“She’s not pretending—she really likes him, and he likes her!” I cried. “You didn’t see how she kissed him, Nora.”

“I haven’t met the guy, Adam,” Nora said. “Let’s leave who’s pretending, or not, for another day—okay, kiddo?”

“Okay,” I told her.

Naturally, I would find a way to ask my mom about those black-and-whites that were haunting me—whatever they were. One night I phoned my mother in Stowe—at her dormitory for girl jocks.

“This is Molly,” the night groomer said, and we went through our Adam the Kid routine before my mom came to the phone.

“Is this my Adam?” she said, as usual.

I didn’t tell her I’d been having dreams. I said I’d been seeing things—usually when I was somewhere between asleep and awake. I told her I’d been imagining black-and-white photographs of what looked like actual people, places, and occurrences.

“You’re being a little vague, sweetie,” my mother said.

“Before it was a ski town, Aspen used to be a mining town—right?” I asked her.

“Silver mining. Describe what you’ve seen, sweetie.”

I began with the guys in front of the shack, the stack of firewood, the bucksaw in the sawhorse; I didn’t get to the different kinds of hats and caps. “Sounds like a mining camp in the 1880s—the early days,” my mom said.

I got only as far as the mule train carrying heavy cargo above timberline—just the part about the narrow trail the mules and the wagons were on. “Sounds like Independence Pass—ore wagons, raw silver, going to Leadville over the Continental Divide,” Little Ray interrupted me.

I described the men, children, and dogs—their posing in front of the ramshackle buildings. I ended with, “Maybe it’s a mine.”

“Of course it is, Adam—it sounds like a daytime shift at the Smuggler Mine,” my mom told me.

I barely mentioned the two miners underground—the one with the sledgehammer, the other tinkering with what might have been an explosive device. “I’ve seen those two—they’re always setting the black-powder charges. Something must have gone wrong,” my mother said.

“You’ve seen them?” I asked her.

“I’ve seen their ghosts, sweetie—you’re seeing ghosts. This kind of ghost can’t hurt you,” my mom assured me.

“What about the well-dressed, bearded gentleman? He looks very refined; he looks brave but sad. Is he the kind of ghost who can hurt you?” I asked my mother.

“Poor Jerome,” my mom said softly. “Jerome B. Wheeler won’t hurt you.”

I knew then what the three-story brick building was, without asking. The massive-looking brick rectangle was the Hotel Jerome. I asked my mom about the horse-drawn wagon.