Free Heart-shaped box by Joe Hill Page B

before he got there, took a detour to Danny’s desk. He flipped through some stacks of paper, looking for Anna’s letters. If Danny had found them, however, he’d tucked them somewhere out of sight. When Jude didn’t turn them up, he settled into Danny’s chair and launched the Web browser on his computer, intending to do a search on Anna’s stepdaddy. It seemed like there was something about everyone online. Maybe the dead man had his own MySpace account. Jude laughed—choked, ugly laughter—down in his throat.
    He couldn’t remember the dead man’s first name, so he ran a search for “McDermott hypnosis dead.” At the top of Jude’s search results was a link to an obituary, which had appeared in last summer’s Pensacola News Journal, for a Craddock James McDermott. That was it: Craddock.
    Jude clicked on it—and there he was.
    The man in the black-and-white photograph was a younger version of the man Jude had seen twice now in the upstairs hallway. In the picture he looked a vigorous sixty, his hair cut in that same close-to-the-scalp military bristle. With his long, almost horsey face, and wide thin lips, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Charlton Heston. The most startling thing about the photograph was discovering that Craddock, in life, had eyes like any man’s eyes. They were clear and direct and stared into Forever with the challenging self-assurance of motivational speakers and evangelical preachers everywhere.
    Jude read. It said that a life of learning and teaching, exploring and adventuring, had ended when Craddock James McDermott had died of a cerebral embolism at his stepdaughter’s home in Testament, Florida, on Tuesday, August 10. A true son of the South, he had grown up the only child of a Pentecostal minister and had lived in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia, and later Galveston, Texas.
    He was a wide receiver for the Longhorns in 1965 and enlisted in the service upon graduation, where he served as a member of the army’s psychological operations division. It was there that he discovered his calling, when he was introduced to the essentials of hypnosis. In Vietnam he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He was discharged with honors and settled in Florida. In 1980 he was wed to Paula Joy Williams, a librarian, and became stepfather to her two children, Jessica and Anna, whom he later adopted. Paula and Craddock shared a love built upon quiet faith, deep trust, and a mutual fascination with the unexplored possibilities of the human spirit.
    At this, Jude frowned. It was a curious sentence—“a mutual fascination with the unexplored possibilities of the human spirit.” He didn’t even know what it meant.
    Their relationship endured until Paula passed away in 1986. In his life Craddock had attended to almost ten thousand “patients”—Jude snorted at the word—using deep hypnotic technique to alleviate the suffering of the ill and to help those in need to overcome their weaknesses, work that his oldest stepdaughter, Jessica McDermott Price, carried on still, as a private consultant. Jude snorted again. She had probably written the obituary herself. He was surprised she hadn’t included the phone number for her service. Mention that you heard about us in my stepfather’s obit and receive 10 percent off your first session!!!
    Craddock’s interest in spiritualism and the untapped potential of the mind led him to experiment with “dowsing,” the old country technique of discovering underground water sources with the use of a rod or pendulum. But it was the way in which he led so many of his fellow life travelers to discover their own hidden reservoirs of strength and self-worth for which he will be best remembered by his surviving adopted daughter and his loved ones. “His voice may have fallen silent, but it will never be forgotten.”
    Nothing about Anna’s suicide.
    Jude passed his gaze over the obit again, pausing on certain combinations of words that he didn’t much