Strangers

memories of which she had been robbed.
        

    ***
        
        In the next two sessions - Monday the 30th and Wednesday, the first day of the New Year - Pablo regressed Ginger yet another eight months, to the end of July, two summers ago, without discovering any tissue-thin memories that would indicate the work of mind-control specialists.
        Then on Thursday, January 2, Ginger asked him to question her about her previous night's unremembered dream. For the fourth time since Christmas, she had cried out in her sleep - "The moon!" - with such insistence that she woke others in Baywatch. "I think the dream's about the place and time that's been stolen from me. Put me in a trance, and maybe we'll learn something."
        But when hypnotized and returned to last night's dream, she refused to answer questions and drifted into a deeper sleep than a mere hypnotic trance. He had pulled the Azrael Trigger once more, which was positive proof that her dreams involved those forbidden memories.
        

    ***
        
        On Friday they did not meet. Pablo needed the day to read further about memory blocks of all kinds and to think about how best to proceed.
        In addition, he had recorded all five post-Christmas sessions, so he sat at the reproduction Sheraton desk in his book-lined study and listened to portions of those tapes for hours. He was searching for a single word or a change in Ginger's voice that might make a particular answer seem more important on rehearing than it had seemed at the time.
        He found nothing startling, though he noticed that, during hypnotic regression, a subtle note of anxiety had entered her voice when their backward journey through time had reached August 31 of the year before last. It was nothing dramatic that would have caught his attention at the time the recordings were made. But by telescoping all the sessions into one afternoon, using the fast-forward control to skip from day to day, he saw the pattern of steadily building anxiety, and he suspected they were getting close to the event now hidden behind the Azrael Block.
        Therefore, during their sixth post-Christmas session on Saturday, January 4, Pablo was not surprised when the breakthrough came. As usual, Ginger was sitting in one of the armchairs by the bay window, beyond which a fine snow was falling. Her silver-blond hair glowed with spectral light. As he regressed her back through July of the previous year, her brows knitted, and her voice became whispery and tense, and Pablo knew she was drawing closer to the moment of her forgotten ordeal.
        Since they were going backward in time, he had already taken her through her busy months as a surgical resident at Memorial Hospital, back to the moment when she first reported to George Hannaby for duty on Monday, July 30, more than seventeen months ago. Her memories remained sharp and richly detailed as Pablo conveyed her into Sunday, July 29, when she still had been settling into her new apartment. July 28, 27, 26, 25, 24… through those days she had been unpacking and shopping for furniture… all the way back to July 21, 20, 19… On July 18, the moving van arrived with her household goods, which she had shipped from Palo Alto, California, where she had lived the previous two years while taking an advanced course of study in vascular surgery. Farther back…
        On July 17, she arrived in Boston by car and booked a room overnight at the Holiday Inn Government Center, as close to Beacon Hill as possible, not yet able to stay at her new apartment because she had no bed there.
        "By car? You drove cross-country from Stanford?"
        "It was the first vacation I ever really had. I like to drive, and it was a chance to see a little of the country," Ginger said, but in such an ominous voice that she might have been talking about a journey through hell rather than a transcontinental holiday.
        So Pablo began to regress her through the days of her journey, back across the midwestern heartland, around the northernmost horn of the Rocky Mountains, through Utah, into Nevada, until they came to Tuesday morning, July 10. She had stayed the previous night at a motel, and when he asked for the name of it, a shudder passed through her.
        "T-Tranquility."
        "Tranquility Motel? Where is this place? Describe it, too."
        On the arms of her chair, her hands curled into fists. "Thirty miles west of Elko, on Interstate