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you went to see him?” I asked.
    “Not right away,” she replied. “People tell me I’m stubborn, and I guess it’s true. I assumed the nightmare had to have something to do with the deaths of my parents. Being orphaned at such a young age was pretty much the defining moment of my life. It seemed reasonable to me that if that’s what it was, I could do what needed to be done on my own. If I thought about what happened to them long enough and hard enough—if I meditated and prayed about it—the nightmare would eventually reveal itself. But that didn’t happen, and unfortunately the screaming didn’t stop, either. Finally the sisters staged a small revolt. The entire convent signed a petition asking me to do something about it. And I did. Three weeks ago I came to Seattle and had my first official appointment with Fred. I think it worked because the trust I felt for him back in high school makes it easy for me to trust him now.”
    “And?” I asked.
    Sister Mary Katherine put down her fork and peered at me through those thick lenses of hers. “The nightmare isn’t about my parents,” she said. “According to what I told Fred while I was under hypnosis, sometime when I was very young, I may have witnessed a murder.”
    A chill ran down my back. “You actually saw it happen?”
    “I believe so, but we’re not sure. Under hypnosis I seem to remember looking out through a window and seeing a man murder the woman who lived next door to me.” She turned to Fred. “Did you bring the tapes?” she asked.
    Nodding, Fred reached into his briefcase and pulled out three separate videotapes. “I often tape sessions so I can go back through them and look for things I might have missed the first time—facial expressions, nervous tics, that sort of thing,” he explained. “In cases of repressed memories, I usually do several sessions. Bringing painful memories to the surface is a lot like peeling an onion. Often more substantial details are recalled with each subsequent session.”
    “When Fred told me about this, my first thought was that I’d made the whole thing up, that it was nothing but a childhood fantasy,” Mary Katherine resumed. “If I had really seen such an awful thing—a man and a woman stabbing someone to death—how was it possible for me to have forgotten it completely?”
    “Man and woman?” I repeated. “So there were two of them?”
    “Yes. And the dead woman’s name was Mimi.”
    “No last name?” I asked.
    Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. “No, just Mimi.”
    I took my notebook out of my pocket and wrote down that one name: Mimi.
    “Whereabouts did she live?”
    “That’s the thing. I have no idea,” Mary Katherine answered. “We moved around so much when I was little that I really don’t know, but I’m assuming it was somewhere here in Washington.”
    “It’s still possible that you did make it up,” I suggested mildly.
    “Perhaps,” Mary Katherine said, “but I don’t think so. When Adelaide died and I was going through her things, I found several boxes with my name on them. They contained the few paltry belongings I brought with me when I came to live with Adelaide. Catholic Family Services had attached a complete inventory sheet. Inside one of the boxes, I found this.”
    Mary Katherine reached into a briefcase-size purse and extracted a slim book, which she passed over to me. It was a much-read volume of Watty Piper’s classic children’s book, The Little Engine That Could . That book had been a particular favorite of mine when I was a child. It was a story my mother read to me over and over, and this copy, with its tattered but familiar dust jacket, came from that same era.
    “Look inside,” Sister Mary Katherine said.
    On the inside cover I found an inscription written in fading blue ink. “For Bonnie, Merry Christmas. Love, Mimi.”
    “I got rid of most of the rest of the things, but I kept the book and a few photos. I always wondered who Mimi was. I