Power of Suggestion Read online

  As Nancy entered Dr. Cohen’s office, she saw that Ned was leaning against the wall, while Bess sat on a corner of the doctor’s desk. Both of them gestured for Nancy to be quiet. Parker sat on a chair, looking edgy and nervous while Dr. Cohen sat near him, talking quietly.

  “How’s it going?” Nancy whispered to Ned, going over to him.

  “They’ve just finished taking a break,” Ned told her, speaking softly. “Dr. Cohen has established that Parker goes into a highly suggestible state as soon as he hears that Johnny Lightning tune.”

  Dr. Cohen glanced over at Nancy, flashing her a friendly smile. “We’re just about to play the song again.”

  “I’m ready,” Parker said, taking a deep breath.

  The doctor reached over to his cassette player, which sat on the floor. He flicked it on, and the opening chords of “Cosmic Mind Control” boomed out. Johnny Lightning’s raspy, compelling voice began to sing.

  “No, I don’t want to show it,

  But darlin’, you know it,

  I feel weak when I try to be strong.

  ’Though I know what you’re asking is wrong

  wrong wrong wrong wrong

  I just can’t resist

  your cosmic mind control!”

  “Look at Parker!” Bess whispered to Nancy.

  Parker’s entire manner had transformed, Nancy saw. Now that he had fallen into a hypnotic trance, he looked relaxed and peaceful. His eyelids fluttered, and his eyes were only half open.

  Dr. Cohen lowered the volume on the cassette player, but “Cosmic Mind Control” continued to play softly in the background. “Parker, how do you feel?” Dr. Cohen asked.

  “I feel good,” Parker answered dreamily. “Nice.”

  “Do you like the music?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s my favorite song.”

  “Do you remember this song making you feel good before?” Dr. Cohen asked in a steady, calm voice.

  “Sure.”

  “Is there anything different now?”

  “Your voice . . . is different. And . . . you’re asking me questions. Usually the voice just tells me things.”

  Ned leaned toward Nancy. “He’s talked about this voice all afternoon,” he explained in a hushed whisper. “The doctor has been trying to get him to identify whose voice it is. So far no go.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Nancy said softly. “The message is supposed to be subliminal, which means the person doesn’t hear anything but the music or ocean or whatever. They can’t actually hear the message.”

  Ned looked at her, astonished. “You’re right,” he said in a low voice. “I hadn’t even thought about that. We’ll have to ask the doctor when he brings Parker out of the trance.”

  “What sort of things does the voice tell you, Parker?” the doctor was continuing.

  “It tells me to obey. It says it’s my friend.”

  “And do you do what it tells you to do?”

  “I try. But sometimes . . .”

  “Yes?” Dr. Cohen prompted.

  Parker said nothing.

  “Do you remember your last study session with Wayne, Parker?” Dr. Cohen asked, taking a new approach.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me all about that night,” Dr. Cohen encouraged.

  Parker leaned back in his chair, and a soft smile came over his face. He looked almost happy. “Wayne was mad at me, but then he cooled off. He said I really was a good test subject and a good student,” Parker said dreamily. “But he thought this might be our last session.”

  “Why was that?”

  “He said he thought the study was about to end.”

  “Did he say why?”

  Parker shook his head. “No. I was in the chair, and then the music started.”

  “What music was playing?”

  “I don’t know. It had soft flutes and bells. . . .”

  Nancy leaned over to Bess. “Like the tape Boyd played for us at Positive Tapes,” she whispered.

  “And then?” Dr. Cohen prompted Parker.

  “Then the song came on—Johnny Lightning. Wayne is in the room with me . . . but he doesn’t hear the music. He takes out a book. . . . He doesn’t need to pay much attention while I’m listening to the tapes.”

  A note of anxiety crept into Parker’s voice as his story shifted into present tense. Bess jumped off the desk and took a step toward Parker, but Dr. Cohen waved her off.

  “He’s upset,” Bess protested.

  “We’ve got to let him live through it,” the doctor said urgently.

  Parker was babbling now. “The voice . . . the voice is talking to me. Wayne has his back to me, he’s just reading. The voice tells me to reach into my pocket. . . .”

  Nancy exchanged a wide-eyed look with Ned, and she knew they were thinking the same thing. This was amazing!

  “My gun, the one my father gave me, is in my hand!” Parker went on, becoming more and more agitated. “I don’t remember taking it from my desk at home, but I remember the voice told me to get a gun.”

  Wild-eyed, Parker leapt to his feet. He jerked his head around, as though he were seeing the lab instead of his actual surroundings. Now he was reacting as if the mysterious voice were speaking directly to him.

  “No! I don’t want to shoot him! Wayne turns around. He sees the gun in my hand. He puts his hands up and says, ‘Please, Parker, don’t!’ The voice is still ordering me! No, no, please, no! I can’t shoot him! Don’t make me! No!”

  Nancy took a step toward Parker. “You’ve got to bring him out of it, Doctor,” she implored. “He’s going to injure himself!”

  Parker flailed his arms. In the next instant his whole body jerked, as though he himself had been shot. Then he collapsed to the floor.

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  PARKER!” Nancy cried, rushing toward the inert figure. She and Bess reached him at the same time.

  Dr. Cohen immediately switched off the music, a look of concern etching his features. A moment later Parker opened his eyes, blinked a few times, and looked around.

  “Are you okay?” Bess asked.

  As the others crowded around, Parker sat up shakily and shook his head. “What happened? What am I doing on the floor?”

  Dr. Cohen helped Parker up and into a chair. “You just reexperienced the murder,” he explained.

  Parker turned pale. “Did—did I kill Wayne?”

  “We still don’t know, pal,” Ned said, resting a reassuring hand on Parker’s shoulder. “You were seeing something that really freaked you out, and you collapsed before you could tell us exactly what happened.”

  A steely glint of determination lit Parker’s green eyes. “I want to try again,” he said firmly.

  Nancy could see that Parker was still very shaken. As much as she wanted to get at the truth, she worried about his mental state. “We can wait a while, Parker,” she said. “This is obviously very hard on you.”

  Parker jumped up and pounded a balled fist into the open palm of his other hand. “I don’t care about that!” he cried. “This is important. I have to know—I have to!”

  “Hey, take it easy. It’ll be okay,” Bess reassured Parker, hugging him. She looked from Nancy to Ned to Dr. Cohen. “This is tearing him apart,” she said. “The sooner he can learn the truth, the better.”

  “I agree,” the doctor said. “But let’s give him a few minutes to rest.”

  Nancy decided not to mention her thoughts about Parker actually hearing a voice. The explanation might become clear as Parker relived his experience.

  Parker stood up and began doing stretching exercises. Soon his breathing was back to normal, and he was noticeably more relaxed. At last he nodded to the doctor and sat back down. “I’m ready to try again,” he said.

  Once more Johnny Lightning’s voice rasped through the room, and Parker immediately dropped into a hypnotic trance. Dr. Cohen spoke soothingly to Parker, bringing him quickly through the events of Thursday night, until they were
back at the moment when Parker pulled the gun from his pocket.

  This time the doctor was ready for Parker’s distress, and he talked him through it, calming him. Now Parker was relaxed as he recalled what happened next. He leaned comfortably against the back of the chair. Nancy was surprised to note how natural he sounded.

  “Parker, did you shoot Wayne?” Dr. Cohen asked.

  “No. I couldn’t. I pointed the gun at him, but I couldn’t pull the trigger, even though the voice kept telling me to do it.”

  Nancy exchanged triumphant looks with Ned and Bess. Parker hadn’t pulled the trigger!

  “So what happened when you refused to kill Wayne?” Dr. Cohen asked next.

  “He came out of his room.”

  “ ‘He’?”

  Parker appeared not to have heard Dr. Cohen’s question. “And then he and Wayne argued, and he took the gun away from me,” Parker went on.

  “Who is this ‘he’?” Bess spoke up softly.

  “And then he shot him!” Parker cried, leaping to his feet. “He pulled the trigger, and Wayne fell.”

  “Who, Parker? Who pulled the trigger?” Ned demanded, unable to restrain himself.

  But Nancy knew. “You guys, think of who had a room to come out of in that lab?” she asked, her heart pounding with excitement. “Who was watching all the time, through the two-way mirror in the lab? Who had a microphone in that little room and knew how to use it to speak softly into Parker’s ears through the headphones, while Parker sat listening to tapes? Who knew how to hypnotize him, had probably done it over and over again until he knew that Parker was under his complete control?”

  Her friends and Dr. Cohen were looking at her as if she had lost her mind, but Nancy couldn’t stop her line of reasoning.

  “Who knew Parker so well that he felt certain he could order him to commit murder and be obeyed?” she said. “Who else, but Dr. Edberg!”

  Suddenly Parker was no longer in his trance. He was wide awake and in complete control. “Nancy is right,” he said calmly. “It was Edberg!”

  • • •

  “How do you feel, Parker?” Dr. Cohen asked later that afternoon.

  “Like I just finished competing in the Nationals,” Parker answered. “I feel emotionally and physically drained. But I feel relieved, too. I know I’m not a murderer.”

  For the last several hours, Parker had recalled everything Dr. Edberg had ordered him to do Thursday night in the psychology lab. Then, when Parker was ready, Dr. Cohen hypnotized him one last time and cancelled out any posthypnotic suggestions Edberg had given him.

  “You see,” the doctor explained to Ned, Nancy, and Bess, “that’s how Edberg got Parker to take the gun. A posthypnotic suggestion is a command lodged in the subject’s subconscious mind. So Parker was unaware of pocketing the gun, and he probably carried it around in his coat pocket for several days without recognizing that it was there.”

  “That’s amazing!” Bess exclaimed. “Wouldn’t he have felt it when he put his hands in his pockets?”

  “Sure,” Dr. Cohen replied. “But his conscious mind had been commanded not to register it as a gun.”

  “Edberg must have come back to the lab while Wayne was looking for me Thursday night,” Parker said. “Wayne never checked the control room. He had set everything up for me beforehand, and when I put on the headphones, he just flipped the play switch on the alternate control panel in the lab.”

  Nancy recalled seeing the small panel of controls in the lab room. “But Edberg must have been listening to your tape on his own headphones in the control room,” she added. “When he heard Johnny Lightning come on, he knew you’d fall into a trance, and he began to talk to you.”

  “And of course he was able to watch everything through the mirror,” Ned put in.

  Parker stood up and started pacing back and forth in front of Dr. Cohen’s desk, too excited to sit still any longer. “I remember now,” he said, raking a hand through his red hair. “Edberg had been hypnotizing me for a couple of weeks. Wayne was usually in the lab with me, while Edberg was in the control room. So Wayne didn’t know that Edberg was actually talking to me through the headphones—he must have assumed that Edberg was just observing me through the one-way glass. Edberg talked to me only during that one song. Since I didn’t know if I was one of the participants hearing the subliminal tape or not, I assumed that Edberg’s talking to me was another part of the experiment. Now I realize he was getting me used to being hypnotized.”

  “You’re right,” Dr. Cohen said. “Finally, the song alone was enough to put you under.” The doctor sat with his elbows on his desk, the fingers of both hands entwined, with his chin resting on his thumbs. “But how did he know to choose you instead of one of the other students?”

  “I think I remember now,” Parker responded. He stopped pacing. “Early in the study I had an interview alone with Edberg. During part of it he told me to watch his finger, and he moved it slowly in front of my eyes while he talked and talked. I felt dizzy, and later I glanced at his notes. He’d written, ‘highly suggestible.’ So I guess he knew I was easy to hypnotize.”

  Nancy and Ned sat together on the couch, holding hands. Now Nancy spoke. “The rest is easy. Edberg was going to use Parker to kill Wayne.” She turned her attention to Parker. “He knew you had a grudge against Wayne, and he knew you had a temper. He just assumed you’d be willing to kill him. But when you resisted, Edberg had to come out and do it himself. He must have been wearing gloves, so only your prints were on the gun, Parker.”

  “That’s right. He told me to forget everything. Then he ran out of the room—and the next thing I knew, I was outside, stumbling into the snow.”

  Ned let out a low whistle. “He was probably still in the building when we found the body!” he exclaimed. “Then he slipped out before the police arrived.”

  “There are still some things I don’t get,” Bess said. “First, there’s Edberg’s alibi. Did his wife lie for him?”

  “That’s the most obvious explanation,” Nancy agreed, “but it may not be the right one. We’ll just have to find out when we catch Edberg.” Bess crinkled up her nose. “The other thing is—well, why? Why did Professor Edberg want to kill his research assistant?”

  Nancy told the others what Maury and Diana had discovered on Wayne Perkins’s computer disks. “We knew the results of the study had been falsified, but the one thing we couldn’t figure out was who had done it. It must have been Edberg. Something must have made Wayne suspicious enough to copy Edberg’s records and then reanalyze them. That’s how he learned that Edberg had doctored the results,” she concluded.

  Bess still didn’t look convinced. “But why was he lying? I mean, wouldn’t that put his whole career in jeopardy?”

  “I bet that’s where Larry Boyd fits in,” Nancy said. “We still need to find out why he was on campus that night. But I’ll bet it has something to do with all those government contracts Boyd kept talking about. There’s a lot of money at stake here. Edberg himself told us that whoever can prove that these tapes really work stands to make huge profits. Maybe he convinced Edberg to falsify the study’s results.”

  Bess’s face lit up with understanding. “If Diana’s right about how honorable Wayne was, he must have threatened to expose Dr. Edberg’s fraud. Maybe Edberg tried to bribe Wayne and was rebuffed. So Edberg had only one choice left.”

  “Murder!” Parker said.

  A moment of silence filled the office as they all considered the story they had pieced together. Then Ned spoke up. “So now what do we do?” He turned to Nancy. “From what you’ve told me about Easterling, he’s never going to buy this story.”

  “It is pretty farfetched,” Dr. Cohen agreed. “And we’ve just destroyed some of the proof. Parker isn’t hypnotized anymore, so we can’t demonstrate the effect of the song on him.”

  “We’ve got a problem here,” Nancy agreed. “We have no hard and fast evidence, and it’s a very tangled case. Lieutenant Easterli
ng is not going to be a friendly audience, that’s for sure.” She sighed. “We’ve still got some heavy-duty thinking to do, guys.”

  Glancing at the clock, Nancy saw that it was already late afternoon. “Is anybody else hungry?” she asked. “I say we figure out what to do over a pizza.”

  • • •

  “Nan, could you pass me a slice with pepperoni?” Ned asked.

  He, Nancy, Bess, and Parker were sitting together in Lorenzo’s, a popular student hangout near the Emerson campus. None of them had eaten since that morning, and only a few slices were left of the two large pizzas they had ordered.

  “So what do we do?” Parker wondered aloud, as he finished his third slice of sausage and mushroom pizza. He turned to Nancy. “Are you really going to go to the police like you promised Dr. Cohen?” he asked.

  Dr. Cohen had declined their invitation to join them. As they’d left his office he had tried to persuade them to go to the police, or at least to Captain Backman. They had promised to do that first thing in the morning. In turn, he had promised to wait until morning to contact the authorities himself.

  “I don’t see how we can avoid it,” Nancy said, answering Parker’s question. “We’ve got to bring Easterling into the case.”

  “But you said yourself that he’ll never believe us,” Bess protested. She took a sip of soda, then crunched down on some small ice cubes.

  “That’s right,” Nancy said. “The only way he’ll believe us is if he hears Professor Edberg himself make a confession.” She paused for effect and then said, “And I have a plan that will get the professor to do just that!”

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  THAT’S RIGHT, Professor Edberg, midnight tonight, in the psych lab.” Nancy paused while Professor Edberg said something. “Yes, that will be fine.” Nancy hung up the pay phone in the back of Lorenzo’s and turned to Ned, Bess, and Parker, who were clustered around her. “He bought it,” she told them.