Page 71 of What Boys Learn

“That’s fine. I’ll drop him and do some errands.”

He reminded me, “And I wanted to follow up on the hypnosis idea.”

“Yes. I talked about it with Benjamin after seeing your note. He seems curious, but he challenged me to go first.”

Curtis laughed. “Has he been challenging you more in general, since the sessions started?”

“In small ways—very visible ways—he’s behaving better. But in other ways, I feel like he’s testing me, like he wants to prove something.”

“Or maybe just to know something. Your son is a curious boy.”

Not usually, I wanted to say. I’d spent my whole life with Benj without him being curious about anything related to my life.

“I’m willing to be hypnotized, if it will help,” I said. “I was thinking we could do a session focusing on smoking cravings.”

“You still have them?”

“Unfortunately.”

Curtis hesitated. “Hypnosis isn’t usually a one-off treatment.”

“I know. I’m not expecting stellar results. It’s just to show Benjamin there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I’ll tell you what. We’ll have you do a session, and then we’ll back off and see if Benjamin feels confident enough to try hypnosis next week. Between now and then, I’ve got a long list of moving errands.”

“Could I do any of the errands for you, during Benjamin’s morning session tomorrow?”

The line went quiet for a moment.

“Boxes—I need two dozen, medium size. Printing. I already moved my good printer up to my father’s house. That was a mistake. I’m in the middle of a big edit and I need to see it on paper.”

I smiled. “I can do boxes. I can do printing.”

“It sounds like we have a plan. And one more thing. You mentioned Benjamin’s soccer accident. He had brain scans done? I’d like to see those, if possible.”

Concussions could affect behavior. But Benjamin’s concussion had happened a long time ago. “Do you think his accident caused a personality change?”

“Doubtful. The scans are just useful for looking for biological indications of certain preexisting disorders. Obviously, new scans might be a good idea, but let’s hold off for now and see what we get from looking at the old ones. I’ve stepped away from active research, but my Menkoka Institute team gives me access to plentiful comparison data with my patients of his type.”

“And what types are those?”

“We’ll talk about that soon. Scans first. Then I have a few more tests I want to do.”

25

The next morning, before inviting Benjamin into his office, Curtis gave me a thumb drive. I was at a Lake Forest print shop, about to do the chore he’d assigned me, when I saw a young male employee tape a hot-off-the-presses flyer in the front window:Veronica Lynn Lovell, age twenty, last seen at the Dugout sports bar in Fox Lake, wearing long-sleeve white shirt, jeans, low-heeled black boots. Fairy tattoo on lower back.

“The missing girl,” I said.

“Yup,” he said, uninterested. “Family is emailing them everywhere.”

“How long will you keep it up?”

He frowned at me. “I don’t know. Until she comes home safe, I guess.”

“Right,” I said. But I knew that wasn’t true. If it was, there’d be missing-woman flyers all over the place. Robert had challenged me to look up the number of girls and women who went missing in Chicago, just for starters, and I had. The statistics were galling.

I hadn’t been able to find numbers specific to the North Shore, but I thought about what Willa had said—that she remembered a big upswing in girls and women going missing in our area and well beyond it, into southern Wisconsin, years ago. Local detectives probably wouldn’t see Veronica Lovell’s disappearance as part of that old trend, and why should they? No one even knew if Lovell’s disappearance involved foul play.