The Missing Hour

by Dawn Stewardson

“Memory flashes?” Mark leaned forward. “Exactly what do you mean?”

  “Well, they’re hard to describe because they’re really nothing. I mean, I know they’re something from the past, but they’re mostly just color.”

  “What color?”

  “Usually red and white. Sometimes green.”

  She wondered if he’d try to make a joke about Christmas, but he didn’t say a word—merely eyed her so intently it made her nervous.

  “And you. think they’re related to the murder?” he asked at last.

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you believe that?”

  “I don’t know. I just do.”

  When he said nothing more, she rose and wandered across to the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Lake Ontario. To the right there was only choppy gray water dotted with sailboats. To the left was the downtown skyline, anchored partway along by the CN Tower.

  “Have you told your mother about the nightmares? And these flashes?”

  She turned away from the windows and shook her head. “You know how she is. She’d get upset, and then she’d drive herself crazy worrying.”

  “What about your father?”

  “No…no, I haven’t mentioned them to him, either .” She was surprised Mark would even ask. Her father had lived in Alberta for so long that when he’d moved back last year they’d barely known each other. Since then, they’d been making a point of getting together every few weeks, but she didn’t really confide in him.

  “I’ve only told a couple of people,” she offered when Mark remained silent.

  “Wendy?” he guessed.

  “Of course. This is the sort of thing best friends are for.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She mostly just listened and sympathized. And told me to call her if I was upset, no matter how late it was. Then, when I was trying to decide if I should talk to you about it, she encouraged me. And I’ve told Brian, too.”

  “Oh? And his reaction was…?”

  “He made his moving-in offer again—so I wouldn’t be waking up from the nightmares alone.”

  Mark smiled wryly. “I take it you said thanks but no thanks again?”

  “Uh-huh. I like living alone. I think it’s an only-child thing.”

  “Really? That’s a new one to me,” he teased. “Maybe we should write a paper about it.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed, although they both knew her living alone had nothing to do with her being an only child. Old-fashioned as it might be, she’d never lived with a man. And she wouldn’t feel right about making any sort of commitment with Brian until she felt more certain that he was her Mr. Forever.

  When Mark was silent, she knew he was waiting for her to say something more about Brian. But he wasn’t what she wanted to discuss.

  “Did you tell him you were coming here today?’’ Mark finally asked.

  She nodded. “He didn’t think it was a very good idea. He’s not a believer in repressed memories—says it doesn’t make sense that a person could forget about something as traumatic as seeing a murder. And even buying that as a possibility, he can’t see why the memory would surface years later.”

  “A lot of people find it a difficult concept. The human mind is far more complicated than they realize. And when it comes to your case…”

  Mark fell silent again and simply sat gazing across the room. Finally, he said, “All right, If you’re determined to recover that memory, I’ll try to help you.”

  His words sent a ripple of relief through her. She didn’t know if she could have gone to a stranger.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” he continued. “We’ll start right now and talk more about what’s been happening. Then we’ll get together every evening we can. We won’t consider it therapy and we won’t meet in my office. You’ll come here, and we’ll just be an uncle and niece talking about a problem.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured, trying to ignore the anxiety that was tinging her relief.

  What if she was making a mistake? What if, as Brian had suggested, she’d be smarter to do nothing—to simply weather the nightmares and assume they’d eventually stop?

  She couldn’t do that, though. Her need to know exactly what she’d seen, all those years ago, was more compelling than her fear of where this might lead.

  “READY?” MARK ASKED, sitting down in the chair that faced Beth’s.

  She nodded and leaned back.

  “You seem tense tonight.”

  “A little.” But who wouldn’t be? They’d started these “sessions”—for lack of a better word—over a month ago. And any time now she was going to remember what had happened during the missing hour.

  Her nightmares had increased in frequency, from once or twice a week to almost every night And Mark said that was because she was getting nearer and nearer to a breakthrough.

  “All right,” he said quietly, “close your eyes and start letting your memory paint a picture. And let’s get you breathing properly. In…and out…deep…slow breaths.”

  She tried to concentrate solely on her Breathing, but she couldn’t stop thinking this had become very much a patient-therapist relationship. After the first few sessions, the “uncle and niece just talking” approach had gone out the window and Mark had fallen into his accustomed role of psychiatrist.

  It didn’t bother her, though. The slow cadence of his professional voice was reassuring, almost hypnotizing, which made it easier for her to open up.

  “Good,” he said, stretching the word across the space between them. “Now breathe a little more deeply…let your whole body relax.

  “Let your thoughts drift back to when you were a little girl, let your memory paint a picture. And when you’re ready, tell me something you see from long ago. First something about your mother, and then about your father.”

  She smiled to herself. By this point, he’d given her those instructions so often they had to be etched in her brain. Close her eyes, let her memory paint a picture, tell him about her mother, tell him about her father. Then he’d follow up by asking her to elaborate on whatever she said. Or, sometimes, he’d tell her something he remembered about one of them.

  “Breathing in now…and hold it…and out.”

  “My mother,” she finally said, “always had the rec room strewn with pieces of her current hobby—sewing, photography, painting, whatever. She went through so many things that my father used to talk about her ‘hobby du jour.’

  “And he…he spent a lot of time in his study, and he’d be annoyed if my mother interrupted. So she’d send me in to get him if she needed him for something, because he almost never got annoyed with me.

  “Good…very good. Now tell me something about Larisa.”

  When that brought her tension rushing back, Mark immediately said, “Relax, Beth, just tell me something when you’re ready.”

  She took a few long, deep breaths, but was too anxious to close her eyes again. “I liked being with Aunt Larisa,” she said at last. “Because she was almost more like another little girl than an adult.”

  Her uncle nodded, looking as if his thoughts were miles away—as if he might be picturing his wife.

  “And she always had so many ideas for games and things,” Beth added. “But one day…”

  Alarm bells began going off in her head and panic welled inside her.

  Mark rested his hand on hers. “You’re perfectly all right. Just close your eyes again and relax.”

  She closed them, but relaxing was impossible.

  “Deep, slow breaths. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to.”

  But she did! Something inside her was trying to spill out, and holding it back had her heart racing a mile a minute.

  “I crept down the stairs,” she whispered. “I crept down the stairs and the door at the bottom was closed.” She couldn’t go on. Cold sweat had begun trickling down between her shoulder blades and her throat was tight with fear.

  “And when you got
to the closed door?”

  Her heart pounding harder yet, she forced more words out. “I…I listened. And I could hear Aunt Larisa talking. She sounded afraid, so I cracked the door open just a little. And then…” The image was suddenly before her eyes—a freeze frame so unspeakable she couldn’t breathe. “Oh, my Lord! It couldn’t have been him!”

  “THE KILLER WAS SOMEONE you knew,” Mark repeated once more, sounding every bit as incredulous as he had the first three times. “The police were wrong, then. He wasn’t an unknown intruder at all.”

  Beth stared at the carpet, so horrified she didn’t know what to do or say. She shouldn’t have said she’d recognized him. Not until she’d had time to think.

  But the words had slipped out in her panic, and now she had to decide what to do about Mark’s knowing.

  “Beth.” He covered her hand with his again. “Look, I realize how incredibly upset you feel, and that’s normal. To remember after all these years…But you’re going to be okay, I promise.”

  She merely continued to sit there in silence, shaking inside. “I’m going to throw up,” she whispered at last, pushing herself out of the chair and racing to the bathroom.

  After every last bit of her dinner was in the toilet, she rested her forehead against the cool porcelain bowl. And with tears streaming down her face, she wished she’d never helped that memory force its way to the surface.

  Now that she knew the truth, she’d rather have lived with the nightmares—because how could she live with the fact? The immediate question, though, was what was she going to do about it?

  “Beth?” Mark tapped on the door. “Beth, are you all right?”

  “Yes…yes, I’ll be out in a minute.” She pushed herself up from the floor, rinsed off her face, then opened the door.

  Mark was right there, eyeing her with concern. “Come on back into the living room,” he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “The best thing to do is tell me exactly what you remembered. Right now. Verbalizing it will help.”

  As they walked down the hallway, her thoughts were racing so fast they were tumbling all over one another. How could she tell him? But after all the effort he’d put into helping her remember, how could she refuse?

  She sank back into her chair; he sat down across from her once more.

  “Okay,” he said gently. “Slow, deep breaths. And when you’re ready, tell me exactly what you remembered.”

  Decide, she ordered herself. But she couldn’t.

  “Beth?’’ Mark said at last. “Larisa was my wife. If you know who killed her, you’ve got to tell me.”

  His words made her feel as if a boa constrictor were wrapped around her chest—gradually squeezing more tightly. And then a wonderful realization came to her.

  The killer had gotten into the house by removing a kitchen screen. Whereas, if he’d been somebody Larisa had known, he’d have simply knocked on the door. Unless…

  Unless he’d only removed the screen so it would look as if that’s how he’d gotten in.

  Beth forced that thought away. The killer had been a stranger, and the memory that had surfaced simply couldn’t be right. Other things from her subconscious had somehow gotten mixed in.

  Or maybe that image had been nothing more than a bizarre creation of her mind. Maybe she hadn’t actually seen the murder at all, but she’d been trying so hard to remember it that—Yes, there had to be some explanation.

  She forced herself to meet Mark’s gaze. “What I saw wasn’t what happened that day. I think…Mark, I just don’t know what to think.”

  “You did remember seeing the murder, though.”

  “Yes, but…No. I mean, I remember seeing it, but the memory wasn’t right. The man I saw as the killer…Well, it just wasn’t right I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “Beth? Who did you see as the killer?”

  She hesitated, her heart pounding again, then said, “I have a question.”

  “Yes?’’

  “About patient confidentiality.”

  “Yes?”

  “When we started out, you said we weren’t going to consider this therapy. That we’d simply be an uncle and niece talking about a problem.”

  He nodded.

  “Does that mean confidentiality doesn’t apply?”

  “Do you want it to?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” he said slowly. “Then it does.”

  That made her breathe a little more easily, but her mouth was still cotton dry. “Why,” she managed to say, “would I imagine the killer was someone it couldn’t have been?”

  “I don’t know. But maybe, if you tell me who you imagined he was, we could figure that out.”

  She couldn’t tell him. She just couldn’t. And then, her heart pounding in her ears, the words spilled out.

  “My father.”

  Chapter Two

  Cole Radford sat behind his desk, listening closely to the story Dr. Mark Niebuhr was telling him, but his gaze kept straying to the man’s niece.

  Beth Gregory was an extremely attractive woman, with shaggy hair the color of summer wheat, big blue eyes and the kind of lush lips that made it hard not to stare at them.

  At some point in his rambling story, Niebuhr had mentioned she was single. And that, Cole felt certain, was by choice. A woman who looked like her could probably have married a dozen times over.

  It wasn’t her appearance that had him eyeing her, though. It was the fact that she was radiating utter anguish. Of course, if he’d suddenly recalled seeing his father murder his aunt, he probably wouldn’t be too happy the next day, either.

  “So that’s where we’re at,” Niebuhr finally concluded. “The possibility that the murderer wasn’t simply an unknown intruder, but Glen Gregory.”

  When Cole glanced in Beth’s direction again, she was looking at the floor.

  “Beth?”

  She met his gaze so uneasily he almost winced. He wasn’t used to making people nervous—not unless he was doing it intentionally.

  “On the day of the murder, wouldn’t your father have known you were with Larisa?” he asked. “That your mother was leaving you with her while she went shopping?”

  Even though he’d directed the questions at Beth, Niebuhr jumped in with the answer.

  “No, he probably wouldn’t have known. Glen and Angela didn’t officially call it quits until a couple of years later, but they were already leading separate lives. So Angela rarely bothered telling him how she spent her days.

  “On top of which, she’s always been rather…” Niebuhr paused, glancing at Beth. “I guess erratic would be a fair word,” he continued. “She was always deciding she wanted to do something at the last minute, then calling Larisa to see if she’d look after Beth.

  “That’s exactly what happened the day of the murder. Angela didn’t phone until after I’d left for my office. It wasn’t until after the police arrived there…” Niebuhr paused again, this time taking a deep breath before he went on.

  “It wasn’t until after the police arrived to tell me what had happened that I learned Beth had been in the house with Larisa.”

  “I see,” Cole said quietly. “And what about motive, as far as Glen Gregory’s concerned? Would he have had any reason to kill your wife?”

  “None that I know of.”

  So the man’s suspicion was based solely on this recovered memory. “Why do you think the memory’s finally surfaced?” he asked. “I mean, with those nightmares and all, why was it trying to surface before Beth decided to help it along?”

  “Beth?” Niebuhr looked pointedly in her direction.

  “The only thing I can think of,” she told Cole, “is that just before they started, I was looking at a lot of snapshots of Larisa.

  “When I was small, my mother was into photography for a while. And a few months ago, she said that I should see if there were any of the old albums I’d like to have. And…well, as I said, I ended up looking at a lot of pictures of
Larisa.”

  “That would be enough to cause nightmares?” Cole asked Niebuhr.

  He nodded. “Seeing the pictures would have start her thinking about Larisa—even if only subconsciously. And that might well have led to her memories trying to break through the wall she erected against them.”

  Cole glanced at Beth once more, wishing he knew more about the subject of recovered memories. He’d watched a television documentary on it once, but all he really recalled from that was how divided the psychiatric community was as to the validity of the concept

  “Have you talked to anyone else about this?” he finally asked.

  Niebuhr shook his head. “I checked around this morning and your name came up a couple of times, so you’re the only one I called.”

  “Well, I’m glad people are recommending me, but why did you come to me rather than going to the police? No matter how old the case, they’d investigate a fresh lead.” “And that’s all I want—just to have the possibility checked out. But Beth refuses to involve the police.’’

  Niebuhr’s tight-lipped expression told Cole how the good doctor felt about her refusal.

  “And I can’t go to them without her okay,” he continued. “I promised her confidentiality. Besides, even if I did go—”

  “Mark, you gave me your word you wouldn’t tell anyone about this. No one except you,” she added to Cole.

  “And I’m not going to,” Niebuhr assured her. “Discussing your…case, for lack of a better word, without your permission, would be unethical. I was merely going to say that unless you were willing to cooperate, my going to the police would be pointless.”

  Beth looked at Cole once more. “There’s no way I can tell them that memory was of my father, because I’m not sure how much of what I remembered is real.”

  “You saw a very strong image,” Niebuhr said.

  “Mark, last night, you told me that doesn’t necessarily mean it was accurate—that it was possible I’d substituted my father’s face for the killer’s.”

  “I think I said it wasn’t impossible. But that doesn’t make it likely.”

  “Well, likely or unlikely, there’s no way I’m going to the police and accusing my own father of murder. Not on the basis of a memory I’m certain is…at the very least, confused.”