Blood Trance Read online

  “So along comes Shakespeare who writes this narrative poem about it. Loretta read part of it to me—the same part she recited just before she was about to stab herself. I knew as soon as I heard it that that's what she intended to do.”

  “Thank God you're quick.”

  “You know, I have to say that since then I've wondered more than once if Loretta would have been better off succeeding.”

  “Alex, she's innocent.”

  “Then why did she say she killed Helen? And why has she barely spoken since?”

  “Because she's hiding the truth. When I was still in practice, I saw Loretta only seven or eight times, but we connected in a very real and powerful way. And believe me, the Long family is one sick bunch. Not just Loretta, but Billy and Carol Marie, as well,” she said, referring to Loretta's much younger twin brother and sister. “I mean, we have to look at why Billy drank, as well as all the pain Carol Marie felt but tried so hard to mask. Not to mention Helen.”

  “Yeah, she was a real control queen.”

  “Absolutely. So you see, there's something very wrong running through the entire family—I think the secrets they kept poisoned them all—but the one thing that's absolutely clear to me about Loretta is her sense of integrity. She's a very honest person, and I don't think she's letting herself really talk now because if she opens her mouth, she knows she'll reveal the truth.”

  As the cool breeze flowed off the lake and around us, I sat back, knowing that my sister the shrink was probably right on that one. It had been obvious back when I'd walked in on the murder scene that something was quite askew.

  “You know what I think?” I said. “I think this whole thing's as twisted, maybe even as sordid, as the story of Lucretia. That's not to say that Loretta didn't kill her stepmother.”

  “But what about the blood? Why didn't Loretta have any on her clothing?”

  “I don't know. Maybe… maybe she wasn't wearing anything. Maybe she was completely nude.”

  “Then what did she do, dash outside and rinse off with the hose?”

  “I've heard of weirder.”

  Off in the distance I saw this huge gray shape dashing from the lawn and into the forest. Then another. I recognized them as Maddy's Irish wolfhounds, Fran and Ollie, the biggest and perhaps unfriendliest dogs I'd ever seen.

  “Your dogs are about to devour another rabbit.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “They just dashed into the forest off to the left. You know, they really make me feel like a prisoner here. I can't step out of the house without wondering if I'm going to be attacked.”

  “Well, they're guard dogs, what do you expect? Besides, all you have to do when you want to go out is get Alfred and he'll pen them up,” said Maddy, referring to Solange's husband and Maddy's other employee.

  “So much for spontaneity.”

  Maddy continued, not even noting my sarcasm, “The one thing I keep coming back to is what Loretta said to you at the end.”

  I'd repeated the line so many times in trance that I now knew it by heart, and I quoted, “ ‘Please, just let me be the bad girl.’”

  “There's something there,” mused Maddy. “Something about the family, the way Loretta, Billy, and Carol Marie operated. Something about Loretta's role in the family. She always acted overly responsible or guilty. That's what I wanted to work on in her therapy. She blamed herself for something, but I don't know what.”

  Referring to another of Maddy's patients I'd seen down in Chicago, I said, “Speaking of basket cases, Ray Preston is about as sick as they come.”

  She shook her head. “Dear God, I just had to drop so many clients. I didn't have any choice, of course, but I think some of them suffered worse than me. Poor Ray, for one.”

  I backtracked, started thinking about the letter that had initiated my going to Chicago in the first place, and said, “Maddy, do you still have the letter from Loretta? Can I see it again?”

  “Sure.”

  My sister reached into a pouch on the side of her wheelchair, felt through several files, then pulled one out. She opened it, touched the first sheet of paper, another smaller one, then came to an envelope, which she withdrew.

  “Here.”

  About ten days before the murder, Maddy had received the letter by express mail; she'd received notification of it from the mainland and Alfred had made a special trip by boat to go in and retrieve it. Maddy had listened with great concern as I read it the first time; not more than five minutes later she was asking me to pack my bags and be on my way to Loretta's.

  “Read it again, would you?” she asked.

  I cleared my throat and began.

  Dear Dr. Phillips:

  I tried to make everything good but instead I made everything bad. Now I'm really in trouble and I need your help—it truly is a matter of life and death.

  Your patient,

  Loretta

  “It seemed rather dramatic at the time,” I commented. “But I guess it wasn't.”

  “No, apparently not. Hearing it now makes me think that if Loretta wasn't thinking of murdering her stepmother, then she knew someone was and she perhaps wanted help in stopping it.”

  “Or… or Loretta herself was somehow threatened.” I paused on the idea. “Maddy, you don't think Loretta could have killed Helen in self-defense, do you?”

  My sister disappeared into her black world, and I knew she was running various scenarios through her mind and imagination in an attempt to sift out the truth. While she could garner incredible insights from a person's tones and inflections, particularly mine, I could discern nearly as much from the way she tightened her eyebrows or wrinkled her forehead or bit her lip. Now the top of her face was stretched high and tight. She had also clenched her left hand and was biting on her thumbnail. Okay, so what was her great idea now?

  “That could be, Alex. I don't know. We'll have to look at that angle.” She turned to me, her face bright. “But I think the thing we have to concentrate on first is who tried to kill you.”

  I knew what she meant. Another trance. Probably right from the beginning, too. I wasn't much up for it, but what choice did I have? If Loretta was really going to be arriving tomorrow, then we had very little time.

  I said, “How soon do we get started?”

  Chapter 4

  Hypnotic age regression was one of the most powerful and draining things I'd ever experienced. Several months ago, Maddy had put me in a deep trance, then led me back through my life until I'd reached age ten, and around me appeared my gangly, thirteen-year-old sister, my father, my mother. At first they were faint, ghostly figures from a distant time, but then my memory and my mind collaborated like two mad charlatans, and before me stood the three most important people of my life, completely real and three-dimensional, living and breathing. It was too much. Immediately I started bawling, losing it like I hadn't since I was a kid. We were all out on the porch of our house in Glenview, our pleasant Chicago suburb, and we were this pleasant, at times even wonderful, family. I looked at my hands, my arms, and they were small. I was small. I was a kid again. It was as if I'd aged like a tree, a ring for each year, and I'd returned to one of those inner rings, and it was all there —Mom, Dad, Maddy, and me—as if I hadn't lost that time or any of us, but merely been around the corner, or rather at the outer edge of all those rings. And it was great. No, incredible. Dad was gazing at me, smiling, then running one hand over his not-yet-gray hair, and Mom—no, Mommy, that's who she was—was so pretty and young and that laugh of hers so big and full of fun. My teenaged sister eyed me, looked at me, giggled. Oh, what great times those were.

  So why, the hypnotist voice of the adult Maddy had called from outside that scene, was I so upset? If I was back then and it was wonderful, why was I sobbing so? I caught my breath, replied that the answer to that was simple: Even though I was back then with all my family, I somehow knew the future. Yes, that's right, Maddy had explained, you've returned to the past with your adult knowledge and insi
ghts. Which was precisely why I was so upset, I told my controller of the trance. I couldn't stop crying because there was nothing but pain ahead. This wasn't going to be the happy family forever and ever. The dad would be killed in a plane that fell out of the sky. The mom would lose her mind yet live on. And the sister…

  I now sat on the beach in front of Maddy's house, the waves rolling against the fine sand. I took a deep breath, stared out over the ripples of water. After lunch Maddy had gone out on one of the paved paths that criss-crossed this island, her little wand scraping the ground in front of her as she wheeled her way toward good health. I, on the other hand, had come down here, seeking solace or clarity or, if I was lucky, both. Maddy and I had decided to take a break from each other, a little breather before this afternoon's long regression.

  That was right. A breather. I was emptying myself, that was what I was doing. Trying to prep myself to channel what had happened a few weeks ago. I was to be little more than a medium, and my head had to be clean and clear, so I lay back, stretched out on the sand, breathed in the cool air, tried to let myself go. But couldn't. Why? Because age regressions scared me. All of the past just came hurtling at you so hard and so fast, overwhelming you, even smothering you. At least that's how it had felt when Maddy had regressed me to age ten. So was that why I was fearful of this afternoon's regression back to Loretta and Chicago? Had I been resistant all along, and had that kept me from revealing or discovering what I might have missed the first time? Quite possibly so.

  It was true that when my old girlfriend, Toni, had been killed last year, I'd eagerly regressed to a time when she still lived. I'd wanted her back, though, wanted to find the truth of her murder as well as of our relationship. Loretta's case, of course, was different. Not as personal, not as close, so did that possibly mean I'd been holding back out of laziness? No, there was something else.

  I stretched out, rested my hands on the sand, listened to the water crash, puffed out my lungs, and told myself to relax, relax, relax. I sensed the sand molding to the contour of my back, closed my eyes, and felt the warm rays of sunshine spread across my face, bleed into my skin like butter into hot corn. Hypnosis drew its power, I had come to believe, because it opened a more direct line of communication between the conscious and the subconscious, those two parts of a person that were usually at battle with one another. And even though I wasn't in trance, I took a deep breath, called inward, tried to reach that deep inner part with which I had recently been so much in touch.

  I asked: Why? Why am I resisting? Is it all the channeling, the energy it takes?

  That distant part that lurked in the damp darkness of my soul was silent, not a peep.

  Talk to me, I silently called. Tell me why I'm holding back, what I'm afraid of.

  I wanted to hear a clear answer, a simple explanation. Instead I heard a rumbling, a sound that was rolling from a distant corner of my mind. It was a voice, I realized, echoing within me, bouncing around somewhere far inside. I strained to decipher the words, to make sense of it all. I couldn't, for it was nothing but jumbled syllables, until suddenly the words burst around a final corner like a sound hitting the last of the canyon walls, and I clearly and unmistakably heard two words: It's yours.

  My eyes snapped open and my hands clawed into the sandy beach.

  Rather shaken, about twenty minutes later I made my way back up the hill and to the house, entering the front door, which was on the west side. I didn't pass through the large entry hall, through the billiard room and back toward the elevator, but rather started for the steps, grabbing on to the thick oak banister and glancing up as I climbed. The staircase was circular and open in the middle, a twenty-foot-wide shaft that rose through the entire house and was capped with an authentic Tiffany dome that had been transported all the way here by boat after the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The ceilings of the house stretched a generous fourteen feet high, and I was already huffing by the time I'd made it to the second-floor landing. The half-dozen main bedrooms stretched off from here, and I caught a glimpse of Solange working in one of them.

  “Great lunch,” I called. “Thanks.”

  Dust cloth in hand, the black woman turned and smiled out the door. “You're welcome.”

  A woman of few words, Solange had a regal, very proud stature, and she continued her light cleaning, wiping an old mahogany carved bed. Both she and her husband were always working, proving themselves of use—even though a cleaning crew came once a week from the mainland to tackle such a large house, Solange always did as much as she could—but I think it was Maddy who was more dependent upon them.

  The staircase from the second to the third floor grew narrower, the banister a tad shaky. Glancing down, I hugged the wall and wondered if Maddy had had the structural integrity of this checked. The carved wood around the dome above was cracked; how much water damage had been done before Maddy had spent $75,000 on roof repair? At the small third-floor landing just beneath the dome, the floor sloped; the next time I'd definitely be taking the rear staircase because a fall from here would mean certain death. I passed a huge radiator, next a large light bulb that looked as if it hadn't been changed since the 1890s, and then I pushed through a wooden door and burst into Maddy's trance room, that huge attic room. My sister was already there, sprawled out on her recliner, hands meditatively folded over her stomach. A vision of mesmerized peacefulness.

  “You look like a swami,” I said as I caught my breath.

  “Shh.”

  I crossed the room, aware that I was interrupting Maddy in the middle of a trance. And glad that I was. I stepped over to the open French doors that led out onto the small balcony, then turned and sat down on the edge of my recliner, which lay parallel to my sister's.

  “Maybe you should wear beads and turbans,” I said, staring at her. “You could start a sect out here on the island.”

  Maddy reached out and swatted, hit nothing, tried again, then struck my knee on the third try. “Alex, I was under!”

  Of course she'd been, and knowing that Maddy frequently used hypnosis to see things and walk places she could no longer go, I asked, “Where were you?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Oh, one of those. I hope he was good-looking.”

  “Stop it, would you?”

  I stretched out on my recliner, fidgeted, shifted, tried to find some sort of comfort. But my back was tight and I couldn't decide if I wanted my hands by my sides, on my stomach, or placed on my chest. Shit. I took a deep breath, spit it out.

  The Great Seer lying next to me asked, “What is it?”

  “I can't get comfortable.”

  “I can tell that much by the way you're squirming.”

  Perhaps it was my belt pushing into the small of my back. I reached down and pulled up my jeans. That hardly helped, though, and I suddenly understood the princess's obsession with the pea.

  “Alex, are you upset about something?”

  “Maybe there's something wrong with this cushion. Something's digging into my back. Or maybe I've got some sand in my back pocket.”

  “No, I mean, is there something else?”

  “I don't know. I don't really feel like doing this. I'm not in the mood for hypnosis right now. It won't work. Let's try later.”

  “Tell me what's really the matter, Alex.” Maddy offered a deep breath and exhale, her version of relaxation à la subliminal persuasion. “There's something bothering you, isn't there? What is it?”

  “Well, when I was down on the beach I had this odd sensation. I don't know, maybe it's the water here. Maybe it's Shirley MacLaine. Maybe she's influencing us all. I mean, it was weird. I was lying on the sand and I heard this odd voice inside me.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Oh, Maddy, I don't know. It said… it said…” I stammered in embarrassment. “It said: ‘It's yours.’” I shook my head. “Am I going nuts? I mean, what the hell does that mean? ‘It's yours.’”

  My sage sister quickly observed, “
The subconscious is both very wise and fearful.”

  “I just have this sense that there's something more I know about Loretta. Something I haven't realized yet and something someone would kill to keep secret.”

  “I know.”

  I clenched my fists, stared up at the wood ceiling high above. Did she always have to be right?

  “What else?” she asked.

  “I'm afraid. That was an awful week. I was attacked, you know. Nearly killed. It wasn't big fun.”

  “I know, and I'm so sorry. I didn't know things would turn so badly.” My dear Maddy let my confession hang there for a long moment before saying, “Just lie back.”

  “I am lying back.”

  “Then just get comfortable.”

  “I can't. I don't know if this is going to work.”

  “Let's just try. Breathe in… out. In… out. Don't worry, Alex. Just let yourself start a nice, deep trance. There's no danger here today.”

  “But there will be tomorrow,” I quipped, “when Loretta arrives. Do you think we can handle it?”

  “In… out.”

  I took a deep breath, nudged aside my resistance, and let her take over, let her lead into and up to the great plane, the vast blackness of hypnosis. The other world. The inner world. That's what we were supposed to be doing here and now this afternoon, and so I closed my eyes. Let my body take in a large amount of air, held it, let it go, and the air trickled over my lips long and slowly. Relax.

  “Maddy, this is important this afternoon. I know that. I know I need to let go of my defenses and go deeper. Maybe that's been our mistake; maybe I just haven't been going deep enough. Can you do a long induction for me? I think that's what I need.”