Dean Koontz - The Mask

“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 Hayenswdod 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 m 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.”