Sleeping Dogs Lie

by Sharon Henegar

“Okay.” Bob put down his glass of tea. “This is hard to say, it sounds so insane. I mean, stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like me, only it has, and—“

  “Just tell us,” Kay broke in sternly.

  “Yes. Right. Well, the beginning of it was, I found out about a murder.”

  I had just managed a sip of tea, which caught in my throat. I snorted and Kay whacked me on the back. “I'm okay,” I said, shaking her off. “I'm okay. Go on.”

  “There’s so much you don’t know about me. First of all, I'm not a writer. It felt so weird to lie about that.” Bob shook his head. “I was sure you could tell by my expression I was making it up, Louisa. When I met you it was the first time I tried out any of the cover story I'd made up.”

  Aha! put in one of my mental voices. You were right about him hiding something. “I was afraid you were a reporter looking for a story on how my husband died,” I blurted.

  “A reporter? No, I said I was a writer to have an excuse not to go to a job every day.”

  “What the hell are you, then?” Kay demanded. “Is Bob Richardson your real name?”

  “Yes. Really. Coming up with fake ID was beyond my capabilities. I’m a hypnotherapist.” We both stared at him. He gave us a faint smile. “Well, somebody has to do it,” he quipped.

  “I saw a website for a hypnotist with that name,” Kay said.

  I nodded, remembering the website as well. “And an artist and a guy who breeds water lilies,” I added. Kay gave me her ‘too much information’ look.

  “I do have a website,” Bob said. “I'm pretty well known in High Cross. I've done hypnosis a long time, over twenty years. I work with all kinds of patients, but my specialty is hypnotic anesthesia.”

  “Is what?” Kay asked.

  “Hypnotic anesthesia. Some people are allergic to drugs or they don’t want to use them. If they’re capable of being deeply hypnotized, we can use it as an alternative to regular anesthesia during an operation or at the dentist, or during childbirth. It can speed healing too.”

  He picked up his glass of iced tea and drank the last of it. He stared at the ice, then rose and walked over to the pitcher sitting on the kitchen counter.

  “A few months ago I started working with a new patient, Ian. Nineteen, planning to be a chef. Just starting at the culinary academy in High Cross. Nice kid, very focused on what he wanted to do.” He refilled his glass and stared at it as he spoke. “He needed to have his wisdom teeth pulled, and he was allergic to most anesthetics. We had some sessions to establish his ability to go into deep trance and he was a good subject.

  “I was testing the depth of his trance when something new came up. By regressing a patient in time, taking him back to his last birthday and having him recall details, and repeating it for the year before, I can get a good idea how deeply hypnotized he is. I use birthdays since they have special significance to most people. But when we reached Ian’s fifteenth birthday it was clear that something happened on that day. He became agitated. I pulled him away from it to relax and to give myself time to think.”

  Bob put his glass down on the counter to pace about the room. “Unexpected reactions do come up when you hypnotize people, and it’s part of my job to help them over rough spots in their lives if I can. Sometimes they come to me with what they think is their problem, but deep down they need to deal with something else, something that’s too hard to look at directly. Of course you have to be very, very careful that you’re not influencing the patient to create false memories that seem real.” He paused to look at us, then resumed his restless pacing. “Ian’s reaction to his fifteenth birthday was so intense that I wondered whether we should keep going. But I've worked with hundreds of people, and I believed I could help him get over whatever had happened to him.”

  The pacing brought Bob to the window that overlooks the alley behind the store. He stood looking out, the light bleaching out the normal laugh lines by his eyes. His shoulders sagged.

  “I made sure Ian was still in a deep trance, and had him distance himself from what he was describing, as though it were a movie he was watching rather than something that was happening to him,” Bob said. He turned away from the window and began pacing again. “I took him back to when he woke up on that day. His dog woke him up. It was on the bed next to him, growling. He looked at the clock by his bed and saw it was 3:17. He got up and went to the door and saw his stepfather coming out of the master bedroom. Ian and his stepfather did not get along at all, and his dog positively hated the man, which explained the growling. So Ian went back to bed.”

  Bob paced to the kitchen counter and picked up his glass of tea, returned to the table and sat down. Jack came and laid his muzzle on Bob’s lap. Bob lifted one of the soft black ears and let it fall through his fingers.

  “Ian said when he woke up again, it was late morning. The house was quiet. He went down to the kitchen and let his dog out. He was surprised that his mother wasn’t up. She always made a fuss about his birthday breakfast. So he went upstairs to wake her.”

  Bob paused to sip a little tea. “This is when his demeanor changed, and I had to remind him he was a spectator, that he was watching a movie. He said the boy crossed the room. The mother was alone in the bed, and she was very still. He saw that she wasn’t breathing. An empty pill bottle sat on the bedside table. Ian said the boy reached out and picked up the bottle and looked at it. Set it down again. The boy was saying, mom, mom, oh mom, no. He ran out of the room and dialed nine one one and sat in the kitchen crying until the paramedics and the police arrived.”

  Kay looked over at me with an expression of concern. A couple of tears had escaped and were running down my face. I shook my head at her and wiped the tears away, but more followed them. I rose and left the room, going to the bathroom for some tissue.

  Behind me I heard Bob say, “What’s wrong with Louisa?”

  “Her—her mother died a few months ago,” Kay replied.

  “Yes, I remember she said she’d inherited her house.”

  “She probably didn’t tell you her mother committed suicide.” Kay sounded resolutely matter of fact.

  “No, she left out that part,” Bob said. “I'm so sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything—”

  I blew my nose hard and missed part of what Kay was saying, tuning back in to hear, “…weren’t close, but it was still upsetting. She’ll be all right.”

  I honked into the tissue again, made a face at myself in the bathroom mirror, and went back to the table. “I'm okay,” I said. “I just needed a little time out.” Emily Ann rose from the couch and walked over, ducked under the table, and lay down on my feet; I felt comforted to my bones. “Go on, Bob, what else did Ian say?”

  Bob gave me an anxious look before continuing, “Ian had been through enough, so again I distanced him from his memories, brought him forward to the present and woke him. He was relaxed, a little sleepy. I said I'd taken him back through his birthdays, and that it appeared he had suffered trauma on his fifteenth. In an instant he went from relaxed to looking sick. He said should have warned me, that one was really bad. He didn’t remember much about that day, and he was curious about what he had told me. I began to repeat what he’d said, starting with seeing his stepfather in the middle of the night, and he stopped me. He said he couldn’t have seen his stepfather that night because he was out of town, and that the police had checked up on where he’d been because he inherited a lot of money from Ian’s mother. I offered to let him watch the video of his session—“

  “Video?” I broke in.

  Bob looked at me and nodded. “I tape every session. Protection in case someone accuses you of unprofessional conduct while they were hypnotized. Or sometimes people want to know what they said or how they acted. There’s nothing secret about it, the camera is in plain sight and all my patients know about it. I give them a copy of the tape if they’re uncomfortable with anything. I don’t want anyone’s session to be a secret from them. Anyway, Ian wouldn’t watch the tape. He
got up and said he had to go. He looked like he was about to cry.” He stopped and put his hands on top of the table and looked across the room, then back at us. “I never saw him again.”

  He pushed himself up from his chair and started pacing again. “I left a couple of days later to go to a conference, and when I got back I happened to see Ian’s dentist, the one who was doing his wisdom teeth. We talked for a couple of minutes, and I asked him when Ian’s surgery was scheduled, and he looked at me like I was from another planet. He said it had been in the papers that Ian had killed himself a few days before.”

  He stopped pacing. His face was grim. “What he said was, he committed suicide ‘just like his mother did a few years ago.’”

  Silence hovered around us. After a few moments Bob went on. “I know it's not proof of anything. But I’m sure that Ian did see his stepfather leaving his mother’s room the night she died. I know he was upset by remembering his fifteenth birthday. But unless he changed completely after he left my office, he wasn’t despondent. He’d already weathered the trauma of finding his mother dead, and had been able to go on with his life. I didn’t see anything in several sessions with him to suggest he was depressed or was considering suicide. He had made peace with his past and was working toward his future, not thinking about ending it. But he was dead. I was convinced that Ian and his mother had both been murdered, she for her money and he because he knew too much.”

  Kay shifted restlessly in her seat. “Seems like some piece of evidence somewhere would put the stepfather on the scene. They couldn’t have had anyone like Ed investigating the case.”

  I stared at her. Like Ed? But she was still talking.

  “You haven’t told us about the woman in red. Why were you kidnapped? And how did you get away? And why the heck did she steal Louisa’s car?”

  He came back to the table and sat down again. “The tape,” he said. “I think they’re looking for the tape of my hypnosis session with Ian. His stepfather’s whole life depends on no one suspecting he’s killed two people. The tape isn’t proof of anything but he must be desperate not to have questions asked in the wrong places. You’re right, Kay. If he murdered them, some bit of incriminating evidence could exist—or he’s afraid it does. And if he’s killed twice, I don’t think he’d hesitate to go for three. The safest thing seemed for me to get out of town for a while.”

  “So his stepfather knew that Ian was seeing you and being hypnotized?” I asked.

  Bob shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t think so at the time. Ian was still living at home while he went to school, but I can't imagine them discussing anything. Everything he said about his stepfather indicated animosity between them. Of course, that’s not unusual between parents and kids, especially stepparents. I believe it was his aunt who recommended that he try a hypnotist, apparently she used one some time ago.”

  Kay frowned. “If the stepfather didn’t know Ian was seeing you, let alone that you taped his recollection of the night his mother died, how the hell did he connect you to Ian?”

  “Ian may have confronted him with his recovered memory. Or maybe something just came out about him going to a hypnotist. I have no idea if he revealed my name, but there aren’t a whole lot of hypnotists in High Cross. Or someone in the police department could have told his stepfather I have the tape. Or he found out I stole Ian’s dog.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I stared at Jack. “You stole him? Jack was Ian’s dog?” I asked at the same time Kay blurted, “The police told him?”

  Bob patted his lap with one hand and Jack reared up to put his front paws there. Bob rubbed a finger along the top of his long nose. “I had to, he was starving,” he answered me first. “After I heard that Ian was dead, I didn’t know what to do. I thought of nothing else for days. If I hadn't hypnotized him, he might never have recovered that memory and would be alive.”

  “He came to you for help, and you did your best,” I consoled.

  “I know, but…I can't tell you how bad that feels. I decided I had to go to the police with my suspicions.”

  “The High Cross police?” Kay asked.

  Bob nodded. “I made an appointment with a detective. It was awful. The whole time I was explaining, he kept shaking his head. He seemed to think hypnosis is a parlor game and that I had as much credibility as someone who sends out those spam emails about hypnotizing women into bed. I'll never forget his voice when he asked me where the tape with this so-called information was. He told me to bring him the tape, and that he’d check into it, but I was sure the whole thing was headed straight for the round file.”

  “Where is the tape?” I asked.

  “It was in my safety deposit box at the bank. Anyway, I left the police station angry. I thought I could put it in their laps and be done with it, that they’d immediately start an investigation. Now I was more frustrated than ever.”

  “Yeah, some cops can really drive you nuts.” Kay was scowling, and I didn’t think it was because of the High Cross police.

  Bob continued, “I drove around trying to decide what to do. I had a copy of the tape that I could take to them. My gut feeling was to keep the original, which had Ian’s signature on the label. But that detective had made me uneasy. I can't explain it. He was just way more negative than he needed to be.”

  “Maybe he’s just used to playing the bad cop role,” I put in.

  “Could be, who knows. Anyway, I found myself driving up in the hills and realized that Ian’s house was somewhere close by. I circled around until I found the right street. Now I felt stupid. I hadn’t driven by someone’s house since I was sixteen and borrowed my parents’ car to cruise by some girl’s house. Just on the off chance she’d be on her front steps to appreciate how cool I was at the wheel of a ’66 Fairlane.” He shook his head and smiled a little.

  “Ian’s house, when I found it, had about an acre of grass in front. The only thing out of place was this black lump in the shade of one of the bushes near the street. I slowed down and the lump moved. It lifted its head and looked at me, and my foot stomped on the brake. You’ve never seen anything so pitiful. He stood up as soon as I stopped, and he was skin and bones. Ian’s stepfather must have kicked him out of the house and left him.”

  “Maybe he’d dumped him somewhere and Jack had made his way back,” I said.

  “Hmmm, his paw pads were pretty worn, that could be it. Anyway, I didn’t think, I just leaned over and opened the passenger door. I called him, and he wobbled over to the car and climbed in and we drove away.”

  “Jeez, this is a really bad man,” I blurted. Kay and Bob looked at me and I felt myself blushing. “Well, two murders are bad enough, but to starve poor Jack…” My voice trailed off, but Kay was nodding.

  “Yeah, and I bet he did it all for money he was enjoying anyway, since he was married to Ian’s mother,” she said. “I wonder if she was going to divorce him or something. But Bob, I still want to know what happened when you got picked up last night. Who is that woman and where does she fit in?”

  “And how you got away,” I added.

  “Oh, that.” Bob said. “Well, to start at the end, I hypnotized her into bed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “What!” Kay and I yelped together.

  He remained deadpan for a moment, then grinned. “Okay, not what you’re thinking. I hypnotized her and she fell asleep. It took a while but I was able to wiggle out of the rope she had tied me up with. So I left.”

  “On foot?” Kay asked.

  “Yeah. Unfortunately she fell asleep with her head on her purse, and she’d put my wallet inside. I was afraid I'd wake her if I tried to get it back, so I didn’t have any money to call a cab to get back home. Her car keys were in there too, so I couldn’t take that. Plus I wasn’t sure where it was safe to go.”

  “I wish I'd been there to see it,” Kay commented. “You make it sound awfully easy.”

  “I'd say she had been hypnotized before. She was very suggestible. She
must have been tired anyway, and once it got late it was fairly simple to put her into a trance and suggest that she have a good, long sleep.”

  “Good grief,” I said, “can you do that with anyone? Hypnotize them without them knowing?” I could feel every paranoid instinct I'd ever had flaring to new life.

  “No, no, of course I can't. And I wouldn’t have done it to her if I hadn't been desperate.” He looked me in the eyes. “I promise you I would never do something like that to you. I doubt if I could.”

  Our gaze stayed locked until Kay broke in. “How about going back to the beginning? At least our beginning, or rather Louisa’s. Who is the woman who kidnapped you?”

  Bob turned to face her. “That’s the weird thing, Kay, I don’t know. I have no idea who she is or where she fits into the picture. She had a gun—that’s how she got me out of the grocery store. You remember I went in for dog food, Louisa?”

  I nodded. “I was listening to the radio and the next thing I knew you came out with this blonde and got into another car. I half killed myself getting into the driver’s seat to follow you. If you ever lock the door when I'm waiting in the car again I may shoot you myself.”

  His eyes crinkled in a smile. “I’ll try to break myself of the habit,” he promised. “I wanted you to be safe.”

  “She was safer than you, anyway,” Kay said.

  “True. So I was in the dog food aisle deciding what size bag to get. I heard high heels clicking on the tile floor but I didn’t pay attention until something hard poked into my ribs. She moved in close beside me and said that she would shoot me if I didn’t come along quietly. She took my arm to guide me out of the store and to her car, and I could feel the gun in my ribs the whole time.”

  “Thank heavens she didn’t trip in those high heels and shoot you accidentally,” I said. One of the voices in my head said that’s exactly what I would have done in her place.

  “When we got to the car, she told me to open the door and slide over behind the wheel. Then she handed me a key and told me to drive. We headed to the highway. I tried to drive slowly because I thought I saw you following, Louisa.”