Catastrophe Cliff Read online

  “Can the people you work with vouch for that?”

  Mari sighed and looked away. “Of course, they can. Ask them.”

  “Were you angry with your sister for any reason?”

  Mari turned back to the detective and made eye contact with him. “If I was, I wouldn’t tell you about it.”

  “Was your sister angry with you about anything?”

  “I didn’t ask her.” Mari used the towel to dab at her neck.

  Nell didn’t like Mari’s surly tone. The woman was beginning to remind her of Kyle and his behavior at the park.

  “Can you tell us anything that might help us with the investigation into Jennifer’s death?”

  “If I had any information that could help, I’d gladly tell you what it was.” Mari leaned forward again, narrowed her eyes, and said softly, “As long as it didn’t incriminate me.”

  When they entered Kyle’s and Jennifer’s rented house, Nell liked the place immediately. There were framed photos of landscapes, flowers, and birds. There was a large colorful rug on the floor and the sofa had a number of brightly colored throw pillows on it. A soft cashmere blanket was placed over one arm of the sofa. The lighting was modern and well-chosen. The room was welcoming, cozy, and reflected the energy of the people who lived there.

  “Did Jennifer decorate the house?” Nell asked.

  “She did. She liked doing that stuff. If I fixed up the room, I’d have a futon and an old box for a coffee table,” Kyle said.

  They took seats and went through the same questions that had been posed to Mari Harding.

  “Have you thought of anything new that might be helpful to the investigation?” Peter asked.

  Kyle shifted a little in his chair. “No, nothing. What’s today’s visit about? Random questions, or is there some news about what happened to Jen?”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have anything new to report,” Peter said solemnly.

  Kyle slumped a little in the seat. “So then it’s just more questions.”

  “After you and Jennifer parted ways in the park, what did you do?”

  “I walked around the duck pond for a while and then did the meadow loop. After that I hiked over to the kettle pond.”

  “Did you go over to the cliffs?”

  Kyle frowned. “Why would I? Jen and I decided we’d meet at the kettle pond.”

  “Maybe you changed your mind and wanted to see the view from the cliffs,” Peter said.

  “I’ve been to the cliffs plenty of times. I’ve seen that view a hundred times.”

  “Well, maybe you decided it would be nice to walk to the kettle pond with Jen so you went to the cliffs to meet her.”

  “I didn’t. We went our separate ways, I waited at the kettle pond, she didn’t show up so I went to the car. I didn’t see Jen again until I got to the hospital.”

  “Did you run into her sister, Mari, in the park?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “How about your friends, Joel and Lindsey? Did you see them when they were in the park?”

  “No. Jen and I went on our hike and Joel and Lindsey stretched and went running. I didn’t see them after they left the parking lot.”

  “What made you decide to park in the small lot?”

  “We park there a lot. Not many people know about it. We like the trails that lead away from the lot.”

  “Were you and Jen getting along well?”

  Kyle’s face clouded. “Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”

  “Did you split the household chores between you and Jen?”

  Anger showed on the man’s face. “Yeah, we did. Are you keeping track of domestic equity now?”

  “What about the bills? How did you split them up?”

  “We each paid half of everything.”

  “Did you ever skip your share for any reason?”

  “No. What’s this got to do with anything?”

  Nell could see angry shades of red floating all around the young man.

  “Did you ever cheat on your girlfriend?” Peter was firing off questions.

  “No.” Kyle’s eyes took on a hard look.

  “Did Jennifer ever cheat on you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you know what happened to Jennifer that caused her to fall?”

  “What? No, I don’t. How would I?”

  Peter cleared his throat. “You took out a life insurance policy on Jennifer.”

  Kyle’s cheeks reddened. “Yeah. Jen had one on me, too.”

  “When did you take out the policies?”

  “About a year ago.”

  “Why did you decide to get life insurance policies on each other?”

  “We were living together. We thought we should protect each other’s financial interests. If anything happened to one of us, the money from the policy would be a big help.”

  “Have you filed a claim for the money yet?”

  Kyle breathed deeply. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Why not?” Peter asked.

  Kyle lifted his hands and then dropped them into his lap. “It seems too soon to do that.”

  “Did it seem to you that you and Jen would be married for the rest of your lives?”

  “As long as the wedding planning didn’t kill us first.”

  Nell smiled at the joke.

  “Had Jen been angry with you recently?”

  “She was annoyed that I hadn’t gotten around to mowing the lawn. She made a big deal about it, like I never did things around the house unless she nagged me.”

  “Was she right?” Peter questioned.

  “I suppose she might have been. I liked to do things in my own time. If she nagged, I’d dig in my heels.”

  It was the first thing Nell had heard from Kyle that sounded truthful.

  “Do you think Jennifer felt she was shouldering more of the work?”

  “Yeah, she thought she did a lot more than I did.”

  “Did that cause arguments between you and Jen?”

  “Sometimes it did.”

  “Was Jen happy in the relationship?” Peter asked.

  “I think she was.” Kyle’s voice was tentative and he was showing flashes of red, yellow, black, and green. “Listen, I’m sorry to cut this short, but I need to be someplace soon. Can we wrap it up?”

  “Is there anything you can tell us that would help us uncover what happened to Jennifer?”

  “I’m sorry.” The young man’s head hung down. “I wish I could. But I can’t.”

  14

  Nell and Violet sat in Dr. Rob Jennette’s research room going over some details of the case. Nell had spoken with him about looking at a photo of Jennifer and suddenly seeing red all over the young woman.

  “I brought copies of some of the photos with me,” Nell told him as she took them out of a folder and placed them on the long wooden table. “I noticed that Jennifer looks different in this picture than in the ones she took at the bottom of the cliffs before she hiked to the top. In the earlier photos, she seems happy and energetic. The one she took at the top shows her looking wary, almost fearful. See.” Nell pointed. “Her body language is different here. Look at how her shoulders are down. She almost seems like she’s about to dart away. It’s like she sees something near the tree line that alarmed her.”

  “I see what you mean,” Rob said. “I wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t pointed it out.” He looked at Nell. “When you focus on the photo, do you see the red color on Jennifer?”

  Nell shook her head. “The picture looks normal.”

  Rob said, “Maybe you saw colors because it was the first time you’d seen the photo, you noticed the young woman’s worry and her changed body language, and it heightened your awareness of her. Then you picked up on what she was feeling when the photograph was taken.”

  Nell considered Rob’s theory and nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  “Do you think Nell will be able to see colors if she stares at the picture?” Violet asked. “Or has t
he emotional window of opportunity passed?”

  “That’s hard to say,” Rob said. “It might take some training and practice for Nell to be able to access the emotions in the photo more than once.” He looked to Nell. “I have some photos here we can use to find out if it’s possible for you to see the emotions that were being felt at the time the pictures were taken. Maybe what you saw on Jennifer was a one-time thing. Or maybe it’s something you can expand on.”

  “You’ve come up with theories about my abilities and the new quirks that have developed like being able to see colors when emotions have been left behind by people,” Nell said to Rob. “What scientific facts could explain me seeing color from emotions that were felt by someone at the time a photo was taken?”

  Rob looked blank and it took him a few seconds to say anything. “I’ve been working to come up with a solid hypothesis. It has to be similar to what we’ve talked about previously. Even if you’re the only person in the world who is able to do this, there have to be scientific reasons for it. Perhaps, where we are in our understanding of such phenomena will prevent me from being able to fully prove and describe the mechanism for this skill, but someday, with scientific advancement, there will be an explanation.”

  “So I’m not some odd freak?” Nell questioned.

  “Well….” Rob couldn’t help a smile from forming. “You might be, but it doesn’t have anything to do with seeing emotions as colors in a photo.”

  Nell gave the doctor a playful bop on his arm.

  “Would you like to have a look at some pictures I brought in and see what you can see in them?” Rob asked.

  With a nod, Nell took a deep breath and folded her hands on the table.

  Violet pointed out, “You could show me pictures and I might deduce an emotion just by looking at the facial expression of the person depicted. Nell could see a sad face and then project a color onto the photo, but it might not be an accurate assessment. The person might look sad, when it fact, he or she might have that expression because they are about to cry from joy.”

  “First of all, Nell has never projected a color onto anything. It’s either there or not. She sees people every day and she doesn’t see colors on all of them. She picks up on very strong emotions which present themselves as color. And, second, I have photos from my family and friends in which I know the circumstances surrounding when the pictures were taken. I know what was going on, so Nell won’t be able to just come up with something based on a guess about what the person was feeling.”

  “Okay, good.” Violet nodded. “Very clever.”

  Rob had a portfolio of photographs in a leather binder and he removed one and placed it in front of Nell.

  The photo was of a young woman who looked to be in her early thirties. She had long brown hair and was dressed in a white shirt and black dress slacks. Sitting in a wooden chair, she was looking slightly downward to a spot a few feet away. She appeared deep in thought.

  Nell leaned forward, her long auburn hair falling around the sides of her face. She touched the photo and silently stared at it for about four minutes.

  “I think the woman isn’t at home. She could be in a room at a university … I think she’s in a doctor’s office. Her face is serious and almost disbelieving. I would say she has just received bad news, except for one thing. She’s covered in sparkling yellow and white. The colors are bright, really bright. I think the news she received is good, the best news she could get. She’s full of joy, but the photo was taken at the very moment she heard the news and although her happiness has yet to show on her face, her body is flooded with it.” Nell looked up at Rob and Violet who were sitting opposite her.

  Violet looked to Rob and she saw the man’s eyes widen and a look of sheer wonder creep over his face.

  In a soft tone, he said, “That’s it, exactly.”

  Nell half-smiled. “Is it? She was happy in this photograph?”

  “The woman’s husband is a friend of mine from childhood. They’d been trying to have a child for ten years. The doctor had just informed them that she was pregnant. It was the first time she’d been pregnant in ten years of trying. My friend and his wife’s sister were in the room. The sister took the picture a second after the doctor gave them the news.” Rob placed another photo on the table. “This is the picture that was taken three seconds after the one you just looked at.”

  The photograph was of the woman and her husband, locked in an embrace, both sobbing with joy. Nell’s heart swelled at the palpable elation so obvious in the picture of the couple. She glanced up at Rob. “Was it a successful pregnancy?”

  “They had a beautiful little girl. And three years later, they had a son,” Rob said. “Ready for another photo?”

  Nell nodded and another snapshot was placed on the tabletop. It was a picture of a woman wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, sitting on a stone and brick wall, her legs hanging down. She was looking off across the grass of what seemed to be a park. Trees and a pond could be seen in the background.

  “I’m not getting anything from this one.” Nell looked up at Rob.

  “Nothing at all?” Rob asked.

  “Not a sparkle, not a single dot of color.” Nell’s shoulders dropped in disappointment.

  “That’s because there isn’t any strong emotion depicted in the photo. My cousin was going to meet his girlfriend in a park. The woman is waiting for him to show up. My cousin thought she looked pretty sitting there in the sunshine so he snapped the picture.”

  Violet smiled at Nell. “Good work, sis.”

  Rob put a third photograph in front of Nell. It was an older, black and white picture of five women standing together. They all wore dresses and had their hair curled, and they stood on a lush lawn in a garden full of flowers surrounded by shade trees. One woman appeared to be saying something to the others. Their faces didn’t show happiness or sorrow or worry.

  Nell leaned closer, and then she looked up. “The women seem to be at an outdoor event of some kind. They’re dressed well so it must be a reception or a party or something like that. The woman in the middle.” She pointed to the person. “I see colors on her, dark colors that are changing from one to the other … navy blue, black, deep dark purple. I think they symbolize loss, grief, a feeling of being alone, adrift.” Nell shrugged.

  Rob smiled. “The photograph is from twenty years ago. The women are my great aunts. They’re attending a wedding reception. The woman in the middle, the one you pointed out, is my great Aunt Anna. A month before the picture was taken, she’d lost her husband to a sudden heart attack. They’d been married for fifty years. It took her a very long time to find any joy in life again.”

  Violet applauded her sister. “You’re amazing.”

  Nell smiled, but then rubbed at her forehead. “Can we stop for now? I feel a headache coming on. We can do more another time.”

  Rob brought over a cup of coffee and opened a package of chocolate chip cookies. “Some sugar and caffeine might help.”

  Nell gratefully sipped from the mug and nibbled a cookie. “Can you tell me your thoughts about how I can see emotions in a photograph?”

  Rob sat next to the young woman. “My very preliminary idea is that the people in the photos were feeling strong emotions and their energy was showing as colors, and as you know, colors are nothing more than visible spectrum light. The camera was able to capture the visible energy just the same way it can capture rays of light in a photographed scene. Because of the four types of cones in your eyes, you’re able to see millions of colors, as well as the light energy given off from people’s strong emotions, whether those emotions are from someone right in front of you, from emotional light atoms left behind when the person leaves a place, or from light energy captured in a photo.”

  “That makes a heck of a lot of sense,” Violet said.

  Nell let out a little sigh of relief. “It does make sense. I feel better about it. I’m not a witch or a nut or a crazy person.”

  Rob raised a
n eyebrow and teased, “I suppose that depends on who you ask.”

  Nell made a face. “I’ll be sure not to ask you.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re normal, sis,” Violet said. “Well, different normal.”

  The three of them laughed.

  Setting her mug down, Nell grinned. “I prefer to say there’s something special about me.”

  Rob looked into Nell’s green eyes and smiled. “Yeah. There is.”

  15

  Nell was working on a pen and ink drawing in the studio at the back of the main shop’s rooms. The walls in the shop and the studio, as well as in the residential side of the house were painted soft white or light cream or gray in order for Nell to have a soothing and visually quiet environment to escape all the colors in the world. The furniture, the rugs, and the wall paintings were also done in neutrals or soft, light colors which provided a calming and neutral space for the young woman to rest her eyes and her brain.

  Molly, a part-time employee, was in the shop waiting on a customer who was interested in some of Violet’s jewelry.

  When the little bell over the shop’s door tinkled, Nell got up to see if the customer needed help, but when she stepped through the doorway from the studio, she saw Peter walking towards her.

  “Am I interrupting?” the detective asked.

  “Not at all. Come in the back.” A flash of nervousness passed through Nell as she worried about what Peter had to tell her.

  “Where’s Violet?” Peter asked as he took a comfortable chair near the bank of wide windows.

  “She went to Boston to see a few clients.” Nell went to the small refrigerator they kept in the workroom and poured two glasses of seltzer. She brought one over to Peter and took the seat across from him. “Is everything okay?”

  Peter had a long swallow of the seltzer. “Yeah. Well, not really. Just more of the same, but there is some news. The medical examiner called this morning.”

  Nell listened waiting for the news.

  “You know Jennifer’s hands had the injuries that were inconsistent with what is seen when someone falls from a height. There are broken fingers on her hands which could be due to the fall, but the examiner shared some information with me. He took more x-rays. There are also broken bones in the hands. It seems they could be the result of Jennifer gripping onto part of the ledge and then someone using a rock to smash her hands to make her let go and fall.”