Bob straightened to his full height and gave Kay a puzzled look. His expression was that of a man trying to translate words into a language he understood. “The police told you to call back?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “Kerry Sue told me to call back. Well, okay, yes, she does work for the police, but she’s not of the police, if you know what I mean.”
His furrowed brow indicated that he did not.
“Bob,” I said, “have you lived in a small town before?”
“No. Not as small as Willow Falls, anyway. Just when I was in college.”
“College doesn’t count,” I told him. “A lot of things happen in small towns because of who you are. Kerry Sue being the police dispatcher is one of them. I can give you her genealogy later.”
“Okay, if you say so,” he replied. “Anyway, let’s go down to the house and—”
“No!” Kay and I barked the word in unison. We looked at each other. I let her continue.
“It’s not safe,” she said. “You’re mixed up in something, and the other side knows where you live.”
“True,” he agreed. “So what do you suggest?”
“Would they have any reason to connect you to me?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Unless they’ve been following me for a while. But merely following me is probably not their agenda.”
“The phone message,” I said. Kay and Bob looked at me. I hurried on. “I came here last night to get Jack, and someone had left a message on your phone—you’d been spotted and should be careful.”
“I think I know who was. Did they leave a name?”
I shook my head. “They started talking before the recording began.”
“Well, at least let me go listen to that,” Bob said.
“Um, you can’t,” I told him. “It—it got erased.”
Sudden amusement sprang to his eyes but he didn’t say anything.
“Anyway,” Kay jumped back in, “they know where you live, and they probably don’t know where I live, and I have fresh bagels and cream cheese and the last of the summer tomatoes in my fridge.”
“Food?” said Bob. He suddenly looked exhausted.
“Food,” Kay assured him. And with one more glance at Bob’s house, we turned to retrace our steps to Kay’s car.
Emily Ann flowed off the couch and over to Bob. She placed her front paws on his shoulders and touched his cheek delicately with her nose.
“Thank you, Emily Ann,” he said quietly. She gazed into his eyes before settling back onto the floor.
Kay walked straight into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and started hauling out the promised victuals. “I don’t know about you all,” she threw over her shoulder, “but having adventures always makes me ravenous. And Louisa ate my cookies in the car.”
“We both ate them. And I didn’t have any breakfast.”
“Let’s get some food and after that, Bob has major explaining to do.”
We had postponed his explanations until now. He’d set a quick pace back through the woods, and it was hard to carry on conversation between the front and back seats in the car. While she drove, Kay had continued trying to report my stolen vehicle. First the phone had rung and rung until she clicked it off, shaking her head. The next attempt was answered, but Kerry Sue must have stepped away from the phone. After an initial “Hello?” I heard Kay’s voice take on a frosty tone.
“Ah, Ed…yes, this is Kay…” She checked her mirrors, pulled the car over to the curb and killed the engine. “Well, in spite of what that idiot Kerry Sue Maddock might have said, I am most definitely not calling to see how you are. I know how you are, remember? Which I why you and I are no longer seeing each other…Yes, of course you do, I’d never argue with that…yes, my cousin has everything to do with the fact that I'm calling you—” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and hunched her shoulders. The atmosphere in the car began to feel close and I tried to roll down my window, but with the engine turned off the electric button wouldn’t work. I thought longingly of the simple hand cranks in my own car.
“Did Kerry Sue happen to mention that I have called three times because my cousin’s car was stolen? Yes, stolen…The first time I called we were watching the woman drive Louisa’s car away. You could have caught her by now, which I happen to know would have looked good in your monthly report to the city council…No, that is not a threat— I can't talk to you. Here, talk to Louisa.” With a face like thunder she thrust the phone in my direction. I took it gingerly and held it to my ear, but I must have hit one of its miniscule buttons and disconnected it, for all I heard was a dial tone.
“Um, I guess I cut him off.” I glanced at Kay for help but she was looking away from me out her side window. I was still trying to find the right button to make the thing work when the phone gave the annoying rendition of Fur Elise that Kay had selected for its ring. I fumbled with it. “Hello?”
“Hello? Mrs. McGuire? We seemed to have been disconnected.” It was Chief Johnson, sounding as frosty as Kay. “I understand that your car has been stolen? Can you give me the particulars?”
“It was the woman who drove away with Bob last night—”
“What?” His voice rose several notes. “The same woman has stolen your car? What about Mr. Richardson? Was he still with her?”
“No, we found him in the old barn, and we were going to his house to get my car, and we arrived just in time to see her drive off in it. She was wearing different clothes, but it was definitely the same woman.” Something about the man made me babble.
Silence stretched into several seconds. When he spoke his voice seemed carefully controlled. “And is Mr. Richardson all right?”
“Yes, thank you, he’s okay,” I replied. “Do you want to speak to—” Bob’s hand gripped my shoulder over the back of the seat, and when I looked at him he shook his head urgently. “—um, to Kay again?” I finished, making a puzzled face at Bob. Now Kay shook her head and scowled at me.
“No, that won’t be necessary. Just give me the information on your car and we’ll start looking for it.”
I described my little car’s make and color.
“That sounds like the car you were driving last night.”
“Yes, Bob and I have identical cars. Well, except for the license plates.”
“I see.” He managed to infuse his words with the suggestion that it was extremely peculiar for Bob and me to have the same kind of car. “All right, give me the plate number for yours.”
I did, thinking it was a miracle I was able to remember it.
“How was she able to just drive off in your car?”
I knew this was going to come up. “I left the keys in it.” At least I hadn't babbled this time.
“I see.” Several more seconds ticked by. “And the theft occurred at Mr. Richardson’s house? All right, we’ll get on it. I take it you no longer need to file a missing person report.”
“No, he’s not missing now, thank you.”
“Right. That’s the usual pattern in these cases.” He disconnected the call. I pulled the phone away from my ear to look at it. The usual pattern? How many men disappeared out of grocery stores in this town? I knew that Willow Falls had changed in the years I'd been away, but still. I handed the phone back to Kay, who dropped it into the compartment between our seats and restarted the car.
“He said they’d look for my car.”
“Great,” she growled as she pulled back onto the street. Brakes screeched, a horn like the trumpet of doom blared, and an enormous SUV pulled around us. Several teenage faces glared from the windows. “Damn. I’m going to get us all killed, and you can lay that on Ed’s doorstep.”
Now, back in her apartment, Kay bustled about toasting bagels, spreading cream cheese, and slicing tomatoes, while I poured tea over ice into tall glasses. Bob excused himself to wash up. When he returned we each grabbed a plate and glass and settled at the trestle table. Bob took a huge bite.
“Thanks, Kay, I'm really hungry,” he said.
She too had taken a bite. She said thickly, “I thought you would be.” She swallowed. “Okay, you can have your bagel. After that I want to know what’s going on.”
He nodded, taking another bite. He seemed to have aged several years since yesterday. I looked down at the food on my plate. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I tried to eat. My stomach was as confused as my head. A few hours ago, all I had wanted was to know that Bob was safe. Now he was back, and I dreaded what I might hear in the next few minutes. What, after all, did I know about this man? He could be anyone. Or anything. He could be the reporter I'd been dreading, or a spy or in the witness protection program or a hit man or—
“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.”