Laura had been having the same terrible nightmare at least once a week for ten years, since she was eleven. It started the summer her father had accidentally drown in the Pacific Ocean while they were at the beach house they had owned at Conchas Chinas Beach in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. For as long as she could remember the family - Laura, her father Brad and mother Joan, had gone to the beach house in Puerto Vallarta for two weeks every winter, leaving the day after Christmas and staying until the end of the first week of January. Laura had always loved the quiet, secluded beach and the wonderful little villa that they owned down there. The thing she loved most was that for those two weeks she had her Daddy's complete attention. He would play games with her, walk on the beach, shop in town, just be her Daddy. Brad Richards traveled around the world as a consultant and it seemed to Laura as if he was never home. When he was home he was shut up in his office. But for those two weeks, those two glorious weeks she looked forward to all year, he was only with Laura and her mother - no airplanes, no fax machines, no telephones.

Laura had awakened that terrible New Years Day morning eleven years ago when she heard two men speaking Spanish in loud voices. She had crept out of bed and listened at her partially open door. They were talking to her mother in the front hall of the villa. Laura's Spanish wasn't a good as her mother's but she understood that something was terribly wrong she heard her mother screaming "Debe ser un error.(It must be a mistake), el no puede ser muerto (he can not be dead), " in Spanish. One of the men responded in a grave voice, "Yo lo tengo miedo es verdad, Žl tiene se ahoga (I am afraid it is true, he has drown.) " Laura still remembered the way the cool tile floor felt on her bare feet as she ran into the hall and saw her mother leaning on the wall, sobbing.

The next few days were a blur, she remembered lots of somber Mexican men coming to the house. Later in the week she spent one afternoon in an official building in downtown where everyone was dressed in dark suits, and she had to wear the black dress her mother had bought for her. The official findings were that her father had drown while swimming alone at night in rough surf. The local medical examiner had found a large amount of alcohol in his blood and many people testified that he had been drinking heavily at the New Year's Eve party he and Joan had been attending. He had left the party before his wife and had obviously gone swimming alone in the middle of the night. He had most probably been caught in a rip tide and taken out to sea. His naked, lifeless body had been found at dawn several miles up the coast on the Playa de Oro by a tourist couple.

Laura wore the black dress again back in San Francisco when they had her father's funeral. He had been cremated and his ashes were buried in a beautiful cemetery just south of the city. Joan had sold the house in Puerto Vallarta the week after they returned and they never went back to Mexico. Joan even destroyed all the pictures and videos of the family in Mexico, she just couldn't look at them. Laura started having the nightmare about a month after coming back to San Francisco. She tried to talk to her mother about it but Joan refused to discuss the dream or the death of her father at all, she said it was just too painful.

......(cont)