“No. Professionals perform age-regression therapy frequently, and it’s usually a straightforward trip into the patient’s past. I’m just telling you the very odd results that have happened a handful of times when a hypnotist takes control of a human brain and finds out there’s far more there than he expected. Has your friend lived before? We won’t know until Dr. Little hypnotizes her, presuming he’ll accept her as a patient.”
After the call, Landry and Cate talked for a while about the amazing story her father had related. When they turned off the lights, Tiffany tiptoed away from their door and returned to her room. She had eavesdropped because she wanted to find out if a doctor could free her from this living nightmare.
It scared her that Landry was talking about hypnotizing her before even asking how she felt about it. Things were moving fast — maybe too fast for her. As much as she wanted to end this nightmare, the potential risks frightened her.
Instead of providing relief, listening to that phone call had unnerved her. She kept the lights on all night, stayed dressed and huddled under her covers, quivering at every sound in the night. She was afraid of what awful things someone might find inside her mind. When she slept, she dreamed of a tall woman who laughed as she beat prisoners in chains.
One of those prisoners was her, and in her nightmare, she felt every lash of the whip and every blow of the baton.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Landry showered and dressed as quietly as possible. He tiptoed into the living room and made sure Tiffany’s door was closed. He kissed Cate, told her he was leaving, moved the furniture from the doorway, and went to work.
Jack was already there, bright-eyed and eager to finish his progress report from last night. Landry would have preferred to spend the next hour preparing for the conference call with Dr. Little, but he had promised his new assistant a forum.
As eager as a schoolboy, Jack read the police blotter for a fall night in 1820 when passersby on Toulouse Street witnessed a scene on the LaPieres’ second-floor balcony. A young black man ran through a doorway onto the balcony with an older woman brandishing a whip close behind. “Get back in there,” they heard her scream as she raised the lash. “Get inside or I’ll kill you!” Cowering, the frightened man obeyed. Although they were out of sight, through the doorway the people on the street heard lashes of the whip and a man’s awful screams for mercy.
One of the concerned pedestrians walked to the police station around the corner on Royal Street and reported the incident. Two officers were dispatched to the LaPiere building at 12:25 a.m. They knocked for some time before “Mr. Lucas LaPiere, a man known to the officers as the owner of the property” opened it. As before, he assured them everything was all right. He explained that a house servant had raised his voice against the mistress, but he dealt with the matter. There had been no whip and no death threat.
Unconvinced, this time the officers insisted on looking around the premises. They asked to go to the upstairs room with the balcony where the pedestrians claimed to have seen the incident. According to the report, despite the late hour Madam LaPiere sat on a couch dressed “as if going to a party” and said nothing while the officers poked around. They found a “possible bloodstain” on the floor, but Lucas told them one of the house servants had cut her finger on a broken glass earlier while serving drinks.
The policemen reported muffled sounds coming from above. When asked what was on the next floor, Lucas LaPiere replied an attic and storeroom. The noise was perhaps a rat, he explained, since the house had a problem with large rodents in the fall months. Hearing another noise — “the sound of something being dragged” — the officers asked to see the attic, but the gentleman declined. He said there were sleeping houseguests, and he did not intend to disturb them.
That was the end of the investigation, and so far as Jack knew, it was the last time the police went there. For the next twenty years, the LaPieres lived there without incident.
Something Jack discovered gave him a hunch why the police left them alone. He unearthed a cache of political information at the historical museum. Beginning in 1820, just around the time of the second visit by police, Mr. LaPiere began making substantial donations to police and fire department charities. He contributed generously to campaigns of the mayor and local politicians. An article in the Louisiana Advertiser newspaper also lauded the couple for donating three fine horses to the police precinct right around the corner from their establishment.
He concluded nothing had changed in two hundred years. Bad actors sometimes made major political contributions. To them it was an insurance policy.
Just then Cate’s father texted with a number to join the conference call. Landry hadn’t had time to brief Jack on last night’s revelations about past life regression, so he told him to close the door, sit down and listen while he called on his office phone and turned on the speaker.
Dr. Little seemed an affable, friendly man as he joked with Doc Adams for a few minutes about some conference they’d attended in Las Vegas. Then the conversation turned to Tiffany’s situation. Landry told the psychologist everything he had witnessed, and Tiffany’s compulsions that interfered with her sleep and work. She feared this mystery would ruin her life if she couldn’t get past it.
The psychologist focused on the recurring dreams and was interested to learn she’d been having them since childhood. He added that a long-forgotten event could trigger her compulsive behavior about
