“Your daughter among them,” said Mitch, resetting the focus. Today wasn’t about Darla, but Penny.
“Do you think it will work?” asked Grace with a hopeful note.
“I’ve come across cases in my research where a dank smell reminds a victim of a basement where some abuse took place, which resulted in switching to a protective persona as a consequence,” he said. “Of all our senses, smell is the one most closely linked to memory, so I think there’s a good chance you found a way to trigger the switch from Eve to Penny.”
“Why is the link so strong?”
“Neuroscience would tell you that smell skips the thalamus in the brain, which the other senses have to pass through—like a relay station—to get various inputs to the hippocampus or the amygdala, where our emotions are processed.”
“Where does smell go?”
“Straight to the olfactory bulb, which we’ve only recently learned is a memory center where certain long-term memories get stored.”
“I just don’t get what significance ammonia has for Penny,” Grace said while walking.
“Did you clean with it a lot at home?”
Grace’s shrug didn’t discount the possibility. “I mean, we used it in the restaurant for sure, but not excessively.”
“It could be any number of things.”
Mitch considered sharing how the smell of grass and rubber cleats reminded him of Adam’s soccer games, or that the stench of marijuana conjured memories of his son’s decline, but opted against it. Grace had her own cross to bear today.
“Did you ever check for the book she mentioned that day in the ER?” Mitch asked.
“I checked her bookshelf thoroughly,” said Grace. “But I couldn’t find any that had a dark blue cover with water and boats.”
“Maybe she took it with her that night, tossed it away somewhere,” Mitch suggested. “That book is significant to her, maybe something her birth mother read to her. Could be she’d bought it on her recommendation, or it was something Rachel mailed to her. We just don’t know.”
“I’ll check our Amazon orders,” Grace said. “If she did buy it online, there’ll be a record of it.”
“Good thinking,” Mitch concurred.
All thoughts of books with boats on the cover, of Adam and sorrow, faded when they arrived at their meeting room. Mitch checked his watch: Eve would be joining them shortly. He opened the door and the scent of ammonia hit with force, burning his nostrils.
“Oh my God, the smell wasn’t this strong,” Grace said, entering behind him, squinting her eyes as she pinched her nose with her fingers.
Mitch closed the door, effectively trapping them in the fumes.
“I don’t think the ratio matters, but we don’t want to let out all the smell.”
Grace continued holding her nose as Mitch took out his phone, launched the camera app, and set the mode to video recording. He wanted to capture Eve’s reaction—and, hopefully, her transformation into Penny. He did not discount the potential secondary benefit of this experiment, namely advancing the acceptance of dissociative identity disorder among his profession’s many skeptics.
“I think I’ll wait in the hall,” Grace said, making for the exit. Before she could take a single step in that direction, the door to the room opened and her daughter came in.
CHAPTER 21
GRACE’S GAZE FLICKERED FROM her daughter to the two uniformed guards who served as her escort. Both were thin and on the younger side, but she got the distinct impression they were quite capable of holding their own in a fight. At that moment, after taking big whiffs of the heavily scented air, each CO simply held his nose. The stench sent them reeling back out into the hallway.
“Whoa, what happened in here?” one guard asked in a young man’s voice.
“Need a gas mask,” said the other.
Grace shifted her attention to her daughter, who had come dressed in her trademark green uniform, baggy as ever. Her hair was pulled back in a loose pony, how Penny often wore it, allowing for an unobstructed view of her face. There was no trace of a smile, and in those sapphire eyes a cold fire burned.
Not Penny. Still Eve.
Sniffing the ammonia-scented air, Eve looked about as if trying to locate the source of the odor before advancing into the room. Grace held her breath with nervous anticipation.
“Is this a gas chamber?” her daughter asked in Eve’s trademark snarl. “Are you finally putting me out of my misery, Mother?”