**********
There was a bench just outside the police department, and that was as far as I got. My strength was gone, and it had nothing to do with my disease. The sky was overcast, but it might as well have been a foreign planet with toxic air, because my lungs had shut down, and it was all I could do to gasp like a fish on sandy shore. The words made no sense. I saw her drown. I knew it. But even as I tried to call it to mind, the water became hazy, like a picture out of focus, static flashing across a TV screen that can’t quite grab the channel. I looked down at my palms. They were trembling, not from the cold but from the discovery that I had been lied to my entire life. The thought broke through my mind in one sure moment of clarity.
Jackie is alive. My sister is alive.
The door to the precinct swung open with a vacuous whooshing sound. I could see Uncle Shane, but I could not process his presence. Thoughts raced through my mind at speeds I could not fathom. How much of my life had been messed with? What else was false? Where was she? Why did I think she had drowned? Then the leather glove flashed in my mind, and I nearly screamed out because it felt real as it clamped over my mouth.
“Lindy, I need to explain,” Uncle Shane said as he neared me. He had gone through negotiator training in his early days on the force, and I could hear the trained control in his voice. I tried to see his intentions, read the emotion on his face, but my mind was too jumbled. My reality had been tossed in a blender, and I could not find my way out of the mush.
I buried my face in my hands, fingers pressed in at my temples to stop the chaos that had been unleashed. “What can you explain, Shane? Where is she? Why do you have a file on Jackie?”
Uncle Shane eased slowly to the bench and sat beside me. “What do you remember?”
“I remember the lake. I remember her drowning.” My volume rose with my anxiety. “But that can’t be true, can it? She did not drown, so why do I remember it? Why do I remember a funeral? Who is in that casket?”
Uncle Shane’s voice remained calculated and even despite my hysteria. “There is no casket. Your parents told you a story so that you would have closure.” He tried to set a hand on me, but I moved from his touch as if he were poisonous. I could not read much, but I could see the pain in his eyes.
With the tranquility of a creekside meadow, Uncle Shane asked again. “What else do you remember?”
Violent images flashed through my mind: a leather-gloved hand, Jackie’s screams, and a blast of cold air. My body jerked against the thoughts, and I pressed my hands over my ears to eliminate the screams from my mind, but they were ingrained, like the words on Jackie’s tombstone.
Uncle Shane’s hand gripped mine, and he slipped an arm around my back. Even with all my anger, I could not resist the comfort of my favorite uncle. So there on that bench, Uncle Shane unloaded the secret he had carried for most of my life.
“You were 4 when it happened. You lived in California, and it was summertime. The nights were hot there, and your parents often left your window open to keep your room cool. I warned your father that it was not safe, especially with your room facing the street, but he told me I worried too much because of my work.”
His words were soft, like a father telling a bedtime story to his child. But this was no bedtime story. There was no fairy-tale ending where the family lived happily ever after. This was a cautionary tale that people told so that no one else would have to go through the same heartache.
“Your father was pretty sure they came through the window, just popped the screen off and stepped through. Eleanor, still a toddler, was in your parents’ room. So it was just the two of you in your bunk bed. They had Jackie in mind from the beginning. We know that now, but at the time we did not understand why they left you and took her. Your father heard Jackie’s screams, but he didn’t get there before the car was already leaving. All he found was you, catatonic from fear, frozen in your bed.”
My tears had started soon after Uncle Shane began speaking, and my hands had not stopped trembling. I was not sure I could trust my voice, but I tried anyway.
“I should have screamed. I should have bitten him or gouged his eyes out. I let them take her. I let them steal my sister.” My desperate words caved into racking sobs of grief and guilt.
Uncle Shane’s palm smoothed the length of my hair as he tried to comfort my despondent soul. “You were 4, Lindy. You can’t think like that. It was beyond traumatic for you. You can’t assign your rational thoughts as an adult to the mind of a 4-year-old.”
I pulled myself free of his grasp, a question clear in my mind. “But the lake, why do I remember the lake?”
Shame pulled my uncle’s face downward. He had not divulged the hard part yet. The lake was the secret he did not want to tell.
“You have to understand how frantic your parents were. They had lost Jackie with no trace of her anywhere. They spent every penny they had searching for her. You have to believe they tried. But with no ransom note and not even a license plate to go on, the trail was cold.” His face turned ugly as my strong uncle fought the urge to cry. “And then they had you, damaged beyond belief, unable to sleep, scared to come out from under the kitchen table, and you never stopped crying.”
His words knocked a memory loose. I could see the hardwood of a kitchen floor, the table legs in front of me. I had clutched my knees to my chest and rocked back and forth, whispering her name. But where had this memory been? The house did not feel familiar, not even the table was right. Was I still doomed to a melting reality, a blurred line between what was authentic and what was fake?
“They took you to therapists, psychologists, even a psychiatrist who tried a myriad of drugs on you. But nothing. You did not speak for an entire year, Lindy. I need you to understand how desperate they had become. To lose one daughter to villains and to be robbed of another daughter’s spirit was more than they could take in their state of mind.”
Uncle Shane took a deep breath before he began again. “There was this doctor who had studied the science of implanted memories for years. Though he had not shared the findings with the scientific community, he had managed to implant a new memory in a mouse. He had suffered a lot of abuse as a child, and it was his dream to be able to erase or overwrite memories so they would not carry the burden through their lives.”
I could not believe what he was suggesting. To treat a human brain as if it were a VHS tape, to pop it in the VCR and record a reality TV show right over Grandma’s ninetieth birthday felt wrong.
I voiced my argument quickly. “Children are resilient. I could have bounced back. Science shows us that children can experience major trauma better than some adults. Yes, they have psychological scars, but they can recover.”
Uncle Shane was already shaking his head. “In some cases, yes, that is true. But it was not true for you. Something snapped in your brain, and you did not recover.”
“Maybe I needed more time. There are other children who go through worse things than I did. Maybe with a little more time, maybe—”
His voice was sharp for the first time. “You were too weak, Lindy. Those other children that go through worse things, some are stronger than you were. I hate to say it, but you were weak, and you broke.”
His eyes squeezed shut at the memory, the pain and heartache too real for him. “Your mom and dad were weak too, and even though I told them it was a bad idea, they let this doctor, Dr. Meinren, conduct experimental memory implantation on you.”
My stomach churned. I felt violated, as if my life were no longer my own. “But why give me a drowning memory? Why not erase Jackie altogether?”
Uncle Shane’s gaze drifted to the ground. “There were too many memories attached to Jackie. All Dr. Meinren could do was a targeted strike, and he was not even sure he could do that. The first memory he tried to implant was a happy one, but you would not accept it. That new memory nearly drove you mad.
So, your parents came up with another memory, the story of the lake and Jackie drowning. Orig
inally, you were on the shore with your parents, something that really happened frequently at your age, so it was acceptable. But as they rehearsed the story, as the memory-regression therapy continued, you changed it.”
His lips trembled for a moment before he broke down completely. “You changed it so that you were in the water with her. You made it your fault. You wouldn’t believe it until it was your fault.”
It was my turn to give the comfort, though I was in no state to do so. But my Uncle had watched for years. He had taken me under his wing and loved me as his own. To carry such a secret for so many years was a terrible burden to bear.
“How long did it take?”
He ran his palm over his face and took another breath. “You were in Germany for a full year. I did not see you again until you were 6.”
“Germany? I don’t remember being in Germany.”
“There were issues with your memory at first, side effects of what they had done. For a while it looked like you might not ever store memory again, but your parents didn’t care. You were talking again. They had one daughter back, and it was a victory.”
He suddenly looked so old, so worn, and I could see why he was willing to consider retirement. He had seen so much, experienced too much heartache. He needed an end in sight.
“Dr. Meinren was worried that your return to the States might trigger the old memories. So your parents sold the house, moved to a new town, hid pictures of Jackie and did everything they could to protect you.”
The breeze picked up and the air turned chilly for a moment. “They told you the story of her funeral so many times that you created the memory yourself.”
“But how—how did he implant the memory? It can’t be possible, Shane. It sounds like something out of a horror movie.”
“Meinren tried to publish his findings, but there were complications, ethical questions at the time about his procedures and the risk to patients. He lost his license and committed suicide only six months after your recovery. All the evidence died with him.”
“Risk to the patients? Were there others? What did he do to me?”
“He tried to help another child, because you were such a success. But during the part of the procedure that involved cutting away a portion of the skull,” I gasped at his words, “the other little girl did not make it.”
I was hyperventilating. The idea of my skull cut open by some crazy scientist poking around in my brain was more than I could handle. With my fingertips vibrating like a tuning fork, I slipped my hands into my hair. There was that cowlick, that one part of my hair that had never grown quite right. I found it quickly, and then I felt the smooth line of a scar, the incision where Dr. Frankenstein had brought me back to life.
“I know this is a lot, Lindy, but I remember when I picked your family up from the airport. You were smiling, happy for the first time in nearly two years. I was against it from the start, but to see you as yourself again—I have never felt joy like that since.”
I steeled myself against the story. I knew how to compartmentalize, how to box up information and shove it where I could not reach it again. But there was one last question.
“Where is Jackie now?”
There was only sadness in Uncle Shane’s eyes. “I don’t know. I have been searching for her your whole life, and I have not found her. It’s the only reason I haven’t retired.”
Chapter 13
I ran over the details as I drove home, eager to find myself in a safe place. Uncle Shane had chased dead lead after dead lead for nearly a decade before he stumbled upon information.
While working a separate case, he learned of a couple who had bought their child from a dealer, like a black-market adoption. The child had lived only 10 miles from my family’s address. The details matched almost exactly as far as the abduction had gone.
The couple had tried to adopt through conventional channels, but after the fifth foster child had been returned to the same rotten parents they had come from, they became desperate. They heard through a friend of a friend, you know the way that goes, that there was a man who connected happy families with children who needed a home, for a steep price.
They were clueless as far as the abduction went. They had always assumed they had rescued some homeless child off the street. Uncle Shane followed the lead to the end of the trail, but it went cold. The only other clue he had found was that the man who arranged the connection between children and their new homes was called St. Anthony. Upon more research, Uncle Shane found that St. Anthony was the patron saint of lost things, a slap in the face for a kidnapper to assume the name, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I collapsed onto my couch and wished I could just fade away into the cushion forever. There was no promise, but I could feel it in my heart that Jackie was alive. My big sister was alive. The thought crushed and exhilarated me at the same time. Like two emotions grabbing hold of my heart and running in opposite directions. Where was she? Who was she? And worst of all, how could I ever find her?
My phone rang, and I quickly answered it.
“Hello?”
Kip’s voice was unmistakable. “You know, you’re still bad at returning phone calls.”
Suddenly I remembered Kip’s voice mail that I had ignored. With the case and then the news about Jackie, I had totally forgotten about it. “I’m sorry, Kipper. It’s been crazy around here. What have you found?”
He was not one to hold a grudge. “I found that couple you asked about, Hannah and Joel. They do work for The Hope Affiliates, and from what I can see, they’re on the up and up. The group does humanitarian work all over the country. They organize charity fundraisers for underprivileged children. And that is on top of the normal congregational services. I could not find anything criminal about them.”
He hesitated for a moment before adding, “Well, there have been employees who have been less than honest, but that is in every company. The Affiliates, in general, is clean.”
I was not willing to accept it at face value. “These employees, what were the crimes?”
I could hear him flip pages as he searched for the information. Kip liked to use yellow legal pads for everything he did. I remembered the stacks of used yellow sheets and the way they had cluttered his desk.
“Embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, petty theft, and fraud are a few of them.”
“All one person?”
“No. A few choice souls are listed, but not the names you had me look up. Close as I can tell, those two are model citizens.” Paper shifted again as he searched out his information. “Joel got a degree in theology at a seminary in southern Texas. He met Hannah there. She was a double major in theology and art history. They were married two years later.”
It was not the news I was hoping for. “Anything else?”
“I went over everything that might be related to them. I found the Edwards on a lot of emergency contact lists, I’m assuming for their parishioners. When I dug deeper, it looked as though every person they were listed for is dead now.”
His chuckle was slow and nervous. “I wouldn’t let them be on my list. That’s for sure.”
My patience faded slightly, and I began doodling on a pad of paper on the coffee table. “I already knew that.”
“Did you know that the lawyer connected to all the wills is the same lawyer?” he asked.
I knew the lawyer had been a part of it, but I did not know that he had been the same throughout.
Kip took my silence as a victory, but didn’t gloat. “His name is Trevor Cripley. Passed the bar exam fifteen years ago and has been practicing ever since.”
“Great. How do I get in touch with him? I have a few questions.”
“That’s just it, Lindy. I can’t find an address, phone number, or what firm he works for. All I could find was his name and signature.” Before I could question him, he emphasized, “And you know how hard I look.”
“I know, Kip. Thank you for everything.”
“One last thing. A
ll those deaths, every one of them had medications in common, which was not strange at first glance. They were all pretty old, so heart medications, blood pressure, even some supplements, all that is typically pretty uniform. But something caught my eye.”
I knew it before he said it. “They were all on Sodexus, right?”
“No,” he corrected. “Some were on Sodexus, some were on Derisidam, and a couple had Tacicisine in common.”
He could sense my confusion. Sodexus was my link. If I lost that, what did I have?
“Lindy, don’t you ever watch TV?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “The drug commercials show all the happy people flying kites and sailing on a blue lake, and then the guy with the fast voice reads all the legal speak about how dangerous the drugs really are. You know, those?”
He had just described nearly every pharmaceutical company’s commercial.
“Yea. What about it?”
“What comes after the legal speak?”
It took me a moment to picture it, and then I saw the connection. “The pharmaceutical company’s logo. All these drugs are from the same company.”
“Bingo. They are all the products of Pharmaco.”
I felt some sort of triumph in my gut. The Edwards were not out of my grasp just yet. “Thank you, Kip. That gives me something to go on.”
My pleasure gave him pleasure.
“Sorry the other stuff didn’t pan out. The Edwards seem like really nice people though.” His voice cracked slightly as he added, “Hannah is really attractive too, but you know how I am about redheads.”
The pen I was doodling with swerved as Hannah’s blonde hair and dark roots flashed in my mind. “Wait, what shade of red?”
“I don’t know. Like a carrot top, bright orange like mine.”
“What about Joel? What does he look like?” I asked my pulse quickening as I chased the discrepancy.
“He’s older, like late fifties.”
My smile was broadening by the second. The Edwards had assumed the identities of two real members of The Hope Affiliates. They were not who they said they were.
Caskets & Conspiracies Page 13