reason to doubt that that she had watched Caitlin go in the water and drown. Until now.
Even now the “proof”—five words from England—was as tenuous as a whisper overheard in an airport. We needed to find out what had happened that day.
Could we do it? Jane was an adult now, and if she was willing to undergo the experience . . . As the only eyewitness, she could tell us what actually happened that afternoon. If she had seen her sister tumble into the water, Caitlin would return to sad memory, at least known now to her sisters. Colin would be spared the notoriety he seemed to fear. Hannah could focus on finishing her senior year at Cornell without having to worry about a beautiful doppelganger.
And me? I would have to accept the inevitability that one moment of inattention could lose a rare book. Or a child.
But what if the outcome were different? What if Jane remembered that afternoon differently and could tell us more about the “bad lady” she had been obsessed with that night. I still had no idea how we would find Caitlin, but it might give us some clues.
T HE F I R S T O F December found me in Dr. Karl Lundy’s office, asking him about age regression. Finding a good hypnotist—one that I felt comfortable about consulting—had been a challenge. I’d considered asking people I knew at the university for a recommendation, but was afraid it would get back to Colin. He would be furious with me, not just because I was pursuing the truth about Caitlin after he had declared the search off-limits, but because he scoffed at hypnosis, visualization, and healing by prayer or “pink light.”
Most of all, he would be worried about the damage it might do to Jane.
So I turned to the Internet. I studied the qualifications of hypnotists in the area and finally called one who was a trained psychologist. He had gotten his doctorate from Columbia and had a collection of positive reviews. Even so, I planned to interview him thoroughly, to make sure I would not be putting this daughter in any emotional danger.
Karl Lundy was intrigued by what I was asking. He warned me not to tell him the details of the day it happened. “Subjects under hypnosis want to please. They pick up cues and say what they think you want to hear. If I knew what you were looking for, I might convey cues without meaning to.”
“Is there any danger?”
He chuckled at that. “Not at all. Your daughter will be aware of what is happening the whole time. If anything, she’ll probably be more relaxed and refreshed afterward than she’s been in weeks.”
“Is it okay if I sit in?”
“Not a problem, Ms. Laine.” He went on to tell me a story about a young woman who was so short-tempered with her children that she and her husband sought counseling and then hypnosis, suspecting her abusiveness had roots in her childhood. As her horrified husband watched, she was regressed to age eight when she had brought home a stray kitten and her father had beaten her and strangled the cat.
“She had no conscious memory of that,” Dr. Lundy said. “But when she remembered, she knew it was true and she was able to redirect her anger at her father, not her kids. It gave her husband a better understanding of what was going on.”
I shivered. “Do a lot of people have things they don’t remember?”
“A lot,” he agreed. “Most of us, in fact.”
I tried to imagine what mine could be.
J A N E W A S E N T H U S I A S T I C when I called her. “I never would have thought of that. Can we film it?”
“I don’t have a camcorder.”
“No, on my phone. I want to be able to watch it afterward.”
Would she really want to see it if it confirmed that she’d watched her sister drown?
But we asked anyway. Dr. Lundy said that he would audiotape the process, using built-in, state-of-the-art equipment, since videotaping it would be too distracting. “You can get everything you need by hearing the process.”
I doubted that, since gestures and facial
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