The Cathar Secret: A Lang Reilly Thriller (14 page)

     She snapped the glasses back on with a crisp gesture.

     Paige was already regretting her tantrum of a few hours earlier. "Marcie may be lacking in the common sense department but I don't think she would intentionally harm . . ."

     "You're just as much bitten by a mad dog as a mean one. I wouldn't let her near the child again. It may take years to undo the damage. Not only does your son suffer some sort of serious problems of his own, now he has those of some fictional victim of the Holocaust."

     "You don't believe this person is real, then?"

     Dr. Weiner's owl eyes got even bigger. "He's real enough to Wynn-Three. His persona has come out of the subconscious and into the boy's mind."

     "I mean the reincarnation thing . . . It's hard to accept. In fact, I don't think I do. Is there any basis for it?"

     Dr. Weiner looked at her blankly for a second. "Have I ever encountered the phenomenon of someone believing they had a past life? No." She stood up and crossed the room to stand in front of a bookcase. "But an absence of proof is not proof of absence." She selected a volume. "
Old
Souls.
A book by Tom Shroder. He spent a lot of time traveling with a man named Ian Stevenson, head of the psychology department at the University of Virginia med school. Obviously not some flake. Stevenson went to Lebanon, Burma, India, places like that, interviewing people over a period of years, mostly young children who claimed to remember a former life. In most instances, the locations, family members checked out."

     Ever the lawyer, Paige asked, "Checked out?"

     "A child would name and describe husbands, wives, children from a previous life in villages where they had never been in the present incarnation. When Stevenson visited those places, the child would point out the specific family member by sight."

     "Did he use hypnosis?"

     Dr. Weiner shook her head. "Never. He was afraid of the suggestibility factor."

     Paige was fascinated, putting the problems of her sleeping son aside for the moment. "You said India and Burma. People there are Hindu, Buddhist. They believe in reincarnation to begin with."

     "Stevenson concluded that was why they were more open in talking about it than, say, here. Would you be likely to go around telling your friends Wynn-Three was reincarnated?"

     "I guess not. But why children?"

     "Again using Stevenson's theory, the older someone got, the less they remembered of prior lives."

     Paige thought about this for a moment. "How about you? Do you believe in reincarnation?"

     Dr. Weiner smiled for the first time. "Remember the movie actor Glenn Ford? Under hypnosis he recalled being a cowboy named Charlie as well as serving in Louis XIV's cavalry. Hypnotic suggestion or paranormal memory? He was a devout Christian, not mentally unstable like so many of those people in the film industry today. I read a survey recently that showed almost half the practicing Christians in the United States believe in the possibility souls, psyche, whatever return. The religions of millions of people in the world teach that they do." She shrugged. "But then, the number of people holding a belief doesn't make it true. Copernicus and Galileo proved that. As to Wynn-Three, I think it significant that in almost all the cases—or purported cases—I've read about, the child is the reputed
reincarnation of someone relatively close geographically and culturally. Indian children recall lives in India, Lebanese in Lebanon, and so on. The previous life thing is pretty rare but even more so is the alleged reincarnation across language and cultural lines, like Glenn Ford. I recall reading a few other cases but not many."

     Purported. Reputed. Alleged. The doctor could use language as slippery as any lawyer's. What she actually believed, though, wasn't the problem at hand.

     "So, what about Wynn-Three?" Paige asked. "What do I do now?"

     Dr. Weiner returned the book to the shelf. "Let's try solving the primary problem first."

     "You mean what you claim is sex abuse?"

     If she noted the hostility in Paige's voice, the psychiatrist ignored it. "That's exactly what I mean."

     "Sending DEFACS after us wasn't exactly helpful. Haven't heard from them yet but . . ."

     Dr. Weiner returned to her chair and sat. "I didn't contact them through any personal malice for you, Ms. Charles. If something happened to Wynn-Three and it came out I had not done what was required, I'd likely lose my license, not to mention possible civil and criminal consequences. You were a lawyer; you can understand that."

     Paige didn't like it, but she understood perfectly. With lawyers breeding lawsuits faster than maggots in dead flesh, a new pestilence had taken over the country, a fifth horseman of the American apocalypse: Litigation, the paper death by which the victim hemorrhaged his assets until both reputation and finances were ruined. Frequently even the vaccine of insurance was not a sufficient preventative. Cover Your Ass had replaced E Pluribus Unum as the national motto.

     "Well, I appreciate your seeing us on such short notice," Paige said, the only nonhostile thought she could find at the moment.

     "I'm always here for my patients. Besides, all the DEFACS people are likely to do is come out, look at your home. They're so overworked, it'll likely be a month or so."

     Paige recalled the articles in the paper that appeared with alarming regularity: children left with crack or meth addicts, suffering starvation, even death because neither the State Department of Human Resources nor
county Department of Family and Child Resources had taken timely notice once the plight of children had been called to the department's attention. They would find nothing of that sort in her home.

     Dr. Weiner seemed to read her thoughts. "If Wynn-Three is otherwise well cared for, suffering no immediate harm, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. In the meantime, make every effort to watch him even more closely than I'm sure you do, keep him away from that Marcie person, and let me see him, say, every Monday and Thursday afternoon around 4:00. And I'll need an hour with his father."

     Paige shook her head slowly. "That won't be possible for a while yet. He's starting a three-week trial tomorrow."

     Dr. Weiner nodded, perhaps a little too knowingly for Paige's comfort. "All things end, including trials. I need to see him as soon as possible. It's a very important part of treating Wynn-Three, deciding if I can help him and the type of therapy. The most important thing, though, is to make sure that, if the child has been subjected to molestation, as I believe, the guilty party be identified and that course of conduct prevented in the future. Reincarnation or not, I do believe, if there's a hell, a special place has been reserved for those who abuse children."

     Paige scooped Wynn-Three up from the couch and headed for the door. She stopped halfway there, a puzzled expression on her face. "Dr. Weiner, one final question."

     The woman's eyebrows lifted in anticipation. "If I can answer it."

     "This reincarnation thing. Assuming there's some validity to it, could that be the source of what's disturbing him?"

     Dr. Weiner frowned. "You might as well ask me if possession by demons could cause the problem. If we could scientifically accept a prior life, we might be able to view that as the problem. Since we have no sure proof of such a thing, we're limited to what we know: Wynn-Three's conduct is indicative of abuse, not recycled souls. We will get to the bottom of it all and we will make him well."

     As Paige carried her still sleeping son to the car, she wondered why she felt a sense of impending doom rather than reassurance.

480 Lafayette Drive

Sunday Morning

The Next Week

7:40
A.M.

W
YNTON HAD GLANCED AT THE SPORTS
section of the paper and checked the recycled
Peanuts
for Charlie Brown's latest predicament, as he drank a cup of coffee prior to leaving for the office. As in all trials, Swisher & Peele insisted on daily copy, a day-by-day transcription of the proceedings. Today, he would read over Friday's copy, making notes for Glen Richardson to review before court resumed tomorrow. He also had to answer several days of mail, both electronic and regular, that had accumulated while he had been in court. His immediate subordinate, Nat Changer, had prepared responses to some interrogatories, questions to which written answers under oath had to be made, in a product liability case during the week. Wynton needed to review those before giving Nat the go-ahead to send them out. The workload did not diminish while in court; it was simply postponed.

     With a little luck, he might be able to meet Paige and Wynn-Three for brunch at the Piedmont Driving Club before working into the afternoon.

     The phone rang.

     Wynton tried to wash down his anxiety with the last swallow of coffee. Nobody called this early on a Sunday morning with good news. His father's health, though good as of late, was subject to the whims of Parkinson's disease. It could change without notice. Paige's parents, healthy the last he knew, were also subject to sudden ravages of age.

     "Hello?"

     "Wynton, good morning. Bill Sharpe."

     Sharpe, another junior partner at the firm, handled real estate transactions for the banks the firm represented. Although he and Wynton were pleasant acquaintances, Wynton could think of no reason the man would be calling, particularly at this hour on a Sunday. Real estate lawyers lead boring lives and didn't work weekends.

     "Morning, Bill. What's up?"

     "You seen this morning's paper?"

     Wynton glanced suspiciously over to the pile of newspaper as though the ads, flyers, and coupons that composed most of the Sunday edition might contain something more noxious than its editorial pages. "This morning's paper?"

     "Take a look at the Sunday Living section. Seeing as how you were on trial, I figured you might be headed down to the office before you had a chance to see it. By the way, good luck!"

     Puzzled, Wynton searched the various sections until he came to the one Sharpe had mentioned. He felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach as he saw a snapshot of Wynn-Three someone, probably Marcie, had taken. He sucked in his breath at the headline below:

REINCARNATED SOUL OR IMAGINATION?

By Marcie Rollens

You don't have to travel to far-off places like India to find reincarnation; there seems to be an example right here in Atlanta's fashionable Ansley Park.

     Wynton Charles III, three, known to his family as Wynn-Three, recalls being a prisoner at Auschwitz, the notorious World War II Nazi death camp. He even remembers the number that was tattooed on his arm, 14257.

     Although too young to know other numbers, Wynn-Three writes these with the one and seven in the European manner, with the "1" as an inverted "V" and the seven crossed. He also writes a triangle under the numbers, a symbol the Germans used to distinguish Jewish prisoners from captured Russians, Gypsies, homosexuals and other minorities considered undesirable. He has even used a pin or
sharp object to write them on his own arm, as though they were a real tattoo.

     Wynn-Three first drew a nursery school picture of a man in a uniform very similar to those worn by Auschwitz prisoners, including what could be described as the yellow Star of David patch required of Jews at the camp.

     Hypnosis has been used to explore his possible past lives. Wynn-Three's response, once hypnotized, was to speak in foreign-accented English and begin recounting what life was like in the largest and most infamous of the Nazis' death camps.

     "It was so cold" was his primary complaint. He actually shivered while talking about his experience as Solomon Mustawitz, a Polish Jew from Warsaw who apparently was imprisoned at Auschwitz from 1943 until he escaped.

     So far as is known, Wynn-Three had no previous knowledge of World War II, the Nazis or their anti-Jewish policies.

     Dr. Pesha Balisha, the hypnotist and member of Atlanta's Hindu community, said, "I am far from surprised. Souls of the dead find a home in the living as a matter of the natural order. We continue the cycle until our lives reach perfection."

     Reincarnation is hardly a radical belief. It has been shared in one form or another for thousands of years by many Eastern religions but is not confined to that part of the world. A number of prominent Western thinkers have believed souls found new hosts. Among them number German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, America's Ben Franklin, American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, British writers and poets W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The list also includes Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, Spanish artist Salvador Dali and American novelist J. D. Salinger.

     It is unclear what Wynn-Three's parents, Wynton and Paige Charles . . .

     The doorbell rang.

     Wynton dropped the paper on the floor, crossed the kitchen, and walked down the hall to the accompaniment of impatient ringing. Who the hell . . . ?

     He opened the door and was staring into a vaguely familiar female
face: blond hair perfectly coifed, late twenties to early thirties. And with an extended microphone in her hand. Behind her, the glassy fish eye of a camera stared.

     "Mr. Charles? I'm Linda Gravener with Channel Four First Alive News. We'd like to speak to your son . . ."

     Stunned and not entirely sure he was hearing correctly, Wynton stammered, "My son? He's only three."

     Linda Gravener smiled with teeth too perfect to have originally been in her mouth. "We know. We want to ask him about his prior life . . ."