Mary Clark - We'll Meet Again

One of the few he felt he had failed was Molly Carpenter Lasch. He had known her since she was a child and would sometimes come to dinner at the club with her parents. She had been a beautiful little girl, unfailingly polite, and composed beyond her years. Nothing in either her makeup or in the battery of tests he conducted after her arrest suggested she might be capable of the violent outburst that had resulted in Gary Lasch’s death.

His receptionist, Ruthie Roitenberg, had been with him twenty-five years and, with the privilege of longevity in a job, was not above stating her frank opinions and passing along gossip. It was she who, after being told Fran Simmons was expected at two o’clock, said, “Doctor, you do know whose daughter she is?”

“Am I supposed to know?” Daniels asked mildly.

“Remember that man who stole all the money from the library fund, then shot himself? Fran Simmons is his daughter. She went to Cranden Academy with Molly Carpenter.”

John Daniels did not allow her to see how startled he was at her news. He remembered Frank Simmons all too well. He himself had donated ten thousand dollars to the library fund drive. Money down the drain, as it turned out, thanks to Simmons. “Molly didn’t go into that. I guess she felt it wasn’t important.”

His mild reproof went unnoticed. “If I were in her boots I’d have changed my name,” Ruthie said. “As a matter of fact, I think Molly would be smart to change her name, move away from here and make a fresh start. You know, Doctor, everybody thinks it would be a lot better if, instead of stirring everyone up again, she’d just come out and say how much she regrets having killed that poor man.”

“Suppose there is another explanation for his death?”

“Doctor, anyone who believes that still looks under the pillow for a dime from the tooth fairy.”

Fran was not scheduled to appear on the news broadcast until that evening, so she was able to spend the morning in her office, lining up interviews. Once she was done, she bought a sandwich and soda to eat in the car and set off for Greenwich at 12:15. She left early so that she would have time before her appointment with Dr. Daniels to drive around the town and reacquaint herself with the places she had known when she lived there.

In less than an hour she arrived at the outskirts of Greenwich. During the night, a light dusting of snow had fallen, and the trees and bushes and lawns were shimmering under the late winter sun.

It is a lovely place, Fran thought. I can’t blame Dad for wanting to be part of it. Bridgeport, where her father had been raised, was only half an hour farther north, but there was a world of difference in the lifestyles of the two places.

Cranden Academy was located on Round Hill Road. She drove past the campus slowly, admiring its mellow stone buildings, remembering the years she had spent there, thinking about the girls she had known best, and those she’d known only at a distance. One was Jenna Graham, who was now Jenna Whitehall. She and Molly were always close, Fran thought, even though they were very different. Jenna was much more take-charge and affirmative, while Molly was really quite reserved.

With sudden warmth she thought of Bobbitt Williams, who had been on the basketball team with her. Is it possible that she still lives around here? Fran wondered. She was a good musician too, she recalled-she tried to make me take piano lessons with her, but I told her I was hopeless. The Lord left musical talent out of my genes.

As she turned the car toward Greenwich Avenue, Fran realized with a pang that she genuinely wanted to look up some of her old school friends, at least the ones she remembered fondly, like Bobbitt. Mother and I never talked about those four years we lived here, but they did exist, and maybe it’s time I acknowledged them, she thought. There were a lot of people here I honestly cared about; maybe seeing some of them will be therapeutic for me.

Who knows? she thought as she glanced at her notebook to check Dr. Daniels’s address, someday I might actually come into this town and not relive the terrible anger and embarrassment I’ve felt ever since I realized my father was a crook.

Dr. John Daniels escorted Fran past Ruthie’s observant eyes and into his private office. He immediately liked what he saw in Fran Simmons-a poised, soft-spoken young woman, well dressed in a casual way.

Underneath her all-weather coat she was wearing a brown tweed jacket and camel slacks. Her light brown hair, with its natural wave, skimmed her jacket collar. Dr. Daniels watched her closely as she settled into the chair facing him. She really was very attractive. It was her eyes, though, that really intrigued him-they were such an unusual shade of blue gray. They get bluer when she’s happy, then turn gray when she’s retreating, he thought. Realizing suddenly that he was getting a little too fanciful, he shook his head. He could not help admitting to himself that he was scrutinizing Fran Simmons so thoroughly because of what Ruthie had revealed about Fran’s father. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.

“Doctor, you know I’m planning to do a program about Molly Lasch and her husband’s death,” Fran said almost immediately, getting directly to the point. “I understand Molly has given you permission to speak openly to me.”

“That’s right.”

“Was she your patient before her husband’s death?”

“No, she was not. I knew her parents, principally through the country club. I saw Molly there from the time she was a child.”

“Did you at any point observe any aggressive behavior from her?”

“Never.”

“Do you believe her when she says that she is unable to remember the details of her husband’s death? Let me rephrase that, please. Do you believe that she cannot remember the details of her husband’s death or of finding him when he was dying or dead?”

“I believe that Molly is telling the truth as she knows it.”

“Which means?”

“Which means that whatever happened that night is so painful that she has pushed it deep into her subconscious. Will she ever retrieve it? I don’t know.”

“If she does recover some memory of that night-for example, about her sensation that there may have been someone else in the house when she returned home-will that be an accurate memory?”

John Daniels took off his glasses and wiped them. He put them back on, realizing as he did so that, ludicrous as it was, he had become so dependent on them that to speak without them made him feel vulnerable.

“Molly Lasch is suffering from dissociative amnesia. This involves gaps in memory that are related to extremely stressful and traumatic events. Obviously, the death of her husband, however that may have occurred, fits into that category.

“Some people who suffer from this condition respond well to hypnosis and are able to regain significant and often trustworthy memory of the event. Molly agreed willingly to submit to hypnosis before the trial, but it just didn’t work. Think about it. She was emotionally devastated by her husband’s death and terrified of her upcoming trial, much too distraught and fragile to be successfully hypnotized.”

“Does she have a chance of gradually recovering accurate memory, Doctor?”

“I wish I could say that Molly has a good chance of recovering her memory and of clearing her name. To be honest, I feel that whatever she may eventually believe she remembers will not necessarily be trustworthy. If Molly seems to regain some sense of what happened that night, it’s very possible she will be filling in with what she wishes had happened. She may honestly believe that she is really remembering what happened, but that won’t necessarily mean that it actually did happen that way. It’s called ‘retrospective memory falsification.’ ”