“Who did you see out there?” Brendan asked her, when the door was safely shut. The room was small, just a table and four chairs. Laurel took a deep breath. She felt shaky, but the amorphous feeling of danger was fading.
“I’m probably just being paranoid,” she hedged, and glanced out the small glass window in the door.
“Doubtful. We’ve got some competitive people in this department. Ruthless, really. Next time we should meet off campus.”
Next time?
she thought.
Already there’s a next time?
Brendan’s face had darkened, and he was silent for a moment. “So all right, what are we trying to get at, here?”
Laurel felt a conspiratorial thrill as she walked the small room, gathering her thoughts. “Leish’s overall hypothesis was that it was the expectation of the group—the affected family and the investigators—that created a poltergeist?”
“Yes … ,” Brendan said, raising his eyebrows.
“Then maybe—maybe that report
was
a fake.” He looked at her, mystified. She sat on the edge of the table beside him, unconsciously lowering her voice, even though they were completely alone. “Maybe that’s just the story he gave out to his team.”
“What team?”
Without realizing she was doing it, she stood again. “What if you put a group of researchers together to study the effects of expectation on a paranormal investigation? Only you use research assistants who test off the charts for ESP and PK abilities?”
She turned and looked at him, watching comprehension dawn on his face. “So you tell these high scorers they’re going in to investigate a poltergeist, provide some corroborating documentation … and see if one shows up? I think that would be freakin’ awesome,” he finished, delighted. “But how do you know—”
She reached to the floor, lifted and set her roller bag on the table, and removed the paper-clipped sheaf of high-scoring tests. Brendan was pacing behind the table, as if he no longer could sit still, either.
She handed the test charts across the table.
He read the first one while standing—and his eyes widened. “Holy shit.” He pulled out a chair and sat at the table, flipping quickly through the tests, then going back and looking a second time, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth between scores, comparing. “This is—”
“I know,” Laurel said, her voice sounding giddy to herself. “Look at the dates.”
“I know,” Brendan said, with the same dazed exuberance. “Late March to early April. So Leish put together a team of super-scorers …” He looked up at her. “These are higher test scores than even Pierce and Linzmeyer.”
“I know. I don’t know how he found them—”
“It’s like putting together a PK pressure cooker—”
“If you believed in that kind of thing,” she said, with a straight face.
He stared at her, then burst out laughing. “Busted,” he admitted. He looked over the tests again, and she saw him frown and point to the notes, in Leish’s spiky handwriting. “What’s this? ‘Folger Experiment’? It’s noted on all three of the tests. Who’s Folger?”
In a split second she decided to keep that part to herself.
You’ve said way too much already. You don’t know him. Not at all.
She shrugged, hopefully casually. “I don’t know. But there’s a linear progression with the dates. The police report, dated right before Leish’s name starts to show up on Rhine Lab documents, then Leish’s notes on all the ESP and PK tests, then the high scorers being culled from that series of tests and pulled for ‘The Folger Experiment.’ And the notations on the test papers are definitely in Leish’s handwriting.”
“And then the lab shuts down just six weeks after the start date of the experiment,” Brendan finished. “Something happened, all right. Something big. Let’s review.” He paced behind the table as if he were in front of a classroom. “One: The Rhine Lab is on a roll. They’ve reinvented themselves and taken paranormal investigations to a new level by starting field investigations of poltergeist activity. These investigations are getting them national attention. Two: A police report surfaces of electrical disturbances and rock showers and sound displacement at an undisclosed location.” He paused. “The report may or may not be real, but for the moment, let’s take it at face value.
“Three: Paranormal investigator Alaistair Leish suddenly shows up at the Rhine lab, attending meetings, conducting tests. It’s Leish’s theory that poltergeists are created by the expectation of the involved parties, including investigators. Four: Leish does a series of ESP and PK tests and culls a group of high-scoring testers for an experiment he calls ‘Folger.’ ”
He glanced at her and Laurel tried to keep from squirming uncomfortably.
I can tell him anytime,
she told herself.
Just wait.
After a second, Brendan continued, pacing back and forth, gathering momentum as he thought aloud. “So, either A: Leish has made up a poltergeist house with classic manifestations to take his high-scoring team into to test his hypothesis that researcher expectation can create a poltergeist; or B: he’s taking his high-scoring team into an actual poltergeist house to see how the presence of the team and its abilities will affect the manifestations.” He stopped pacing dropped into a chair, and looked at Laurel, his face alight. “Either way it’s revolutionary.”
She found herself, against her will, warming all over her body.
Brendan held up an index finger. “And then—six. Within six weeks of the start date of the experiment, the Duke parapsychology lab is closed, and all the laboratory files sealed.”
They sat in silence, overwhelmed by the implication.
Something big …
Brendan’s face had taken on a faraway look. He suddenly slammed his hand on the police report on the table between them. “We need to find this house.”
“What?” she said, feeling caught up in something far beyond her control.
He looked at her. “ ‘How can we not devote our lives to pursuing that question?’ ”
She felt a shiver, as if she were hearing Dr. Leish speak directly through him, and she was two seconds away from telling Brendan everything—about Uncle Morgan, about the Folger House, about her dream, all of it.
Then she felt herself pull back.
What is this “we” stuff? “We” this and “we” that.
It was a technique commonly used by criminals, con artists, serial killers, called “forced pairing.” Get the victim to drop her guard by pretending you and she were a team.
“You’re leaving out the obvious, aren’t you?” she said aloud, and there was an edge to her voice.
Brendan frowned, lifted his hands in puzzlement.
“That there might have been a good reason that the experiment was covered up?” she said pointedly. “That maybe something
bad
happened?”
“Like what?” he asked, perplexed.
“Do you know that that Leish died in April 1965, the same month as the experiment?”
Brendan stopped for just a fraction of a second. “He died of a heart attack—” he started.
“At forty-one?” she demanded.
“It happens,” he countered, defensive.
“How do we know it was really a heart attack, anyway?” The only evidence she had for that was Anton’s word—another man she didn’t trust.
“What are you saying, that he was murdered?” Brendan asked skeptically. “He was scared to death?” That stopped her. “I don’t get what you think happened.”
She hesitated.
What do I think?
“I don’t know,” she said finally, “and you don’t either. But whatever it was, it was bad enough to shut down a world-renowned department that had been functioning for thirty-eight years. It wasn’t just shut down—someone locked up all the research files and tried to erase all physical trace of the department’s existence. I mean, they turned it into an auditorium—”
He was staring at her, perplexed. “An auditorium—what are you talking about?”
“Baldwin Auditorium… . ” But she was having a bad feeling, suddenly.
Brendan shook his head. “The old Rhine Lab was in the East Duke Building. The building was torn down in 1978.”
Laurel’s face and chest flushed with the heat of humiliation. So Tyler had been completely having her on—it was all a big joke.
All lies. All of it.
Her head was ringing; it felt as if the room were closing in on her. She pushed back her chair and stood—she just had to get out.
“I have a meeting with a student,” she lied, and grabbed her book bag. “I have to go.” In a flash she was out of the room.
Students looked up from their study carrels as she barreled past them toward the elevators.
“Wait a minute—Mickey!” Brendan had pulled open the door of the conference room to call after her.
Mickey?
She registered in some part of her brain. But she just kept going, nearly running, through the library.
CHAPTER TWENTY
She sat alone in her office with the door securely locked, lacerating herself.
How could you possibly have confided in him? You don’t even know him. Are you that starved for company?
And Tyler, that whole ruse, the “haunted” auditorium … Her face burned again, thinking about it.
Are you so gullible that a twenty-year-old can fleece you now?
Would she ever be able to tell the truth from a lie again?
She swiveled her chair from her desk and stared out her window on the quad. The gargoyle stared back in at her.
And suddenly she felt a surge of resolve.
They can all go to hell. I’m going to figure this out.
She shot to her feet and paced her office—as well as anyone could pace a five-feet-by-six-feet rectangle, and tried to arrange her thoughts.
What do I know about the experiment?
Leish was dead, and quite possibly had died in the middle of the experiment. No one wanted to talk about that, and she wouldn’t trust anyone who did, anyway.
But there were three other witnesses: Subject A, Subject B, Subject C.
A sudden thrill shot through her at the realization. Leish had collected three students with off-the-charts psi scores. Well, all right, she didn’t exactly
know
they were students, but it was a good bet; she’d noticed from all her research that the Duke lab had favored student participants. They would have been enrolled in the school. There must be a way to find them.
She went to a bookcase for the 1965 yearbook that she had coaxed out of the reference librarian. She’d found one photo in it that she was certain was Leish, and one of Uncle Morgan, and she knew there were photos of other student participants. She stood by the window and paged through the volume impatiently, to the section of photos of the lab and the student participants.
She stopped on the photo of Uncle Morgan watching the dice machine … and felt the same pang as before at the
life
in him.
Still holding the yearbook, she crossed the few steps to her office door, opened the door, and looked out carefully. The hall was empty. She stepped out of her office and walked quickly to the departmental office. She stopped just before the door and peered in—then breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the secretary’s desk was deserted. Laurel moved past the wall of anachronistic mail slots, with their glass doors and old-fashioned keyholes, and stepped through the door of the copy room.
The room was also empty, and for five nervous minutes Laurel stood in the heat of the copy machine, making copies of all the photos of the lab in the yearbook. The lights of the machine flicked in a regular, steady beat as she paged through the yearbook and her copies snicked into the receiving tray.
She pulled the finished stack from the slot, looked around the small room, and grabbed an empty cardboard box, then returned to her office and locked the door again.
She swept everything off the top of her desk into the box, and lined up the photocopied lab photos on the desk. Then she sat in her desk chair and opened the yearbook to the beginning of the student portraits and started going through the photos one by one, page by page, to see if she could identify the students in the lab shots by name. She didn’t know what she was looking for, exactly, and maybe she was just crazy, but she would start with that and see if that led to any interesting information.
As it turned out, it did.
The students in the yearbook photos of the lab were unidentified, but with the copies of the lab shots in front of her, she was able to match school portraits to all the students in the lab shots, and compile a list of twelve names …
… after which she had to do a mad sprint downstairs to her Personality 101 lecture (where Tyler Mountford was sitting front and center, grinning lewdly at her flushed face and tousled hair).
Lecture accomplished, she hurried back to her office, locked the door behind her, and called the Alumni House. She explained to a secretary that she was trying to track down a number of alumni to interview for a departmental project. The secretary was blessedly cooperative. Out of Laurel’s list of twelve, there were four deceased. Of the remaining eight, the secretary provided contact phone numbers and addresses for six of them, one of which, of course, Laurel knew already.
The other two had never graduated.
Laurel hung up, thinking about this. It was a small piece of information, and it didn’t necessarily mean anything. But the backs of her ears were tingling again. She reached across her desk to pick up a photo and put it in the center of her desk. She was looking down at two students seated on opposite sides of a square table with a black screen dividing it—one of the Zener card boards. On one side of the screen sat a young woman she’d identified as Victoria Enright, a creamy-skinned, dark-haired girl with a Jackie Kennedy bouffant, holding a card in the palm of her hand. On the other side another student made markings on a pad: Rafe Winchester, an unsmiling young man with unnervingly intense eyes, and black hair shiny with Brylcreem, which failed to tame a defiant cowlick.
Laurel picked up the phone again, and this time dialed the extension for the registrar.
The registrar confirmed that Rafe Winchester and Victoria Enright had both dropped out of the university in April of 1965 and had not been in touch with the school ever since. And for both of them, their last class, never completed, had been a work-study program with the psychology department.