That was when he started to make the turn into her drive and saw that another car was already there.
He came to a stop and then moved to put the truck in park. When he reached for the gearshift, the necklace slipped from his hand and the sapphire fell to the filthy floor mat, its brilliant shine lost in Ridley’s own shadow.
The car was a new-model Ford SUV and while Ridley wanted to believe that it was not a rental and did not belong to Mark Novak, he couldn’t convince himself of that. He reached into the glove compartment and withdrew a small pair of binoculars that he carried with him in the field to study terrain. He focused them on the front window of the house and what he saw chilled his blood.
Julianne was seated in a chair beside the couch, and on the couch, his posture slumped, his head drooping, was Mark Novak.
He was in trance. She had promised Ridley she would have no more contact with the man until Ridley commanded otherwise, and not only had she broken that promise, but she’d shattered it in the most irrevocable way — she was working with him, guiding him in the way she had guided Ridley.
He sat in the idling truck for a long time, and then he reached down and fumbled around the dirty floor mat until he found the necklace with the broken chain. The gemstone’s power was not a lie. Whether it would grant him protection or not, Ridley couldn’t say, but it had guided him and allowed him to see things clearly again, and this was critical.
He put the necklace into his shirt pocket, close to his heart, and drove away knowing that the time had come to set right his mistakes. He had trusted in something outside of himself and should have known better.
45
Mark felt incredibly relaxed as he listened to Julianne count upward to ten, though he became aware of the progression only at around five or six. Then, when he opened his eyes at ten, he felt exposed. The room came into focus in a disorienting way, and his first clear thought was that the light on the floor had shifted to another area. Some time had passed, certainly. His mouth was dry and he wanted to talk just to reassure himself that he had control over his own voice, but no words came to mind. There was a sensation of pressure on his right hand, and he looked down and saw that his index finger and thumb were curled together in a perfect circle, like a basketball player signaling for three points.
You did that to join the past and the present, he thought, and though the purpose seemed crystal clear he couldn’t recall the specifics of the action or how long he’d held his hand in that fashion. He relaxed his fingers and flexed them, then looked up at Julianne Grossman. She was watching him with an expression of deep compassion, and he felt nothing but warmth for her in that moment.
“So,” Mark said, his voice a croak. He worked his tongue around his mouth, trying to rid it of that dry sensation. “So, how about that? How good was I?”
Julianne smiled. “How do you feel?”
“Odd,” he said. “And tired.”
“Would you like some water? Sometimes trance can cause a strong feeling of thirst.”
“I would love some water,” he said, the word trance lingering in his mind, bouncing around. He’d actually entered one. She’d hypnotized him. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Julianne brought him a glass of water and didn’t speak while he drank. Outside, the trees moaned in a strong wind, and he wondered how he hadn’t heard them before.
“Okay,” he said. “Did we get anywhere? Or did I just talk about the cigar box the whole time?”
Julianne said, “That’s all you remember?”
He thought about it, and although he couldn’t recall the specifics beyond that, it wasn’t a troubling sensation.
“That’s all,” he said.
“You reached a state of somnambulistic trance,” she said. “That’s excellent, you know. For all of your initial resistance, in the end you made quite an effort.”
“So what did I remember?” Mark said.
“It’s all recorded on your phone, as you requested. But your descriptions of what happened on the road were... vivid. You talked about the way the men spoke, looked, and breathed. The way the wind felt. You said that you’d tried to make a trail of blood so that the police would have better clues than they’d had with your wife’s case. You didn’t want to make it hard on the police if you were killed.”
Mark turned away from her and looked out the window. The trees were weaving and at the top of the driveway the dog was patrolling, nose up, sniffing the wind.
“That’s right,” he said, and his voice was thick. He hadn’t remembered the attempt to leave a blood trail behind until now, and that seemed impossible. It had been so calculated; how could he have forgotten?
“After they put you in the van, they took you to another place,” Julianne continued. “A field. Your head was covered by some sort of a hood that you said smelled like horse feed.”
He nodded.
“At that point, you thought there was only one of them left. He was the one who cut you, the one who put a needle in your arm.” She paused and then said, “Maybe that blood test you keep talking about wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.”
“Did I remember going into the cave?”
“No. You said that this one man, the only one left, took you somewhere to ask more questions. You said that it was probably a house, you weren’t sure about that, but you knew that it was someplace where you couldn’t feel the wind, though it was still cold even without the wind. Your memory of getting inside involved walking a plank.”
“Walking a plank? They took me to a pirate ship? That ought to be easy to find.”
Julianne continued without pause at his sarcasm. “You didn’t remember much about the house except for a wall of boards that you said didn’t look right. At times you thought they were melting.”
This meant less to him. A vague sense of recollection, but not as clear as the blood trail.
“The questions this man asked you were mostly related to Ridley Barnes and the cave. He was very interested in the cave.”
Listening to a recap of his own words when he didn’t remember the words or the source of them was surreal.
“You don’t seem to have any memory at all of how you arrived in the cave. There’s a gap, which suggests that you were truly unconscious when you went from this place with the wall of boards to the darkness in the cave.” She paused, gazing at him with interest. “The recollections of the cave troubled you. That was the only time you displayed any real resistance to trance. You said you encountered people in the cave who did not belong there. You would not identify them to me because you said they were not real.”
“Sarah Martin,” he said. “I was imagining things. Hallucinating.”
“Interesting. Here you are willing to tell me that, but in trance you were not.”
“Which means what?”
“That your subconscious has a greater difficulty dismissing the things that you saw.”
“My subconscious can believe in ghosts, but I can’t? That’s what you mean?”
“Possibly? I’m trying to facilitate access. I’m not trying to interpret for you. You can consider the meaning of all this on your own. Before we ended the trance, I asked whether there was anything you could or should do to further help yourself understand what had happened in the cave. You said you should have looked at the maps by now.”
“That’s what I was going to do next. I want to look at a cave map with Ridley.”
“That’s not the way you put it during trance. You said repeatedly that you were looking at the wrong maps, and that was a problem. You were very insistent that you needed to look at different maps. At this point, you laughed a little and told me that your mother wouldn’t have made the same mistake.”