The Color of Love (The Color of Heaven Series) (16 page)

I regarded my daughter curiously.

“She’s right,” Donna said. “Let’s take this discussion elsewhere.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

We followed Donna out and she led us to a lounge area outside the ICU with a television, sofas and some bookcases.

“What if that man doesn’t wake up?” Gladys asked. “How will I live with this?” She turned to me. “Surely this is enough evidence to make them send out more search parties. If this man is alive, that means he was in contact with Seth. What if he robbed him, or killed him?”

“He was probably on the plane with him,” Kaleigh suggested.

“That makes sense,” I said. “There were others as well. Two pilots and a couple of members from the film crew. I can’t remember their names, but I’m sure the local authorities can—”

“I can look it up on my phone!” Kaleigh offered, whipping it out of her pocket. “There were tons of news stories about it last year.”

“Good thinking,” Donna said.

As Kaleigh keyed in the information, I couldn’t help but glance back at the room where the mystery man was fighting for his life.

What must he have gone through?

My heart squeezed painfully in my chest.

Please God… He made it this far. Just let him live
.

o0o

By the time the RCMP officers arrived, we had already determined that the man in room 403 must be Aaron Cameron, a clinical psychologist who was widely known to be George Atherton’s personal therapist. The photos of him on the various websites were a dubious match to his current appearance, though we understood that he had changed drastically over the past year due to extreme weight loss and a weathered complexion.

The online articles reported that Dr. Cameron had taken a one-week vacation from his position as a clinical psychologist at a successful medical practice in Boston to be part of the documentary film crew.

Aside from the pilots, the only other passenger onboard, besides Seth, was a producer named Jason Mehta. Based on the photos online, we quickly reasoned that he couldn’t be the man who was found on the iceberg because Jason was East Indian with an olive complexion and jet black hair.

Two RCMP officers joined us in the visitor’s lounge to interview us about what had occurred.

“What led you to believe that the man who was brought in was Seth Jameson?” the female officer asked Donna.

“That’s what they told us on the phone,” the nurse replied.

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The rescue team that brought him in. They found Seth’s wallet and journal in his jacket. He also had a compass and a couple of ice climbing axes.”

“Would you be able to identify those as belonging to your husband?” the officer asked me.

“Not likely,” I replied. “I hadn’t seen him in a while. I don’t know what his climbing equipment looked like.”

The officer wrote that down, then addressed Donna again. “Do you have those personal items here at the hospital?”

“Yes.” She stood up. “I’ll go get them.”

Gladys raised the tissue to her lips and sat down on the sofa. “Dear God. This is a nightmare.”

Kaleigh slid closer and put her arm around her.

I wished in that moment that I had thought to ask to see the wallet and dog-eared picture of me before the RCMP officers arrived, as well as Seth’s journal.

God
, a journal. What had he written in it?

o0o

Donna returned with two climbing axes with yellow handles, and the compass, wallet and journal in a clear plastic bag. All this, she handed to the female officer, while the other officer left to verify Aaron Cameron’s identity and seek out and notify his next of kin.

The female officer emptied the bag and set everything on a table. “Would you mind coming to take a look?” she said to Gladys and me.

We both approached. I stared down at the brown leather wallet but didn’t recognize it—again because I hadn’t seen much of Seth over the past few years. But the compass had been a gift from me. With trembling hands, I slid it out of the leather case and turned it over.

So you’ll always be able to find your way home…

A lump formed in my throat as I slid it back into the case. “This definitely belonged to Seth,” I said shakily.

The officer flipped through the wallet and removed some credit cards, receipts, a few dollars and the photograph of me. When she laid those items on the table, something wrenched inside of me because the image was worn down to almost nothing. Perhaps it had gotten wet or had been exposed to the elements.

“That’s me,” I said, “and that’s Seth’s driver’s license.”

“What about this?” she asked, picking up the journal and handing it to me. “Would either of you recognize his handwriting?”

“Yes, we both would.” I took hold of the leather-bound notebook and opened it to the first page, where I saw the words:
Journal of Seth Jameson
, along with the date—only a few days after the crash.

When I turned the next page, however, I was shocked to discover an indecipherable jumble of words. I flipped through the entire journal and it was like that on every page. It took me a moment to understand that whatever had been written initially had been covered up by additional journal entries layered vertically over the horizontal lines.

“It’s going to be difficult to read this,” I said, “but it looks as if Seth’s entries are at the beginning, but later it changes to someone else’s handwriting—probably Dr. Cameron’s—and he ran out of pages so he started back at the beginning by turning the book sideways.”

I handed it to Gladys. “I’m not sure how much of this you want to read—it won’t be easy—but I’ll bet it contains all the answers we’re looking for.”

“This is still a missing person’s case,” the officer interjected, “so we’re going to have to keep that as evidence for the time being. It might lead us to your husband.”

“Will you send out another search party?” Gladys asked. “Now that we know where Dr. Cameron was found, it couldn’t be that far from where the plane went down.”

“I’ll call it in,” the officer replied. “We’ll see if we can get some choppers out there today.”

“Thank you,” Gladys said, breaking down again and turning away.

“In the meantime,” the officer added, “let’s keep hoping that Dr. Cameron will wake up, because outside of this journal—which looks like it’s written in code—he’s the only key to finding out what happened to that plane. And we’ll handle the reporters. We’ll put out a statement that it wasn’t your husband who was found.”

“Thank you,” I replied. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Kaleigh rise from the sofa and head out of the room. “Where are you going?” I asked.

She stopped and turned. “I’m going to go sit with him because he shouldn’t be alone. He needs somebody. Is that okay?”

I glanced at Donna for permission, and she smiled at Kaleigh. “That’s a great idea, honey. You go right ahead.”

Kaleigh left the lounge while I went to comfort Gladys.

“I don’t want to be here,” she sobbed into the tissue. “I need to go back to the hotel and lie down for a while.”

“I’ll take you,” I said.

“No,” she replied, “you should stay here in case he wakes up. He might be able to tell us something. I’ll take a cab, but call me if he comes to.”

“All right.” I helped her to stand and walked her to the elevator.

Chapter Forty-seven

I arrived back in room 403 to find Kaleigh standing over Dr. Cameron’s bed. She looked up at me when I entered.

“I’ve been talking to him,” she said, “and asking him to try and come back.”

“Come back from where?” I asked.

“From wherever he is right now.”

I was careful about how I responded. “Do you think he can hear you?”

“I don’t know,” Kaleigh replied. “He hasn’t moved or anything, but I read a book once about a woman who was in a coma and went to heaven where she saw her dead mom and her dead daughter. She came back after a week because she felt she still had stuff to do here. Her family was at her bedside the whole time and her old boyfriend came and played guitar for her. I wish I had
my
guitar. And I hope Dr. Cameron’s family can get here, but for now
someone
should be talking to him, or else he might just think there’s nothing to come back to and float away.”

I moved to stand beside her and stroked her hair away from her face. “Do you believe in heaven?”

“Yes.” She slid me a glance. “Do you?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “My mom wasn’t much of a church goer when I was a kid, but I do pray. I
want
to believe, but I guess I won’t really know until I see it for myself.”

Kaleigh thought about that for a moment. “But then you won’t be able to tell people what you saw, unless you die and come back to life. Maybe Dr. Cameron’s there now, and if he wakes up he’ll be able to tell us about it. I hope so.”

Now I understood why Kaleigh wanted to be here at his side. She’d always had an interest in otherworldly things.

“That would be interesting, if he could tell us,” I said. “What was the book called?”

“
The Color of Heaven,”
she replied. “I read it when I spent the weekend with Emma and Wendy at Aunt Nadia’s house last year. She had a bunch of books about heaven and other stuff.”

Aunt Nadia wasn’t really Kaleigh’s aunt—not by blood—but that’s what Kaleigh called her because she was like a sister to me and her Aunt Audrey. When my half-brother Alex died, he had donated most of his organs and Nadia had received his heart. There had been a strong bond between Nadia and Audrey from the moment they met because Audrey had been married to Alex.

“Did Gram leave?” Kaleigh asked.

“Yes. She was tired and went back to the hotel.”

“But
you
don’t want to leave, do you?” Kaleigh asked. “Because I’d like to stay.”

I couldn’t ignore the note of pleading in her voice, and besides that, I couldn’t possibly turn around now and go back to Boston, not when we still knew so little about what happened to Seth and what this man might know of it.

Gladys couldn’t let go of the hope that Seth might still be alive and part of me didn’t want to give up either, even though my gut was telling me it was a lost cause. Especially now that we had his wallet and journal.

Surely this man must know what happened.

I leaned over the bed and looked carefully at his face.

o0o

I should have thought of it when I walked Gladys to the cab, but after about a half hour I realized I hadn’t called Josh since we landed.

“Will you be okay here for a little while?” I asked Kaleigh. “I should call Josh and tell him what’s happened. I’ll have to go outside to use my cell phone.”

“I’ll be fine,” she replied, digging into her bag for her book. “I’m going to read to him now.”

“That’s a great idea.”

I left the room, rode down the elevator and exited the hospital into a private courtyard where there were no reporters. Outside the sun had come out from behind the clouds which lifted the temperature a few degrees above freezing, causing the icicles that hung from the roof to melt and drip on the snow-covered ground.

Choosing a bench in the sunshine, I sat down and dialed Josh’s number. He answered right away.

“Hello?” The sound of his voice made me nervous for some reason.

“Hi, it’s me. I’m at the hospital.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to call,” he said with a sigh of relief. “How’s Seth doing?”

I leaned back on the bench. “Well…none of this has turned out exactly the way we were expecting. As soon as we arrived, we came straight to the hospital, but it wasn’t even Seth they found on the iceberg. It was someone else. It’ll probably be on the news soon.”

“You’re kidding me,” Josh replied. “How could that happen?”

“I’m not sure, because this man hasn’t woken up yet, but he had Seth’s things. We looked up the crash from a year ago and we’re pretty sure he was on the plane. His name is Aaron Cameron and he’s a psychologist.”

“So he survived the crash…?”

“For a whole year,” I replied, “but I’m not hopeful that Seth was that lucky. If he was still alive, why would this man have his wallet and journal?”

“Have you looked at the journal yet?” Josh asked. “Maybe it will tell you something.”

“The RCMP took it as evidence,” I explained, “but they’re also sending out some helicopters to search the area where they found Dr. Cameron. I hope we’ll know more soon. In the meantime we’re not ready to come home yet. We still need answers.”

“Of course,” he said. “I understand. Do what you need to do, but keep me posted.”

“I will.” I glanced back at the hospital doors. “I should go back inside now. Kaleigh’s glued to the man’s bedside and I want to make sure she’s okay.”

“What do you mean?”

I let out a sigh. “She’s always been fascinated with the afterlife. I think she believes she can help him come back from the light—if you know what I mean. I just don’t want her to get her hopes up that there’s some kind of miracle happening here. That man has been alone in the wilderness for a year. He might wake up and be a little crazy, or mean and ornery.”