We'll Meet Again

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.’ ”

Back in her car outside Dr. Daniels’s office, Fran sat for several minutes, trying to decide her next move. It was quarter of three. The offices of the Greenwich Time were only a few blocks away. She thought suddenly of Joe Hutnik. He worked there; he had covered Molly’s release from prison. He’d been adamant in stating he believed her guilty. Had he covered her trial too? she wondered.

He seemed like a stand-up guy, Fran thought, and clearly he’s been around for a while.

Maybe too long? a voice whispered. Maybe he covered your father’s story as well. Do you really want to deal with that?

Outside, the late winter sun was fading as thick, gray clouds moved in. March, the unpredictable month, Fran thought as she continued to debate what to do next. Why not take a chance, she decided finally, reaching for her cell phone.

Fifteen minutes later she was shaking Joe Hutnik’s hand. He was in his cubbyhole off the computer-filled Greenwich Time’s newsroom. About fifty years old, with broad, dark eyebrows and alert, intelligent eyes, he waved her to the mini-sized love seat, half of which was piled with books.

“What brings you to ‘The Gateway to New England,’ as our fair town is known, Fran?” He did not wait for an answer. “No, let me guess. Molly Lasch. The word is that you’re doing a program on her for True Crime.”

“The word moves too fast for my taste,” Fran told him. “Joe, can we level with each other?”

“Of course. Provided it doesn’t cost me a headline.” Fran raised her eyebrows. “You’re my kind of guy. Question: Did you cover Molly’s trial?”

“Who didn’t? It was a slow news time, and she filled it for us.”

“Joe, I can pull all the information I need from the Internet, but no matter how much testimony you read, it’s a lot easier to judge truth when you get to see the demeanor of the witnesses, especially under cross-examination. You obviously think Molly Lasch killed her husband.”

“Absolutely.”

“Next question. What did you think of Dr. Gary Lasch?”

Joe Hutnik leaned back in his desk chair, swiveling from side to side as he considered his answer. Then he said slowly, “Fran, I’ve lived around Greenwich all my life. My mother is seventy-six years old. She tells the story of when my sister had pneumonia forty years ago. She was three months old. In those days doctors came to the house. It was known as a house call. You weren’t told to bundle up sick kids and take them to an emergency room, right?”

Hutnik stopped swiveling the chair and folded his hands on the desk. “We lived at the top of a pretty steep hill. Dr. Lasch, Jonathan Lasch, I mean, Gary ’s father, couldn’t get his car up the hill. The wheels kept spinning. He left