Stolen(67)

“Good enough.” Caity took her time and thoroughly explained to Hatcher how Webber had been using Laura’s medications as a form of chemical restraint.

“Shrinks!” Hatcher said, when Caity wrapped it all up. Then he cast a glance at his feet. “No offense, Caitlin.”

“None taken. I’m well aware that although a good psychiatrist can be a godsend for someone in need, a bad one can do grave harm.”

Hatcher raised his finger in the air. “You know what struck me wrong about Webber was how in that very first interview he kept dancing around the issue of whether or not he thought Laura was dangerous. One minute he was implying she killed her nanny because she had a lock of her hair in a sock, and the next he was saying the lock of hair was just a hallucination. Then he changed again and said maybe the hair in the sock was real . . .”

“But went the way of all missing socks,” Caity finished Hatcher’s sentence for him.

“With shrinks like that . . .”

“No wonder Laura believed she might’ve killed her nanny,” Spense said. He scrunched his eyes up. “Caity, what’s that old Ingrid Bergman movie?”

She sent Hatcher a look. “Spense gets a little distracted sometimes.”

“No. No. No,” Spense said. “This isn’t that.” He pulled out his cube and solved it in a jiff. “See?”

“Okay, sorry. But anyway, no, I don’t know that old Ingrid Bergman movie. Maybe if you clue the rest of us in on how you got from a lock of hair tied with ribbon and stuffed in a sock to a classic film it might jog my memory.”

“It had Claude Rains in it, too.” That wasn’t right. “I mean Charles Boyer.”

Hatcher clasped his hands together and leaned forward. “I hear you can solve the Times crossword in under two minutes. I seen you work that Rubik’s cube in nothing flat with your eyes closed. Some people think you’re some kind of a genius. But I gotta tell you, Spense, I’m not really feeling it.”

“Gaslight!” Caity’s eyes lit up.

And he was the one who put the shine back in them. “Yep. That’s the one.”

“Of course.” She reached her hand toward him, but quickly drew it back. “Spense, you really are a genius.”

“Still not feeling it.” Hatcher straightened in his chair.

“Go ahead, Caity, you explain it.”

“Well, I’m not sure where you were going, but I’m thinking about that disappearing lock of hair.”

That’s exactly where he’d been going.

Caity shifted her body toward Hatcher. “In Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman is a psychologically vulnerable young woman who’s been through a terrible trauma. She witnessed the murder of her beloved aunt. Charles Boyer plays her villainous husband who tries to make her question her own sanity.”

Spense couldn’t contain himself. “Paula—that’s Ingrid Bergman—finds a letter signed with the killer’s name—it’s her husband, only now he’s using a different name.”

“So the husband hides the letter, and tells his wife it never existed in the first place. Oh, my dear Paula, you imagined it. You must be losing your mind, my darling—I’m paraphrasing.”

“And then he gives her a pill and sends her to bed, or something like that.” Spense spread his palms triumphantly.

“Do you see, now?” Caity asked Hatcher.

“You think somebody’s Gaslighting Laura?”

“Locks of hair don’t just disappear. Maybe Laura did imagine them, but maybe . . . someone in her inner circle, maybe Webber, or someone else, put them in her drawer and then took them away again to keep her off-balance and make her question her own senses. Gaslighting is a real form of psychological abuse, and it doesn’t just happen in the movies. The medical term for it is introjection. When someone’s traumatized, and then kept isolated, it’s not uncommon for them to internalize their abuser’s version of world, and of themselves. Even if that version makes absolutely no sense.”

“Like the idea Laura killed Angelina,” Hatcher said.

Spense jumped in. “No reasonable person could possibly believe Laura Chaucer is responsible for the murder of her nanny. An eight-year-old child doesn’t have the resources to copy her nanny’s handwriting in a ransom note, convince the nanny to take her out into the wilderness, and then strangle and stab the nanny to death. But those stories of Laura standing over her sleeping mother with a knife, and the lock of hair she found in her drawer made Laura believe it was possible.”

Caity grimaced. “And there have been a few unstable, obsessed bloggers over the years who’ve suggested Laura did it, too. As fragile as Laura’s psyche is, she needed someone to anchor her to reality in the face of those wild accusations.”