Mysterious Montana

by B. J Daniels

  “What do you know about mind control?” Slade said, diving right in.

  Charley laughed. “What don’t I know? Hey, man, I’ve spent years researching it.” He rattled off some code names. “What do you want to know?”

  Slade was afraid he’d made a mistake calling Charley, but asked, “What are those?”

  “Government research projects, man. You can’t believe it.”

  No, Slade thought, he couldn’t.

  “We’re talking using LSD on civilians to see if they would tell their darkest secrets, brainwashing with radiation, low frequency and ultrasonics, hypnosis—”

  “Hypnosis?” Slade heard himself ask.

  “Oh, yeah, man. Hypnosis and all kinds of drugs trying to come up with a hypnotic resistance to torture. They implanted secrets with special codes, turned regular men into killing machines and then erased their memories, man.”

  “They can erase memory? Give someone a drug, then hypnotize them and make them do things they normally wouldn’t do, then erase their memory?”

  “Dude, they can do a lot more than that!”

  “But I always heard that a person wouldn’t do anything under hypnosis that he wouldn’t do under normal circumstances,” Slade said.

  “Yeah? Well, here’s how it works,” Charley said. “Say a guy who would never commit murder is drafted into a war. He’ll kill on the battlefield, right? Well, with hypnosis, the mind becomes the battlefield. If we’re told under hypnosis that it’s a battlefield, then we believe it and will kill. It’s all a matter of perception.”

  Slade frowned. Was it really possible? “But I thought with hypnosis you went into an—” He parroted the words he’d found in the dictionary. “—altered state of focused awareness. I’ve always heard that you’re awake, you know what’s going on and you can stop it at any time.”

  “You’ve been talking to shrinks, man,” Charley said. “If they can tell you you can’t lift your damned arm during hypnosis, and, no kiddin’, you try and you can’t lift your arm, then why can’t they make you do just about anything? It’s all about mind control.”

  “It sounds so…crazy.”

  “Listen, governments have been doing this kind of research for years and lying about the outcome. They can program a guy to kill, they can get him to keep government secrets because he doesn’t really ‘know’ anything on a conscious level—”

  “Like the movie with Frank Sinatra, The Manchurian Candidate?” Except that was fiction. Pure fiction, right?

  “Kinda. Problem with hypnotically induced amnesia, there’s memory leaks and that’s how we’ve found out so much about what they’ve been doing. Guys are remembering.”

  Slade gripped the phone. “Memory leaks?”

  “Bits and pieces of repressed stuff that suddenly pops up in dreams, flashbacks, you know…memories. So the government came up with screen memory. They fed ’em false stories to recall, like seeing spaceships and stuff like that, so no one will believe them.”

  Slade shook his head, not sure how much of this he was buying. “You mean the memories may not be real?”

  “Not if the guy who programmed ’em did screen memories on ’em.”

  Slade let out a sigh as he moved over to the kitchen window and looked out into the night. He felt exposed. He turned off the light. Something whipped by the window, startling him. Just snow blowing off the roof. He moved into the dark living room where the drapes were drawn.

  “OK, let’s say someone was programmed? How do you get them unprogrammed?”

  “Could use hypnotic regression. Depends on how deeply the dude’s been programmed. Sometimes just getting off the drugs and away from the programmer…”

  “But if they get around the programmer?” Slade asked.

  “Oh man, then they can be zapped into another state with just one word. There was this one case of this woman who got involved with this military man. She didn’t even remember how they’d met. Missing-time experiences are common. So are personality changes.”

  Slade felt his heart begin to pound. It sounded too much like Holly. Too much like her experience with Allan Wellington. “Charley, you remember that place outside of town, Evergreen Institute?” He could hear Charley scrambling for a pen and paper. “I’m not saying anything is going on out there.”

  “Yeah, I got ya. I’ll do some checking. I’ve got friends in low places.” He laughed.

  “Well, be careful. It could be dangerous,” Slade said, realizing that that was something he did believe.

  Charley let out a low whistle. “Man, not even Dry Creek is safe. Whoa, that blows me away.”

  “I don’t have anything definite,” Slade protested.

  “No problem, man. If there’s something to get, I’ll get it.”

  Slade started to give Charley his phone number.

  “Caller ID, man. There are no secrets anymore.” Charley hung up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  December 26

  A swollen gray sky spat snow as Slade and Holly drove through town early the next morning. With stores not yet open, the town felt abandoned.

  Holly stared out the side window, watching the buildings sweep past, lost in thought. Last night when Slade had kissed her, she’d believed it would open up her memory like a floodgate. Instead, she’d felt confused and…afraid.

  Now, she tried not to think about the kiss or Slade. All she could think about was the blood typing results in her purse. Inconclusive. The baby could have been hers.

  So why did someone call from the hospital last night to say the blood typing proved the baby wasn’t hers? She wanted to believe someone had “fixed” the results. But what was left of her rational mind knew that the young nurse who’d called Slade last night might not have understood the report.

  She realized she was beginning to question her own sanity. What if they found out that she’d given birth somewhere near the hospital, alone? What if she’d been the person who’d brought the baby—and herself—to the hospital? Maybe there was no mystery at all. Just that she was very, very sick.

  She tried to concentrate on what she would say to Dr. Parris. Thinking herself crazy wasn’t helping. It was too close to what she suspected was the truth.

  “Do you trust this Dr. Parris?” Slade had asked this morning at breakfast.

  “Yes.” The answer had come so quickly, she’d had to stop to think why. “He doesn’t like Inez.”

  “He told you that?”

  She recalled only one time Inez had come up to Evergreen. “There was a row,” Holly told Slade. “I heard it from the sunroom. I didn’t even know it was Inez, although I probably should have. I saw Dr. Parris rush by in the hall and I stuck my head out to see what was going on. That’s when I saw Inez. She was giving the staff hell over something. I never did find out what. But Dr. Parris took her aside and spoke with her and she left, obviously angry. I caught the expression on his face before he saw me. He definitely didn’t like her.”

  Now, as Holly stared out the side window at the passing town, she wondered what Inez had been so upset about. Inez hadn’t stayed that time, but she must have come back if she’d sat in on sessions with Dr. Parris when he’d discussed Holly’s possible guilt over Allan’s death.

  That seemed strange—that Dr. Parris would let Inez attend sessions, especially after their initial meeting. Or had that been the first time they’d met?

  She rubbed her temples. Why could she remember Inez’s first visit and not the others? Her head ached too much to think. She reached for her purse. It’s time for me to take my pill. Her hand wavered just over her purse. Slade had taken the pills.

  But that wasn’t what stopped her. It was the thought: It’s time for me to take my pill.

  Where had that come from?

  She felt a rush of panic as another thought rear-ended the first. Take your pill. You need that pill. The pill is the only thing that helps you.

  But she didn’t have to have the pills. She’d forgotten on Christmas Eve an
d hadn’t taken one yesterday. It wasn’t as if she was addicted to them. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure about that. She definitely couldn’t remember feeling better after taking them. What she remembered, though, was Inez insisting they helped.

  She’d never been one to take pills. Not even aspirin. Except when she had a headache, which was rare. How had she come to depend on pills? Because since she’d met Allan and his sister, she’d seemed to have headaches all the time.

  No, she realized, that wasn’t fair. The headaches had started before then. When her mother’d died. Holly’d had a headache the night she met Allan. Is that when he’d suggested the pills? Had it started that far back?

  She shook her head, amazed that she’d been taking the pills for so long. Desperation. She realized she’d been desperate to believe something would help her memory loss, her mental confusion, her…fear that she was losing her mind. And she was still desperate, she reminded herself as she glanced over at Slade.

  She noticed his hands and was fascinated by their size and shape and strength on the wheel. Long fingers. Strong, masculine hands. Hands that had touched her most private places. Shocked, she looked away.

  Hadn’t she just substituted him for the pills? Put her faith in him, convincing herself that he would help her, just as she had the pills? Only she was clear enough now to know that he might not be any better for her than the drugs.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, Slade was driving past the cemetery. Through the chain-link fence, past the towering stands of pine trees and the snow-cold tombstones, her eye caught the huge marble monument that was a memorial to Allan’s and Inez’s father. Next to it stood the god-like statue Inez had erected over Allan’s grave and next to that—

  Her heart leapt, and she sat up with a start. “Stop the truck!”

  “What?”

  “Go back to the cemetery. I saw someone. A woman. She was at the baby’s grave.” She didn’t have to add at the bogus Allan Junior’s grave.

  Slade immediately swung the pickup around in a U-turn and sped back down the road to the cemetery turn-in. Through the pines, she could get only glimpses of the Wellington monument now. The hard-packed snow crunched under the truck’s tires as Slade wound the pickup through the maze of narrow roads, turning at Holly’s directions until she told him to stop.

  The snowflakes grew larger, falling from the low, sullen clouds, silent as goose down. A magpie put up a ruckus in a nearby pine. The woman was gone.

  “You’re sure you saw someone?” he asked.

  Without answering him, Holly opened her door, the cold morning air making her catch her breath. She pulled her coat around her as she walked toward the newest grave in the Wellington family plot. She hadn’t been here since the funeral, not that she remembered much about that day. While it wasn’t a complete blank, it felt surreal, just real enough to hurt.

  “It could have been Inez you saw,” Slade suggested as he joined her.

  “It wasn’t Inez,” she said without looking at him. “There was no car.” They both knew Inez couldn’t have gotten away that quickly on foot. Whoever had been here had walked into the cemetery—not driven. As she neared the grave, she spotted the woman’s footprints in the crusted snow near the grave. Beside an ostentatious sympathy spray was a tiny bouquet of blue silk forget-me-nots tied loosely with a blue ribbon.

  “It was his mother,” Holly said, knowing that to be true, the way she was starting to know herself again. She looked over at Slade. He was staring down at the tiny bouquet—and the footprints in the snow.

  She followed his gaze as it chased the tracks through an empty part of the cemetery to the border of pines and the road on the other side.

  Did the woman come here everyday? Or was this the first time? Would she be back? Holly felt her heart jump at the thought.

  “It would be dangerous for her to visit the grave,” she said, more to herself than to Slade. “That’s why she came so early, why she parked over on the road and walked through the pines. She didn’t want to be seen.”

  She turned to look at him then, blinking as if suddenly blinded by the sun. “If she knows that her baby was buried as my child—” A thought stopped her. Why would a woman agree to let her child be buried as someone else’s? “Oh, my God!” Urgently she grabbed for Slade, getting a handful of his jacket in her fist. “She has our baby!”

  * * *

  SLADE FELT the hairs stand on the back of his neck as her words echoed through the frozen cemetery.

  “She traded her stillborn for our child!” Holly cried. She jerked on his jacket as if she could physically convince him by shaking the truth into him. “Why else would she agree to this? Don’t you see?”

  He placed his gloved hand over hers and gently pried her fingers open, freeing his jacket to hold her hand in both of his. Her eyes shone too brightly. She tried to pull her hand away as if too nervous to hold still. He turned her palm up, sandwiching it between his hands as if to warm it, when the truth was he didn’t want to let go of her, afraid she’d fly off in a dozen different directions in a thousand different pieces.

  “Holly,” he said quietly, hoping to stop her before she let her hopes run so high he couldn’t get them back down without doing permanent damage. “Why would these…people go to that kind of trouble simply to replace this woman’s child?”

  She stopped, the light dimming a little in her eyes. “Maybe she’s someone. She has a lot of money or—”

  “Not by the looks of the flowers she brought,” he broke in, hating to disappoint her.

  “She just didn’t want anyone to know she’d been here,” Holly said.

  “Then a spray like the one already on the grave would have been less conspicuous, don’t you think? Or none at all.”

  He watched Holly’s breath come out in frosty white puffs. Tiny specks of snow floated down to land in her dark hair, to catch on her lashes. She frowned, fighting what he was saying.

  “Another thing,” he said, motioning to the footprints in the snow. “Look at what she was wearing. An old pair of sneakers, the tread nearly gone on the heels. The snow is deep on the way in from the road. Her feet had to be cold. Why didn’t she wear snowboots? Unless she didn’t have any.”

  “Maybe she was in too much of a hurry,” Holly said. “Or was too upset.”

  He shrugged, giving her that.

  Holly pulled her hand free of his, but didn’t move away from him. He watched her blink, the tears making all that blue seem endless. “If she doesn’t have our baby, then she has to know who does, right?”

  He couldn’t take that away, too. “I would think she’d have to know at least one of the players.” He didn’t want to tell her that the woman might have just been paid to give up her baby. Especially if she’d known just before the birth that the baby would be stillborn. But that would mean that some local doctor was in on the switch. How else could the people behind this have found her—and made some deal for her baby?

  “She knows where her baby is buried,” Holly said. “She has to know about me.”

  Maybe. If she really was the mother. The county was small. Dry Creek even smaller. All the woman had to do was check the obits in the paper to find her baby. He didn’t believe this woman would know much. Just as he didn’t believe she had their baby.

  He took Holly’s arm and turned her away from the grave, away from the towering Wellington monuments to the dead and back toward his pickup, managing to step squarely on Allan Wellington’s grave in the process. It was a childish show of disrespect. He didn’t like Allan Wellington. Nor could he entirely justify his animosity towards a dead man. But he planned to be able to soon. He fervently believed Allan was somehow involved in all this—even though the man had been dead for months. Slade felt it as surely as the winter cold around him.

  “How do we find her?” Holly asked when they’d reached the pickup.

  He’d already been thinking about that. The other mother, if that’s really who she’d bee
n, could be added proof that the babies had been switched. Plus that mother would have given birth at the same place Holly had. She might be able to help them with that as well.

  “I’m not sure,” he said as he climbed behind the wheel. He didn’t have a clue how to find her. She wouldn’t have gone for medical help even if she’d needed it. Too many questions would have been asked.

  “You know, something’s been bothering me,” he said. “If these…monsters who delivered your baby, if they were doctors, why didn’t they do an episiotomy? Why were you suffering from hypothermia when you arrived at the hospital?”

  “Maybe they wanted it to look as if I’d given birth alone, without any help,” she suggested as he started the truck.

  “Maybe.” He thought about her memory of the three ghouls appearing frantic, the feeling that something was wrong. “That seems a little too cruel, even for monsters. Maybe they didn’t know what they were doing because they lacked the medical expertise. Maybe they weren’t doctors at all.” He didn’t like that theory because it opened up too many possibilities. “Have you remembered anything more about the room? It wasn’t just a bedroom in some house?”

  She shook her head as she squinted out at the gloomy day. “The bed made me think it was a hospital because of the rails.”

  Hospital-type beds could be rented. Or purchased.

  “I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t be positive it wasn’t just a bedroom but—Wait a minute. The ceiling.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

  He looked over at her.

  Her eyes were closed. “The ceiling seemed too high for a regular house. And…there was something on it.”

  He waited, afraid to speak for fear of making the memory—if that’s what it was—slip away.

  “A mark.” She opened her eyes and frowned.

  “You mean like the roof leaked?” he asked when she didn’t continue. “Or the plaster cracked?”

  She nodded. “It was in the shape of something large and scaly.”

  He stared at her for a moment, then looked back to his driving. “Like a dragon?”