“Was there a woman in the car?”
“She doesn’t remember. She never looked.”
“So it’s forged.”
“It’s forged,” said Ray. “Backdated. Two days before you were supposed to die. So the house wouldn’t go through your estate, or through probate, or anywhere near that trust. It would just already be his.”
I looked at that flat, plain C.
“He planned it,” I said. “Before the hike. He’d already forged the deed.”
Ray didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
Michael sold my house in October. To a young couple with a baby. For $287,000.
The money went into his account at Flatirons Community Bank. From there, Ray said, it went in three directions. One hundred and forty thousand to pay off a second mortgage on the gray house in Boulder. Sixty-one thousand to a sports betting company and two online brokers. Michael, it turned out, had lost almost six hundred thousand dollars over four years. Betting on football. Day-trading cryptocurrency. Borrowing from one credit card to pay another. His credit report, which Maria Esparza showed me in a folder, was four pages of collections and late payments.
The rest went to a white BMW for Emily.
She posted a picture of it on Instagram. With a red bow on the hood.
Life is short. Treat yourself.
The hardest one was the trust.
Michael couldn’t touch the trust. Not yet. As long as I was only missing, not dead, I was still the trustee. He could only get it through a court.
So, eighteen months after the hike, his attorney filed a petition in the County Court of Douglas County, Nebraska.
In the Matter of the Estate of Carol A. Hartwell. Petition for Determination of Death.
And a second one, in Colorado, for Aiden.
Thomas Reinholt was notified, because he was the attorney for the trust. He read both petitions and called Ray, and Ray drove up the mountain and handed them to me at the kitchen table.
I read every page.
Michael had signed a sworn statement. Under penalty of perjury. He described the hike. The overlook. The edge giving way. He described rushing to the edge and seeing us fall. He described trying to climb down and the slope being too unstable to reach us. He described calling for us and hearing nothing.
I heard no response of any kind from my mother or my son, he’d written. I am certain they did not survive the fall.
Emily had signed one too. Almost word for word.
The hearing was set for June 3rd. Two years and three weeks after the hike. In front of Judge Harold Imes.
Great Plains Mutual Insurance had already received Michael’s claim on my life insurance policy. Four hundred thousand dollars. An insurance investigator named Dale Whitaker had told Thomas Reinholt they’d pay as soon as the court entered the order.
“He’s sworn under oath now,” Maria Esparza said, sitting at my kitchen table. “In two states. He’s forged your deed. He’s sold your house. He’s taken over three hundred thousand dollars from you under a power of attorney he knew he had no right to use if he believed you were dead. And he’s filed a sworn claim for your life insurance.”
She closed her folder.
“That’s enough, Carol,” she said. “That’s more than enough.”
“When?”
“The night before the hearing,” Ray said. “They’ll both be home. They’ll be getting ready.”
I looked out the window of June’s guest cabin at the creek.
“I want to knock,” I said.
Ray and Maria looked at each other.
“Carol—”
“I lay in that ravine and listened to my son decide I was better off dead,” I said. “I’ve lain awake for two years listening to my grandson scream about the ground falling. I want to be the one who knocks on that door. I want to see his face.”
Ray was quiet for a long time.
“We’ll be right behind you,” he said finally. “The whole time.”
So that’s how I came to be standing on the porch of my son’s house in Boulder, on the night of June 2nd, two years after I died, with a crayon drawing in my pocket and my knuckles an inch from the door.
The brass lantern hummed above my head.
Inside, I could hear the television. Some cooking show. Emily laughing at something.
I thought about Richard. About his careful trust. About his voice at our kitchen table. Just so you know where everything is, Carol. In case.
I thought about Aiden, safe at June’s cabin, asleep in the bunk bed with one of June’s dogs.
I knocked.
Three times. Slowly.
Footsteps inside. Bare feet on hardwood.
The door opened.
Emily stood there in a gray silk robe with a glass of white wine in her hand. Her hair was short and blonde now. She had a small diamond on a chain at her throat.
She looked at me.
For one second, nothing happened on her face at all. She was looking at an older woman on her porch. A neighbor, maybe. Someone selling something.
Then she saw the scar.
It runs from my left temple up into my hairline. Eleven stitches. It’s faded now, but you can see it, if you know to look.
Her eyes went to my left arm. To the long surgical scar on my forearm, where they’d put in the plate.
Then back to my face.
The wine glass slipped out of her hand.
It hit the hardwood floor and shattered. White wine splashed across her bare feet.
She didn’t look down.
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
“Hello, Emily,” I said. “I’m sorry to drop in without calling. I know you’re busy. I hear you have a court date in the morning.”
“Em? What broke?”
Michael’s voice. From deep inside the house. Then his footsteps, coming down the hallway.
“Em?”
He came around the corner into the front hall. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, holding a dish towel. He’d gained weight. His face was puffier. There was gray in his curls now.
He saw Emily standing frozen in a puddle of wine and glass.
Then he looked past her. At me.
He stopped walking.
I watched every drop of color leave my son’s face. It was like watching water drain out of a sink. His mouth fell open. The dish towel dropped from his hand.
He took one step backward. Then another. His back hit the wall.
“No,” he said. “No. No, no, no.”
“Hello, Michael.”
“You’re—” His voice broke into pieces. “You’re dead. You’re dead. They searched for nine days. There was a memorial. I gave a eulogy—”
“I watched it,” I said. “On television. In a hospital bed in Fort Collins. With a plate and six screws in my arm.”
He slid down the wall. Slowly. Until he was sitting on the floor of his own front hallway with his knees up.
He stared up at me like a child who’s seen a ghost.
“This isn’t real,” Emily said. Her voice was high and strange. “This isn’t—you can’t be—who are you?”
“You know who I am, Emily.”
“You fell. You fell thirty feet. You weren’t breathing.”
“I was holding my breath,” I said. “You asked Michael if I was dead. He said, If she’s breathing, we can’t risk it. So I stopped breathing. I lay there with my face in the pine needles and I didn’t move. Not when you talked about the money. Not when you said this way is cleaner. Not when the rock came down.”
Emily’s face went from white to gray.
“You’re confused,” she said. “You hit your head. Whatever you think you heard—”
“We say they slipped. Both of them. Tragic accident,” I said. “Those were your exact words, Emily. I’ve said them to myself every night for two years. I’m not confused about a single one.”
She stepped backward, through the wine, onto the broken glass. She didn’t seem to feel it.
On the floor, Michael made a sound. Like someone had punched him.
“Mom,” he said.
I looked down at him.
“Mom,” he said again. And then, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it: “Aiden?”
Of all the things he could have asked.
I reached into my coat pocket. I took out the folded piece of paper. I unfolded it.
The green crayon drawing. Two stick figures beside a big brown mountain. ME AND GRAMMA. WE DIDNT DIE.
I held it out.
Michael looked at it.
His face crumpled. Completely. Like a paper bag in the rain.
“He’s alive,” I said. “He’s six now. He has a scar on his collarbone and nightmares about the ground. He likes trucks and dogs and pancakes. He’s learning to read. He drew this for me last week, when I told him I was going on a trip.”
Michael put both hands over his face and sobbed.
“He heard you, Michael,” I said. “Lying there at the bottom of that ravine with a broken collarbone. He heard you say okay. He thought for a year it was a bad dream. It wasn’t.”
Emily turned around and ran.
Down the hallway. Toward the kitchen. Toward the back door.
She didn’t get far. Two deputies were already standing on the back patio. Ray had put them there an hour before I knocked.
I heard the back door open. Emily screaming. A deputy’s calm voice. “Emily Hartwell. Stop. Put your hands where I can see them.”
Then Ray Salas was standing on the porch behind me, with Maria Esparza beside him, and two more deputies coming up the walk.
Ray stepped past me, into the front hall. He looked down at my son sitting on the floor.
“Michael Hartwell,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Salas, Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. You’re under arrest for the attempted murder of Carol Hartwell and Aiden Hartwell. Also for forgery, theft, and fraud. You have the right to remain silent.”
Michael didn’t move. He just sat on the floor with his face in his hands and cried.
“Stand up, please, Mr. Hartwell.”
Michael stood. Slowly. Ray turned him around and put the handcuffs on him.
At the door, Michael stopped. He turned his head and looked at me.
“Mom,” he said. “I didn’t push you. I want you to know that. The ground gave way. I didn’t push you.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said. “The mountain did that. All you did was decide to leave me there.”
He opened his mouth.
“And then you came back down and asked if I was breathing,” I said. “And you rolled a rock.”
He closed his mouth.
The deputies walked him down the steps, past the brass lantern, down the long walkway to the patrol car at the curb.
He didn’t look back.
I stayed on the porch for a long time after they were gone.
Maria Esparza stood beside me. Neither of us said anything.
Inside the house, a deputy was taking photographs of the broken wine glass in the front hall.
“You okay?” Maria asked finally.
“No,” I said. “But I will be.”
I looked at the brass lantern.
“He asked about Aiden,” I said. “Of everything. He asked about Aiden.”
“I noticed that,” said Maria.
“I don’t know what to do with that.”
“You don’t have to do anything with it,” she said. “Not tonight.”
The next morning, at nine o’clock, I walked into Courtroom 4 of the Douglas County Courthouse in Omaha.
Ray had driven me to the Denver airport at four in the morning. Thomas Reinholt picked me up in Omaha. He walked me up the courthouse steps in his gray suit with his hand on my elbow.
Michael’s attorney was there, a man named Prescott, standing by the petitioner’s table with a stack of folders. He looked like he hadn’t slept. Somebody must have called him around midnight.
