J. Jance - Long Time Gone

“And?” I asked.

Sister Mary Katherine put down her fork and peered at me through those thick lenses of hers. “The nightmare isn’t about my parents,” she said. “According to what I told Fred while I was under hypnosis, sometime when I was very young, I may have witnessed a murder.”

A chill ran down my back. “You actually saw it happen?”

“I believe so, but we’re not sure. Under hypnosis I seem to remember looking out through a window and seeing a man murder the woman who lived next door to me.” She turned to Fred. “Did you bring the tapes?” she asked.

Nodding, Fred reached into his briefcase and pulled out three separate videotapes. “I often tape sessions so I can go back through them and look for things I might have missed the first time-facial expressions, nervous tics, that sort of thing,” he explained. “In cases of repressed memories, I usually do several sessions. Bringing painful memories to the surface is a lot like peeling an onion. Often more substantial details are recalled with each subsequent session.”

“When Fred told me about this, my first thought was that I’d made the whole thing up, that it was nothing but a childhood fantasy,” Mary Katherine resumed. “If I had really seen such an awful thing-a man and a woman stabbing someone to death-how was it possible for me to have forgotten it completely?”

“Man and woman?” I repeated. “So there were two of them?”

“Yes. And the dead woman’s name was Mimi.”

“No last name?” I asked.

Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. “No, just Mimi.”

I took my notebook out of my pocket and wrote down that one name: Mimi.

“Whereabouts did she live?”

“That’s the thing. I have no idea,” Mary Katherine answered. “We moved around so much when I was little that I really don’t know, but I’m assuming it was somewhere here in Washington.”

“It’s still possible that you did make it up,” I suggested mildly.

“Perhaps,” Mary Katherine said, “but I don’t think so. When Adelaide died and I was going through her things, I found several boxes with my name on them. They contained the few paltry belongings I brought with me when I came to live with Adelaide. Catholic Family Services had attached a complete inventory sheet. Inside one of the boxes, I found this.”

Mary Katherine reached into a briefcase-size purse and extracted a slim book, which she passed over to me. It was a much-read volume of Watty Piper’s classic children’s book, The Little Engine That Could . That book had been a particular favorite of mine when I was a child. It was a story my mother read to me over and over, and this copy, with its tattered but familiar dust jacket, came from that same era.

“Look inside,” Sister Mary Katherine said.

On the inside cover I found an inscription written in fading blue ink. “For Bonnie, Merry Christmas. Love, Mimi.”

“I got rid of most of the rest of the things, but I kept the book and a few photos. I always wondered who Mimi was. I thought maybe she was some friend or relative of my parents. Clearly we had been close once, or she wouldn’t have given me such an expensive gift. And I thought it was odd that I never heard from her after my parents died. As soon as Fred told me what I had said under hypnosis, I knew why. Mimi was dead long before my parents died. So I asked Fred to see if he could find any record of a woman named Mimi being stabbed to death. I wanted to know whether or not the people who did it were ever caught and punished. I felt I owed her that much.”

I glanced at Fred. “Any luck?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I guess I’m better at being a hypnotherapist than I am at being a detective. That’s your job, not mine.”

“And how exactly did this particular case get to be my job?” I asked.

“That’s my fault,” Sister Mary Katherine said at once. “Fred was the one who knew you worked in that new investigative unit in the attorney general’s office.”

I made a mental note not to call us the SHIT squad in the good sister’s presence.

“Before Father Mark retired from Christ the King, he had a young assistant priest named Father Andrew who moved up into the diocese office years ago. Father Andrew is now the new archbishop’s right-hand man. He was a huge help to me personally when I was starting Saint Benedict’s and needed to cut through mounds of red tape.”

She stopped talking as if she had said enough, but I still didn’t get it.

Obligingly, Freddy Mac clued me in. “Years ago, Father Andrew Carter and Ross Connors played football together at O’Dea High School.”

Click. In that one sentence, my worst suspicions were confirmed. With those kinds of high-placed connections, this was indeed a case with almost unlimited potential for disaster. Bearing that in mind, I decided it was time to treat it that way. I hauled out my notebook and began asking questions and taking notes.

By the time i left the Hyatt, it was early afternoon, but traffic was already a mess. Make that still a mess. Unit B has a conference room with a VCR, but when I called into the office to see if I could use it, Barbara told me the room was booked.

“All right then,” I told her. “Tell Harry I need to spend the next several hours reviewing videotapes, and I’m going home to do it.”

“Absolutely,” Barbara said. “No sense sitting around the office waiting for rush hour.”

Barbara Galvin is a good twenty-five years younger than I am, but that doesn’t keep her from mother-henning anybody who gets near her, me included.

“And the DJ on KMPS just said it’s going to get worse,” she added. “They’re expecting more black ice tonight and maybe even the s -word for tomorrow.”

The s -word is wintertime Seattlespeak for snow. I’m sure the people who live in Buffalo, New York, and other places where it really snows would find it hilarious that two or three inches of white stuff can bring this whole region to a grinding halt, but that’s the way it is. And if it’s more than three inches? Then we can look forward to days of downed trees and power outages.

With that cheery prospect in mind, I headed back across Lake Washington. By three o’clock I was settled into my recliner with the first of Sister Mary Katherine’s videos playing on the VCR. It was a lot like viewing tapes done in cop-shop interview rooms everywhere-only this was shot with higher-quality equipment, so it had better sound and better resolution.

When the first interview started, before Fred MacKinzie put Mary Katherine under, she sounded just as she had earlier that day at lunch. That first session was a fishing expedition as Fred carefully led her back through her years as a nun, through high school, her years with Adelaide Rodgers, and back to that fateful day at camp when she first learned of her parents’ tragic deaths. I think Fred and Sister Mary Katherine both expected to find the answer to her mysterious recurring nightmare lurking in the details surrounding that accident, but her answers remained lucid and unforced, with no resistance to Fred’s probing questions.

It was only then that Fred switched tacks. “Tell me,” he said quietly, “about the first thing you remember.”

“No!”

Her instantaneous and flat-out refusal brought Fred MacKinzie to full attention. It had the same galvanizing effect on me.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because I don’t want to.”

I noticed a subtle sudden change in the mother superior’s voice. It seemed younger somehow. Her words were now being delivered in the singsong staccato of a small child.

Fred remained smoothly reassuring. “How old are you?” he asked.