Susie Pevney and her husband, Paul, were part of the Long Island bookselling community. They had unfortunately been nicknamed the Hoovers by the other dealers for their habit of arriving at the end of a sale when the remaining books were cheapest, and vacuuming up cartons of them. The books they scarfed up were the ones other dealers ran screaming from. Susie had been listing those books for pennies on eBay and spending the rest of her time at the post office mailing them. It was, she had claimed, like being a gerbil in a classroom cage.
Marty finally capitulated when I promised to be involved with the shop too. But Paul Pevney remained opposed to Susie working here, complaining as loudly as if she were selling her body on Harbor Street. He had been forced into working at Home Depot to keep from losing their home, but insisted it was only temporary, only until they got their bookselling business going. Paul believed that every book was worth something and would only appreciate in value. If it didn’t sell on eBay now, wait ten years. Like a stubborn child with a broken toy, he kept insisting that all they needed to make it work was faith—and Susie working harder.
“Paul doesn’t seem to have noticed that I’ve been squirreling away most of the money I make here. He has good health coverage through Home Depot.”
“That’s great.” Traditionally booksellers didn’t.
But she suddenly looked as if the sun had gone in. “All he wants to do is be a full-time bookseller and not worry about a family. He doesn’t realize that I’m thirty-one and it’s time.”
I nodded and finished my coffee. I hoped it would work out for her.
Although I knew that Christmas orders were still piling up on my computer in the barn, I lingered in the bookshop, curious to talk to Marty. He had spent the weekend at a two-day book auction in Charleston, one of the most prestigious in the South.
He appeared at noon, pushing the door back with a bang. “My books get here yet?”
“The books you bought? When did you send them?” I was sitting on the leather sofa now, filling orders on my laptop.
“Yesterday.”
“There you go. How was the auction?”
“Not too shabby. When they got over not wanting to sell to me.”
I glanced at Marty in his scruffy black leather jacket, his red “Cappy’s Cadillac Repair” T-shirt showing underneath. He was tall and attractive, but his black-framed glasses were taped at the bridge, and his dark curly hair was overlong. Picturing him among the old boys’ club of book dealers in velvet dinner jackets, I laughed.
They hadn’t known—how could they—that Marty had inherited family money. His grandfather was one of the first cesspool pump owners in Suffolk County and had created his own chemical process to dissolve waste faster. At the perfect moment Mario Campagna had sold the formula to a national company. Campagna cesspool trucks still patrolled Long Island, showing a mischievous little king perched on a toilet with the slogan, “We turn your waste into gold!” Gold for the Campagnas in any case.
Marty sprawled in a wing chair, hands behind his head, looking pleased with himself. “This lackey followed me around while I was inspecting the books, then when the auction got under way and I started to bid, the head guy came up and asked me how I planned to pay.”
“What did you do?”
Marty grinned. “Showed him the money.”
I had seen Marty’s wad of bills at sales and could picture him pulling the handful of folded hundreds from his jeans pocket. “One of these days you’re going to get mugged.”
“Not to worry, blondie.”
With perfect recall, he went on to describe every book he had bid on and won. The prize had not been a book at all, but a letter written by Jefferson Davis.
“Funny thing for a Yankee to want,” I said.
“It was a steal.”
He stood up and moved around the counter to gloat over his best books. They weren’t under lock and key, but were shown only to serious buyers.
“Hey, good. Somebody snapped up that history of the Kansas Regiments and the signed first edition Kon-Tiki. I should go away more often.”
“No, they didn’t.” I would have noticed sales for over a thousand dollars. “But the Tom Sawyer Abroad sold for $325.”
He waved that away as if it were a half-eaten bagel. “Did you move them somewhere else?”
“I haven’t touched them.”
“Did she?”
“Susie?” I called.
She came in from the next room where she had been straightening stock.
“Have you seen Kon-Tiki?” I asked.
“It’s on the shelf. Or was,” she added, seeing our faces.
We searched every shelf behind the counter. There were no obvious gaps where the books had been, though everything seemed a little more spread out.
“Who was working?” Marty demanded.
“Me. And I was in this room all the time.” Yet that wasn’t entirely true. I had been in back several minutes showing the woman from the ferry where the children’s books were. Had it been a ruse? Maybe she had never planned to leave her children. Maybe it had only been a distraction while her accomplice pilfered the most valuable books. But if so, why only take two? You could get away with at least four without anyone knowing for days. Granted, you’d have to know where they were located, but someone could have scoped the bookshop out earlier.
Yet I had not heard the bell over the door chime when I was in back.
“What the hell? They were here when I left!”
I believed that. Marty’s phenomenal memory was one thing that made him so successful as a book buyer. He devoured references and catalogs and never forgot a single detail of anything he read.
I stared at him, guilty. It must have been on my watch. Maybe I wasn’t as competent as I had been reassuring myself. “Who would come in and steal just those two? No one was even behind the counter to look at books.” But someone must have been. “They have to be around.”
“They’d better.”
Or else.
Chapter Ten
WHEN I WAS thirteen I believed in reincarnation, that people could be regressed back to past lives. I had stumbled on The Search for Bridey Murphy on a library shelf and went on a quest, tracking down all the other past-lives books it had spawned. I was enthralled. The writers had traveled back through something called hypnotic regression. As I lay in the porch swing that summer, knees up supporting the book of the day, I was actually in famine-ridden Ireland or medieval France.
My father patiently pointed out why reincarnation was impossible.
Granted the Bible was his authority, but he was persuasive enough to make me give up my fantasy of being an Egyptian princess darting among the pyramids. What remained was the knowledge that people could be age-regressed to earlier times in their own lives.
I woke up thinking about it the next morning. Why had we never regressed Jane back to that day in the park? Probably because we hadn’t thought of it. Even if we had, we would have felt that making her relieve her sister’s drowning would be too traumatic, too horrible for her. There had been no reason to doubt that that she had watched Caitlin go in the water and drown. Until now.
Even now the “proof”—five words from England—was as tenuous as a whisper overheard in an airport. We needed to find out what had happened that day.
Could we do it? Jane was an adult now, and if she was willing to undergo the experience . . . As the only eyewitness, she could tell us what actually happened that afternoon. If she had seen her sister tumble into the water, Caitlin would return to sad memory, at least known now to her sisters. Colin would be spared the notoriety he seemed to fear. Hannah could focus on finishing her senior year at Cornell without having to worry about a beautiful doppelganger.
And me? I would have to accept the inevitability that one moment of inattention could
lose a rare book. Or a child.
But what if the outcome were different? What if Jane remembered that afternoon differently and could tell us more about the “bad lady” she had been obsessed with that night. I still had no idea how we would find Caitlin, but it might give us some clues.
THE FIRST OF December found me in Dr. Karl Lundy’s office, asking him about age regression. Finding a good hypnotist—one that I felt comfortable about consulting—had been a challenge. I’d considered asking people I knew at the university for a recommendation, but was afraid it would get back to Colin. He would be furious with me, not just because I was pursuing the truth about Caitlin after he had declared the search off-limits, but because he scoffed at hypnosis, visualization, and healing by prayer or “pink light.”
Most of all, he would be worried about the damage it might do to Jane.
So I turned to the Internet. I studied the qualifications of hypnotists in the area and finally called one who was a trained psychologist. He had gotten his doctorate from Columbia and had a collection of positive reviews. Even so, I planned to interview him thoroughly, to make sure I would not be putting this daughter in any emotional danger.
Karl Lundy was intrigued by what I was asking. He warned me not to tell him the details of the day it happened. “Subjects under hypnosis want to please. They pick up cues and say what they think you want to hear. If I knew what you were looking for, I might convey cues without meaning to.”
“Is there any danger?”
He chuckled at that. “Not at all. Your daughter will be aware of what is happening the whole time. If anything, she’ll probably be more relaxed and refreshed afterward than she’s been in weeks.”
“Is it okay if I sit in?”
“Not a problem, Ms. Laine.” He went on to tell me a story about a young woman who was so short-tempered with her children that she and her husband sought counseling and then hypnosis, suspecting her abusiveness had roots in her childhood. As her horrified husband watched, she was regressed to age eight when she had brought home a stray kitten and her father had beaten her and strangled the cat.
“She had no conscious memory of that,” Dr. Lundy said. “But when she remembered, she knew it was true and she was able to redirect her anger at her father, not her kids. It gave her husband a better understanding of what was going on.”
I shivered. “Do a lot of people have things they don’t remember?”
“A lot,” he agreed. “Most of us, in fact.”
I tried to imagine what mine could be.
JANE WAS ENTHUSIASTIC when I called her. “I never would have thought of that. Can we film it?”
“I don’t have a camcorder.”
“No, on my phone. I want to be able to watch it afterward.”
Would she really want to see it if it confirmed that she’d watched her sister drown?
But we asked anyway. Dr. Lundy said that he would audiotape the process, using built-in, state-of-the-art equipment, since videotaping it would be too distracting. “You can get everything you need by hearing the process.”
I doubted that, since gestures and facial expressions are so crucial. But I would be there to see it. I didn’t know how living through that terrible day again would make me feel, but I reminded myself this was not about me.
I picked up Jane at the LIRR station in Port Lewis and we drove to Dr. Lundy’s office. He explained the process to her the way he had to me, and she settled into the navy high-backed chair, took a deep breath of vanilla air freshener, and smiled at him.
DR. LUNDY TOOK her back to the park, establishing who was there, getting her to describe the woman who approached them, then asked what she was saying to Jane.
“She says, she says—” Jane’s voice was piping and eager, the way it used to sound when Colin brought home a surprise. “ ‘Go pick that yellow flower for me and I’ll give you a toy from the carriage.’ ”
What toy? What carriage? I put my hand over my mouth to keep from crying out.
“What does the carriage look like?”
“It’s like our one at home.” She said it impatiently, focused on the promise of a toy. Did she mean it was plaid? Or double-wide? But I couldn’t interrupt her to find out.
Jane was fully in the moment. “I want . . . I want . . . the bunny! The bunny is so cute. He has a pink nose.”
And then suddenly she slumped back in the chair, defeated.
I couldn’t breathe. Something had happened; she was no longer in the park in Stratford. Where was she?
“Jane? Did she give you the bunny?” Dr. Lundy understood something had happened too, and asked the question as if it were in the past.
“No.” Jane was still a child, but with a difference. “I got the flower for her, the yellow one. But she wouldn’t let me get the bunny out of the carriage. She said—she said—‘Go and tell your mum your sister fell in the river. Hurry now!’ ”
I started to gasp. This woman had seen it all!
Unexpectedly, Jane was back in the park again, breathless from running. “Mama, Mama, Cate fell in. She fell in the river!” After a moment, her face contorted. “No, don’t you fall in.”
“That’s enough!” My voice came from nowhere, ringing into the room like an alarm.
Dr. Lundy jerked his head to stare at me.
But I was back in the park myself. I had plunged into the river, thrashing around to try and feel where Caitlin might be, screaming her name over and over. This can’t be happening, it can’t be, not Cate. Then people were everywhere, some in the water with me, two men on shore horrified at the wet smock clinging to my baby-swollen stomach and reaching their hands to pull me out. My head was buzzing and Jane, crying and calling me from the bank, seemed very far away. An older woman had stooped down and was trying to comfort her.
And yet—had all that searching been for nothing? Jane had only been repeating what she had been told to say, not what she had seen. She probably believed that Caitlin had fallen in. Because when you’re four years old, adults don’t lie to you.
It all hinged on what that woman had seen.
Chapter Eleven
TO DR. LUNDY’S credit, even after my outburst he brought Jane out of her trance gradually, promising her that she would feel relaxed and well-rested. As she had asked, he pointed out that when she wanted to buy an expensive new purse, she would remember all the beautiful handbags she had in her closet, and put her credit card away.
Jane opened her eyes and smiled at me. She was a young adult again who looked as if she had just finished dozing over a book. “What did I say? Is it—okay?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Something about a bunny?”
“You’ll hear. It’s wonderful.”
“I’ll give you the recording so you can listen to it.” Dr. Lundy turned from where he was extracting a CD from a system built into the wall, but he looked shaken, his pale eyes startled behind his rimless glasses.
As I zipped up my jacket, I asked him, “What do I owe you?”
“Suppose we handle it this way: If you come back and let me know how it all works out, we’ll treat it as a teaching experience.”
I could see how curious he was to hear the whole story. “Well—that’s very generous.”
He helped Jane out of the chair as if she were a frail old lady, then watched as she buttoned her coat.
As soon as we had closed the outside door, I grabbed her shoulders. I could barely keep from shrieking. “You didn’t see her drown! Someone told you to tell me that.”
“Really? Really? I was afraid when you yelled, ‘That’s enough.’ it was because you didn’t want me to go through it again.”
“You heard that? No, I guess I didn’t want us to live through all that agony again, if it wasn’t really true.” Yet now I felt sorry that I hadn’t l
et it unspool. We might have learned other things, like what had happened to the woman with the stroller. “But you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Just excited.”
“Me too.” Part of me wanted to dance and whirl and scream my happiness to the stars. What stopped me was that there had still been an eyewitness to the drowning,
I unlocked the van and we climbed in. But rather than stay in the small industrial parking lot, I drove to my favorite pond just a few blocks away. There were no other cars this time of night. In summer I would come here to watch the red-winged blackbirds swoop in and out of the trees, chasing each other. But they were gone now, the trees as bare as ancestral bones.
As soon as I pulled into a parking space, I slid the disk into the player. Jane was pressed into the seat, her knuckles against her mouth. I kept the engine running, the lights on.
“Don’t let it hypnotize you again,” I warned.
She laughed.
As soon as we heard Dr. Lundy’s soothing tones and I looked out over the pond, I realized what I had done. I had brought us to a place of more dark water.
As the CD ended, Jane said, “Is that how I sounded when I was little? Play that part again.”
How could she focus on her voice when what she was saying might have changed our lives completely? Obediently I ejected the CD, then pushed it in again.
This time she stopped the recording before Dr. Lundy could bring her out of her trance, and turned to me. “That woman should rot in hell! How could she steal Cate? How could she walk out of the park with her? She must have put Cate in that stroller as soon as I wasn’t looking.”
“You think she had Caitlin in the stroller?” Belatedly I started to fit it together.
“Of course she did. That’s why she wouldn’t let me reach in and get the rabbit, why she sent me running to you with a message so she could get away.”
“But she said she saw Caitlin fall in.”
Jane put her hand on my arm. “Mom, think. If that woman had been legitimate she wouldn’t have stood there calmly and watched a little girl drown. She would have rushed over to pull Cate out herself, or at least raised the alarm. Besides, there wasn’t enough time. We were far from the water and it only took me a minute to pick the flower and run back. I wanted that bunny, remember? There was only enough time for the woman to pop her in the carriage and—I don’t know—chloroform her?”
A Photographic Death Page 5