False Memory

one pocket.

In the kitchen, from a large pot of spaghetti sauce rose the mouthwatering fragrance of cooking meatballs and sausages.

Closterman offered a drink to Dusty, coffee to Martie—“unless you’ve taken no more Valium”—and poured coffees at their request.

They sat at the highly polished pine table while the physician seeded and sliced several plump yellow peppers.

“I was going to feel you out a little bit,” Closterman said, “before deciding how frank to be with you. But I’ve decided, what the hell, no reason to be coy. I admired your father immensely, Martie, and if you’re anything like him, which I believe you are, then I know I can rely on your discretion.”

“Thank you.”

“Ahriman,” Closterman said, “is a narcissistic asshole. That’s not opinion. It’s such a provable fact, they should be required by law to include it in the author’s bio on his book jackets.”

He glanced up from the peppers to see if he had shocked them — and smiled when he saw they were not recoiling. With his white hair, jowls, extra chins, dewlaps, and smile, he was a beardless Santa.

“Have you read any of his books?” he asked.

“No,” Dusty said. “Just glanced at the one you sent.”

“Worse than the usual pop-psych shit. Learn to Love Yourself. Mark Ahriman never had to learn to love Mark Ahriman. He’s been infatuated with himself since birth. Read the book, you’ll see.”

“Do you think he’s capable of creating personality disorders in his patients?” Martie asked.

“Capable? It wouldn’t surprise me if half of what he cures are conditions he created in the first place.”

The implications of that response were, to Dusty, breathtaking. “We think Martie’s friend, the one we mentioned this morning—”

“The agoraphobic.”

“Her name was Susan Jagger,” Martie said. “I’ve known her since we were ten. She killed herself last night.”

Martie shocked the physician as the physician had not succeeded in shocking them. He put down the knife and turned away from the yellow peppers, wiping his hands on a small towel. “Your friend.”

“We found her body this afternoon,” Dusty elaborated.

Closterman sat at the table and took one of Martie’s hands in both of his. “And you thought she was getting better.”

“That’s what Dr. Ahriman told me yesterday.”

Dusty said, “We have reason to think that Martie’s autophobia — as we now know it’s called — isn’t naturally occurring.”

“I went with Susan to his office twice a week for a year,” she explained. “And I’ve begun to discover…odd memory lapses.”

Sun-seared, windburnt, with permanent dashes of red in the corners, the doctor’s eyes were nevertheless more kind than damaged. He turned Martie’s hand over in his and studied her palm. “Here’s everything important I can tell you about the slick sonofabitch.”

He was interrupted when Charlotte raced into the kitchen with a ball in her mouth, Valet on her heels. The dogs slid on the tile floor and shot out of the room as pellmell as they had entered.

Closterman said, “Toilet training aside, dogs can teach us more than we can teach them. Anyway, I do a little pro bono work. I’m no saint. Lots of doctors do more. My volunteer work involves abused children. I was battered as a child. Didn’t scar me. I could waste time hating the guilty…or leave them to the law and to God, and use my energy to help the innocent. Anyway…remember the Ornwahl case?”

The Ornwahl family had operated a popular preschool in Laguna Beach for over twenty years. Every opening in their classrooms led to heated competition among parents of potential enrollees.

Two years ago, the mother of a five-year-old preschooler filed a complaint with the police, accusing members of the Ornwahl family of sexually abusing her daughter, and claiming that other children had been used in group sex and satanic rituals. In the hysteria that ensued, other parents of Ornwahl students interpreted every oddity in their kids’ behavior as an alarming emotional reaction to abuse.

“I had no connections with the Ornwahls or with families whose children attended the school,” Roy Closterman said, “so I was asked to perform pro bono examinations of the kids for Child Protective Services and the D.A.’s office. They were getting pro bono work from a psychiatrist, too. He was interviewing Ornwahl preschoolers to determine if they could give convincing accounts of abuse.”

“Dr. Ahriman,” Martie guessed.

Roy Closterman got up from the table, fetched the coffeepot, and refreshed their cups.

“We had a meeting to coordinate various aspects of the medical side of the Ornwahl investigation. I instantly disliked Ahriman.”

A twinge of self-reproach caused Dusty to shift uneasily in his chair. That persistent inner voice shamed him for his disloyalty to the psychiatrist, for even listening to this negativity.

“And when he mentioned offhandedly that he was using hypnotic-regression therapy to help some kids revisit possible incidents of abuse,” Closterman said, “all my alarm bells went off.”

“Isn’t hypnosis an accepted therapeutic technique?” Martie asked, perhaps echoing her own inner counselor.

“Less and less so. A therapist without finesse can easily, unwittingly implant false memories. Any hynotized subject is vulnerable. And if the therapist has an agenda and isn’t ethical…”

“Do you think Ahriman had an agenda in the Ornwahl case?”

Instead of answering the question, Closterman said, “Children are highly susceptible to suggestion, even without hypnosis. Study after study has shown they’ll ‘remember’ what they think a persuasive therapist wants them to remember. Interviewing them, you have to be very cautious to avoid leading their testimony. And any so- called repressed memories recovered from a child under hypnosis are virtually worthless.”

“You raised this issue with Ahriman?” Martie asked.

Resuming his work with the yellow peppers, Closterman said, “I raised it — and he was a condescending, arrogant prick. But smooth. He’s a good politician. Every concern I raised, he answered, and no one else in the investigation or the prosecution shared my concerns. Oh, the poor damn doomed Ornwahl family didn’t like it, but this was one of those cases when mass hysteria subverts due process.”

“Did your examinations of the children turn up any physical evidence of abuse?” Dusty asked.

“None. There’s not always physiological evidence of rape with older children. But these were preschoolers, small children. If some of the things claimed to’ve been done to them actually had been done, I’d almost certainly have found tissue damage, scarring, and chronic infections. Ahriman was turning up all these stories of satanic sex and torture — but I couldn’t find one scintilla of medical backup.”

Five members of the Ornwahl family had been indicted, and the preschool had nearly been torn apart in the search for clues.

“Then,” Closterman said, “I was approached by someone aware of my opinion of Ahriman…and told that before all this started, he’d been treating the sister of the woman who accused the Ornwahls.”

“Shouldn’t Ahriman have disclosed that connection?” Dusty asked.

“Absolutely. So I went to the D.A. The woman, it turns out, was the sister of the accuser, but Ahriman claimed he’d never been aware of their relationship.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“No. But the D.A. did — and kept him on board. Because if they had admitted Ahriman was tainted, they couldn’t have used any of his interviews with the kids. In fact, any stories the children told him would have to be treated as coerced or even induced memories. They wouldn’t be worth spit in court. The prosecution’s case depended on unwavering belief in Ahriman’s integrity.”

“I don’t recall reading any of this in the papers,” Martie said.

“I’m getting to that,” Closterman promised.

His knife work at the cutting board grew less precise, more aggressive, as if he were not slicing just yellow