The easiest wedge would clearly come from getting Rhea Wiell to help out. Since I was in the Loop already, I decided to pay a surprise visit: maybe she’d be more responsive in person than on the phone. And if she wouldn’t give me background material on her patient, maybe she’d at least help come up with a strategy for controlling him.
I walked the length of Michigan Avenue to Water Tower Place, stopping partway up for something the shop called a vegetarian sandwich. The mild day had drawn a throng of office workers outside for lunch. I sat on a marble slab between a guy buried in a paperback and a couple of women who were smoking while denouncing someone’s horrible behavior in asking them to fill out a second set of time sheets.
The sandwich turned out to be a thick roll with a few slices of eggplant and peppers. I crumbled up part of the roll for the sparrows who were pecking hopefully at my feet. Out of nowhere a dozen pigeons appeared, trying to muscle the sparrows aside.
The guy with the paperback looked at me in disgust. “You’re only encouraging pests, you know.” He dog-eared his page and got up.
“I wonder if you’re right.” I stood as well. “I always thought my work was keeping them at bay, but you may be on to something.”
His disgust changed to alarm and he turned hastily into the office building behind us. I crumbled the rest of the bread for the birds. It was almost one o’clock. Morrell would be over the Atlantic now, away from land, away from me. I felt a little hollow below my diaphragm and increased my pace, as if I could leave loneliness behind me.
At Rhea Wiell’s office, a young woman was sitting in the waiting room, her hands nervously clutching a cup of herbal tea. I sat down and studied the fish in the aquarium while the woman darted suspicious looks at me.
“What time is your appointment?” I asked.
“One-fifteen. Are you-when is yours?”
If my watch was right, it wasn’t quite ten after. “I’m a drop-in. I’m hoping Ms. Wiell will have a break in her schedule this afternoon. How long have you been seeing her? Has she been helpful?”
“Very.” She didn’t say anything else for a minute, but as I continued to watch the fish and the silence built, she added, “Rhea’s helped me become aware of parts of my life that were shut away from me before.”
“I’ve never been hypnotized,” I said. “What’s it like?”
“Are you afraid? I was, too, before my first session, but it’s not like they show it in the movies. It’s like riding an elevator down into the middle of your own past. You can get off on these different floors and explore them, only with the safety of having Rhea right next to you, instead of-well, being alone, or being with the monsters who were there when you had to live through the time originally.”
The door to the inner room opened. The woman immediately turned to watch for Rhea, who came out with Don Strzepek. The two were laughing in a kind of easy intimacy. Don looked wide awake, while Rhea, instead of her flowing jacket and trousers, had put on a red dress that fit snugly around the bodice. When she saw me she flushed and withdrew slightly from Don.
“Have you come to see me? I have another appointment right now.” For the first time in our brief acquaintance her smile held genuine warmth. I didn’t take it personally-I knew it was the overflow from Don-but it made my own response more natural.
“Something rather serious has come up. I can wait until you’re free, but we ought to talk.”
She turned to the waiting patient. “Isabel, I’m not going to start your session late, but I need one moment alone with this woman.”
When I moved with her to the entrance to her inner room, Don trailed after me. “Paul Radbuka has started stalking Mr. Loewenthal’s family. I’d like to talk to you about strategies for managing the situation.”
“Stalking? That’s a fairly extreme criticism. You may be misinterpreting his behavior, but even if you are, we definitely should discuss it.” She went behind her desk to look at her calendar. “I can fit you in at two-thirty for fifteen minutes.”
She nodded regally to me, but when she glanced at Don her expression softened again. When she walked us out to the waiting area, it was to him that she said, “I’ll see you at two-thirty, then.”
“Looks as though things are going well with your book,” I said once we were out in the hall.
“Her work is fascinating,” Don said. “I let her hypnotize me yesterday. It was wonderful, like floating in a warm ocean in a totally secure boat.”
I watched him reflexively touch his breast pocket while we waited for an elevator. “Have you stopped smoking? Or remembered buried secrets about your mother?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Vic. She put me in a light trance so I could see what it was like, not a deeper one for memory recovery. Anyway, she never uses a deeper trance until she’s worked with a patient long enough to make sure they trust each other. And to make sure the patient’s strong enough to survive the process. Arnold Praeger and the Planted Memory guys will definitely be sorry they’ve tried to trash her reputation when this book comes out.”
“She’s put some kind of spell on you,” I teased as we rode to the lobby. “I’ve never heard you abandon journalistic caution before.”
He flushed. “There are legitimate grounds for concern with any therapeutic method. I’ll make that clear in the text. This isn’t an apology for Rhea but a chance for people to understand the validity of recovered-memory work. I’ll give the Planted Memory camp their say. But they’ve never taken the time to understand Rhea’s methods.”
Don had first met Rhea Wiell when I did, four days ago, and he was already a true believer. I wondered why her spell didn’t work on me. When we met on Friday, she’d realized I approached her with skepticism, not Don’s admiration, but she hadn’t tried to charm me out of it. I’d thought perhaps she didn’t try as hard with women as with men, but the young patient in the waiting room was clearly also a votary. Was Mary Louise right? Did Rhea and I instinctively distrust each other because we both wanted to command the situation? Or was my gut telling me there was a problem with Rhea? I didn’t think she was a charlatan, but I did wonder if a steady diet of adulation from people like Paul Radbuka had gone to her head.
“Earth to Vic-for the third time, do you want coffee while we wait?”
I realized with a jolt that we were standing outside the elevators on the ground floor. “Is that what hypnosis is like?” I asked. “You become so lost in your own space that you lose awareness of the outside world?”
Don steered me outside so he could light a cigarette. “You’re asking a novice. But I think they consider losing yourself like that akin to a trance. It’s called imaginative dissociation, something like that.”
I stood upwind from him while he finished his cigarette, checking in again first with Tim Streeter, who said there was nothing new to report, and then with my answering service. By the time I’d returned a couple of client calls, Don was ready to move into the hotel for a cup of coffee. In the tree-filled terrace at the Ritz, I got him to give me a digest of the research he’d been doing the last four days.
He had a wealth of data about the way in which hypnosis had been used to treat people with traumatic symptoms. One man who’d had terrible fantasies about having his neck wrenched off his shoulders turned out to have seen his mother hanging herself when he was three: his father was able to confirm all the details that the son produced under hypnosis. The father had never discussed them with his son, hoping that the boy had been too young to understand what he was watching. There were also plenty of documented cases of people hearing what was said around them under total anesthesia and being able to reconstruct whole operating-room conversations through hypnosis. Rhea herself had worked with a number of incest victims whose memories recovered under hypnosis had been validated by siblings or other adults.