‘Whatever it is, it’s a crying shame,’ said Michael.
‘It’s the day of atonement,’ the driver repeated. ‘I always knew it was going to come, and now it has.’
He dropped Michael off at the Cantina Napoletana. He handed Michael his change, fixing him with his one good eye and his one bloodshot eye. ‘It’s a burnt offering, that’s what it is,’ he said, with aggressive over-emphasis. ‘An offering by fire of a soothing aroma to the Lord.’
‘A what?’
‘A so – o – othing aroma,’ the cab driver replied, and steered off into the traffic.
Standing on the sidewalk outside the Cantina Napoletana, amidst all the normality of a summer evening on Hanover Street, with the smells of Italian cooking and gasoline fumes and Boston Harbor and diesel oil and women’s perfume, Michael knew for certain that Joe was right, and that Joe had discovered something strange and terrible in the fabric of everyday life.
It must have been like discovering a hideous face in the pattern of a familiar wallpaper. Once you’ve noticed it, you can never look at the wallpaper again without seeing that same hideous face, endlessly repeated.
He climbed the stairs to his apartment and unlocked the door. All the lights were on, and Thelonious Monk was playing ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’ on the CD. Victor was there already, his feet up on the couch, sipping alternately from a cup of espresso and a shot-glass of Jack Daniels.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said, taking off his glasses, and putting down the notebook that he had been reading. Beside him on the couch were the other books that Michael had taken from Dr Rice’s office: his Filofax, and the green-bound volume from the shelf beside the Sheeler painting. While the Hyannis police had been helping the paramedics to carry Dr Rice to the ambulance, Michael had simply slipped them into a large manila envelope marked NEW ENGLAND DEACONESS HOSPITAL and walked out of the office with the envelope under his arm.
‘It looks like Frank Coward had been a patient of Dr Rice’s for quite a few years,’ said Victor. ‘Dr Rice was giving him hypnotherapy for recurring nightmares and panic attacks. Apparently poor old Frank kept seeing two old buddies from his service days. The unnerving thing was that he was twenty years older, while they hadn’t aged at all.’
‘Is there anything to indicate that Frank Coward might have been given post-hypnotic suggestion?’
Victor licked his finger and leafed quickly back through the pages. ‘This struck me as a possible clue,’ he said, and handed the book over.
There was a short, scribbled entry in Dr Rice’s own handwriting, in vivid purple ink. ‘April 6, H called 11 am to ask about Frank’s progress & gnrl condition. Of course I told him that I am satisfied that Frank is ready to help us and will be even easier to galvanize than Lesley Kellow.’
Michael lowered the book and stared at Victor wide-eyed. ‘Lesley Kellow! Do you know who Lesley Kellow was?’
‘Should I?’
‘Lesley Kellow was the co-pilot of the L10-11 that exploded and crashed over Rocky Woods.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Absolutely not. Not that there was much of him left afterwards. Bits, literally. Little bits and pieces, exactly like a jigsaw, only flesh and bone. In fact, he was more severely injured than anybody else on the aircraft.’
‘How did the plane come down?’ asked Victor.
‘We never found out for sure. But the most plausible theory was that somebody had planted a bomb, somewhere in the mid-section. Not in the hold, but in the passenger compartment, between rows 20-23, right between the wings. The bottom of the airplane opened up like God was shelling peas, and everybody dropped out.’
Victor nodded. ‘I remember seeing it on TV.’
Michael said, ‘Look at this – a definite connection. Frank Coward and Lesley Kellow were both given hypnotherapy by Dr Rice. And there’s another connection, too, that Joe mentioned. It’s only a possible connection, but it’s a connection all the same. John O’Brien was killed in the helicopter crash, and in the Rocky Woods disaster, Dan Margolis died. You remember Dan Margolis, don’t you, the guy who was going to clean up the Colombian drugs trade? Two liberal campaigners, both killed in aircraft piloted by patients of Dr Rice.’
‘And another connection, too,’ Victor put in. ‘The men behind the fence on the grassy knoll, when Kennedy was shot. Another liberal campaigner.’
They were both silent for a moment, reluctant to voice the next logical conclusion out loud. It was too far-fetched; too dramatic. It was like finding out that the South Pole was supposed to be at the top of the world, and that the North Pole was supposed to be underneath.
‘Conspiracy?’ said Victor, at last.
‘Pretty incredible kind of conspiracy if it is,’ Michael replied. ‘And what’s the motive? What’s the political agenda?’
‘That’s what we’ll have to find out,’ said Victor.
Michael read Dr Rice’s scribble a second time. ‘We could start with finding out who this “H” is. If “H” was interested to know if Frank Coward was ready for action, then it seems likely that “H” is Dr Rice’s contact with the conspirators. Always assuming there are any conspirators.’
Victor thumbed through Dr Rice’s Filofax. ‘Hmm – he knows plenty of “H’s”. Julius Habgood, dental surgeon. Kerry Hastings, florist. Norman T. Henry.’
Michael went across to the table and picked up the telephone. ‘I’ll give Marcia another call, see if there’s any sign of Joe.’
‘Mason Herridge, realtor. Ruth Hersov, realtor. Jacob Hertzman, psychiatrist.’
Michael punched out Joe’s number and Marcia answered almost instantaneously. Joe?’ she asked, her voice bleached with worry.
‘No, I’m sorry, Marcia, it’s Michael. There’s still no sign?’
‘Nothing. Nobody’s seen him, nobody’s heard from him.’
‘I’m sure he’s okay. He probably doesn’t even realize how worried you are.’
‘You don’t believe that, do you? Joe wouldn’t just vanish without telling me. He’s irritable sometimes, he’s impatient sometimes, but he’s never cruel.’
‘Is there anything I can do?’ Michael asked her.
‘Joe Hesteren, auto repairs,’ Victor intoned. ‘Joyce Hewitt. Leonard Heyderman.’
‘Just keep in touch,’ Marcia begged. ‘My sister’s coming over tomorrow, but I feel so all alone.’
Michael put down the phone. He was gravely worried about Joe. He had the terrible leaden feeling that Joe was dead; and that he would never see him again, ever, except in his casket.
‘Here’s an odd one,’ said Victor.
‘What’s that?’ asked Michael.
‘It’s the only entry without a first name, that’s all. It probably doesn’t mean anything.’
Michael walked around the couch and peered over Victor’s shoulder. Victor was pointing to the neatly lettered name and address, Mr Hillary, Goat’s Cape and then a 508 telephone number.
Michael felt a chilly prickling all the way down his back, and he couldn’t suppress an involuntary shiver.
‘Mr Hillary,’ he repeated. ‘That’s the man I saw when I was under hypnosis. That’s the name that the blind man told me by Copley Place.’
Victor turned around. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You’re white as a sheet.’
‘But I didn’t realize that Mr Hillary was real.’
‘What are you worried about? It’s perfectly explicable. Dr Rice put the name into your mind while he was hypnotizing you. He may not have even mentioned the name to you directly ... maybe he was talking on the phone to Mr Hillary while you were under.’
‘But I saw Mr Hillary. I know exactly what he looks like.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. What probably happened was, you heard the name Mr Hillary while you were in a trance, and your imagination fleshed him out for you. I’ll bet if you go back into your memory, you’ll think of somebody you once knew who looked like that, or maybe a character in a b
ook, or on TV – somebody with a name that sounded like Hillary.’
‘I never knew anybody who looked like this guy. And anyway, how come that blind man mentioned his name to me?’
‘I don’t know. You probably misheard. Or maybe it was a hangover from your hypnotic trance.’
‘Who are you, Mr Sceptical or something?’ Michael asked him.
Victor smiled. ‘I’m a medical examiner. I was trained to be sceptical. I don’t mind following clues and connections, and trying to put two and two together. But I don’t believe in magic and I don’t believe that you can see people under hypnosis when you’ve never seen them in real life.’
Michael picked up the Filofax. ‘Mr Hillary, Goat’s Cape. Where the hell’s Goat’s Cape?’
‘I don’t know. Do you have a map?’
Michael went down to the street and got his tattered Rand McNally route map out of the glovebox of the car. The sidewalks were still crowded and busy, and across the street a young man with long sweeping black hair was playing the violin – one of those high and hungry passages that always reminded Michael of Gothic movies, with white-faced women in deserted mansions, hurrying in terror from room to room.
Michael was locking the car when he noticed somebody else across the street, too. A man in very dark glasses, standing in the doorway of DiLucca Italian Bakery, which was closed. Michael felt a prickle of apprehension. It was impossible to tell whether the man was staring at Michael or not, but he was standing so still, his arms by his sides, and it was his utter stillness in the midst of all the hurrying and jostling that made him appear so threatening.
Slowly, Michael retreated across the sidewalk, and back to the Cantina Napoletana. He turned around just once, before he went inside, and the man was still there, still motionless.
Back upstairs, he went to the window overlooking Hanover Street, but a large blue van had parked in front of DiLucca’s and he was unable to see whether the man was still there or not.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Victor. He had poured himself another shot-glass of whisky and was reading through Dr Rice’s notebook.
‘I don’t know ... there was a guy standing in a doorway across the street. Pale face, dark glasses. He looked just like one those guys who were hanging around at New Seabury.’
‘Is he still there now?’
‘I don’t know ... I think he must have gone now.’
‘Well ... don’t let’s get paranoid,’ said Victor.
Michael unfolded the map and laid it out on the table. He traced his finger all the way up the coastline from Acoaxet in the south to Salisbury Beach in the north.
Victor said, ‘Did you know that Dr Rice practised Aura Hypnosis?’
‘Yes, he mentioned it today. And he talked about my “aura” a couple of times when I was under therapy. I guessed he meant personal vibes. He said my aura was in pretty lousy shape.’
‘That was all? He didn’t tell you what he was trying to do?’
Michael looked up and frowned at him. ‘He was trying to straighten my aura back into a shape. Kind of a Cindy Crawford workout, with Woody Allenish overtones.’
‘But he didn’t explain what Aura Hypnosis actually is?’
Michael pursed his lips. He found it irritating that Victor was questioning him so intently on a course of therapy which he, after all, had been experiencing first-hand for almost a year. ‘Aura Hypnosis is hypnosis that sorts out your aura, that’s all.’
‘Well, for sure, it does in a way. But it works in a different way from regular hypnosis. It has the same therapeutic purpose ... but the technique is different. Apparently it’s much more powerful, much more direct. I was reading an article about it in New Psychology a couple of months ago, and if you can understand Advanced Mumbojumbo, it’s all explained here in this book.’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Michael, trying not to be testy. His finger had crept as far north as Priscilla Beach, just south of Plymouth. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in hypnosis. I thought you said the only hypnosis you’d ever witnessed was on the stage, people being persuaded to take their pants off, stuff like that.’
‘Maybe I lied.’
Michael looked up. ‘Maybe you lied? Why would you lie about something like that?’
Victor took off his glasses. His eyes looked bleary and unfocused. ‘I know what hypnosis did for me. I just wanted to find out what it had done for you.’
‘So what did hypnosis do for you?’
‘I’ve never been hypnotized myself. I wasn’t lying about that. But my sister was, repeatedly, for months. She was very ill, you understand. It seemed to spare her a whole lot of pain. I suppose I just wanted to know if it was true – and if it really did ease her suffering.’
‘Well, it works, I can guarantee it,’ Michael told him.
Victor had folded down the corner of one of the pages in Dr Rice’s book. ‘Listen to this: “Aura Hypnosis was originally discovered by the Marquis de Puysegar in 1782. He was a pupil of Mesmer, the Viennese doctor who invented mesmerism. Mesmer used to use all kinds of elaborate magnetic equipment to hypnotize people, wires and magnets and bowls of water, but the Marquis de Puysegar proved that you didn’t need any of this equipment ... all you needed was an optical focus like a light or a coin, and a soothing voice.”
‘What’s more – listen to this – “he travelled to South America in the 1780s and found Peruvian Indians hypnotizing themselves for no other purpose than to let their auras leave their bodies and dance around their campfires to amuse their children.” Can you believe that? Early television! ‘They were even having hypnotic duels with each other ... putting each other into hypnotic trances so that the aura of one warrior could physically leave his body and fight with the aura of another.” It sounds like a certain amount of coca leaf chewing was involved in all of this, but basically that’s what Aura Hypnotism is all about. The hypnotist’s own personal aura actually leaves him for a while, and joins the patient’s aura inside of his trance. What you might call “hands-on” hypnotism.’
‘Go on,’ said Michael, pausing in his map-reading.
Victor said, ‘Dr Rice mentions Aura Hypnosis two or three times here. This is, what?, October last year. “Michael Rearden’s trauma is proving so intractable that I decided this session to take him under by Aura. The experience was horrifying. His state of shock is such that his etheric body has formed into dark knots of tension and dread, similar to extreme muscular spasm. It is one of the worst cases I have come across, even more difficult to deal with than Frank Coward’s. If it were possible to X-ray his aura, one could identify each and every traumatic experience he had on that night, but as it is I have to do it by ‘touch’ and by ‘feel’. I have never before encountered an etheric body so darkened and deformed.” ‘
Michael grunted in amusement. ‘He makes me sound like Quasimodo.’
‘The Hunchback of Hyannis,’ Victor smiled. ‘All the same ... he seems to think that Aura Hypnosis was helping to straighten you out. I guess you should be grateful, when you consider how dangerous it can be.’
‘Dangerous? What do you mean?’
‘In regular hypnotherapy, the hypnotist puts you into a light trance which has the effect of temporarily abolishing some of your cortical functions. You become highly suggestible, and so the hypnotherapist can guide you back to your childhood, or whenever your problem started – which in your case was the Rocky Woods air disaster. He helps you to locate and to understand your anxiety, and he simply suggests that it doesn’t worry you any more. Wake up, snap, end of problem.’
‘But Aura Hypnosis isn’t like that?’
‘Aura Hypnosis is more like physiotherapy ... you know, when you’ve had an accident or something, and a therapist takes you into a pool and manipulates your muscles. In Aura Hypnosis, the hypnotist puts you into a very deep trance – so deep that your heartbeat slows and your respiration rate is almost halved. Just as you’re going in, his etheric body comes in with you. His aura is actually inside your trance wi
th you. He can then ‘Visit” your anxieties along with you, and help you to see that you don’t have anything to be worried about’
‘What’s dangerous about it?’
‘For starters, your anxieties could be a whole lot more horrific than your hypnotist’s aura is capable of dealing with. Whatever traumas have been distorting your aura might distort his aura, too. The danger is that the doctor will wind up just as sick as the patient. Even sicker, since his aura is outside of his body, and is much more vulnerable than usual.’
‘Do you believe any of that?’ asked Michael.
Victor nodded. ‘You should have seen Ruth, my sister. In 1967, she contracted stomach cancer. She had the kind of pain you don’t even want to think about. The only person who made her last days bearable was her hypnotherapist. She could have spent weeks in agony; instead he gave her weeks of bliss. He took her back through her childhood, he took her back through her wedding day. She relived all of her happiest moments. When she died she wasn’t lying in a hospital bed in Newark, she was walking her dog at our uncle’s home at Cos Cob, Connecticut.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Inside of here, anyway.’
He paused for a while, his eyes glistening a little. Then he added, ‘That was Aura Hypnosis, and what I didn’t find out until years later was that when the hypnotherapist was taking Ruth under he suffered almost as much pain as Ruth was suffering herself. After Rum died, he spent seven months in hospital with perforated ulcers. It almost killed him.’
Michael said, ‘It’s amazing that two people’s personalities can be so intertwined. You know, so – what’s the word – symbiotic.’
‘Well, I’m not so sure that I believe in the collective unconscious,’ said Victor. ‘But I sure believe that two people can become so magnetically close that they can share the same unconscious experiences. You love your wife. You should know that.’
‘Yes,’ said Michael, slowly. ‘I guess I do. Maybe I forget it more often than I should.’
Victor closed Dr Rice’s books and got up from the couch, in a deliberate attempt to break the mood. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, ‘where’s this Goat’s Cape you’re looking for?’
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