Crossing Over Page 12

  “He’s making me feel like you’ve had a continued kind of affinity with his energy since his passing.” This brought a pained smile through her tears.

  “His actions brought about how he passed. Are you aware of that? He put himself at the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s how he’s coming through. . . . He’s showing me a ring. Were you guys talking about getting married, or talking about engagement?”

  Nicole couldn’t speak. Judy, sitting behind her, reached out and held her hand. “I know this is hard,” I told Nicole. “He’s telling me to talk to you about the ring. Now, this was a situation he should not have been in, correct? Just yes or no, if you can.” Again, Nicole nodded through her tears. “He shows me that this is a fast passing. It’s like one-two-three. What impacted his body?”

  “He was out, uh, on his boat out here on the bay,” Nicole said, barely above a whisper. “And, uh, shot.”

  I thought, wow, right here on this bay? I knew Nicole was from California. Now Roger showed me the boat and gave me a very warm feeling. “That boat was his baby,” I told Nicole. She smiled. Roger practically lived on his boat, she explained later. To him, a perfect life would be spent on the water, fishing.

  “He’s showing me the number two.”

  “He died on the second. In May. A year and a half ago.”

  “He’s showing me pink roses. When I see pink roses, that’s their way of expressing their love . . . He’s showing me that it was a struggle for you to be together. Like something pulled you guys apart. . . . Was he supposed to come out to you by June?”

  “That’s when he was supposed to move.”

  As Nicole later explained, her boyfriend, Roger, was from Tampa and was waiting for a job transfer to San Francisco, where she lived. They worked for the same San Francisco-based company and had met in the fall of 1996, when Roger came out for a business meeting. They clicked immediately, and when he went home to Florida, they began just about as long a long-distance relationship as you can have without leaving the continental United States. They talked three times a day, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and once during the workday. They saw each other when Roger came to the West Coast on business, and twice when Nicole went to Tampa to visit him. In Florida, they spent almost all their time on Roger’s boat. He loved being on the water. He told Nicole that he would be perfectly happy to quit his job and work as some captain’s first mate. Roger was the company’s national sales director, working out of his home. The head of the company had been talking about moving him to San Francisco. Roger didn’t like the idea. He had grown up in the Southeast, played football at Florida State, and stayed put. He liked his life on Tampa Bay and wasn’t a big-city boy. But when Nicole entered the picture, he really had a conflict.

  Nicole and Roger’s relationship was like something from Guiding Light. They’d had to keep their romance secret because the boss, a man in his fifties named Bert, had a thing for Nicole and made it known within the company that nobody could date her. He told people that she was “my girl,” even though he was married, twice her age, and Nicole made it clear that she had zero interest in him. When Bert found out about Roger’s relationship with Nicole, around Christmastime, he ordered him to stay away from her. And suddenly his plans to bring Roger to the home office were put on hold.

  Now things started to get weird. When Roger came home with Nicole after a business meeting in Seattle, they found Bert the boss waiting for them outside Nicole’s apartment. That’s when Nicole started thinking about a sexual harassment case. But she couldn’t convince Roger that she wasn’t somehow encouraging Bert. After all, he was a rich, charming, powerful guy. “No man in his right mind would act this way toward a girl unless he thought there was a chance,” Roger told Nicole. After that day, the air seemed to come out of the romance. It wasn’t over—Nicole hoped this was just a bump in the road, that Roger would eventually move west and things would work out. She kept an eye out for an apartment for him.

  One Tuesday night at the end of April 1997, Roger called Nicole in what struck her as a strangely serene mood. “He said, ‘You know what? All I want to do is enjoy myself and be happy, because all the other stuff doesn’t matter, the stuff at work, the confrontations. Just be a seaman somewhere and sail away.’ And that’s the last thing he said to me. And I think, wow, it’s almost like he knew. You look back on things. I was flying to Orange County for my girlfriend’s wedding two nights later, on Thursday at around eight o’clock. I had a very warm sensation, and I started crying on the plane. I looked out on the water as I was flying in, and there was this boat with all these lights, and I felt something and thought of him. I was upset about how things had gone the last few months, but this was different. I had a very strange feeling, one of those things you can’t explain and don’t think about until after the fact. I found out later this happened at just about the time they determined he died.”

  That night in May, Roger had gone out into the Gulf, a longer trip than his twice-daily jaunts around the bay. He never came back. The Coast Guard found his empty boat the next day. His body didn’t surface for another eight days. There was a fatal bullet wound in Roger’s temple, and the death was ruled a homicide. The FBI took over the investigation because the boat had been found in international waters, but the case hadn’t been solved. Roger offered no clues from the other side, other than to say he had put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nicole found this comforting, because it allayed some troubling suspicions she’d had about who might be responsible.

  After Roger’s death, Nicole was struck by the possibility that her boss might have been involved. He had fired her a few weeks after the death—they were making changes in the company, he said—and her family thought it was all too strange. But Nicole never shared her suspicions with investigators. “I was just a mess. I couldn’t do anything,” she said. She told me later that when I started reading her, all she wanted to know was: Did he do it? If he did, she would feel some responsibility, not just for what had happened, but also because she hadn’t told the FBI investigators the whole story. So Nicole was more than happy to take Roger’s message to mean that he had unwittingly gotten in the middle of something out on the water. Maybe he had stumbled onto someone’s drug deal, or had some kind of confrontation with another boater. From Nicole’s description, though, the second possibility didn’t seem likely. She described him as a sweet, easygoing guy, which is the way he came across to me.

  While I was connecting with Roger, he gave me no clue who had murdered him, only that he had gotten himself into a wrong place-wrong time situation. I’ve gotten that kind of message countless times, for both murders and accidents, and it wasn’t very specific. It could mean that the person had taken a foolish risk, or had simply walked into something. With Roger, my medium’s interpretation was that it wasn’t sinister or premeditated—more like an accident. But when Nicole told me the story, my human reaction was the same as a lot of people’s. I didn’t know the answer to this mystery. But I can’t rule out the possibility that Roger simply didn’t want to stir things up for Nicole. He knew she needed to find some peace and move on with her life. That would be consistent with the outlook of those on the other side. And one thing Roger was less ambiguous about was the one other thing Nicole needed to hear: that he now knew that she had been telling him the truth when she told him she considered Bert nothing but a nuisance. “He’s coming across in a way to say to you he might not have appreciated who you were in his life, at the time,” I had told her during the reading. “And that he can see that differently now.” The whole tenor of the few minutes Roger, Nicole, and I spent together was one of comfort and reassurance. Of course, that’s not unusual. Most readings are about comfort and reassurance. But this was not like most readings. Whether it was a case of truth withheld out of love, we’ll probably never know. As far as I know, Roger’s murder is in the FBI’s cold-case file.

  Nicole was a very professional young woman, a private person
who kept control of her emotions and tended not to share her personal life with many people, especially those she worked with. So nobody on the set knew anything about all this except Chad. But now we all realized how hard this had to have been for her. One of the marketing guys told us that he had given Nicole a ride from the hotel to the set that day, and took a back route along an inland channel where they had come upon a sign saying manatees could be seen at that spot. He stopped the car and they went down to the water, where there was a big gathering of these funny-looking sea mammals splashing around.

  Manatees, also known as sea cows, are an endangered species, adored around Tampa Bay, where “Save the Manatees” is a common battle cry. It’s said that ancient sailors, including Christopher Columbus, thought manatees were mermaids—a mistake that could only be made by men who have been at sea for six months. Manatees can weigh a ton, and they look like hippos with flippers. They’re as gentle as puppies, and they like to play with people in the water, especially if those people scratch their enormous round bellies, for which they might get an actual sea cow kiss. You can’t help but smile when you see a manatee. But when Nicole saw them in the channel that morning, the big, wet lugs seemed to turn her somber.

  Nicole explained why. “The manatees were like our special animal,” she said. “Roger was a really sweet, sensitive guy, and he had a thing for manatees. He would get mad at all the boats in the waterways because the manatees were so slow they couldn’t get out of the way of the propellers. And so when I came to Tampa for the first time, he taught me about them. We went and looked at some, and I started to fall in love with them. After that they represented us being together. We would send each other manatee cards, manatee stuff. So whenever I see a manatee, of course I think of Roger.”

  We realized that Nicole must have been upset since the moment Chad had first mentioned shooting the infomercial in Tampa. “I didn’t want to interfere with the shoot,” she said. “I didn’t say anything to Chad. But when it kept coming back to Tampa, I was thinking, Why does it have to be there? Why can’t it be someplace else?”

  Now we knew, of course, why it had to be Tampa. And why all those great Caribbean locations kept falling through. And it had to be that Nicole was out on the dock, looking out across the endless stretch of water where Roger slipped across to the other side, just as he was inside with me, breaking through the curtain.

  “He’s not in a bad spot, even though he had a horrendous passing,” I told Nicole at the end of the reading. “He’s making me feel like he had to interrupt what we were doing today to get me to do this, because this has been a very painful experience for you, being back here and having to do this. He recognizes that. You’re trying to do this, be a trouper, be a professional, but he’s aware and he appreciates it. He wants you to know your thoughts and feelings are being heard.”

  “Is that why you were pointing out that way, because I was sitting outside?” Nicole asked after Roger pulled back and she was finally able to speak.

  “I was totally being pulled out there.”

  Nicole told me that when we had first met in California, she had hoped something like this might happen—her fears about who had murdered Roger were tearing her apart. But by the time we got to Tampa, she had changed her mind. She didn’t want to bring her personal life so openly into work. And she was afraid of what she might hear. So she had made sure to stay outside during the taping. And when she heard the words “impact to the head,” she thought, Oh, shit.

  Nicole dabbed her tears. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said.

  “Oh, please don’t be embarrassed,” I told her.

  “This is a special delivery,” Judy assured her.

  “Oh, major league special delivery,” I agreed.

  Chad suggested that we take a few minutes to break the tension of what had been a powerful experience for all of us. Nicole unhooked her mike and stood up, and without a second’s hesitation started walking back toward the door through which she had come. She sat down and peered across the bay, completely lost in thought. And then she got back up and started walking toward the wood stairway to the beach, and then out to the pier. “I had this overwhelming feeling, a pull that brought me out to the dock,” she would recall later that day. Nicole made her way slowly, barefoot, to the end of the dock. Chad saw her out there and had a cameraman film a long shot from the house. He couldn’t resist capturing footage of this beautiful woman in this heartbreaking, contemplative moment at the water’s edge. It might have seemed like an invasion, but there was a reason the cameraman made the shot.

  When Nicole came back to the house, she had an amazed look on her face. It seemed that she was crying again. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “When I got to the end of the dock, I was standing there thinking about Roger, wishing there was some way he could give me a sign that it was all true. At that moment, I looked down into the water right in front of me, and there was a manatee. He lifted his lips out of the water and looked right at me. Then he swam away. I felt it was him saying good-bye, and I could have some peace. If there weren’t all these people here, I swear I would have jumped in with him.”

  A skeptic might say, well, this was Tampa Bay. It’s nothing special to see a manatee there. Yes, except for this: As a member of the endangered species list, the warm-water manatee is scarce enough in summer. This was February. It’s a good winter if there are a couple of hundred of them in the entire four hundred-square-mile bay. And, as the owner of the house told us, those few will not be found anywhere near the cold waters where we were. They winter together in the only places they can survive, in the inland channels where Nicole had seen them earlier, and in the spa-like waters around factories and power plants way on the other side of the bay. No wonder Nicole’s manatee just said a quick hello and turned around. He must have been freezing.

  Now everybody needed a drink. We piled into a car—Chad driving, Nicole in front, Judy and me in the back The radio was on with the volume low, the music drowned out by our excited talk about what had just occurred. My ears, as you might imagine, are supersensitive, and I’m often saying to people I’m with, “Did you hear that?” As we were driving to the restaurant, I thought that there was something outside the car that we needed to hear. “Listen,” I said. “Shh.” Chad thought I was trying to hear something on the radio. So he cranked it up.

  “What’re you doing?” I blurted.

  “I thought you wanted to hear it.”

  “No, it’s outside . . .”

  And then we all heard it. It was inside the car. A slow, sentimental ’70s melody floating from the radio speakers, and the words from a high-pitched Motown man’s voice: I had to meet you here today . . . There’s just so many things to say . . . Please darlin’, don’t you cry . . . Let’s just kiss and say goodbye.

  Everybody in the car lost it. I’m leaking tears, Judy is speechless. Nicole is on her second box of tissues. We just sat there listening to the Manhattans singing the rest of “Kiss and Say Goodbye.”

  As the sun was going down that evening, I thought about how Elmer Fudd had tried to get me to make the host cry like I’m Barbara Walters. Now all I could do was laugh and shake my head at the spirits’ superb sense of irony. Elmer couldn’t have asked for a more emotional scene to sell these products if he had staged it himself. And that’s exactly what he thought I had done with Nicole. “Was that a setup?” he asked me later. Yes, and she’s Reva Shayne and I’m Otto Preminger. And the manatee was remote controlled. But he made my point for me: Souls in spirit are truly amazing. It’s as if Roger wasn’t just coming through for Nicole. He was bringing an even bigger message from the other side: Don’t mess with this.

  It’s funny. I cringe at the slightest suggestion of manipulation on my end. But I never stop marveling at how often and how intricately the spirit world orchestrates things. Even as I was spurning this guy’s shameless nudge to use his hired hand to stage manage reality, a spirit was working overtime to arrange a truly awesom
e One Last Time for someone else on the set. I can only smile when some cynic thinks I’m making it up. Our people on the other side come up with stuff I couldn’t even dream of.

  THAT WHOLE THING WITH NICOLE—that was really impressive. Even after sixteen years of hanging out in the intercosmic air space between the physical and spirit worlds, and after making a career of it for six, I’m neither blasé nor jaded. Hardly a week goes by when I’m not in awe of something that happens around me. And when it’s one of those extraordinary, unforgettable experiences like that day on Tampa Bay, I feel honored to be a part of it. It’s not a case of Wow, look at what I just did. Sometimes I really amaze myself. I don’t see it as something I did. I see it as something they did. I’m just lucky they chose me as the conduit. After all, I’ve never been able to come up with a satisfying explanation of why I have this ability. And that’s the only thing I call it. An ability—not a gift. As I see it, the only gift is the privilege of participating in a circle of energy from God Himself. I receive, interpret, and deliver messages from the spirit side to a recipient on this side. The recipient understands, accepts, and appreciates these messages. And that appreciation rebounds back to the other side. It’s the completion of the energy circle that is the real gift.

  When I have one of those rocking moments, I feel like an archaeologist who’s made a big find. He’s studied his field, he works hard at it, he knows where to look and what he’s looking for. But in the end, it’s pure blind luck that he’s the one who discovers the 780,000-year-old elephant buried beneath the banks of the Jordan River. Everyone who watches the Discovery Channel gets to hear about it and see pictures, but he was there, he’s the one who had the exhilaration of touching it first, of being the one who brought it up from the burial ground. He’s the one who got to dust off the treasure and describe what it was and what it might mean. So that’s me: Indiana Jones, wondering what I might happen onto when I start digging today. And thanking God for letting me do it.