Page 28 of The Hollow | AllFreeNovel

“Well, I can see where there might have been cause for a food fight if this was what they served.”

“It was worse. Do you have a microwave here?”

“We do. Mr. Bishop is scheduled to get his lunch in forty-five minutes. Let’s start a session before that, when he may be hungry, and we’ll give this a try.”

Bosch sat down in a chair.

“First tell me how it works,” he said. “This is beyond anything I was taught.”

“Well, it’s really quite simple,” Sears said. “As you must remember, hypnosis is about getting past the logical mind to the emotional center. This is where memories reside. The limbic system. We use these sorts of artifacts and scents and music to enhance the ability to explore those memories under trance.”

“You have music.”

“We were able to download the Muzak hits of 1965. It’s cued up in the therapy room. Did you know that, at the time, President Johnson owned a Muzak franchise?”

“News to me. You really think Mr. Bishop will be able to remember that specific day nearly sixty-one years ago?”

“I think it’s a long shot, to be honest, but what works in our favor is the traumatic event that occurred on the day in question. The brain never deletes files, so it has to be somewhere in the limbic filing cabinet. So I think it’s definitely worth a try.”

“Okay, then.”

“Ready to go to the therapy room?”

“Lead the way.”

The therapy room was furnished like a living room, done in quiet pastels with soft cove lighting bounced off the ceiling. There were potted plants and a thick, patterned carpet. In the center, two chairs faced each other, one a routine desk chair on wheels with a small table next to it, and the other a heavily tufted zero-gravity recliner built to induce afternoon naps in front of a television.

There was soft music in the background, the Muzak version of “A Taste of Honey,” a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass hit from the sixties.

Dr. Sears put Bosch in a second desk chair located to the left side of the central configuration. She gave him a notebook and a pen to use should he want to give her a question to ask Bishop. She reminded him that all questions to Bishop should come through her.

In Bosch’s own visual memory files, Vernon Bishop was big, imposing, and mean-looking. A man whose short sleeves were stretched tight by bulging biceps. Whose hands could close around the back of a boy’s neck and put a paralytic squeeze on it. Even though Bosch understood that the man being studied and cared for at the institute was sixty years older, he still wasn’t prepared for the physical diminishment of the person who was escorted into the therapy room. Bishop was now a bent old man with white hair and a scraggly white beard that did little to camouflage a crepe paper neck. He carried half the weight he once did and was hunched over a walking cane. He was a man clearly one fall and broken hip away from death’s door.

The nurse who walked him in led him to the recliner and helped him slowly melt into it. Once he was seated, she pushed a button on the armrest that made the chair conform to his personal comfort settings. The nurse moved behind a video camera that was mounted on a tripod at the side of the room. Bishop was wearing light blue scrubs. His arms were marked with old-man bruises, and a pulse oximeter was clipped to the index finger of his right hand.

Sears took the chair directly in front of him.

“Good morning, Mr. Bishop,” she said.