“Avery Morgan certainly didn’t kill her for her money, if that’s what you’ve been thinking.”
“What did he kill her for, then?”
“I didn’t say he did. I just meant, he’s already got so much money of his own.”
“You suspect him, though. Don’t you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You do suspect him. Everybody around here does. But is it based on anything other than speculation? What was his motive?”
She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Maybe she had a lover.”
“More speculation.”
“No. Maybe I know she had a lover.”
“You know that for a fact? It’s not just some gossip you heard?”
“I think I know the difference between fact and gossip.”
“How do you know? Did you catch them in the act?”
“No.” She hesitated. “I—I saw a letter.”
“To Maria Morgan?”
She nodded.
“Who was it from?”
Miss Whipple swung her shelving cart around so that it stood between herself and Dubin, and with that barricade between them she faced him defiantly. “I’m afraid you’re going a little too fast for me, Mr. Dubin.”
“I thought you wanted to help.”
“I’m trying to help, but I have my limits. You’re going to have to do your homework and see what you can find out for yourself.”
“All right. I can think of two other people who probably know at least as much as you do.”
She smiled skeptically. “Who’s that?”
“The nurse. What’s her name? Mrs. Paterson? She was with the family even in those days, wasn’t she? And Dr. Palmer. He was the one who treated Maria Morgan for her so-called depression.”
“I doubt if either of them would talk to you.”
“Well, there’s no harm in asking, is there? I’ll let you know what happens.”
When Dubin and Miss Whipple stepped out from behind the stacks they came face to face with Avery Morgan, who stood at the desk waiting to return an overdue book. Morgan seemed shocked to see Dubin and angry with the librarian for allowing him in the library.
“What have you been telling this man?”
The librarian blushed and nearly toppled over. “Mr. Morgan. What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. He’s been asking you about Maria, hasn’t he? What have you told him?”
“Nothing, really. I haven’t told him anything.”
“He’s a blackmailer.”
“A blackmailer?”
“That’s right “
She turned to Dubin, who again tried his most winning smile. She did not smile back this time. “But he told me he was a writer.”
“The only thing he writes is extortion notes.”
“But who is he blackmailing?”
“He’s tried my wife and me, but since he doesn’t have anything to blackmail us about he’s shopping around in the neighborhood for whatever he can find.” Morgan’s lower lip was quivering. “No one in this town is safe with a man like that walking around.”
Dubin drove past the train station and parked in the shady spot where he often sat watching for Nicole. He thought about her often, much more often than about Susan Avery. Sometimes, in her flimsy running clothes, she flitted out the door and flew away before he could even think about following her. There was no sign of her that day, which was just as well. His encounter with Avery Morgan had left him in a foul mood. He knew what he was and made no excuses for himself, but still Avery Morgan had wounded his pride. No one in this town is safe with a man like that walking around. It infuriated him to be spoken of that way, even if it was true.
* * *
Miss Whipple spent a sleepless night, angry and upset with herself as much as with Dubin. What had she done? After keeping her secret for seven years, what had possessed her to confide in a stranger? He called himself a writer—and he looked like a writer, with his thoughtful eyes and his delicate moustache and the wavy dark hair that he wore a little too long—and somehow she must have thought she could trust him. She thought he’d write a book that would eventually find a place in the True Crime section, and she’d be mentioned in the Acknowledgements—“The author extends his warmest gratitude to Miss Francine Whipple, without whose tireless assistance this book could never have been written.” Was that what she’d been hoping? Was she that much of a fool? All she’d accomplished was to expose the town and everyone in it to the machinations of a blackmailer.
Miss Whipple tossed and turned for three more hours before she fell asleep. By then it was almost dawn and she knew exactly what she would have to do. Don’t worry, she told herself. The letter is in a safe place.
* * *
I feel I should say more about Hunter and Antonia, because this is their story, not mine. And I could do that easily enough by sticking to the jargon of my trade, substituting clinical data for the kinds of observations we normally make about the people around us. But to say very much about them as human beings—to describe them in the same terms as I’ve described Olympia or Nicole or even Jeff Gottlieb—is frankly beyond my powers.
Hunter was a hard person to know. His social interactions consisted of incoherent ravings interspersed with long periods of silence. It’s no accident that Hamlet was his favorite play. He spent his life brooding, reading books, talking to himself as he tried on his multiple personalities, shouting out random challenges and conundrums—and watching videos, endlessly watching videos, often the same one for hours at a time. I could record all this as clinical data, but I would have to be Shakespeare to go beyond the pathological in my rendering of it. And he had spent most of his life so heavily sedated that, unlike Hamlet, he could not express himself in actions any better than in words. You could have watched him for a hundred years without coming any closer to knowing his innermost thoughts. I wanted to bridge the gap by reducing his dosages, but on that I had been overruled. For Antonia the situation was even more hopeless. Gibberish would have been an improvement over the seven years’ silence her illness had imposed on her. In her bright blue eyes you could glimpse a beautiful soul, like a tropical fish in an aquarium, trying to escape through the clouded glass.
Just three weeks had gone by since Hunter first sat down to play the piano, but so much had changed in those weeks that it seemed a different world. Hunter’s illness had shown some improvement; Nicole had turned out to be more seriously troubled than anyone imagined; and I—not to be outdone by my patients—had become the victim of frequent nightmares and migraine attacks that left me feeling unable to cope with the demands of my job. I considered calling Dr. Neuberger, the therapist who, during my residency, had helped me overcome these and other symptoms before they spoiled my chances for a successful career. But what would I say to Dr. Neuberger? How could I spare the time to travel into the city to see him on any kind of regular basis? Frankly, there were things going on in my life that I would have been reluctant to discuss with him. I had been drawn into a relationship with Olympia that even I could recognize as a dangerous sexual obsession. I had lost my judgment and self-control and was beginning to lose my grip on reality. Only that could account for my fateful decision to yield to Olympia’s blandishments and allow her father, Dr. Peter Bartolli, to conduct a hypnotic past life regression on Hunter Morgan.
Dr. Palmer would have been furious if he’d known what we were doing behind his back. Not only because it involved Peter Bartolli but because to him the whole subject of past life regression was completely beyond the pale. I’d had the same reaction when Olympia first brought it up, but under her prodding I did enough research to convince myself that the idea wasn’t utterly mad. A scientist named Stephenson at the University of Virginia has published several volumes of carefully documented studies on the past life regression phenomenon, having traveled throughout Africa and India collecting first-person narratives for many years. For example, Stephenson relates the story of a smal
l boy in India who specifically recalled being murdered in a past life, describing his killers, their weapons, and numerous details that no one in his village could have known. It turned out that a crime corresponding exactly to the boy’s “recollection” had been committed in a distant village about six months before he was born. My research uncovered many stories of a similar nature. And I discovered that past life regression through hypnosis has been used as a therapeutic tool by a wide variety of practitioners, including many who don’t believe in reincarnation or any other mystical claptrap. It’s no more unbelievable than Freudianism, I told myself—and probably no less therapeutic. And so I pretended to have an open mind, though deep down I knew it was nonsense. The truth is that I was being guided not by sound medical judgment but by my obsession with Olympia. In her mind anything labeled “New Age” might as well have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt—she herself had experienced several previous lives, she told me, all of a glamorous and historically significant nature. And at the merest hint of skepticism on my part, she would turn away coldly and challenge me to argue the point with her father.
I had never actually met Peter Bartolli until the night appointed for the hypnosis session with Hunter. It was a rainy, moonless night, with the north wind whisking in the first shudder of an autumn chill. Bartolli appeared in my office shaking the rain from his black umbrella after having been spirited into the Institute’s service entrance by Olympia. The umbrella was almost as large as he was and it seemed to enfold him like a pair of black wings. He kept it furled around him as he made his way down the darkened corridors to my office, presumably to avoid being identified by the staff. But no one who’d ever seen him before could have failed to recognize his wiry frame or the agitated, insistent movements of his long, slender hands. As he shook the rain off the umbrella and reached out to greet me, a wide smile stretched beneath his bottomless eyes. “Dr. Hoffmann,” he said with an air of satisfaction. “Peter Bartolli. I’m so very pleased to meet you.”
Bartolli wore black shoes, black wool slacks and a black turtleneck. But in spite of this lugubrious color scheme he projected a warmth that made me like him immediately. He spoke perfect English—almost too precise to be perfect—but there was something Old World, possibly Middle European about him. I tried to remember what Olympia had told me about his background. “I’m delighted to meet you, doctor,” I said. “Olympia has told me so much about you.”
“That’s unfortunate,” he said, making a face at his daughter. Then he laughed, “I hope she didn’t tell you any of my secrets.”
Olympia joined in his laughter, and I took the cue and laughed too. “Even though,” he winked, “she has told me all of yours.”
Olympia and her father enjoyed another round of laughter, though I felt like squirming out of the room. Fortunately Hunter, who had been sitting quietly in the wing chair across from my desk, with his back turned to the door, chose that moment to make his presence known. “Dr. Palmer!” he called out. “Where’s Dr. Palmer!”
“Dr. Palmer is out of town,” I answered. “He’s at a meeting in London. He won’t be back till next week.”
Bartolli stepped forward and leaned around to face Hunter. “Do you know me?”
“Excellent well, sir. You are a fishmonger.”
“Ha!” Bartolli smiled. “Still playing Hamlet!” He pulled up a small chair and sat down. “No, Hunter, I’m Dr. Bartolli. You remember me, don’t you?”
“Have you a daughter?”
“Yes. You know Olympia, don’t you?”
“Let her not walk in the sun.”
Bartolli knew the script. “Still harping on my daughter!”
Hunter laughed. “Gone, far gone!”
Bartolli took his hand and squeezed it lightly. “Yes, you’re gone, far gone, but you can come back if you do as I say. You feel better lately, don’t you, Hunter?”
Hunter nodded.
“Well, tonight we’re going to try something a little different, and I think you’ll feel even better than you do. We’re going to try to go back in time. Would you like to do that?”
Hunter nodded again.
Bartolli signaled to Olympia and me to take seats in the back of the room where Hunter wouldn’t see us. Before I sat down I pushed a button to start the tape recorder beside my desk. “What I’d like you to do is just relax,” Bartolli said, gently laying Hunter’s hand on the arm of the wing chair. “Close your eyes and just listen to my voice and relax. You know what ‘relax’ means. It means not to worry about anything or care about anything or think about anything. So just relax. That’s right. Just relax.”
Bartolli’s voice was so entrancing that even Olympia, sitting beside me in the back of the room, seemed to be drifting under his control. I squeezed her hand and she jolted awake just as her father glanced in our direction to let us know that Hunter had fallen into the desired hypnotic state. “Now let’s try to think back to an earlier age,” he said softly, “a time when everything was different. You’re still you, although you’re different too, and there you are and there’s everyone else and it’s an entirely different time and place. Just relax, and in your mind look around you and try to tell us what you see.”
Hunter’s voice sounded low, almost growling. “Dark,” he said. “Dingy.”
“It’s a dark and dingy place. Where are you?”
“Noisy too. Lots of men.” He rolled his head from side to side, growling in that strange voice that none of us had ever heard before. “Dancing in circles, drinking out of mugs.”
“You’re someplace dark and dingy and noisy where there are a lot of men dancing around drinking. And are they saying anything?”
“Shouting. Singing. Drinking and singing and shouting.”
“Are they speaking English?”
“English, sure. They’re speaking English.”
Bartolli leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Can you tell us what you’re doing?”
“I just walked in. I’m looking around.”
“When is all this happening?”
“Oh,” Hunter whispered, as if he didn’t want the men to overhear. “It’s a long time ago. A big barrel, men in funny clothes, drinking beer and jumping around singing and drinking beer.”
“Now if you could just go back and give us the whole picture again.”
“It’s a place like a bar, sort of dark, no windows, noisy...”
And so it went. Bartolli had the uncanny ability to draw a coherence out of Hunter’s “past life” that was completely absent from his present one. Hunter answered his questions in meaningful phrases, sometimes even complete sentences, with none of the breathless gibberish that usually poured out of him. It was as if he’d recaptured a life in which he was not schizophrenic—though the world he described was a very strange one indeed. It was all as Olympia had predicted, but I could hardly believe my ears. And as for Olympia: I had my hands full just trying to keep her out of Hunter’s trance. She sat with her eyes closed, smiling, bobbing her head as she listened, and more than once I had to clamp down on her arm to keep her in her seat.
We recorded and transcribed the entire session, filling thirty-five pages with Hunter’s disconnected answers to Bartolli’s questions. Let me try to give a condensed version, without all the fits and starts:
“I’m in a dark, dingy tavern filled with noisy men dancing and shouting, drinking and singing. It’s a long time ago, I don’t know where it is. They’re speaking English, but their clothes look funny and old fashioned. They’re singing some kind of drinking song, waving their beer mugs around in the air as they sing. They shout at me when I arrive—it’s like they all know me—and I sit down at a big round table and drink a glass of wine, keeping my eye on an evil-looking man who wears a cape and a hat like George Washington’s. Everyone’s laughing at a weird little midget who looks like a court jester. The men light a fire in the middle of the table—it’s some kind of flaming punch—and we drink toasts and smoke pipes and talk about women. Eve
ryone looks at me, and I offer to tell the story of the three women I have loved.”
At this point Hunter started shouting incoherently, almost violently, and Bartolli had to calm him down and renew the painstaking process of drawing out his memories one by one. In fragmentary moments of lucidity over the next half hour, Hunter described the following scene:
“A beautiful young woman lies sleeping on a swinging couch, dressed in a kind of ballet dress. I walk in with an old man, who refers to the young woman as his daughter, though she doesn’t wake up. Another old man runs into the room, with white hair and long eyebrows that stick out in front of his face. He shows me a pair of eyeglasses, and when I try them on the room comes to life. The girl wakes up and the two old men fight over her—apparently each of them thinks she’s his daughter—and she starts dancing like a ballerina. I’m in love with her, and before long we’re dancing together, she’s spinning me around and we whirl wildly down a long staircase. Her father chases after us, shouting for us to stop.”
Hunter grew increasingly agitated as he related these events, and by the time the “father”—I couldn’t tell which one—started chasing them down the stairs, he was shouting and gasping for breath and all the color had drained from his face, as if his deepest fears were being realized. Bartolli had no choice but to pull him back from the regression and release him from the trance, and in a few minutes he had caught his breath and sat gazing around the room with his accustomed lack of affect.
I had never seen anything remotely like it. To be sure, the second half of the narrative sounded more like a fantasy or a nightmare than a historical recollection, but for Hunter even that was a momentous leap forward. He had gone “back in time” into a world that he could describe and other people could begin to understand.
It was time for Hunter to return to his room and go to bed. I rang for Mrs. Paterson and she appeared so quickly that I wondered if she’d been listening outside the door. She took Hunter’s hand and spoke softly to him, almost as if she were soothing a horse. “Okay now Hunter. It’s time to go back to your room. Can you stand up?” With Olympia’s aid, she stood him up, and the two of them walked him out of the room.
The Rules of Dreaming Page 9