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.”