The Mask (22 page)

“Shippensburg.”

Shippensburg was a small town less than an hour from Harrisburg. It was a quiet, pleasant place that existed to serve a flourishing state college and a large number of surrounding farms.

“Do you know the address where you live in Shippensburg?” Carol asked.

“There’s no street name. It’s a farm. Just outside of town, off Walnut Bottom Road.”

“So you could take me there if you had to?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a pretty place. There are a pair of stone gateposts by the verge of the county lane; they mark the entrance to our land. And there’s a long drive flanked by maples, and there are big oaks around
the house. It’s cool and breezy in the summer with all those shade trees.”

“What’s your father’s first name?”

“Nicholas.”

“And his phone number?”

The girl frowned. “His what?”

“What’s the telephone number at your house?”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you have a telephone?”

“What
is
a telephone?” the girl asked.

Carol stared at her, puzzled. It wasn’t possible for a person under hypnosis to be coy or to make jokes of this sort. As she considered her next move, she saw that Laura was becoming agitated again. The girl’s brow furrowed, and her eyes widened. She started breathing hard again.

“Laura, listen to me. You will be calm. You will relax and—”

The girl writhed uncontrollably in her chair. Squealing and gasping, she slid off the chair, rolled onto the floor, bumping the coffee table and pushing it aside. She twisted and shuddered and wriggled as if she were having a severe epileptic fit, though she was not; she brushed frantically at herself, for again she seemed to believe she was on fire. She called for someone named Rachael and choked on nonexistent smoke.

Carol required almost a minute to talk her down, which was a serious loss of control; a hypnotist could usually calm a subject in only seconds. Apparently, Laura had lived through an extremely traumatic fire or had lost a loved one in a blaze. Carol wanted to pursue the matter and learn what was at the root of
it, but this wasn’t the right time. After taking so long to quiet her patient, she knew the session should be ended quickly.

When Laura was seated in the wing chair again, Carol crouched beside her and instructed her to remember everything that had happened and everything that had been said during the session. Then she led the girl forward through time to the present and brought her out of the trance.

The girl wiped at the moist corner of one eye, shook her head, cleared her throat. She looked at Carol and said, “I guess it didn’t work, huh?” She sounded like Jane again; the Laura voice was gone.

But why the hell had her voice changed in the first place? Carol wondered.

“You don’t remember what happened?” Carol asked.

“What’s to remember? All that talk about a blue kite? I could see what you were trying to do, how you were trying to lull me into a trance, so I guess that’s why it didn’t work.”

“But it
did
work,” Carol assured her. “And you should be able to recall all of it.”

The girl looked skeptical. “All of what? What happened? What did you find out?”

Carol stared at her. “Laura.”

The girl didn’t even blink. She merely looked perplexed.

“Your name is Laura.”

“Who said?”

“You did.”

“Laura? No. I don’t think so.”

“Laura Havenswood,” Carol said.

The girl frowned. “It doesn’t ring any bells at all.”

Surprised, Carol said, “You told me you live in Shippensburg.”

“Where’s that?”

“About an hour from here.”

“I never heard of it.”

“You live on a farm. There are stone gateposts to mark the entrance to your father’s property, and there’s a long driveway flanked by maple trees. That’s what you told me, and I’m sure it’ll turn out to be just like you said. It’s virtually impossible to answer questions incorrectly or deceptively while you’re hypnotized Besides, you don’t have any reason to deceive me. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain if we break through this memory block.”

“Maybe I
am
Laura Havenswood,” the girl said. “Maybe what I told you in the trance was true. But I can’t remember it, and when you tell me who I am, it doesn’t mean a thing to me. Boy, I thought if I could just remember my name, then everything would fall into place. But it’s still a blank. Laura, Shippensburg, a farm—I can’t
connect
with any of it.”

Carol was still crouched beside the girl’s chair. She rose and flexed her stiff legs. “I’ve never encountered anything quite like this. And so far as I know, a reaction like yours hasn’t ever been reported in any of the psychology journals. Whenever a patient
is
susceptible to hypnosis, and whenever a patient
can
be regressed to a moment of trauma, there’s always a profound effect. Yet you weren’t touched at all by it. Very odd. If you remembered while you were under hypnosis, you ought to be able to remember now. And just hearing your name ought to open doors for you.”

“But it doesn’t.”

“Strange…”

The girl looked up from the wing chair. “What now?”

Carol thought for a moment, then said, “I suppose we ought to have the authorities check out the Havenswood identity.”

She went to her desk, picked up the phone, and called the Harrisburg police.

The police operator referred her to a detective named Lincoln Werth, who was in charge of a number of conventional missing-persons files as well as the Jane Doe case. He listened to Carol’s story with interest, promised to check it out right away, and said he would call her back the instant he obtained confirmation of the Havenswood identity.

Four hours later, at 3:55, after Carol’s last appointment for the day, as she and the girl were about to leave the office and go home, Lincoln Werth rang back as promised. Carol took the call at her desk, and the girl perched on the edge of the desk, watching, clearly a bit tense.

“Dr. Tracy,” Werth said, “I’ve been back and forth on the phone all afternoon with the police in Shippensburg and with the county sheriff’s office up there. I’m afraid I have to report it’s all been a wild-goose chase.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“Nope. We can’t find anyone in Shippensburg or the surrounding county with the name Havenswood. There’s no telephone listed for anyone of that name, and—”

“Maybe they just don’t have a phone.”

“Of course, we considered that possibility,” Werth
said. “We didn’t jump to conclusions, believe me. For instance, when we checked with the power company, we discovered they don’t have a customer named Havenswood anywhere in Cumberland County, but that didn’t discourage us either. We figured these people we’re looking for might be Amish. Lots of Amish in that neck of the woods. If they were Amish, of course, they wouldn’t have electricity in their house. So next we went to the property-tax rolls at the county offices up there. What we found was that nobody named Havenswood owns a house, let alone a farm, in that whole area.”

“They could be tenants,” Carol said.

“Could be. But what I really think they are is nonexistent. The girl must’ve been lying.”

“Why would she?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the whole amnesia thing is a hoax. Maybe she’s just an ordinary runaway.”

“No. Definitely not.” Carol looked up at Laura—no, her name was still Jane—looked into those clear, bottomless blue eyes. To Werth, she said, “Besides, it just isn’t possible to lie that well or that blatantly when you’re hypnotized.”

Although Jane could hear only half of the conversation, she had begun to perceive that the Havenswood name wasn’t going to check out. Her face clouded. She got up and went to the display shelves to study the statuettes of Mickey Mouse.

“There
is
something damned odd about the whole thing,” Lincoln Werth said.

“Odd?” Carol asked.

“Well, when I passed along the description of the farm that the girl gave—those stone gateposts, the long driveway with the maples—and when I said it was off Walnut Bottom Road, the Cumberland County
sheriff and the various Shippensburg policemen I talked to all recognized the place right off the bat. It actually does exist.”

“Well, then—”

“But nobody named Havenswood lives there,” Detective Werth said. “The Ohlmeyer family owns that spread. Really well known around those parts. Highly thought of, too. Oren Ohlmeyer, his wife, and their two sons. Never had a daughter, so I’m told. Before Oren owned the farm, it belonged to his daddy, who bought it seventy years ago. One of the sheriff’s men went out there and asked the Ohlmeyers if they’d ever heard of a girl named Laura Havenswood or anything even similar to that. They hadn’t. Didn’t know anyone fitting our Jane Doe’s description, either.”

“Yet the farm
is
there, just like she told us it was.”

“Yeah,” Werth said. “Funny, isn’t it?”

In the Volkswagen, on the way home from the office, as they drove along the sun-splashed autumn streets, the girl said, “Do you think I was faking the trance?”

“Heavens, no! You were
very
deeply under. And I’m quite sure you aren’t a good enough actress to fake that business about the fire.”

“Fire?”

“I guess you don’t remember that, either.” Carol told her about Laura’s screaming fit, the desperate cries for help. “Your terror was genuine. It came from experience. I’d bet anything on that.”

“I don’t remember any of it. You mean I really was in a fire once?”

“Could be.” Ahead, a traffic light turned red. Carol
stopped the car and looked at Jane. “You don’t have any physical scars, so if you were in a fire, you escaped unharmed. Of course, it might be that you
lost
someone in a fire, someone you loved very much, and maybe you weren’t actually in a fire yourself. If that’s the case, then when you were hypnotized, you might have confused your fear for that person with fear for your own life. Am I making myself clear?”

“I think I get what you mean. So maybe the fire—the
shock
of it—is responsible for my amnesia. And maybe my parents haven’t shown up to claim me because…they’re dead, burned to death.”

Carol took the girl’s hand. “Don’t worry about it now, honey. I may be all wrong. I probably am. But I think it’s a possibility you ought to be prepared for.”

The girl bit her lip, nodded. “The idea scares me a little. But I don’t exactly feel sad. I mean, I don’t remember my folks at all, so losing them would almost be like losing strangers.”

Behind them, the driver of a green Datsun blew his horn.

The light had changed. Carol let go of the girl’s hand and touched the accelerator. “We’ll probe into the fire during tomorrow’s session.”

“You still think I
am
Laura Havenswood?”

“Well, for the time being, we’ll keep calling you Jane. But I don’t see why you’d come up with the name Laura if it wasn’t yours.”

“The identity didn’t check out,” the girl reminded her.

Carol shook her head. “That’s not exactly true. We haven’t proved or disproved the Havenswood identity. All we know for sure is that you never lived in Shippensburg. But you must have been there at least once because the farm exists; you’ve seen it, if only in
passing. Apparently, even under hypnosis, even regressed beyond the onset of your amnesia, your memories are tangled. I don’t know how that’s possible or why. I’ve never encountered anything quite like it. But we’ll work hard at untangling them for you. The problem might lie in the questions I asked and the way I asked them. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

They rode in silence for a moment, and then the girl said, “I half hope we don’t get things untangled too quickly. Ever since you told me about your cabin in the mountains, I’ve really been looking forward to going up there.”

“Oh, you’ll get to go. Don’t worry about that. We’re leaving on Friday, and even if tomorrow’s session goes well, we won’t be able to untangle this Laura Havenswood thing
that
fast. I warned you, this could be a slow, complicated, frustrating process. I’m surprised we made any progress at all today, and I’ll be twice as surprised if we make even half as much headway tomorrow.”