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?”