On the Street Where you Live by Mary Higgins Clark Page B

there was a serial killer in Spring Lake in the 1890s and that he’s been reincarnated.”
    â€œThat’s utter nonsense,” Lillian Madden said brusquely. “Reincarnation is a form of spiritual growth. A serial murderer from the 1890s would be paying for his transgressions now, not repeating them.”
    With decisive steps, her entire posture telegraphing her disapproval of the tone of the conversation, Lillian Madden went into her private office and closed the door. There, she sank into her desk chair and put her elbows on the desk. Her eyes closed, she massaged her temples with her index fingers.
    Before too much longer, human beings will be cloned, she thought. All of us in the medical field understand that. Those of us who believe in reincarnation believe that pain we endured in other lifetimes may affect us in our present existence. But evil? Could someone knowingly or unknowingly repeat exactly the same kind of evil deeds he committed over a century ago?
    What was bothering her? What memory was trying to force itself into her conscious mind?
    Lillian wondered if she could skip her lecture tonight. No, that wouldn’t be fair to the students, she decided. In ten years she hadn’t missed one session of the course in Regression she gave every spring at Monmouth Community College.
    There were thirty students enrolled in the course. The college was allowed to sell ten more single-session tickets for each lecture. Would some of those reporters who had been phoning find out about those tickets and be there tonight?
    In the second half of the session it was her practice to ask for volunteers to be hypnotized and regressed. That sometimes resulted in vivid and detailed recollections of other incarnations. She made the decision to eliminate the hypnosis section tonight. During the last ten minutes she always took questions from the students and visitors. If reporters were there, she would have to respond to them. There was no way around that.
    She always prepared her lectures well in advance. Each one was carefully integrated with both its predecessor and successor. Tonight’s lecture was based on the observations of Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He had tested the hypothesis that in order to identify two different life histories as belonging to the same person, there would have to be continuity of memories and/or personality traits.
    It was not exactly the lecture she would have chosen to give tonight. As she went over her notesshortly before she left home, Lillian became painfully aware that Stevenson’s findings could be interpreted as bolstering the theory about a reincarnated serial killer.
    Lillian was so deep in thought that she was startled by Joan’s brisk knock on the door. It opened and Joan was in the room before she could be invited to enter.
    â€œMrs. Pell is here, Doctor, but she’s early, so take your time. Look what she brought to show you.”
    Joan was holding a copy of
The National Daily
. SPECIAL EDITION was enblazoned across the logo. The headline read SERIAL KILLER RETURNS FROM THE GRAVE .
    The story continued onto the second and third pages. Pictures of Martha Lawrence and Carla Harper, side by side, were captioned, “Sisters in Death?”
    The story began, “Red-faced police are admitting that the eyewitness who claimed to have seen twenty-year-old Carla Harper at a rest stop not far from her home in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, may have been mistaken. They now admit it is entirely possible that Harper’s purse was planted near that rest stop by her killer after the eyewitness account was widely published. The focus of the investigation is now centered in Spring Lake, New Jersey.”
    â€œIt’s just what I told you, Doctor. The last time that girl was seen was in Spring Lake. And she disappeared on August 5th, the same day as Letitia Gregg—isn’t that a great name?—did in 1893!”
    The