P. Parrish - South Of Hell

“What?” Louis asked.

“If one believes in repressed memory — and that is a big if, as far as I am concerned…” Dr. Sher hesitated again. “Hell’s bells, I might as well just say this and get it out in the open.”

She blew out a hard breath that lifted the red curls from her forehead. “Have either of you ever heard of past-life regression?” she asked.

Louis looked at Joe, who shrugged. “Reincarnation?” Louis asked.

“Well, that would be part of it, yes.”

“Good God,” Louis said. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Louis,” Joe said softly.

“It’s all right,” Dr. Sher said, holding up a hand. “Look, I’m as skeptical as you. But there is some work being done in this field. There’s a doctor in Miami who’s written some remarkable papers-”

“A doctor?” Louis said.

“Yes, he’s the head of psychiatry at Mount Sinai, a professor at the University of Miami Medical School. He was treating a patient with routine therapies, and during a hypnosis session, she-”

Louis held up his hands. “I don’t mean to be rude, Dr. Sher, but you just said a minute ago that Amy could be mentally ill. If that is the case, we need to know, because time is running out, for her and for us on this case. If we don’t have hard evidence, there’s nothing we can really do.”

Dr. Sher held Louis’s eyes for a moment. “Hard evidence,” she said softly. Then she looked to Joe. “I think I’ll see how Amy is doing,” she said.

She went back into the living room, closing the French doors behind her. Louis watched her go to the settee and sit down next to Amy.

He turned to Joe. “You’re awfully quiet.”

She looked at the floor.

“Don’t tell me you’re buying into this past-life crap, Joe.”

“I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“I can’t believe what I am hearing,” Louis said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a cop, Joe.”

“I don’t need you to remind me of that,” Joe said quickly. “I just think we have to keep an open mind.”

“Well, if you keep your mind too open, your brains fall out,” Louis said.

Her eyes shot back to him. “And what the hell does that mean?”

“It means that this can be explained,” he said. “There’s a reason she knew where those bones were, and I’m going to find it.”

Louis had been sitting behind the Texaco station for two hours when he finally spotted the green Gremlin coming up Lethe Creek Road. Margi was driving, and Brandt was hunched down in the passenger seat. The car turned and headed north toward Hell.

Louis pushed the Bronco into drive and started toward the farm, one eye on the rearview mirror. He couldn’t count on having much time once he got in. But at least this time he knew what he was looking for.

Anything that made sense out of Amy’s memories.

This whole case had become too damn strange. So that morning, he had told Joe he was going back to the farm.

“What for?” she had asked.

“Some answers,” he said.

“To what?”

When he didn’t reply, Joe said, “You don’t even know the questions.”

The farmhouse came into view. Louis stopped, turned off the engine, and stared at the place through the muddy windshield. Oh, he had questions, all right. The same ones neither Joe nor Dr. Sher had any answers for.

Such as why Amy could sing in French when she didn’t even know where she was born. Or how she knew where to dig for those buried bones. And the question he still hadn’t told Joe about: Why had Amy put a lock of her hair into the locket he gave her, mimicking the one found in the barn?

All of the “memories” that had come out of Amy’s latest hypnosis session — the screaming horses, the men with torches, the names John and Amos — all of that he could easily chalk up to Amy’s vivid imagination fed on her reading of Gone with the Wind. Joe told him Amy had read the book so many times she could quote whole passages of it.

But the rest? There had to be logical explanations for all of it.

He went to the front door and tried the knob. Locked. Around at the kitchen, he found the same thing. Brandt had installed a new lock. He peered into the door’s window. A light was on inside. Brandt had somehow got the power back on. He paused, thought of trying the windows, then remembered something Amy had said.

Joe had asked her recently how she got into the Brandt house the first time. Amy had said there was a cellar door in the back, covered with weeds.

Louis tramped through the weeds to the back. It took a while, but he finally uncovered the two faded blue doors. No lock. He pulled one door open, peered down into the blackness, and went in. Clicking on a flashlight, he found the narrow stairs leading up to the house.

Once in the kitchen, he took stock of the situation. There was a Coleman cooler shoved into one corner. An old table was piled with canned goods, toilet paper, bags of potato chips, and Styrofoam take-out containers. Empty beer cans littered the floor. There was also a red smear on the linoleum. He knelt, running a finger through it.

Blood… and he had a fleeting angry image of Brandt hitting Margi in the barn.

Louis went quickly to the front of the house. He started with the boxes in the dining room. But they were filled only with old dishes and glasses. In the hallway, he found boxes of old clothing, boots and shoes, musty books, and one carton brimming with moldering magazines.

There were no boxes in the parlor. But he stopped at the door, staring at the piano.

Amy had been playing it that first day. He went to the piano, noticing for the first time that it was a player piano. He squinted to read the titles on the slender old roller boxes: RAMONA, MY BLUE HEAVEN, TILL WE MEET AGAIN, MAPLE LEAF RAG. He scanned the titles, but there was nothing of note.

Still, there was something about the piano that was tugging at him. He sat down on the stool and put his feet on the pedals. He began to pump them, and a tinny sound emerged. The piano was so out of tune, the thing so warped and damaged, that the notes barely sounded like music at all.

He stopped. The quiet quickly moved in. His eyes settled on the yellowed piano roll stretched in the window above the keyboard.

The words ran down in a narrow column to the right of the old paper’s perforations. He leaned forward to read them:

Caches dans

cet asile ou

Dieu nous

a conduits

unis par

le malheur

durant les

longues nuits

He rewound the roll, eased it from the piano’s rollers, and unfurled the top so the title was visible: “BERCEUSE,” DE L’OPERA “JOCELYN” PAR BENJAMIN GODARD.

Berceuse . That meant “cradle,” or maybe “lullaby.” It didn’t take much imagination to envision Jean Brandt sitting here playing this old roll and singing the words to her child. Hidden in this sanctuary where God has led us, united by suffering through the long nights we rest together, rocked to sleep beneath their cover we pray beneath the gazes of the trembling stars.

But how did Jean know French? And how did Amy retain it all these years? He didn’t care. This, at least, explained something.

He stuck the roll under his arm and left the parlor. More boxes in a second back room offered up nothing of use. He paused at the stairs leading to the second story, then went up. He didn’t have time to search every box, so he opened flaps, peered in, and closed them, working quickly through the two front bedrooms. At the bedroom in the back, he drew up short.

The pink wallpaper.