The House in the Pines(76)

Both Dan and his father sighed at the same time, as if Greta had gone too far.

“My mom says the same thing about me,” Maya said.

Greta gave a slight nod at this, and her sharp eyes softened until they looked a bit like her son’s. “I know,” she said. Her voice filled with warmth. “I know.”





THIRTY-EIGHT




Maya wanted to know more about the research study Frank’s father had conducted back in the ’80s, the one he’d gotten in trouble over. And now she had Dan on her side. He called in a favor with a friend of his who clerked for the district attorney’s office and a week later handed Maya a police report. The report was from 1984. Oren hadn’t been arrested, but he’d been brought in for questioning because of something that happened during the research study—the reason it was canceled, and his career ruined.

The purpose of the study—as summarized by Officer Finley, who’d written the report—was to test an experimental method of hypnotherapy proposed by Dr. Bellamy. The method built upon existing research into clinical hypnosis for pain management but had the potential to be much more effective. Dr. Bellamy claimed it would have been a major breakthrough for medical science.

It worked by employing a series of subperceptual cues, both verbal and nonverbal, to reach beyond the subject’s conscious awareness and tap into the part of the nervous system that regulates processes not usually under the patient’s control. The part of us that takes in information from the senses—like a burning hand, for example—decides what to do with that information, then sends a message to the hand—Stop touching the stove—without our needing to consciously think about it.

Dr. Bellamy’s method, as Officer Finley understood it, took control of that whole system. It left the patient’s mind and body—specifically the involuntary nervous system—open to manipulation in ways that traditional hypnosis did not. It was, according to Dr. Bellamy, “a trancelike state with enormous potential to treat ailments of both mind and body.” He’d probably thought he was helping his son when he subjected him to this method, but he was also honing it on him, putting Frank into trances he was never aware of, and implanting suggestions designed to manipulate his behavior.

Like traditional hypnosis, it didn’t work on everyone. The percentage of people who are highly susceptible to hypnosis is low—only one of the participants in Oren’s research study had qualified as such a person. Forty-two-year-old Russell DeLuca had tested higher than anyone else on what was known as the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale. DeLuca was highly hypnotizable.

Maya got a bad feeling when she read that. She Googled “Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale” and learned that people who are highly hypnotizable tend to share other attributes as well. They tend to be imaginative. To lose themselves in movies and in books. To daydream.

Russell DeLuca died during a hypnosis session with Dr. Bellamy. The cause of his death was later determined to be a stroke. Because it couldn’t be proven that the stroke was a direct result of the hypnotic trance he’d been under at the time, Dr. Bellamy was never charged with the death, but he lost his job and psychology license.

Dan agreed with Maya that this could turn out to be strong evidence in the case against Frank. In 1984, it couldn’t be proven that Dr. Bellamy’s method had caused DeLuca’s death—but hypnosis research had come a long way since then. Imaging studies now confirmed that hypnosis causes changes in certain parts of the brain, which can in turn influence bodily functions like blood pressure and breathing. Now that doctors at major hospitals used hypnosis to treat gastrointestinal issues, the idea that something so effective could also be used to hurt, to kill even, seemed a lot less far-fetched.

What was needed, Maya and Dan agreed, was to show that Frank was also trained in his father’s method, and that he’d used it on her.

This was where Clear Horizons Wellness Center came in. As Maya had suspected, the “center” turned out to consist of a single employee who went by the name Dr. David Hart. That was why Maya hadn’t been able to find Frank all these years. He was going by another name and posing as a doctor.

The only name and face that appeared on the center’s website belonged to Dr. Oren Bellamy. The center was the one place his “proprietary therapeutic method” was practiced. The testimonials page, all the happy clients, demonstrated Frank’s efficacy when it came to his father’s “technique.”

Frank had taken the site down, but Maya had screenshots of every page and had sent them all to Detective Diaz.

She waited.



* * *



— It wasn’t long before the detective managed to track down Frank’s mom.

Maya had tried to look her up in the past without any luck, and now she could see why: Sharon Bellamy had changed her name, not once but four different times since divorcing Oren and taking her son to live in Hood River. Sharon—who went by Dana Wilson these days—appeared to be in hiding. She’d moved many times over the past twenty years and had been in and out of institutions and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

But Maya doubted that Frank’s mom was paranoid. And she understood why the former Sharon Bellamy had refused to talk to Detective Diaz. She hoped that, with time, Dana Wilson would be able to open up about the abuse she’d almost certainly suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, though Maya didn’t blame her if she didn’t. She knew how it felt to be called crazy.