Orientation by Rick R. Reed

Author:Rick R. Reed [Reed, Rick R.]
Language: nld
Format: epub
Tags: erotic MM, Romance MM
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

When Robert pushed aside Jess’s collection of Heather Marshall books, one of the books he missed seeing was Morey Bernstein’s The Search for Bridey Murphy. But Jess hadn’t, and now her gaze fell upon its cracked spine. The book chronicled taped sessions the author made with a woman named Ruth Simmons in 1952. Under hypnosis, the woman revealed several past lives, the most memorable of which was the life of Bridey Murphy, a woman living in nineteenth-century Ireland.

Jess remembered reading the book as a girl, fascinated by the possibility that reincarnation was a real phenomenon. The book seemed to offer proof—a woman with memories of a 119

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time and place she had no way of knowing about. She even talked about areas of the County of Cork that were small and obscure. She described a trip from Cork to Belfast with astonishing detail, even though she had never been out of the United States.

Jess pulled out the book from the stack, running her fingers over its simple pale cover, and was once again in her girlhood bedroom in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, lying on one side while she devoured the entire book in one afternoon.

Bernstein had made it all seem very real, his case for reincarnation extremely compelling.

After reading the book, Jess had wanted to find out more.

She couldn’t understand how a case like the one described by Bernstein, with such credible evidence, had escaped attention.

She was surprised it wasn’t still being talked about with awe and reverence. Neither Ruth Simmons nor Morey Bernstein seemed like hungry fame seekers, but rather, people who had stumbled onto something remarkable.

Back then Jess had gone to Naperville’s public library and had begun researching the case on the computers there.

Eventually, she came across detractors who labeled The Search for Bridey Murphy a hoax, calling into question the author’s real motives and Ruth Simmons’s sanity (who, she discovered, was actually named Virginia Tighe and been born in Chicago, not far from Jess). They described the book as mumbo jumbo, not worth the paper it was printed on, nothing in it provable.

Basically, all those who scoffed belonged to the media, 120

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many of whom had actually gone to Ireland to see if they could track down verifiable evidence about Bridey Murphy.

The book had been a bestseller in the nineteen-fifties and, at the time, people like Jess wanted to know more. They came back with their own evidence proving none of what Virginia Tighe recalled could be true. In fact, sympathetic theorists conjectured that most of her “past life” memories were nothing more than buried memories of the subject’s own early childhood. But they were never really able to explain the accuracy of her description of life in nineteenth-century Ireland, or the fact that she mentioned places and names that turned out to be real.

Jess laughed out loud, her voice echoing in the empty apartment, causing her to stop abruptly. What had seemed powerful, romantic, and real when she was a teenager, had been rubbed out by the realities of her early adult years.

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