nineteen when she had given birth to her first child, her daughter, Tamara. Now their nest was empty while we were only beginning to prepare ours.
"Call us Dell and Cathy, please." The order came from Dell Franklin.
"Sit down, sit down. Have some coffee and cake."
Dell collapsed heavily on his chair and his breathing was labored. He was portly and wore his hair in a buzz cut that has recently become fashionable again. I doubt that Dell knew much about fashion, though. To meet with us, he had dressed in a long-sleeve blue polo shirt with a Cadillac insignia over one breast, and new blue Wranglers. The sleeves of the polo shirt were pushed up halfway over his thick forearms. He wore boots that were reserved for indoor use. Even this early in the summer his skin was brown and weathered and the ladder of wrinkles on each of his temples was deeply furrowed from many hours, probably too many hours, in the high-country sunshine.
Cathy's gaze seemed to burn and her eyes filled me with sorrow. Over the years I'd met with dozens of parents who displayed their pain in their eyes the way Cathy did-mothers who were desperate for whatever psychological help, or salve, I could provide to aid her child. Mothers who had placed all their hope in me after they'd concluded that I was their last best chance for salvation, but were preparing themselves for the possibility or even the likelihood, that their hope would again be burned at the pyre of disappointment.
The big book that Cathy Franklin held in her lap was a photo album.
She wore a pair of old Lee jeans that she'd cherished so long the cotton was now as soft as chenille. They still fit her as they did the day she bought them. Her blouse was rayon or silk, and she wore it with the top four buttons loose.
Underneath was a faded yellow chemise.
We were sitting in what Dell had called the "sitting room." I would call it a family room. A massive stone fireplace filled half of a long wall above a hearth fashioned from thick pine logs and topped with stone. The mantel above the firebox was crowded with trophies topped with brass golfers and silver golf balls. A coffee service was set up before us on a low table.
Cathy had been anxious for our arrival.
She'd be twenty-eight today. She'd have babies by now. I think she'd have… two babies. I'd be a grandmother." Cathy sighed and flipped open the photo album on her lap and stared at a picture that I suspected had not been chosen at random. Tamara, upside down from my point of view across the coffee table, appeared to have been eight or nine when the picture was taken. She was standing on cross-country skis in front of a teepee. The psychologist in me wondered why her mother had chosen a photograph of her daughter during the quiescence of latency. It might have meant nothing of course, but Cathy Franklin hadn't locked on to an oedipal Tami, or a preadolescent, pubertal one.
She hadn't chosen a picture of Tami just before her death, either.
Cathy said, "Her smile-Tami's? It was so bright-it would make you glad that you're alive." She fidgeted and stared at her hands as she spoke to us about her dead daughter. I was thinking that the absence of a daughters smile could probably leave a mother wishing she were dead. My thoughts leapt to the life growing in Lauren's belly. I pried my attention away and my stomach flipped.
Cathy continued.
"Its been over ten years," she said as she lifted one hand and scratched behind her ear.
"Well more than ten." Her voice was disbelieving. I couldn't tell whether she was disbelieving because the tragedy still felt like yesterday, or whether she was disbelieving because she felt as though she'd already cried away enough tears to lubricate a few lifetimes.
Wendell-Dell-reached over and touched his wife on the knee. He was a bear of a man and the act seemed all the more gentle because of his mass.
His breathing grew less labored as he made contact with her. He said, to his wife as much as to us, "It's still hard sometimes. You know-it's hard to remember… and… it's hard to forget." Cathy clenched her husband's thick fingers and lifted her face to us. She manufactured a smile that brought tears to my eyes.
"We're so grateful you've agreed to help," she said.
I was fighting therapist proclivities. Cathy's arrested grief was fertile ground. But I reminded myself that this field wasn't mine to furrow. Not here.
Not now.
Lauren jumped in and explained our role in Locard. That we were consultants.
And that our participation in the investigation was limited to specific tasks that had been delineated by the permanent members of the Locard team. She explained her role as a local prosecuting attorney.
When she was finished, I spoke.
"As you know, I'm a psychologist. One of my most important tasks is to get to know your daughter," I said, moving my gaze from Dell to Cathy and back.