Still holding her daughter in her lap, Laura said, ‘You are all the way down now, deep asleep. But you hear me and you will answer me when I ask you questions.’
The girl’s mouth was slack, lips parted slightly.
‘Can you hear me, Melanie?’
The girl said nothing.
‘Melanie, can you hear me?’
The girl sighed, a sound as soft as the light from the amber-shaded brass lamps.
‘Uh …’
It was the first sound that she had made since Laura had seen her in the hospital last night.
‘What is your name?’
The child’s brow furrowed. ‘Muh …’
The calico cat raised its head.
‘Melanie? Is that your name? Melanie?’
‘Muh … muh.’
Pepper’s ears pricked up.
Laura decided to move to another question. ‘Do you know who I am, Melanie?’
Still sleeping, the child licked her lips. ‘Muh … muh … it … ah … it …’ She twitched and began to raise one hand as if fending something off.
‘Easy,’ Laura said. ‘Relax. Be calm. Relax and be calm and sleep. You’re safe. You’re safe with me.’
The girl lowered her hand. She sighed.
When the lines in the girl’s face smoothed out somewhat, Laura repeated the question. ‘Do you know who I am?’ Melanie made a wordless murmuring-whimpering sound. ‘Do you know who I am, Melanie?’
Lines of worry or fear returned to the child’s face, and she said, ‘Umm … uh … uh-uh-uh … it … it…’
Taking a different tack, Laura said, ‘What are you afraid of, Melanie?’
‘It … it … there…’ Fear was in her voice now as well as carved into the pale flesh of her face.
‘What do you see?’ Laura asked. ‘What are you afraid of, honey? What do you see?’
“The … there … the…’
Pepper cocked her head and arched her back. The cat had become tense, watching the girl intently.
The air was unnaturally still and heavy.
Although it wasn’t possible, the shadows in the corners of the room seemed darker and larger now than they had been a moment ago.
‘It … there … no, no, no, no.’
Laura put one hand on her daughter’s creased brow, reassuring her, and waited expectantly as the girl strove to speak. A strange, disconcerting feeling came over her, and she felt a chill creeping like a living thing up the length of her spine.
‘Where are you, Melanie?’
‘No …’
‘Are you in the gray room?’
The girl was audibly grinding her teeth, squeezing her eyes shut, fisting her hands, as though resisting something very strong. Laura had been planning to regress her, take her back in time to the gray room in that Studio City house, but it seemed as though the girl had drifted back there without encouragement, as soon as she’d been hypnotized. But that didn’t make sense: Laura had never heard of spontaneous hypnotic regression. The patient had to be guided, encouraged backward to the scene of the trauma.
‘Where are you, Melanie?’
‘N-n-no … the … no!’
‘Easy. Be still. What are you afraid of?’
‘Please … no …’
‘Be calm, honey. What do you see? Tell me, baby. Tell Mommy what you see. The tank, the deprivation chamber? No one’s going to make you go back in there, honey.’
But that wasn’t what frightened the girl. Laura’s reassurances didn’t calm her. ‘The … the …’
‘The aversion-therapy chair? The electric chair? You’ll never be put in that again, either.’
Something else terrified the child. She shuddered and began to strain against Laura, as if she wanted to get away, run.
‘Honey, you’re safe with me,’ Laura said, holding her tighter than before. ‘It can’t hurt you.’
‘Opening … it’s opening … no … it … coming open…’ ‘Easy,’ Laura said. As the chill climbed all the way up her back and reached the nape of her neck, she sensed that something of terrible importance was about to happen.
15
Behind his back, Lieutenant Felix Porteau of the Scientific Investigation Division was called ‘Poirot,’ after Agatha Christie’s pompous Belgian detective. It was clear to Dan that Porteau preferred to think of himself as Sherlock Holmes, in spite of his stocky legs, potbelly, slumped shoulders, Santa Claus face, and high-domed bald head. To bolster his desired image, Porteau was seldom without a curved-stem pipe in which he smoked an aromatic blend of shag tobacco.