I think it was hardest for Laura. She cried a lot and made us laugh a lot, too, even in her pain. It was hard for her because Laura had been in the midst of her struggle with chemical dependency when Toni had died. As she put it, at the bottom of the barrel, and she'd thrown all of her self-hatred, all of her anger at Toni. That's what she regretted the most. She just wished that instead of shouting at Toni that morning in front of my apartment, she'd told her how much she cared. Unspoken love. That was, I knew, the hardest of all wounds to heal.
But of course Maddy, the great seer and healer, tried to do exactly that. She hypnotized Laura a handful of times and finally got her to the point where she could regress. I never learned the exact scene, but I knew that Maddy led Laura back through her unconscious, and in trance created some fictional meeting where Laura made amends to Toni.
As for myself, I shied away from hypnotism, at least for that week, content that I would never again return to Toni in trance. I'd found her once, discovered new dimensions in her as well as myself, resolved a great deal, and now it was time to release the past and move again back into the present.
The present? I wasn't quite sure what that meant. Maddy offered me a job, wanted me to come to her island and work for her. I spent a lot of time pondering that. Leaving my work as a technical writer and going into the field of forensic hypnosis, being my sister's eyes and legs. It was tempting, to say the least, particularly if I never had to talk about garage door openers again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
R.D. Zimmerman is the Lambda Award-winning and Edgar-nominated author of numerous mysteries. He has studied, worked, and traveled extensively in Russia. Under the pen name of Robert Alexander, he is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Kitchen Boy, and other novels, including his latest, When Dad Came Back As My Dog. For more information, visit: www.robertalexanderbooks.com
Praise
Other Books
Title Page Copyright Page
Death Trance Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
About the Author
Death Trance Page 26
