by P J Parrish
He hadn’t told Joe about the locket. Nor had he given voice to the question that had been in his head since the trip to the medical examiner: Why had Amy put her own hair into the locket?
The click of the tape recorder drew his attention back to Dr. Sher. The room was quiet and warm. He and Joe waited in silence while the doctor again took Amy back to her nightmare, telling her there was nothing to be afraid of and that she was safe.
“Tell me where you are,” Dr. Sher said.
“I don’t know,” Amy said.
“Look down at yourself,” Dr. Sher said. “Look at your clothes and shoes. What do they look like?”
“I’m wearing a blue dress,” Amy said. “And black leather lace-up shoes. They don’t fit me right, and they’re heavy and hard to run in.”
“Are you running now?”
“No,” Amy said. “But I’m afraid. I hear the horses coming. I see a white horse pulling a black carriage. I hear the men. The fire is in their hands.”
Louis caught Joe’s eye and mouthed the word Carriage? She just shook her head.
“Are there other people with you, Amy?” Dr. Sher said.
“He is there…and his wife.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. They’re watching.”
“What do they look like?” Dr. Sher asked.
“He has eyeglasses and a long black coat, heavy to keep the cold away. She wearing a long yellow dress, and her hair is black and piled up on her head.”
Louis glanced at Joe. She was leaning forward, elbows on her knees, mesmerized by Amy’s narrative.
“I’m running,” Amy said. “I’m running through the corn. It’s cold, so cold. My chest hurts.”
“Why are you running?”
“They’re chasing me,” Amy said. “I hear the horse’s hooves on the dirt. They’re close, very close. But I can’t go to the cellar. John is there, and I can’t let them find John. So I run to the corn.”
Amy’s breathing became labored.
“What is it, Amy?”
“They found me. They found me in the corn. They’re dragging me back, back to the barn. No!”
“Calm down, Amy,” Dr. Sher said. “You’re safe. Just tell me what you see.”
“He has a whip.”
“Who? The man with the eyeglasses?”
“No, one of the others,” she said. “The fire…I can feel it on my skin.”
“Is the barn on fire?”
“No, no,” Amy said impatiently. “Torches! They scare me, but I can’t move. I can’t move. I am naked now. They have taken my clothes. I’m so cold.”
“Slow down,” Dr. Sher said. “Relax.”
Amy’s voice suddenly deepened, became almost unrecognizable. “Stand back,” she said. “You stand back, Amos. You let us do what we need to do.”
“Who is speaking, Amy?”
Amy let out a low moan. “The ropes…they are pulling me up on the hook. The whip…it hurts. It rips and rips. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”
“Amy, pull yourself away from the pain, and get past the whipping,” Dr. Sher said. “Look down now. Where are you?”
For the next few seconds, Amy was quiet. Dr. Sher glanced up, meeting Louis’s eyes. She seemed as mystified as he was.
“I’m lying on the ground,” Amy said softly. “I’m freezing but warm with my own blood.”
Dr. Sher placed her hand gently over Amy’s.
“I hear digging,” Amy whispered. “They are digging a grave. It is my grave.”
Louis heard Joe pull in a quick breath.
Then, suddenly, Amy went limp. She fell quiet again. It was the second or third time she had, but Louis got the feeling that her memory—or whatever this was—was over.
Dr. Sher awakened Amy and told her to rest. Then she motioned Louis and Joe from the room. Once in the foyer, she closed the French doors to the living room and took several deep breaths. She was watching Amy through the doors.
Louis glanced at Joe. Her face was white, and she was holding her arms over her chest like she was cold.
“All right,” Louis said quietly. “What the hell was that all about?”
It was a while before Dr. Sher turned to face them. When she did, her pale blue eyes took a moment to focus. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Those weren’t memories of her mother’s death,” Joe said.
“No, they weren’t. At least, not all of them,” Dr. Sher said.
“She had one of her episodes last night,” Joe said. “It’s like a nightmare, but she’s awake. She mentioned the name John last night, too. And she said she was dying. Not her mother, Dr. Sher. She said she was dying.”
Dr. Sher looked at Amy again. And this time, when she looked back, first to Louis and then to Joe, her clinical mask had slipped back into place.
“I think Amy believes she was the black woman whose bones were found in the barn,” she said.
“Jesus,” Joe whispered. She took a step away, walking in a small circle in the foyer.
“What, she’s mentally ill?” Louis said.
“I—” Dr. Sher hesitated. “I don’t believe she is.”
Joe turned back. “Then what is causing this?”
Dr. Sher took a second to gather her thoughts. “Memory is a complicated process,” she said. “But research tells us that the qualities of a memory do not always provide a reliable way to determine accuracy. For example, a vivid and detailed memory may be based on inaccurate reconstruction of facts. Or even on self-created impressions that appear actually to have occurred.”
Joe was listening intently.
“Also,” Dr. Sher went on, “memory is a reconstructed phenomenon, and so it can often be strongly influenced by various biases such as social expectation, emotions, the implied beliefs of others, inappropriate—”
“Doctor,” Louis interrupted, “help us out here.”
Dr. Sher gave him a small smile. “Sorry.” She glanced back at Amy before she went on. “I’ll try to keep this simple,” she said. “Some doctors believe that childhood abuse can cause repressed memories. Later, these memories can resurface on their own or with help.”
“But why does Amy think she’s a dead black woman?” Joe pressed.
“People think memory is just a matter of recall, but it is also about how the brain reconstructs that memory,” Dr. Sher said.
Joe was shaking her head.
“Let me give you an example,” Dr. Sher said. “A child might have a memory of standing on a street looking into a scary alley. As an adult, he might falsely remember the alley as containing a dead body, when in fact the child saw only a homeless man sleeping in an alley.”
“So, you’re saying Amy is mixing real memories of the farm with things from her imagination?” Louis asked.
Dr. Sher nodded. “It’s called confabulation. Put simply, it is the mixing or confusion of true memories with irrelevant associations or bizarre ideas. And no matter how strange or untrue, these ideas can be held with the firmest of convictions.”
Louis had to ask the question again. “Is she mentally ill, Doctor?”
“Confabulation is a function of brain chemistry, and it is associated with patients who have suffered brain damage or lesions,” Dr. Sher said. “We’d have to do some tests…” Her voice trailed off.
Louis was watching Joe, knowing she was seeing Owen Brandt backhand Margi and thinking about what horrors Amy might have suffered at the farmhouse. Things she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, remember, because maybe, unlike the made-up memories of some dead black woman, the real memories were too close to home.
“This still doesn’t explain everything,” Louis said.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Sher asked.
“Like why she can sing in French,” Joe said.
“Or how she knew where those bones were buried,” Louis said.
“No, I guess it doesn’t,” Dr. Sher said softly.
They fell quiet. Louis was looking at Amy. And
Amy was just sitting there on the settee, looking back at them. Through the wavy old glass of the French doors, Amy was just a soft-focus pink blur.
“Okay,” Dr. Sher said softly. “There’s one other thing I need you to consider.”
They both turned to her.
“Before I retired, I was head of research here at the university. I’ve written many papers on various disorders and conditions. I can’t believe I am going to say what I am about to say.”
“What?” Louis asked.
“If one believes in repressed memory—and that is a big if, as far as I am concerned…” Dr. Sher hesitated again. “Hell’s bells, I might as well just say this and get it out in the open.”
She blew out a hard breath that lifted the red curls from her forehead. “Have either of you ever heard of past-life regression?” she asked.
Louis looked at Joe, who shrugged. “Reincarnation?” Louis asked.
“Well, that would be part of it, yes.”
“Good God,” Louis said. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Louis,” Joe said softly.
“It’s all right,” Dr. Sher said, holding up a hand. “Look, I’m as skeptical as you. But there is some work being done in this field. There’s a doctor in Miami who’s written some remarkable papers—”
“A doctor?” Louis said.
“Yes, he’s the head of psychiatry at Mount Sinai, a professor at the University of Miami Medical School. He was treating a patient with routine therapies, and during a hypnosis session, she—”
Louis held up his hands. “I don’t mean to be rude, Dr. Sher, but you just said a minute ago that Amy could be mentally ill. If that is the case, we need to know, because time is running out, for her and for us on this case. If we don’t have hard evidence, there’s nothing we can really do.”
Dr. Sher held Louis’s eyes for a moment. “Hard evidence,” she said softly. Then she looked to Joe. “I think I’ll see how Amy is doing,” she said.
She went back into the living room, closing the French doors behind her. Louis watched her go to the settee and sit down next to Amy.
He turned to Joe. “You’re awfully quiet.”
She looked at the floor.
“Don’t tell me you’re buying into this past-life crap, Joe.”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“I can’t believe what I am hearing,” Louis said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a cop, Joe.”
“I don’t need you to remind me of that,” Joe said quickly. “I just think we have to keep an open mind.”
“Well, if you keep your mind too open, your brains fall out,” Louis said.
Her eyes shot back to him. “And what the hell does that mean?”
“It means that this can be explained,” he said. “There’s a reason she knew where those bones were, and I’m going to find it.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Louis had been sitting behind the Texaco station for two hours when he finally spotted the green Gremlin coming up Lethe Creek Road. Margi was driving, and Brandt was hunched down in the passenger seat. The car turned and headed north toward Hell.
Louis pushed the Bronco into drive and started toward the farm, one eye on the rearview mirror. He couldn’t count on having much time once he got in. But at least this time he knew what he was looking for.
Anything that made sense out of Amy’s memories.
This whole case had become too damn strange. So that morning, he had told Joe he was going back to the farm.
“What for?” she had asked.
“Some answers,” he said.
“To what?”
When he didn’t reply, Joe said, “You don’t even know the questions.”
The farmhouse came into view. Louis stopped, turned off the engine, and stared at the place through the muddy windshield. Oh, he had questions, all right. The same ones neither Joe nor Dr. Sher had any answers for.
Such as why Amy could sing in French when she didn’t even know where she was born. Or how she knew where to dig for those buried bones. And the question he still hadn’t told Joe about: Why had Amy put a lock of her hair into the locket he gave her, mimicking the one found in the barn?
All of the “memories” that had come out of Amy’s latest hypnosis session—the screaming horses, the men with torches, the names John and Amos—all of that he could easily chalk up to Amy’s vivid imagination fed on her reading of Gone with the Wind. Joe told him Amy had read the book so many times she could quote whole passages of it.
But the rest? There had to be logical explanations for all of it.
He went to the front door and tried the knob. Locked. Around at the kitchen, he found the same thing. Brandt had installed a new lock. He peered into the door’s window. A light was on inside. Brandt had somehow got the power back on. He paused, thought of trying the windows, then remembered something Amy had said.
Joe had asked her recently how she got into the Brandt house the first time. Amy had said there was a cellar door in the back, covered with weeds.
Louis tramped through the weeds to the back. It took a while, but he finally uncovered the two faded blue doors. No lock. He pulled one door open, peered down into the blackness, and went in. Clicking on a flashlight, he found the narrow stairs leading up to the house.
Once in the kitchen, he took stock of the situation. There was a Coleman cooler shoved into one corner. An old table was piled with canned goods, toilet paper, bags of potato chips, and Styrofoam take-out containers. Empty beer cans littered the floor. There was also a red smear on the linoleum. He knelt, running a finger through it.
Blood…and he had a fleeting angry image of Brandt hitting Margi in the barn.
Louis went quickly to the front of the house. He started with the boxes in the dining room. But they were filled only with old dishes and glasses. In the hallway, he found boxes of old clothing, boots and shoes, musty books, and one carton brimming with moldering magazines.
There were no boxes in the parlor. But he stopped at the door, staring at the piano.
Amy had been playing it that first day. He went to the piano, noticing for the first time that it was a player piano. He squinted to read the titles on the slender old roller boxes: RAMONA, MY BLUE HEAVEN, TILL WE MEET AGAIN, MAPLE LEAF RAG. He scanned the titles, but there was nothing of note.
Still, there was something about the piano that was tugging at him. He sat down on the stool and put his feet on the pedals. He began to pump them, and a tinny sound emerged. The piano was so out of tune, the thing so warped and damaged, that the notes barely sounded like music at all.
He stopped. The quiet quickly moved in. His eyes settled on the yellowed piano roll stretched in the window above the keyboard.
The words ran down in a narrow column to the right of the old paper’s perforations. He leaned forward to read them:
Caches dans
cet asile ou
Dieu nous
a conduits
unis par
le malheur
durant les
longues nuits
He rewound the roll, eased it from the piano’s rollers, and unfurled the top so the title was visible: “BERCEUSE,” DE L’OPERA “JOCELYN” PAR BENJAMIN GODARD.
Berceuse. That meant “cradle,” or maybe “lullaby.” It didn’t take much imagination to envision Jean Brandt sitting here playing this old roll and singing the words to her child. Hidden in this sanctuary where God has led us, united by suffering through the long nights we rest together, rocked to sleep beneath their cover we pray beneath the gazes of the trembling stars.
But how did Jean know French? And how did Amy retain it all these years? He didn’t care. This, at least, explained something.
He stuck the roll under his arm and left the parlor. More boxes in a second back room offered up nothing of use. He paused at the stairs leading to the second story, then went up. He didn’t have time to search every box, so he opene
d flaps, peered in, and closed them, working quickly through the two front bedrooms. At the bedroom in the back, he drew up short.
The pink wallpaper.
He hadn’t noticed the pattern before, but then there had been no reason to. Now, all the details registered: a large white plantation-style home, a white horse pulling a black carriage, tall-masted sailing ships. A couple—the man in a long black waistcoat and the woman with her hair up in bun and wearing a long yellow gown straight out of the mid-nineteenth century.
This had been Amy’s room. How many nights had she lain in here alone, staring at this wallpaper, absorbing its details?
Louis tore a piece of the peeling paper from the wall, folded it, and stuck it into his pocket. Back out in the narrow hallway, he paused. An open door caught his eye—another staircase.
The attic. He hadn’t bothered with it on his first visit. He climbed the creaking narrow stairway. The dim, low-ceilinged attic was crammed with junk: furniture, countless old boxes, stacks of picture frames, an old violin case, rusting tools, and, near the door, piles of yellowed newspapers, some reaching to his chest. He glanced at the top newspaper: HAUSFREUND UND POST, ANN ARBOR MICH. 1891.
There was so much junk—and so little light coming through the one small circular window—he could barely move. And the place gave off a foul feeling. It was nothing he could put a name to, but it was the same feeling he got being in the kitchen, like he had to get out and breathe fresh air. For a moment, he considered abandoning his search. But he knew if there was anything that could illuminate this house’s past, it would be found here.
He spotted an old rope hanging from the rafters. He went to it and fingered the frayed end, thinking of Amy’s memories of being tied up. But she always talked of being outside or in the barn.
He was about to give up when he spotted a large trunk. He opened it, but it appeared to be filled only with old clothes. Underneath the old lace and moth-eaten velvets, though, his hands closed around an old biscuit tin. It was filled with photographs, small, sepia-toned, and faded with age. There was no time to go through them now. He set the tin aside and dug further.