― Carl Gustav Jung
My dinner with Arthur Reid did nothing to reassure me he was in my corner. If anything, it made me feel I was cornered.
But one fact emerged from our meeting―I now knew Ray Hull was spying on me and reporting back to Arthur and that made me question all my social interactions with the locals.
I thought about Clay Lightbourne and wondered if our meeting at Whitehern was simply fortuitous, and whether our subsequent dinner with Sylvia was really the chance encounter I thought it was.
The one thing apparent in all my dealings with the townspeople of West Harbour was that nothing was what it seemed.
I felt trapped in a Pirandello drama contending with the vanity of illusion and struggling to unravel reality from appearance.
The next morning I skipped breakfast knowing I'd be lunching with Nat Cohen at the Tim Horton's coffee shop in town.
Instead, I went for a jog, avoiding the harbour and opting instead to run along The Bruce Trail that followed the Niagara Escarpment.
After about an hour, I ended up in a small Victorian village called Waterdown which apparently derived its name from its many natural waterfalls.
The older section of town was tree-lined and shady and I followed a winding street that led up to a public house that looked familiar, although I knew I had never visited this town before.
The pub was called The American House and the more I stared at it I became convinced I had been here before and not by myself, but with Lillian Yardley, the girl from my dreams.
The experience was so intense I became overwhelmed by feelings of familiarity mingled with nostalgia.
Tears ran down my face as I stood there alone peering into a past I didn't own and yearning to grasp a hand I could never hold.
I had to get away and found myself running back down the winding street to the trail where I kept running for several minutes until finally collapsing, winded and miserable on the slope of a grassy knoll.
What the hell is happening to me? I wondered, deeply disturbed by the visions and confused feelings welling up from deep within me.
Instinctively I knew what I was experiencing was more than a memory flashback to a forgotten moment in my personal history. That was what disturbed and frightened me the most―it was a past incident alright, but not from my own memory but someone else's history.
The incident left me so shaken I could no longer jog but somehow managed to hike back to my home.
As I entered the foyer of Sunnyside I glanced at the grandfather clock and saw it had just turned eleven.
Just time enough to shower and keep my lunch date with Nat, I mused.
My body was sore and aching but I knew it wasn't good for me to be alone―not now, not after experiencing what I did.
I needed someone friendly I could talk to―someone I could trust who would offer support.
In all of West Harbour, I knew of only one person I could trust at this moment and that was Nat Cohen.