His Dead Mother's Ashes

By Kimberly Larsen

After Nick's ninety-year-old mother passes quietly from a stroke, he inherits five acres and three homes outside Santa Fe without a clue as to what to do next. An old girlfriend from Colorado shows up to help him sort through closets and his life and figure out what to do next. Nick's infatuation with her escalates when she meets a handsome Mexican artist who has taken up residence in Santa Fe. Nick's past, which includes a murder that he might have been responsible for when he lived in Mexico but doesn't remember, as well as the case of one Jane Doe who was found in an alley after Nick spent a weekend in New Orleans, quickly catches up with him when the artist senses his new girlfriend may be in danger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662475382

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His Dead Mother's Ashes

Kimberly Larsen

Copyright © 2023 Kimberly Larsen

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 978-1-6624-7537-5 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-7538-2 (digital)

Cover Art by Ava Clark

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

About the Author

Chapter 1

His mother's ashes sat in the tin box in the middle of the bed inside the plastic envelope just as they were when handed to him by the woman at the mortuary. The box lay on top of the neatly-made bed where she'd spent her last night alive as if she might pull back the covers and turn in for the night with a cup of tea and a book. The pills on the nightstand told the story of her failing health. The old tube-type television remained perched on the swivel stand on the other side of the room. The remote on her bedside stand sat next to a lamp as if to suggest that her making a selection might still be an option.

Nick sat on the fainting couch at the foot of her bed, head in his hands, cigarette burning between his fingers, too close to his hair. It had been exactly seventeen months and he was still paralyzed. He couldn't strip the bed, couldn't move the box. He didn't really know where to put the box. What do you do with your mother when she is in such a state? he wondered almost out loud.

He lived in the house alone now. Well, almost alone if mother resting on the bed counted for almost another person. Her small five-foot-two frame; her long, slender fingers; her swollen calves; and her snow-white hair now condensed to a box that was barely a foot long and eight inches wide. She was gone, but she still spoke to him.

Nick's mother was born Klara Anne Müller on April 6, 1913, in Frankfurt, just before the great World War ravaged the country. She raised her son in the style of many German mothers who had no husband, with love but also with strict rules that she would ardently enforce. They used to argue in German, beginning when he was a teenager and later when Nick was an adult, the language to which they would often rudely switch when others were around and especially when he didn't want them to hear the hideous things he was saying to her. She didn't want people to hear it either, so she obliged, often apologetically to her guests when she switched back to English.

Now he wandered through the dark halls in the night after he'd downed one too many beers, cursing her and arguing with her still. She no longer had any control over him, and for this, he was glad. But in fact, she did.

He had abused her without a doubt, especially toward the end. She'd had no one else to watch over her with his stepfather gone. During that time, Nick finally had the chance to exert dominance, getting even with her for years of holding out on him, using her money to sway him to her will. Once she became frail, if she needed heavy things moved, or if she needed him to reach something out of her range above her head, she would call for him to help her.

Why do you need that anyway? he would ask, cynically. A crystal bowl for the gravy, and yet it's just the two of us. The two would square off until her piercing green eyes won as they nearly always did.

Klara loved crystal. She collected it when she was in Germany, fine crystal from throughout Europe. There was now a cabinet in the living room filled with the finest pieces, all of which she'd brought with her when they moved to America, those that he'd learned at an early age to identify as the real thing. She taught Nick the importance of learning the value and authenticity of not only crystal but other antiques as often sellers would show up at their shop in Frankfurt when his mother was out, and it would be up to him to determine whether or not to make the purchase.

He'd made a couple of mistakes to be sure, but for the most part, his insight was good. She'd taught him well. The crystal that now sat in the glass hutch with the dark wood and gilded, rounded edges was worth a small fortune as was the cabinet. Though he had no idea how and to whom he was going to sell it, at least he would know what he was talking about when the buyers showed up.

There were days in the shop when his purchases would amount to hundreds of dollars, especially when they got into buying antique clocks. Word spread quickly that they would buy them if they were in good shape, and soon, they had the best collection in town. The word also spread among military families living on a nearby base, and very soon, clocks were selling as fast as they could purchase, raking in thousands per week. When they moved to the United States, they had to decide which to part with and what to bring. Nick looked around his mother's home. There were clocks now on the walls of every room as well as two grandfather clocks from the eighteenth century in the foyer and the fireplace room. There was no longer a strong market for these antiquities, and he used the Internet for little other than playing chess. He had no idea how to research, how to post a listing online. He had taken photos to consignment shops where the owners all shook their heads in disbelief. These are museum quality and should just be donated, they all said.

Crystal had still been her favorite, and she wanted to use it for nearly every meal. But first, Nick would taunt her, taking her by her bony shoulders, gently pulling a wisp of gray hair out of her face with a smile, and then moving her to one side to get to the bowl that she'd had him place safely on the top shelf just the night before. He would set the bowl down on the counter—looking at her with still a smile in his eyes yet with his lips pursed, which was not a smile at all—and then turn to walk back to his room. She cooked all the meals in those last days and tended to the cleaning up afterward as well, and he let her, gladly.

He'd hated hearing his name, Nick! Nick! from down the hallway while he was engrossed in the play of his favored German futbol team. She disliked the fact that he spent most of his days locked in his room, smoking cigarettes and watching television, and would sometimes call him to her with the most trivial of requests, thinking that she might actually pull him away for a bit, perhaps engage him in a bit of conversation. It seldom worked, however, as he would come just long enough to satisfy her request before immediately retreating back into his private space. Now with her gone, he was free to stay in his room twenty-four hours a day if he wished!

Some days he did.

Nick looked over at the ash box on the bed, delicately filigreed, imagining what it must have been like to be the one to push her cold body into the hot oven. He thought then about how she'd lived through Nazi Germany where many of her family, friends, and neighbors who'd disappeared had likely experienced the same but that they'd been forced to walk into the incinerators perhaps holding the hands of their children, wives, or husbands to their own cremation. She'd often told him stories of the war and of the many friends who just one day went missing, including the story about getting lost while walking to school because the landmarks had been bombed and the corner store where she normally turned was but a pile of rubble.

A faint smile crossed his lips as he stubbed out his butt in the ashtray on the table by the couch, the one she would use when she smoked her weekly cigarette. She would always open the window afterward and fan the smoke out of her room, not wanting him to be aware that while she complained about his smoking, she was doing the same. Of course, he'd known, and as he sat there, he wondered why he never said so.

The bed was covered with mouse droppings. The tin box was surrounded as many of those curious mice had been crawling up and over it for months. There were little brown turds all over the nightstand among pill bottles, one opened and on its side, small pink capsules littering the glass top where many had certainly gone off and met their own fate after nibbling on blood pressure medication or sleeping pills.

He loved mice. He was curious about their ways, what it must be like to be one of the babies cocooned in the nest of straw and insulation and clothing remnants surrounded by siblings, warmed and loved by the mother—the love that his own mother stopped showing him after she met his stepfather. And so he couldn't bring himself to kill them. He let them wander freely through the house, down the halls at night, and on to the kitchen countertops where he intentionally left crumbs of bread so that the babies would be well-fed until they left the nest and learned to explore and forage for themselves. His mother had always insisted they set traps and made him do it as well as dispose of the bodies.

So take that, he said softly, his voice pointed at the box, eyeing the mouse shit, his eyes narrowing in disgust as he took in the scenario—the bed, the box, his mother. He envisioned what lay inside, although he'd never had the courage to open the box—dust, ash, pieces of bone, maybe an intact tooth. She'd purchased an urn and requested that he place her ashes there when she passed, but after her death and a particularly bad drunken night, he'd thrown it against the fireplace and it shattered into hundreds of pieces, most of which were still strewn about under the chairs and the couch. He'd stepped on a piece of it just the week before, sending blood squirting onto the precious rug that she'd purchased from an Afghani rug dealer, and he cursed her again.

He stood and left the room. The workers would arrive early in the morning, and it was well past midnight, so he went to find the now-warm beer that he'd left by his bed. He guzzled it, hoping that it might help him find the sleep which eluded him these days. He spent hours in bed, well past ten each morning, and people whispered that he was lazy, but it was actually for the lack of sleep and the nightmares.

Some were about Sarah. She was the subject of many of his bad dreams, or a version of her, in at least one of them weekly.

She was the girl that his mother told him he should marry and the one who he regretted not engaging almost forty years ago. At sixty, she seemed to be more beautiful than she did back then, just in different ways. Sarah was five-foot-three with a slender but muscular build—she'd continued to work out almost daily, and it showed. It was clear that she'd aged, but when he looked at her from a distance, he swore he saw the same young brunette that he'd first eyed out on the soccer field decades earlier.

Sarah's blue eyes rivaled his mother's gray-green in intensity, and she used them in the same cutting way as had his mother. Sarah wore her hair much shorter now. Out of convenience, she'd said. It was stylish and cute. That was it, he thought. She actually looked cute! She was out in the adjacent guesthouse at that very moment, sleeping soundly, and he could imagine her as she slept. Although when she was younger, she'd always slept in the nude, now she usually wore a very thin T-shirt and pajama shorts to bed. Nick had told her just the day before that she was the only one who really understood him.

"Sarah, you are the only one who really gets me these days," he said while she was making dinner for the two of them, standing in the same place his mother would stand to prepare his meals. He was sitting at the table fumbling with a cigarette, holding a warm beer.

Really, she'd said slowly as she turned to look at him, seeing a handsome but disheveled older version of the young soccer star she was once in love with, wondering what he meant by that. There was a smudge of toothpaste at the corner of his mouth that he knew was there but hadn't bothered to wipe away. Had he just brushed his teeth before dinner? She also wondered why he did not have a girlfriend. He was still quite good-looking with his curly gray hair, wide smile, and white teeth. He'd never gotten fat like so many of her girlfriend's husbands, and surely by now, he'd gotten over his problem down there. Hopefully, in the last four decades, he'd been able to work it out and was hopefully seeing women. She didn't know what he did with his days when he left the house—or his nights for that matter.

Sarah sincerely hoped he would find someone to settle down with finally, but something in her doubted this. He was a bit spoiled when she first met him, and was once again due to the money he'd inherited. The fact that he didn't work a full-time job and didn't live a productive life in any way that she could see really bothered her. Sarah had grown up working from the age of sixteen and had always worked hard, appreciating the work ethic that her grandfather had instilled in her quite young. That Nick chose to continually figure out ways to skate by, always on the knife-edge between poverty and success but never pushing himself hard enough to have a real career, would have also caused problems with them. She just never fully respected him and one day had to leave him because of that—and the other thing. His mother had been devastated and had called her out to the house to talk. She held one of Sarah's hands in hers and with the other, waved across the living room past the paintings, the clocks, and the antique furniture. She pointed to the cabinet that held the crystal.

This and more could all be yours. Please don't leave him.

Sarah breathed in Klara's gaze, sweetly explaining that they just hadn't been able to make it work. Fine, Klara had said, and that was that. And so it continued that through the years that since her own mother lived far away, Sarah would visit often, but only when Nick wasn't there. She would take Klara out on Mother's Day for brunch because Nick would not, and she would always bring her flowers. Sarah even sang a duet with a man she'd never met to a room full of people at Klara's ninetieth birthday party. One of Klara's friends, knowing of Sarah's intentions to sing, introduced them and suggested it might work.

They practiced together in secret in the guest bedroom for nearly an hour before making their appearance and announcement that they had a surprise for Klara. It had been Sarah's idea to sing Sinatra's Young at Heart, and she'd been practicing for weeks.

Thankfully she had been prepared, as later she realized she'd been gifted with a member of the Santa Fe Chorale to accompany her in the singing of this classic tune. Klara beamed during the performance as did everyone.

Sarah's relationship continued this way with Klara up until the day Klara died. Sarah was one of the first people Nick had called when one day, his mother simply went to sleep for the last time on an ornate sofa in front of the fireplace. They said later it could have been a stroke, but at her age, an autopsy made no sense.

Sarah was grateful that things turned out the way they did. That she'd met her now-ex-husband and moved to Colorado. That she had two beautiful girls that she likely would not have had with Nick, especially with his limited ability to be intimate and his lack of caring to work on it. He caught her glance and wondered what she was thinking but didn't ask as she had turned back to the counter to continue the dinner preparation, pouring herself another glass of wine.

His life actually disgusted her in a way now that she was back, Klara was gone, and seeing the person he'd become. She realized the situation that she'd put herself in on behalf of his mother, her mother too, in so many ways—and that th­e way he lived now was simply not healthy. He was quite unwell, and Klara would have been horrified to see him like this. Sarah would finish her work here soon and be gone. And Lord knows what will happen to him then, she thought. Sarah shuddered at the thought of what it might have been like to spend her life with this man.

Nick had reminded her that morning that she was the only one left in his life now who'd known him way back then and who had loved his mother like her own until the day she died. Although there was the German woman Dora, who Sarah recalled meeting at one of the fashion shows at the Hotel St. Francis where Klara had worked in her spare time as a model up until two years before she died. Dora had been a longtime friend and loved her equally, but Sarah didn't remind him of this. Dora hadn't spoken to Nick in years as she despised the way Nick had no respect for her friend, his mother. And yes, she understood the things that she overheard Nick say to Klara in German.

The last time Sarah had gone to one of the afternoon tea and runway shows—Dora had been there—Klara had worn a long denim skirt and turquoise boots, a soft white sweater, and a silver concha belt cinched snugly over the sweater and her slim waist. She was also wearing a silver-and-turquoise squash-blossom necklace that had a price tag of $2,000. Her white hair and sparkling eyes along with this upscale Santa Fe ensemble truly made her the belle of the ball. In her eighties, she could hold a runway walk better than some of the younger girls that were part of the show, and people murmured as she passed, exclaiming to each other how beautiful she was. Klara would turn and look directly at the women who she knew would be the likely ones to make a trip to the sponsor's stores, capturing their gaze with her own and holding it, her smile embracing them. The clothes, the belt, and the squash-blossom necklace were all loaned to the hotel by downtown shops for the show. Many times, it was Klara who would purchase the items, not a member of the audience. A lot of that jewelry was still hanging in her room and the clothes still in her closet.

Sarah had, just that day, taken some of Klara's gold jewelry to an appraiser, planning to pick it up the next morning. The woman told her that her first guess was that the value would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000. That was before Sarah found the envelopes of unset diamonds and other precious stones along with three gold necklaces tucked into a box at the back of an overfilled cabinet in the hallway.

Nick had really cared for Sarah and agreed with his mother that she should have been the one. There were still days that he beat himself up over letting her go. When he called her the morning of his mother's apparent stroke to tell her that she had stopped breathing, he couldn't bring himself to say she was dead. Sarah promised to come down as soon as she could. She had some things to wrap up in Colorado, but she would come. He looked forward to it and dreaded it all the same.

Nick had just seen her at his mother's ninetieth birthday party a few weeks prior, and she looked so beautiful. The party had been a smashing success. Klara in her typical style had dressed to the nines, as they say. Her white hair had been perfectly styled early that morning by her hairdresser from the runway shows. She wore a white silk shirt under a black jacket embellished with gold threads creating intricate patterns, and with her pointed black and gold shoes, she was the perfect picture of a lady of character and charm, charm that she exuded throughout her nine decades and to the very end.

Many of the guests lined up to take a picture with his mother, everyone except him. Nick sat out on the fringes of the party, sometimes hovering by the open door that led to the parking lot in the back so that he could leave when he needed a break. He preferred letting his mother do her thing. She had organized the party herself, hired an acoustic guitarist, invited who she wanted to see, and let him know who she did not want there as was her style, which included one of his recent girlfriends she'd only heard about but not met. She catered and paid for the event herself. Sarah took her turn in the photo line, the two of them holding each other and smiling at the photographer, although Klara's smiles for the camera were always insincere as she absolutely hated having her picture taken. Nick watched Sarah from across the room as she leaned into the camera with Klara, wondering what his life would have been like if he'd married her, then turned and went out to smoke another cigarette.

At one point during the evening, Klara took the microphone from the entertainer and asked everyone to come up and tell a story about how they met, adding, I know I'm not going to live much longer, and I don't want a funeral. I want to hear what you have to say about me now, not after I'm dead, which elicited hearty rounds of laughter from the crowd. She handed the microphone to Sarah who slowly, awkwardly described meeting her through Nick, with whom she'd played soccer. She omitted much of the rest but landed on the thing that Klara had told her when Nick moved out.

Klara called me up one day, Sarah said, and told me, ‘You may be breaking up with Nick, but you're not breaking up with me.' With this, everyone snickered and some looked over at Nick, who backed out the door, glaring at the crowd. He went to his car, plucked a rolled blunt from above the visor, puffed on it angrily, then got out, slammed his car door, and kicked the tire. He paced back and forth in the parking lot. Sounded just like something his mother would have said, he thought to himself.

Chapter 2

Sarah was here to help him now. He knew this, and he was glad. He didn't really understand why he treated her so badly—perhaps because she reminded him so much of his mother and that he could only argue with her in English, which frustrated him. He was being awful to her, and still, she stayed to help him. And the house—the house was a disaster. Over a year had passed, and it looked as if his mother had just thrown another one of her fabulous parties and forgotten to clean up, and yet Sarah didn't say a word.

He would bring boxes back from the liquor store after his daily trip to buy beer and cigarettes with the intention of cleaning a little himself, but the boxes lay stacked and strewn around the living room and he'd not filled a single one. Sarah never asked why Klara's ashes were still on the bed or what he planned to do with them or why the bed hadn't been stripped and the soiled sheets discarded almost two birthdays after her death. She never asked because she knew. She knew of his demons—well, some of them—and she felt sorry for him.

She'd come to help, she'd said, because his mother never would have let her while she was alive. Klara knew that Sarah had a busy life and didn't want to burden her with such things as closets that needed to be cleaned, although Sarah always offered when she was in town.

On the first day at Nick's, Sarah spent an entire day deep down inside kitchen cabinets dragging out old Tupperware and broken baking dishes and had found a mouse nest in the very back. She'd hired a woman to help her clean and organize, but after a full day of disgusting work, the woman disappeared without pay, never returned, and refused to pick up when Sarah called.

Sarah thought that by cleaning the place up,