South Of Hell lk-9

by P J Parrish

  Louis glanced at Joe. Her face was white, and she was holding her arms over her chest like she was cold.

  “All right,” Louis said quietly. “What the hell was that all about?”

  It was a while before Dr. Sher turned to face them. When she did, her pale blue eyes took a moment to focus. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Those weren’t memories of her mother’s death,” Joe said.

  “No, they weren’t. At least, not all of them,” Dr. Sher said.

  “She had one of her episodes last night,” Joe said. “It’s like a nightmare, but she’s awake. She mentioned the name John last night, too. And she said she was dying. Not her mother, Dr. Sher. She said she was dying.”

  Dr. Sher looked at Amy again. And this time, when she looked back, first to Louis and then to Joe, her clinical mask had slipped back into place.

  “I think Amy believes she was the black woman whose bones were found in the barn,” she said.

  “Jesus,” Joe whispered. She took a step away, walking in a small circle in the foyer.

  “What, she’s mentally ill?” Louis said.

  “I-” Dr. Sher hesitated. “I don’t believe she is.”

  Joe turned back. “Then what is causing this?”

  Dr. Sher took a second to gather her thoughts. “Memory is a complicated process,” she said. “But research tells us that the qualities of a memory do not always provide a reliable way to determine accuracy. For example, a vivid and detailed memory may be based on inaccurate reconstruction of facts. Or even on self-created impressions that appear actually to have occurred.”

  Joe was listening intently.

  “Also,” Dr. Sher went on, “memory is a reconstructed phenomenon, and so it can often be strongly influenced by various biases such as social expectation, emotions, the implied beliefs of others, inappropriate-”

  “Doctor,” Louis interrupted, “help us out here.”

  Dr. Sher gave him a small smile. “Sorry.” She glanced back at Amy before she went on. “I’ll try to keep this simple,” she said. “Some doctors believe that childhood abuse can cause repressed memories. Later, these memories can resurface on their own or with help.”

  “But why does Amy think she’s a dead black woman?” Joe pressed.

  “People think memory is just a matter of recall, but it is also about how the brain reconstructs that memory,” Dr. Sher said.

  Joe was shaking her head.

  “Let me give you an example,” Dr. Sher said. “A child might have a memory of standing on a street looking into a scary alley. As an adult, he might falsely remember the alley as containing a dead body, when in fact the child saw only a homeless man sleeping in an alley.”

  “So, you’re saying Amy is mixing real memories of the farm with things from her imagination?” Louis asked.

  Dr. Sher nodded. “It’s called confabulation. Put simply, it is the mixing or confusion of true memories with irrelevant associations or bizarre ideas. And no matter how strange or untrue, these ideas can be held with the firmest of convictions.”

  Louis had to ask the question again. “Is she mentally ill, Doctor?”

  “Confabulation is a function of brain chemistry, and it is associated with patients who have suffered brain damage or lesions,” Dr. Sher said. “We’d have to do some tests…” Her voice trailed off.

  Louis was watching Joe, knowing she was seeing Owen Brandt backhand Margi and thinking about what horrors Amy might have suffered at the farmhouse. Things she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, remember, because maybe, unlike the made-up memories of some dead black woman, the real memories were too close to home.

  “This still doesn’t explain everything,” Louis said.

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Sher asked.

  “Like why she can sing in French,” Joe said.

  “Or how she knew where those bones were buried,” Louis said.

  “No, I guess it doesn’t,” Dr. Sher said softly.

  They fell quiet. Louis was looking at Amy. And Amy was just sitting there on the settee, looking back at them. Through the wavy old glass of the French doors, Amy was just a soft-focus pink blur.

  “Okay,” Dr. Sher said softly. “There’s one other thing I need you to consider.”

  They both turned to her.

  “Before I retired, I was head of research here at the university. I’ve written many papers on various disorders and conditions. I can’t believe I am going to say what I am about to say.”

  “What?” Louis asked.

  “If one believes in repressed memory — and that is a big if, as far as I am concerned…” Dr. Sher hesitated again. “Hell’s bells, I might as well just say this and get it out in the open.”

  She blew out a hard breath that lifted the red curls from her forehead. “Have either of you ever heard of past-life regression?” she asked.

  Louis looked at Joe, who shrugged. “Reincarnation?” Louis asked.

  “Well, that would be part of it, yes.”

  “Good God,” Louis said. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Louis,” Joe said softly.

  “It’s all right,” Dr. Sher said, holding up a hand. “Look, I’m as skeptical as you. But there is some work being done in this field. There’s a doctor in Miami who’s written some remarkable papers-”

  “A doctor?” Louis said.

  “Yes, he’s the head of psychiatry at Mount Sinai, a professor at the University of Miami Medical School. He was treating a patient with routine therapies, and during a hypnosis session, she-”

  Louis held up his hands. “I don’t mean to be rude, Dr. Sher, but you just said a minute ago that Amy could be mentally ill. If that is the case, we need to know, because time is running out, for her and for us on this case. If we don’t have hard evidence, there’s nothing we can really do.”

  Dr. Sher held Louis’s eyes for a moment. “Hard evidence,” she said softly. Then she looked to Joe. “I think I’ll see how Amy is doing,” she said.

  She went back into the living room, closing the French doors behind her. Louis watched her go to the settee and sit down next to Amy.

  He turned to Joe. “You’re awfully quiet.”

  She looked at the floor.

  “Don’t tell me you’re buying into this past-life crap, Joe.”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “I can’t believe what I am hearing,” Louis said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a cop, Joe.”

  “I don’t need you to remind me of that,” Joe said quickly. “I just think we have to keep an open mind.”

  “Well, if you keep your mind too open, your brains fall out,” Louis said.

  Her eyes shot back to him. “And what the hell does that mean?”

  “It means that this can be explained,” he said. “There’s a reason she knew where those bones were, and I’m going to find it.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Louis had been sitting behind the Texaco station for two hours when he finally spotted the green Gremlin coming up Lethe Creek Road. Margi was driving, and Brandt was hunched down in the passenger seat. The car turned and headed north toward Hell.

  Louis pushed the Bronco into drive and started toward the farm, one eye on the rearview mirror. He couldn’t count on having much time once he got in. But at least this time he knew what he was looking for.

  Anything that made sense out of Amy’s memories.

  This whole case had become too damn strange. So that morning, he had told Joe he was going back to the farm.

  “What for?” she had asked.

  “Some answers,” he said.

  “To what?”

  When he didn’t reply, Joe said, “You don’t even know the questions.”

  The farmhouse came into view. Louis stopped, turned off the engine, and stared at the place through the muddy windshield. Oh, he had questions, all right. The same ones neither Joe nor Dr. Sher had any answers for.

  S
uch as why Amy could sing in French when she didn’t even know where she was born. Or how she knew where to dig for those buried bones. And the question he still hadn’t told Joe about: Why had Amy put a lock of her hair into the locket he gave her, mimicking the one found in the barn?

  All of the “memories” that had come out of Amy’s latest hypnosis session — the screaming horses, the men with torches, the names John and Amos — all of that he could easily chalk up to Amy’s vivid imagination fed on her reading of Gone with the Wind. Joe told him Amy had read the book so many times she could quote whole passages of it.

  But the rest? There had to be logical explanations for all of it.

  He went to the front door and tried the knob. Locked. Around at the kitchen, he found the same thing. Brandt had installed a new lock. He peered into the door’s window. A light was on inside. Brandt had somehow got the power back on. He paused, thought of trying the windows, then remembered something Amy had said.

  Joe had asked her recently how she got into the Brandt house the first time. Amy had said there was a cellar door in the back, covered with weeds.

  Louis tramped through the weeds to the back. It took a while, but he finally uncovered the two faded blue doors. No lock. He pulled one door open, peered down into the blackness, and went in. Clicking on a flashlight, he found the narrow stairs leading up to the house.

  Once in the kitchen, he took stock of the situation. There was a Coleman cooler shoved into one corner. An old table was piled with canned goods, toilet paper, bags of potato chips, and Styrofoam take-out containers. Empty beer cans littered the floor. There was also a red smear on the linoleum. He knelt, running a finger through it.

  Blood… and he had a fleeting angry image of Brandt hitting Margi in the barn.

  Louis went quickly to the front of the house. He started with the boxes in the dining room. But they were filled only with old dishes and glasses. In the hallway, he found boxes of old clothing, boots and shoes, musty books, and one carton brimming with moldering magazines.

  There were no boxes in the parlor. But he stopped at the door, staring at the piano.

  Amy had been playing it that first day. He went to the piano, noticing for the first time that it was a player piano. He squinted to read the titles on the slender old roller boxes: RAMONA, MY BLUE HEAVEN, TILL WE MEET AGAIN, MAPLE LEAF RAG. He scanned the titles, but there was nothing of note.

  Still, there was something about the piano that was tugging at him. He sat down on the stool and put his feet on the pedals. He began to pump them, and a tinny sound emerged. The piano was so out of tune, the thing so warped and damaged, that the notes barely sounded like music at all.

  He stopped. The quiet quickly moved in. His eyes settled on the yellowed piano roll stretched in the window above the keyboard.

  The words ran down in a narrow column to the right of the old paper’s perforations. He leaned forward to read them:

  Caches dans

  cet asile ou

  Dieu nous

  a conduits

  unis par

  le malheur

  durant les

  longues nuits

  He rewound the roll, eased it from the piano’s rollers, and unfurled the top so the title was visible: “BERCEUSE,” DE L’OPERA “JOCELYN” PAR BENJAMIN GODARD.

  Berceuse. That meant “cradle,” or maybe “lullaby.” It didn’t take much imagination to envision Jean Brandt sitting here playing this old roll and singing the words to her child. Hidden in this sanctuary where God has led us, united by suffering through the long nights we rest together, rocked to sleep beneath their cover we pray beneath the gazes of the trembling stars.

  But how did Jean know French? And how did Amy retain it all these years? He didn’t care. This, at least, explained something.

  He stuck the roll under his arm and left the parlor. More boxes in a second back room offered up nothing of use. He paused at the stairs leading to the second story, then went up. He didn’t have time to search every box, so he opened flaps, peered in, and closed them, working quickly through the two front bedrooms. At the bedroom in the back, he drew up short.

  The pink wallpaper.

  He hadn’t noticed the pattern before, but then there had been no reason to. Now, all the details registered: a large white plantation-style home, a white horse pulling a black carriage, tall-masted sailing ships. A couple — the man in a long black waistcoat and the woman with her hair up in bun and wearing a long yellow gown straight out of the mid-nineteenth century.

  This had been Amy’s room. How many nights had she lain in here alone, staring at this wallpaper, absorbing its details?

  Louis tore a piece of the peeling paper from the wall, folded it, and stuck it into his pocket. Back out in the narrow hallway, he paused. An open door caught his eye — another staircase.

  The attic. He hadn’t bothered with it on his first visit. He climbed the creaking narrow stairway. The dim, low-ceilinged attic was crammed with junk: furniture, countless old boxes, stacks of picture frames, an old violin case, rusting tools, and, near the door, piles of yellowed newspapers, some reaching to his chest. He glanced at the top newspaper: HAUSFREUND UND POST, ANN ARBOR MICH. 1891.

  There was so much junk — and so little light coming through the one small circular window — he could barely move. And the place gave off a foul feeling. It was nothing he could put a name to, but it was the same feeling he got being in the kitchen, like he had to get out and breathe fresh air. For a moment, he considered abandoning his search. But he knew if there was anything that could illuminate this house’s past, it would be found here.

  He spotted an old rope hanging from the rafters. He went to it and fingered the frayed end, thinking of Amy’s memories of being tied up. But she always talked of being outside or in the barn.

  He was about to give up when he spotted a large trunk. He opened it, but it appeared to be filled only with old clothes. Underneath the old lace and moth-eaten velvets, though, his hands closed around an old biscuit tin. It was filled with photographs, small, sepia-toned, and faded with age. There was no time to go through them now. He set the tin aside and dug further.

  A Bible…

  He pulled it out. It was a heavy old thing, its dark red leather scarred, its bindings eaten away by age and insects. He had seen one like it before, back in the Mississippi boarding house where he had briefly stayed while waiting for his mother to die. The woman who had rented him the room — Bessie, he could still see her face clearly — had brought the Bible out one night to show him her family tree because she had a notion that it would instill a sense of pride in his own roots. It hadn’t worked — that was a different life, and he had been a different, younger man then. But he had been intrigued by Bessie’s attachment to her past and her need to write it all down.

  The Bible opened with a soft crack. And there it was, whole lives laid out on the frontispiece in a listing of births, deaths, and marriages.

  Louis took the Bible over to the small window for more light. The names at the top said family record amos and phoebe brandt. Patting his jacket, he found his glasses and slipped them on. The listings began in 1800, and a quick calculation told him he was looking at Owen Brandt’s great-great-great-grandparents.

  Family Record

  Amos and Phoebe Brandt

  Name

  Place

  Birth

  Marriage

  Death

  Amos Brandt

  Hell, Mich

  1800

  Phoebe Poole

  1879

  Phoebe Brandt

  Hell, Mich

  1802

  Amos Brandt

  1872

  Ann Brandt

  Hell, Mich

  1829

  Clay Stafford

  1869

  Lucinda Brandt

  Hell, Mich

  1830

  Randolf Rawls

  Zachary Stafford

  Kalamazoo, Mich

  1
849

  Linda Wigginton

  Joseph Stafford

  Kalamazoo, Mich

  1853

  Sharon Potts

  Thomas Rawls

  Kalamazoo, Mich

  1853

  Joanne Sinchuk

  Caroline Rawls

  Kalamazoo, Mich

  1856

  Jeremiah Healy

  Quince Stafford

  Flint, Mich

  1868

  Catherine Carper

  This confirmed that the farm had been in the Brandt family for generations. And at least Louis had hard proof that the Amos of Amy’s memories was a real man and that his name had been written down in a Bible that Amy could have seen.

  As Louis studied the names, he found himself trying to imagine what kind of man Amos Brandt had been. And even stranger, he was trying to imagine what Amos Brandt would feel seeing his farm in ruin and worse, knowing his family tree had produced such rotted stock as Owen.

  He glanced at his watch. He had to get out of here before Brandt returned. He was about to close the Bible when a thought hit him.

  He looked again at the names.

  Damn. Amos and Phoebe had only two daughters, Ann and Lucinda. The daughters had married and taken their husbands’ names. So, how had the Brandt name survived five generations without sons? Who the hell had Owen Brandt descended from? Something wasn’t right.

  There were two words scrawled under one of the death entries. The second word was cemetery; the other might have said brandt, but he couldn’t make it out.

  He closed the Bible, took it and the tin of photographs, and climbed down out of the attic and went back to the kitchen. He retraced his steps through the cellar and closed the blue doors, pulling weeds over them.

  Back in the Bronco, he tore a muddy, gravel-spewing path back to the Texaco station. No sign of the Gremlin, so he chanced a quick stop at the gas station, parking out of sight just in case.

  Inside, a pimply-faced kid was tipped back in a chair behind the register reading a comic book. He looked up at Louis with eyes that said he didn’t get many black men in this part of his world.