What Nobody Knew: A Reincarnation Mystery

By Arthur S. Berger

Although many years have passed since her husband Erik was killed in World War Two, Sarah Zukor still grieves for the man of her dreams. She uses a ouija board to contact him and one message it spelled out was “I will come back.” So when Sarah learns that seven-year old Paul Kelly of Miami claims that he lived before as Erik Zukor, she believes that her love has returned to her. However, her euphoria is shattered when skeptics dismiss the child’s claim that he is the soldier reborn as lies or imagination. Sarah turns to world-famous reincarnation researcher Professor John Aldrich and begs him to investigate and confirm for the world the reincarnation of her husband.

A series of strange events – his father suddenly bursting into flames, the psychic experiences of his wife and a handwritten will scrawled by an illiterate man – all had led to Aldrich’s entry into parapsychology and his interest in the paranormal and reincarnation. His pioneering and meticulous investigations in India into the cases of children remembering prior lives had been the alarm clock that had awakened many people to the realization that reincarnation might be a real phenomenon but here was the problem: there had never been such a case in America - a fact that had not escaped Aldrich’s critics like Professor Simon Garnett and other critics who rejected reincarnation as an article of Eastern religious beliefs. So, when Sarah comes to him, Aldrich agrees to take the case: it may be the American case for which he had been waiting and that will silence critics.

But can he verify the boy’s claims, show that the case is not fraudulent and that reincarnation is the best explanation for it so that it will count as evidence confirming the reality of reincarnation? To make Aldrich’s investigation scientifically and methodologically sound, Berger, although himself a veteran researcher, was inspired by the late Ian Stevenson, the most prominent reincarnation investigator in the world, and drew on his methods. What Nobody Knew: A Reincarnation Mystery is a must-read story for those readers who want to know how a claim of reincarnation is scientifically investigated with sound methodology to see if it is authentic.

But all readers will soon discover that the story goes beyond describing a scientific investigation. Its roots are dark and tangled with skepticism, the paranormal, lies, revenge. Questions arise: Why is a hand-written will hotly contested? Aldrich is dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Will he have the will and the time to complete his investigation? Meanwhile, Sarah is terrified. Why has she become the prey of a mafia hitman? What surprise ending turns the case upside down and then rightside up again?

One reviewer said, “I give this book five stars. It is far more than a compelling page turner, a tale of intrigue and mystery that winds around decades and continents. It is also a love story that travels through time.” Another reviewer said, “This is the best reincarnation fiction I’ve ever come across...The story is all-in-one. It combines everything you want in a story: good writing, years of research, insight, originality, a fascinating plot, interesting subplots and an unexpected ending. I rate it as a five star must-read.” A third reviewer wrote: “Absolutely FIVE stars! I loved reading Berger's newest book; it is so much rolled into one "can't wait to pick it up again" book.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arthur S. Berger
• Release date: Jun 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301094523

Arthur S. Berger

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Arthur S. Berger practiced law as a City Attorney until his retirement from the law in order to deal with a subject to which he had always been irresistibly drawn and by which he had always been puzzled. He was both fascinated by the question of survival after physical death and troubled by the constant arguments and counterarguments over the quality of the evidence for life after death. Berger felt that, as a lawyer, he would be able to analyze the evidence and determine what was valid and what was not. He became active in the American and English Societies for Psychical Research, the Parapsychology Association and President of the Survival Research Foundation, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization whose mission is to search for valid evidence of survival of human consciousness after physical death. Berger is the author or co-author of many nonfiction books dealing with parapsychology. These included: Lives and Letters in American Parapsychology (1988) described as "superb" by Parapsychology Review and selected by for its "outstanding academic list”; Evidence of Life After Death: A Casebook for the Tough-Minded (1988) and Aristocracy of the Dead (1987). He was also the co-author of Fear of the Unknown (1995), The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research (1991) and Reincarnation: Fact or Fable? (1991

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What Nobody Knew: A Reincarnation Mystery

by Arthur S. Berger

Copyright 2011 by Arthur S. Berger

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What Nobody Knew: A Reincarnation Mystery

Copyright © 2011 by Arthur S. Berger Under the editorship of Joyce Berger

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

What Nobody Knew:

A Reincarnation Mystery

ARTHUR S. BERGER

CHAPTER ONE

During the early hours of a day in December 1944, an Army ambulance carrying the bloody body of an American officer sped through Oran on its way to a military hospital. Two years earlier, when Europe lay in Hitler’s grip, the city’s large port on the Mediterranean coast had been a principal objective of the Allied operation with the code name Torch. With the landing of the American First Division on its shores and the bitter resistance put up by French land and naval forces, Oran became a turbulent scene of drama and danger, gallantry and tragedy. But, by 1944, occupied by the Americans, the city had become peaceful, quiet, even inviting with its modern hotels, office buildings and restaurants. Violent death had left its broad streets lined with trees and outdoor cafes. But its absence was only temporary. When the ambulance arrived at the hospital and the man was carried by stretcher past the hospital clerk, the ambulance driver classified him for the clerk’s record as DOA. Although the officer was not actually dead on arrival, he was very close to it because, when his commanding officer was notified and rushed to the hospital from the prisoner of war compound in St. Cloud, a hospital physician wearing the insignia of a major, using a term commonly used in Army hospitals to designate a DOA, told Captain Edward Brown, "Your lieutenant is kaput. There’s nothing more we can do for him."

Brown stood over six feet and was normally rigidly straight in posture. But when he heard this announcement and saw his friend in his last hour of life, he lost his military carriage. He became as bent as a bow, a man carrying heavy burden on his back. He stood at the lieutenant’s bed. What the hell happened to you? he asked in a tone in which anger, disbelief and sadness were mingled. The reply was not audible. Brown placed his ear next to the lieutenant’s mouth and listened carefully to the man’s labored, last words. When the lieutenant’s whispers stopped, Brown rose and took the man’s hand between his. I promise, he said solemnly, I’ll do just what you want.

Then he sat quietly by his friend’s bed. As he began his death- watch, Brown remembered the lieutenant as a good officer and a close companion. But most prominent was his memory of the man’s attitude toward life and death. Most people Brown knew always avoided such discussions but not this young officer. He had a strong belief that everywhere in nature, there is this cycle of death and rebirth, like the sun rising every day after it has set. Two months before, on Brown’s birthday, he had posted a sign in the officers’ mess. It read, Happy Birthday, Ed. Since I believe in reincarnation I wish you MANY HAPPY RETURNS! It was as though this special memory triggered a response from the lieutenant for at that very moment he opened his eyes, smiled and, just before his last breath, said in a loud, clear voice as if he were addressing someone not visible to Brown, Don’t cry, Sari. I’ll come back to you.

Something jolted Emily Kelly out of her sleep. She lay in bed, her heart pounding as she listened intently. There it was again! She nudged her snoring husband. Tim, Tim, she whispered, There’s someone in the next room! Tim!

He stopped snoring and stirred. He opened one eye to look at the illuminated clock on the night table. On its face was the figure of a green leprechaun with a little hand pointing at three and a longer one at nine. God, woman, grumbled Tim, it’s only three in the morning. What’s the matter with you?

Emily shook his shoulder and put her mouth next to his ear Get up. Someone’s in the house! she hissed. Still half-asleep, Tim struggled to a sitting position. He sat quietly in bed, hardly breathing, alert to catch any sound. In a moment, he knew that his wife had been right. Those were footsteps. There was a thud. Now convinced, he removed his handgun from the night table drawer and, followed by Emily, ran to the bedroom door. Gun pointed, he opened the door slowly, moved his hand along the living room wall until he found the wall switch.

When the dark room burst into light, they saw a child marching in the room with his little body erect and shoulders back.

Paul! Emily screamed. What are you doing?

Oblivious to his mother, the boy continued to march. Although he bumped into a couch and then into four chairs standing vigil around a small table where the Kellys play cards with friends, Paul was as totally unaware of the collisions as he had been of his mother’s voice. He just marched on mumbling strange words. His parents thought they heard the word empty.

Emily was at his side immediately and hugging him. Paul, you should be asleep. What are you doing?

The boy did not reply. His eyes were glassy. He seemed in another world.

Tim, still at the bedroom door, lowered his gun and yawned. Put him back to bed. He’s just sleepwalking. Get him back before he hurts himself or breaks something. Emily Kelly flew at her husband. You care more about what happened to Reagan than you are with what’s happening to Paul. Sure I do. I knew it was coming.

What? You knew that John Hinckley was going to try to assassinate Reagan while he was in office?

Don’t you see? It was in the cards. History shows that each president elected in a year ending with zero died before his term was up. Reagan was elected last year - in 1980.

Well, it wasn’t in the cards. Reagan was wounded but not killed. But that’s what I mean. You’re still not thinking about Paul and about what you’re doing to him. Emily stuck her finger under Tim’s nose and thrust it at him with each word. A few days ago, when we heard him groaning, we found him in bed suffering in pain and putting his hands over his body where he seemed to be hurting. He had no idea that we were even with him and the worst of it is that the next morning he couldn’t even remember what happened. Now it’s sleepwalking! Emily didn’t have her husband’s Irish temper, but whatever she did have, she got it up and was furious. It’s your fault, she shouted. You’re working him too hard. He just can’t memorize all his lines at once.

Timothy Kelly was no less furious as he waved a manuscript in front of her, I’m not asking him for a word-for-word memorization of this script we just got. I just want the boy to keep in mind the character he’s got to play and, if necessary, to ad lib in line with the script. What I want for him is to seem natural and make people believe that he is the character.

But you’re working him too hard.

If he’s going to be an actor, he has to work hard. Listen, I’m an actor and I’m telling you that that kid of ours is not going to learn to act by us talking to him about acting or reading to him about acting. There’s only one way to become an actor and that’s by working at being one. I’m the kid’s teacher and that’s what I’ve got him doing. I promise you that with his talent and my approach, he’ll be another Jackie Cooper or Dickie Moore.

I’m the boy’s acting coach, too. But he’s only a little kid, for God’s sake.

Right and that’s just why he has to work. This is when he can score as an actor and we can make some big money. Talent agents, directors, producers want him now because he is just a child. In another two, three years - once he starts growing up and his voice changes, they won’t want him at all and they’ll start looking for another kid again.

Timothy had been hard on the boy but he was hard on everybody. He had been born in 1953 in Minnesota. His mother gave birth to him while she was tending the Shamrock Bar she and her husband operated. At the moment of his birth, his father set up free drinks for everyone, Timothy probably got a few drops of the gods’ nectar because he grew up to be rough and tough and a hard- drinking Irishman. And Irish he was. Every St. Patrick’s Day he and his parents would celebrate the occasion by sitting down to dinner with green caps and by having pistachio ice cream for dessert. As devout Roman Catholics, his father and mother sent Tim to Our Lady’s High School and wanted him to be a priest. But at eighteen, after graduating from high school, the priesthood was not his aim in life. He got a job delivering products for an office supply company until he could accomplish what was his real object. What appealed to him was acting. He read all that he could about the theater. He attended acting classes and workshops after work, worked with other actors to read lines, exchanged interpretations of scenes and characters with them and found that he had a better memory for lines than they did. He walked the streets looking for castings and auditions, would read lines for anyone who would listen and, since he was short and bowlegged with a beak-like nose, soon found himself playing character roles in plays. He appeared in thirty professional productions at the Playwright’s Center and a few more at the Guthrie Theater. Whenever he had to travel from Minneapolis to perform in a facility in some other city, such as the Commonweal Theater in Lanesboro, he would always protect himself by packing a small statue of St. Christopher in addition to his rosary beads.

There were many theaters in Minneapolis, all well attended by an enthusiastic public, and ample acting opportunities. But Kelly had enough of the city of the lakes because it was the second coldest city in the country with winter temperatures falling to twenty to thirty degrees below zero. He left in search of the sun and headed straight for Miami. Its warmth was not the city’s only attraction for Kelly. Model and movie scouts who had abandoned the Big Apple for the Latin-Caribbean culture of Miami had occupied the place like conquering armies. Their hunt for different faces and good talent had made Miami into a thriving center of the entertainment industry and the magic place for actors like Kelly who hoped to be discovered. There was no end to requests for talent for movies, television commercials, print work, industrial videos or a television series. In response to the demand, talent agencies sprang up and soon had collected files for every category from kids and teen agers to body builders, Latin lovers and retired old men and women trying to make some money or experience the thrill of being an extra and meeting some star on a movie set.

Within a year of Kelly’s arrival in Miami, he met Emily Saunders, a tall, thin, freckle-faced, quite pretty woman with reddish hair drawn back in a knot. When Timothy first dated her, he told a friend, There ain’t much meat on her but what there is is choice. In contrast to him, she was quiet, reserved and had the ability to make people laugh. This talent was not an accident of birth. She developed it. After her father lost his job, he and Carla, her mother, went out each day looking for employment. "While they were gone, Emily would stay at home and amuse herself by singing to herself or looking in the mirror and making various kinds of faces. To earn extra money for the family, she would go on street corners where she would make grimaces and sing clever songs that never failed to elicit laughter and some donations. Soon she was impersonating movie personalities in costumes her mother sewed for her. Her performances were so successful that invitations came in for her appearances at parties, clubs and weddings

By the time Emily was twenty she was a seasoned entertainer. But she wanted her independence and left her home in Pittsburgh for Miami where she shelved her performances in favor of steady employment and a salary as a secretary for a prominent law firm. It was then that she and Timothy Kelly met. She had been born a Protestant and was troubled by Kelly’s Catholicism. But her mind was not entirely closed to his faith. After a few months of studying its doctrine and practice, she accepted it as her own and a priest married them.

She worked in the law office until her boss was disbarred after an article in the Courier identified him as a key figure in one of Miami’s political corruption scandals. Now out of work, she needed to find some way of bringing in money to supplement the family’s income. Then Timothy gave her an idea for a business that was validated by the fact that there was a constant need for talent in Miami. She opened up a workshop for actors. Acting for stage, screen and television commercials as well as improvisations were taught to budding actors by Emily, her husband and other artists. Her business had grown steadily and was now in its sixth successful year.

Emily bore Timothy a son. The proud parents made the boy’s bedroom into a gallery of old pictures of famous child actors Tim’s father had collected and given to him. Above the child’s bed and in a row along the length of the wall were Mary Pickford, then the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy. Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Dickie Moore, Jackie Searl and others. But in a commanding place of honor above all the old photographs of another era was the photograph of the actor Paul Kelly whom the Kelly family believed was a distant cousin. Kelly had begun his long career in movies at the age of seven and acted in them until he died in 1956.

Timothy and Emily decided to name their son Paul after Timothy’s supposed distant cousin whose picture had been a constant inspiration to him. There was little doubt in this family of performers and dramatic coaches that Paul would be reared to be a star. Timothy was going to mold him into a child actor who would follow in the steps of the famous Paul Kelly who acted in child, juvenile and later in supporting roles all his life. Timothy imagined his son someday signing contracts with salaries higher than most people make in a lifetime. Emily was too gentle and reserved to be a stage mother like Rose Hovick who dominated Gypsy Rose Lee. But in Timothy Paul had a stage father. He was as sly, aggressive and intimidating as Madam Rose had ever been. He convinced Paul that he was to be an actor. Timothy saw in his beautiful son another Dickie Moore who had played in the Our Gang comedies and other films and whose picture had appeared on the lids of millions of ice cream cups.

As soon as Paul could walk, Timothy taught his son to dance and sing. By the time he was five years of age, Paul was learning to play the guitar and clarinet. Emily and Timothy began now to teach him to act although sometimes Kelly would disappear for hours to drink double Scotches at Blender’s Bar on Biscayne Boulevard with his friends. Nevertheless, under his parents’ direction, Paul was taught how to move and control his body, how to use mime to communicate an idea without words, how to speak clearly so as to be heard by an audience, how to improvise so that without memorizing the author’s lines a dramatic situation could be felt and understood, and how to study a character and create it as a real, living being for an audience. They trained his memory. As he developed, they saw in him that talent and capacity essential to acting well to adapt to and blend into an imaginary scene and to assume the personality of some imaginary character. Whatever acting needs, Paul was born with it and what was not inherent in him was taught to him by his gifted parents.

Paul was small for his age but he was a pretty little boy with rosy cheeks and wide innocent eyes always shining with a happy light.

Timothy wasted no time in getting professional photographs of him in various poses - playing one of his instruments, dancing, smiling, laughing - and sending them to every talent agency along with his voice and video tapes.

When the boy was six, he was no different from other boys of his age. He cut his first permanent tooth and entered the Ellen Davidson elementary school, one of the schools in the Miami-Dade County Public School system. He was a happy child, with above-average intelligence and an interest in school and friends. But after that, the similarity with other children ended. Directors and producers often selected his photograph out of the many photographs of child actors sent to them by talent agencies. Paul was booked for a television commercial as a bright, laughing boy hungrily eating and enjoying a new breakfast cereal to be marketed in Europe. Then he appeared in a television series about a family who won a lottery. Later, he was booked for "Say ‘’Yes’ to Drugs", a new play to open in a theater in Coconut Grove. He was given a dramatic role to play and a lot of lines to say as a kid approached by drug dealers. It was a challenging role for so young a child and his most important. There was every possibility that it was just what was needed to send Paul on his way to stardom. Kelly knew it and, although at times he would disappear for a few days to go on a binge, he worked Paul and himself hard to get his son ready for his role in the show. After it opened, a reporter came charging backstage to see Paul and slapped the boy on the back. You’re the best little kid actor I’ve seen! he said. Timothy was so proud of his son that he forgot himself and smiled. The reporter shook his hand. I’m Jim of the Miami Courier. I thought your boy was great in the show. Congratulations!"

The show got rave reviews and so did Paul. Flaherty had written, "Say ‘Yes’ 'to Drugs is excellent. Miami audiences will enjoy it but when they see the remarkable performance of the child actor Paul Kelly, they will be positively entranced.

Kelly called to thank Flaherty and to invite him for drinks at Tim’s favorite bar. It was the start of their friendship. They became drinking buddies, two Irishman who loved to talk about Notre Dame football and the Church.

When Paul was six and one-half years old, his photograph led to a lucrative deal. He was working on that script and rehearsing for the special role when his parents found him groaning in bed and sleepwalking - and when the curtain fell on what had been a happy family scene.

Paul had always been an obedient son anxious to please his parents. The radical transformation of the boy took place when Timothy and Emily invited several people to dinner to celebrate his birthday. To be sure that they would come, Emily had sent them a mock formal invitation - The Kellys request the pleasure of your company at a birthday party to celebrate their son Paul’s Seventh Birthday on the eighteenth day of October, 1981, at six o’clock.

The invited guests were now arriving. Coming in the door together were Father James Knight, the priest who had performed their marriage, Dr. Sidney Gaines, the doctor who had brought Paul into the world, and his wife, Blanche. When