Death Gets a Time-Out (27 page)

“It sounds lovely,” I said.

“What can I do for you, Juliet?”

“I just want to be absolutely sure, Wanda. You know for sure that Reese Blackmore was sleeping with Chloe, and he was the one who arranged for Chloe to go to the rehab center?”

“Yes, as far as I know. I mean, that’s what Chloe told me.
He was her client, and he paid for her to check into the clinic. Everyone at that clinic was so nice to her. She made some really good friends there. And you know, I never would have thought Chloe would go into rehab.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, I guess mostly because before she checked in, she’d never even admitted she had a problem. Once I’d quit the business and stopped using, I tried to encourage her to lay off the cocaine and crank. But she wouldn’t. She’d just tell me that I was being ridiculous, that she was only using a little, and that I should mind my own business. But then one day she called and told me that she was checking herself in.”

“Did she tell you why?”

Wanda paused. “No. Not really. She just said that she had a plan to change her life, and that Ojai was the first step.”

Had Chloe’s life-altering intention been to be drug-free, or had she had some other goal in mind?

“Have you seen the papers, Wanda? The
Daily Enquirer
?”

She hadn’t, and she was horrified at the story I told her. “That’s who Chloe was blackmailing?” she said. “Lilly Green?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“What?” I said.

“It’s just . . . I don’t know. A little while before she died, when Chloe came to visit me? The time she gave me the money for the gallery? She said something . . .”

“What? What did she say?” I asked, barely containing my excitement.

“She said something about knowing things about people that even they didn’t know. How exciting that was. I just assumed she was talking about Polaris. I mean, because they were married and everything. I told her I wouldn’t know, really, because I never had a husband, but I could remember things about her childhood that I was sure she’d forgotten.”

“And what did she say?” I tried to keep my voice calm, but it trembled despite my efforts.

Wanda sighed. “I don’t really remember. She just laughed, I guess. I’m not sure. We started talking about my plans for the gallery. I was so excited about that.”

I hung up the phone and absentmindedly nibbled on my coffeecake. Chloe must have been referring to Lilly. How
she
knew about what Lilly had done even though Lilly’s own memories were vague. I reduced the cake to a mere memory and glanced at my watch. I still had almost an hour before I had to pick Isaac up from school and then drive crosstown to get Ruby in time for her piano lesson. I looked around the café and saw, in a corner, a sign that said
INTERNET ACCESS, TEN DOLLARS PER HOUR.
The perfect way to waste some time.

I gave one of the bored young women behind the counter ten dollars and logged on to the cute little orange I-Book perched on the corner table. I clicked over to Google and input the full name of the Ojai Rehabilitation and Self-Actualization Center. The first site to come up was the center’s own, and it was beautiful. It offered a three-dimensional tour of the center, testimonials by satisfied clients, and a long essay by Dr. Blackmore himself explaining the link between repressed memory of traumatic events and self-medication. Blackmore’s theory appealed to me. It certainly isn’t a coincidence that drug users are generally, although certainly not always, people who’ve experienced some kind of personal trauma or pain. That was absolutely true of the many drug-using clients I’d represented. It made sense to me that a person might abuse drugs in order to achieve a release from the pain. The disease of drug addiction has always seemed to my uneducated mind to be one that combines physical symptoms with serious emotional problems. Dr. Blackmore’s hypothesis that these problems might have as their root the repressed memory of trauma made as much sense to me as any other explanation I’d heard.

I spent the next hour winding my way through the web, reviewing every reference to either Dr. Blackmore or the center. Just as Lilly said, her doctor was nationally recognized as a leader in the field. He’d written more than thirty articles
on the link between repressed memory and drug addiction, the most recent dozen of which he’d coauthored with his assistant, Molly Weston. Unlike the majority of theorists whose research concentrated on repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse, Blackmore’s writings explored a wide range of trauma susceptible to repression, including the death or injury of a parent. I found the Little Girl Q articles and E-mailed them to myself so that I could read them at my leisure. Then I spent some time looking for the source of the center’s funding. I knew from my visit to the center that the majority of clients paid their own way, or benefited from generous health insurance programs. However, I soon discovered that Dr. Blackmore treated enough indigent clients to allow the center to receive a hefty share of public funds. One of the most important things the web has given investigators is access to records to which the public is entitled, but whose request used to involve an elaborate series of forms, and infinite patience. Searching through the records of the California Budget Office, I found a number of references to the Ojai center, including a notation of the unanimous approval by the California Assembly of Speaker Beverly Green’s inclusion of the center on a list of state and private agencies singled out as models of effective drug rehabilitation. This made the center eligible for special consideration in the allocation of state funding. Beverly had obviously been very grateful to Dr. Blackmore for the work he did with Lilly.

It took a while longer to find the other major source of the center’s funding. Finally, a web page publicizing the recipients of private foundation grants linked me to a list of the CCU’s philanthropic activities. In the twenty-five years that the Ojai center had been in operation, it had received almost ten million dollars from Polaris’s church.

I sat back in my chair and blew out between my lips. Dr. Reese Blackmore’s center was funded in large part by the CCU, and by the State of California. Both Polaris and Beverly had been remarkably generous to Reese Blackmore. Was it gratitude that inspired their benevolence? Or was there a more nefarious reason for it? Had he threatened to expose
Lilly, and thus their own roles in keeping her secret? Were they funneling money to the Ojai center to keep him doing work they admired, or to keep him quiet? And what, if anything, did all this have to do with the murder of Chloe Jones?

I clicked back through the web pages, looking for anything I might have missed. This time, something new caught my eye. I hadn’t bothered going to this site initially because it was an individual’s home page. The graphics were plain black and white, and the text was full of typos. The page was called Stephanie’s Story, and it was written by her mother.

Stephanie, I read, had been a lovely little girl, but had become lost in adolescence. Stephanie’s mother wrote that, despite her family’s attention and concern, Stephanie became addicted to heroin. After an overdose that nearly killed her, the girl checked into the Ojai clinic for treatment. That was, according to her mother, when the worst began. Much of the webpage was a screed by Stephanie’s mother, accusing Dr. Blackmore of implanting false memories of abuse in her daughter.

Dr. Blackmore had, the web page insisted, convinced Stephanie that her father had molested her when she was a child. In therapy, and out, she recounted specific acts of violence that horrified all who heard them. Ultimately, her father was prosecuted for multiple counts of rape and child sexual abuse stemming from her accusations. Stephanie’s mother, sure of her own memories, and of her husband’s innocence, stood by him, testifying in his favor at trial. He was acquitted, but the family was torn apart. Years later, much to the mother’s relief, Stephanie had recanted her claim, calling herself a victim of False Memory Syndrome.

I did a quick search for False Memory Syndrome, and hit pay dirt. The World Wide Web had become the theater of war for a bitter conflict between proponents of recovered memory theory and those of False Memory Syndrome. Cases like Lilly’s, where the traumatic memory was one of the death of a parent, seemed to be rare; the battle was being fought almost exclusively over the issue of memories of childhood sexual abuse.

The proponents of the existence of repressed memory, I learned, argue that children who suffer victimization at the hands of someone from whom they cannot physically escape often suffer a kind of selective amnesia in order to cope with the trauma. Later in life, when their psychological survival does not depend on the repression of the traumatic memories, they begin to recall the events. This psychological theory has spawned a cottage industry of therapists, support groups, and self-help books and has led to the prosecution of crimes as old as thirty or forty years. Inputting “Recovered Memory” into Google led me to sober articles—some by Nobel Prize—winning neuroscientists—that tracked memory repression using tried-and-true scientific method, and to websites that encouraged individuals suffering every kind of emotional ailment from anxiety to insomnia to attribute their distress to repressed memories of sexual abuse at the hands of their parents. There were even a disturbing number of sites devoted exclusively to the idea that there was a huge movement of Satanic worship in the United States that had as its focus the sexual abuse, torture, and murder of children.

When I input the term “False Memory Syndrome” into my search engine, I found a similar range of sites. Some described the work of memory theorists engaged in clinical studies in which they successfully implanted false memories using techniques such as hypnosis, drug therapy, guided imagery, journaling, and even mere repetition—the precise methods used by therapists to uncover repressed memories. The authors of the studies concluded that the very attempt to recover repressed memory itself caused the implantation of false memories. Once false memories are “recalled,” they are indistinguishable from memories of actual events. The False Memory Syndrome camp listed its own support groups, offering succor to parents and families who felt they had been wrongly accused of sexual abuse as a result of a family member’s false memories.

The whole area of sexual abuse is fraught with the potential for confusion and debate. On one hand, it necessarily involves a perpetrator, someone subject to criminal liability, with a
tremendous interest in calling the memories into question. On the other, it’s an accusation that is difficult if not impossible to disprove, especially if the abuse was supposed to have occurred in the distant past. But Lilly hadn’t suffered sexual abuse. Her trauma was a different kind altogether. I wondered if repressed memory really existed in other kinds of situations, for other kinds of ongoing trauma. I input the words “holocaust survivor” and “repressed memory” into my search engine. I found hit after hit. There was an entire body of research into the phenomenon of repressed memory, particularly among children who had survived concentration camps. For many children, their horrific experiences were remembered not at all, or in fragments. Once they began to recall incidents they, like those who claim to have suffered sexual abuse, often suffered hyperrealistic memories complete with intensified emotional and even physical effects.

Next, I input some key terms used by False Memory theorists, along with Blackmore’s name. He had become a major player, it turned out, in the debate over recovered and false memories, vigorously defending his theories in print. Nonetheless, once the concept of False Memory Syndrome was popularized, and victim recantation cases hit the media, people seemed to have lost interest in exploring repressed memories as a part of drug treatment. Allegations of implanted memories by his own patients also seemed to have done some damage to his business. I found articles describing the clinic’s descent from one of the most popular in California to one with empty beds.

Finally I found a reference to a short article from the
Pasadena Union Tribune
reporting a press release by the CCU, announcing that it was terminating its relationship with the Ojai center and opening its own Cosmological Unity Rehabilitation Centers. But try as I might, I couldn’t find any further references to any CCU rehab centers.

Suddenly, a voice woke me from my Internet trance. “Your time’s up.”

“Excuse me?” I said, startled. I looked up into the face of the young woman to whom I’d paid my ten dollars. She still
looked bored, but now she’d complicated that expression with a frown of irritation.

“Your time’s up. And we’ve got, like, a line.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. I got to my feet and then a sickening realization hit me. “What time is it?” I asked her.

“Like, twenty after one,” she said.

I was going to get fined. Again. I was a full half-hour and thirty dollars late by the time I screeched into the parking lot at Isaac’s school. And you know what? It turns out that Ms. Morgenstern doesn’t always smile, after all.

Thankfully, Isaac fell asleep in the car, giving me time to think about all that I’d discovered. The recovered memory proponents, especially those discussing the particular biology of memory, succeeded in convincing me that it was possible for a highly charged emotional memory to be stored in a different place in the brain than more neutral memories, and thus to be forgotten and recalled in a different manner. The Holocaust studies were absolutely convincing, as were those cases of adults recovering memories of sexual abuse where there was corroboration. At the same time, however, the False Memory Syndrome folks had also found in me a supporter—other cases of recovered memory seemed to me to be more false than real. In particular, I simply wasn’t able to swallow the notion that the countryside of Middle America was littered with the corpses of small children fallen prey to Satanic ritual, no matter how many individuals “remembered” this kind of abuse.

And what about Lilly’s recovered memories of the killing that was now splashed all over the tabloids and would be in the international press as early as tomorrow? Lilly hadn’t remembered shooting her mother until after she’d been in therapy for years, reenacting the gruesome killing with Barbie dolls. Everyone involved had attributed her failure to remember to the trauma of the event. But maybe there was something else going on. Maybe little Lilly couldn’t remember killing her mother
because she hadn’t done it.
Maybe someone else had murdered her mother and then had convinced them all that Lilly was responsible, leaving her to spend her entire
life tormented by guilt for something she hadn’t done.