That wasn’t the only reason she’d chosen the ABBA song. She could have used anything, the name of the first hair salon she worked in, where I’d go to wait for her after school; any of the early places we’d lived in together when I was young. She had brought in the song because it was one of the few times we had felt happy together. I’m sure she hoped this would soften me up. Joan was a mistress of manipulation.
Duncan got to his feet and headed for the kitchen.
“I’ll be right back.”
There was a serving opening between kitchen and dining room, and I could see him as he started to make tea. He was alert to everything going on this side of the wall. Joan sat down in one of the easy chairs in front of the fireplace. She was obviously stiff and sore.
“Well, here I am, as requested,” I said. “And you still haven’t told me what happened.”
There was a lively fire burning in the grate, and she said something, but she was addressing the flames.
“I didn’t hear what you said.”
She faced me and her eyes were filling with tears.
“Oh, Chris. I wish I could, but I don’t remember. That’s why I needed you to come.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Here we go. Warm us up.”
MacKenzie emerged from the kitchen, carrying a large tray with teapot, cups, and a plate of cakes. He put it on the table.
“Chris would probably prefer coffee,” said Joan.
“You should have told me,” said MacKenzie.
“No, no, tea is fine, really.”
There was another weighty silence while he did the tea dispensing. He addressed my mother.
“Shona? Would you like a bannock?”
That answered one question. She was indeed the girl in the photo. Joan gave a little apologetic smile.
“Chris isn’t used to anybody calling me Shona. That used to be my name,” she added.
“Really? Shona MacAulay, I presume, whom I was told not more than an hour ago had run off in the wilderness with a Red Indian, never to be heard from again. You reincarnated as Joan Morris — I take it for reasons that I don’t know of, but which you are surely going to tell me.”
She winced, but she’d also come to the end of her patience. Same old pattern: me being deliberately provocative until she finally lost her temper and we screamed at each other.
She banged her fist on the arm of the chair and set off yelling. “Cut it out! You just want your pound of fucking flesh don’t you. Well, fuck off. Who needs you, you toffee-nosed little shit? Just fuck off. I’m your mother for Jesus’ sake. I’m your fucking mother, and you just don’t give a toss, do you?”
I’d heard these words many times before so the term “toffee-nosed” wasn’t new to me. However, I was aware that an accent had returned. She must have worked hard to eradicate it. Now she was sounding quite Scottish, long e’s in “shit” for example. I don’t know if I would have jumped in and started retaliating with finely honed insults. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have... that I’d outgrown that phase. However, I never had the opportunity. Her anger was spent as quickly as it had flared up and she dropped into painful sobs, deep and choking, unlike any drunken wailing I’d heard from her before. Duncan ran over to her and took her in his arms. She leaned her head on his chest and he stroked her hair, whispering to her in Gaelic.
My God, he loves her. I was still sitting at the table with my teacup in my hand, and I felt like Regan and Goneril rolled into one. I got up and went over to her. Tears and mucous were dampening Duncan’s nice jacket and I fished a tissue out of my pocket and stuffed it under her cheek.
“I’m sorry. You’ve obviously had a bad time. I do really want to hear what happened.”
It took her a while to stop crying, and Duncan stayed with her, not looking at me. I knew he was furious with me for acting like such a callous bitch, but who the hell was he to judge anyway? What did he know?
Finally, she quieted down. I couldn’t get over his tenderness.
“All right now?”
“I’m fine.”
She looked terrible, her eyes red and swollen and her cheeks blotchy. Funny thing was, I had never seen her so soft and vulnerable. Probably not since we had danced together.
I made myself useful by bringing over the cup of tea, which she accepted with a shaky smile.
“I just don’t know where to start.”
“As Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, ‘Start at the beginning and go on to the end.’”
For a moment, she glanced at me warily, as if I was making fun of her, something I’d been guilty of more than once before. I helped her out.
“I guess I have to rewrite my résumé about where I came from.”
“What do you mean?” a sharp tone in her voice.
“You always said you were from Down East, but that isn’t true, is it? You were born here on the island of Lewis. You grew up here.”
A small grin. “You could say that’s out East.”
She was not admitting to the outright lies she told me, but I didn’t want to get into that now.
“Why did your family let everybody believe you had died? And I take it you didn’t abscond with an aboriginal Canadian?”
Again tears suddenly flooded her eyes, and I had to wait while she mopped up. Duncan was crouched beside her, and he took her hand.
“Norman MacAulay was a self-righteous son-of-a-bitch, that’s why,” he said.
“It’s such a long and complicated story, Chris, I think I’d better save it for later. Let’s just say they thought I had disgraced them.” She shrugged and I saw the vestiges of that old teenage defiance. “Two can play that game. I got a job as a nanny with the Cohens. You remember them don’t you, Chris? We lived with them until you were four years old. They were very nice. They were in Scotland on holiday and, luckily, they needed a nanny for their wee ones. I just went with them when they returned to Canada.”
“And you never had contact with your family again?”
“I wrote them to say I had decided to settle in Canada.... I said some silly thing about going to live on an Indian reserve. My father wrote back and said that I was dead to him and he never wanted to see me again.”
“What did you do that was so terrible?”
She swallowed some of the tea and shrugged. “As far as he was concerned everything I did was bad. Me, the lost, perpetual sinner.”
I still thought disinheriting your daughter was pretty drastic, but I let it ride for now.
“A woman at the wake, Mary MacNeil, told me you have older brothers. Did they know where you were?”
“Probably. But they and my father were like peas in a pod. I never heard from any of them.”
She almost dropped her cup at this point because another burst of anguished crying tore out of her. This time both Duncan and I soothed her.
“Did you know she was in Canada?” I asked him over her head.
“Yes, I knew. She wrote to me.”
“Why didn’t you tell everybody the truth? How could you go along with such an atrocious lie?”
“I begged him not to tell, Chris. What was the point? At that time, I had no intention of ever returning to the island.” She sat up a bit and gave another wry grin. “I’d show them! I was going to make good, become rich and famous, and then I’d come back. Like Lazarus brought back from the dead.” Then she looked into my eyes, and the depth of sorrow I saw pierced me to the core. “But it never happened. I truly fucked up my life.”
“It’s not too late,” I jumped in.
The look of despair vanished, covered over by a mask of false cheer.
“No, it’s not, is it? Which is why I came back to Lewis. I told you I had been seeing a wonderful therapist, didn’t I?”
I nodded. I wasn’t about to repeat my jeering remarks about psycho-banging.
“Charlene was the one who suggested I had to face my demons and get some closure before I could move on with my life. So here I am.” There was some ot
her expression in her eyes now, more angry than sad. “But as usual, I seem to have fucked up my chances. Oh God! Chris, I need your help like never before.” Her agitation was such that she had to stand up, and she began to pace. “Oh God, oh God.” She swivelled around and stood in front of me. “I was telling the gospel truth when I said just now that I don’t remember what happened in the accident. I didn’t even know there had been a car crash until Sunday morning when somebody rang Duncan. And people were saying the Canadian woman was the driver... ”
“Weren’t you?”
She clasped her hands, her eyes never leaving my face. “I truly don’t know. I have a big blank in my mind. I remember getting into the car with Sarah, then nothing until I woke up in Duncan’s bed on Saturday morning.”
“I slept in the guest room,” said MacKenzie hastily. As if it mattered to me.
“How did you explain the fact that you were battered and bruised? Surely you had to say something?”
Duncan was about to jump in and answer for her, but he stopped. I knew he was waiting to hear what story she would give first.
“You tell her, Dunc. I hardly remember.”
He scowled at me yet again. “She said she had come over from her B&B in Skye, but her car stalled a ways from here. She decided to walk along the cliffs, slipped, and cracked her head.”
“You were walking along the cliffs in the middle of the night in the rain?”
She shrugged. “I grew up doing that.”
I didn’t like that answer at all with its myriad implications, but I turned to MacKenzie. “Why didn’t you go and get her car on Saturday?”
He was getting truly exasperated now, but I didn’t care. “Because, Miss Sherlock, my car was dead as a doornail. Shona needed tending to, so that’s what I did. I thought the car would wait. Do you want to get out and have a look to see if I’m telling the truth?”
Joan put her hand on his arm to calm him. “It’s all right, Dunc. She’s just asking.”
Back to her. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but again according to Mrs. MacNeil, Sarah MacDonald was originally Sarah MacAulay, and she was your half-sister?”
She blinked and her hand flew to her bruised jaw. “Yes. She belonged to my stepmother.”
Abruptly, she turned and went to the window. I could see her shoulders were shaking as she struggled for control. MacKenzie followed her and offered the comforting arm again. She availed herself of it while I waited. Finally, I said.
“In what way do you want me to help you?”
He answered for her. “Shona told me about your work. She’s very proud of you, Christine. She says you’ve dealt with cases like this before.” His tone and expression made it clear that he thought the pride was a tribute to Joan’s generosity of heart and not much to do with my ability.
“What specifically are you referring to?” I asked her.
“You told me a few years ago that you’d been on a course with the FBI in the States somewhere. There’s a way to help people get back their memories of what happened when they’ve been traumatized.”
“You mean by the use of hypnosis?”
“Yes, that’s what it was. Please, Chris. I want you to hypnotize me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I was demurring like crazy with facial expressions and gestures – as if to say “I can’t hypnotize… you can’t do… it’s not a magic trick,” etc. – when Duncan interrupted me.
“Och, you’re not giving your mother a chance. She’s desperate here. You could help her if you wanted to.”
I resented his interference.
“I am obviously not making myself clear. Hypnosis is a useful tool, and sometimes buried memories can be retrieved, but more often than not, they are permanently lost. The brain has wiped them out.”
“But that bodyguard of Princess Di’s who was in the crash, he got his memory back didn’t he? He remembered seeing a member of the paparazzi forcing them over.”
“No. As a matter of fact, Trevor Rees-Jones is a good example of what I’m talking about. And he wasn’t her bodyguard, by the way. He was employed by Dodi Fayed. In spite of numerous sessions with a psychiatrist, Rees-Jones remembered getting into the car as they were driving off, but that is all. Nothing else. And that is the most common scenario.” Yes, I know I sounded pompous, but it was the truth. “Besides which, I’m not a psychiatrist. I took one course four years ago. I’ve never practised the technique on anyone since then.”
Joan looked exactly like somebody who’d been turned down for a job she desperately needed. “I have faith in you, Chris. I know how you are. You were always top of the class, but you never believed you were smart. I’m sure it will all come back to you when you start.”
“Faith in me, by either of us, is not the point. I might be utterly brilliant. The new Mesmer, but memory recovery through hypnosis isn’t usually effective when there has been physical trauma.”
I might as well have saved my breath. She had on her stubborn look.
“We can at least give it a try.”
“No harm in that,” said MacKenzie, throwing in his two cents’ worth. I could have throttled him.
Oh God.
“But you’re my... I don’t know how objective I can be.”
Her lips tightened. “For Lord’s sake, Chris, I’m not asking you to give me a gynie exam. I just want you to put me into a trance and help me get my memory back. Besides, there’s lots of times I’ve seen you act pretty detached where I’m concerned.”
That was another minefield I wasn’t about to walk through.
She tried again. “Please Chris. I need to know. I’ve got to clear my name.”
“I see. And you’re thinking that if you do the hypnosis with me, a police officer, you can bring whatever is said into a court of law? Well, I’m telling you right now, anything revealed in a hypnotic trance is not admissible evidence. It won’t do you a damn bit of good if you tell me you weren’t even in the bloody car.”
“I thought you couldn’t help but tell the truth when you were hypnotized.”
“That’s another common myth. People who lie in their daily lives are quite capable of lying even when they are in a trance. Besides which, the unconscious works in the same way dreams do. If you had a dream that you shot Kennedy, you wouldn’t go and confess. Same thing. People say things when they’re under hypnosis that aren’t necessarily true. They’re coming from the fantasy part of the mind.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Chris, but that’s nothing new, is it? And I don’t like the implication that I’m just trying to produce an alibi. That’s not why I want you to do this for me.”
Duncan interjected again. “She wasn’t drunk when she came here and she wasn’t drinking at the hotel. She’s gone straight. But poor Sarah MacDonald was killed and Shona would like for her own conscience’s sake to remember what happened. Wouldn’t you feel the same way?”
I ignored him and focused on Joan. “But what if you discover you were the cause of the accident? And you walked away. What are you going to do if that’s the case?”
“I’ll turn myself in.”
“You could be charged with vehicular homicide. You could go to jail.”
“And not pass GO. Christine and I used to play Monopoly by the hour,” she explained to Duncan. “She’d always put up such a fuss about going to jail. I think that’s why she became a police-woman. Remember that, Pet?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to reply. The endearment that had, once upon a time, melted my heart, felt like a drop of acid. And she knew perfectly well how much Paula’s dad being a police officer had influenced me. Realizing she wasn’t getting a response, Joan returned to the issue.
“Let’s put it this way. I have to go to the police sooner or later, but I’m going to be in a better position if I know what happened myself. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“There’s more than just the car crash. You and Mrs. MacDonald were identified as leaving the house of To
rmod MacAulay that night. He’s a relative, I understand. I presume you know he died?”
She averted her eyes quickly. “Yes, Duncan’s daughter rang here.”
“You did go there, didn’t you? Was he still alive when you left?”
Duncan exploded at me. “She just said she doesn’t remember anything. And how do you know she was there?”
“There are witnesses.”
“Why are you hounding her like this?”
“Because if I’m going to help her, I need to pin down some of the facts.”
Yes, my voice was raised too, and he had to force himself into some kind of control, spluttering indignantly.
It took a few moments for us all to calm down. Joan was looking so vulnerable I felt like a shit and toned down my voice.
“Let’s backtrack a little. You said you can recall getting into the car with Sarah MacDonald. Do you remember where you were heading and why?”
She jumped away from that question like a spooked cat, but she nodded her head. “I do recall that we were on our way to visit Mr. MacAulay. Sarah was a real-estate agent. She had some business with him.”
“Did she know you were her half-sister, by the way? She would have been pretty young when you disappeared, but I can only assume you sought her out to have some kind of reunion.”
Joan was looking more and more like a cornered rabbit. “Christine, please! I know you’re upset about all this, and I will tell you the whole story, I promise, but I can’t do it now.”
“Your mother’s had a very bad time. You need to go easy on her,” this was from Duncan, of course, who was building up a head of steam again.
“Okay. You, Joan, want me to help you find out the truth concerning that car accident, and I think one piece of truth deserves another. I was in MacAulay’s house after his body was found, and something didn’t sit right with me.”
I could see the sudden flush of colour in her face but she didn’t speak, didn’t have a chance. MacKenzie leaped in.
“Lisa told me about you making her go through the house like it was a murder scene. Bloody irresponsible, I call it. Tormod was a very sick man. He wasn’t expected to live out the summer. All these insinuations are malicious, if you ask me.”
Does Your Mother Know? Page 18