The Unseen (16 page)

Laurel hung up the phone with her face tingling … she felt cold all over, and exhilarated.

Work-study. Leish’s name was on some of those work-study requisition forms. And Rafe and Victoria never graduated. And Leish … Leish died.

She looked up—and nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of baleful eyes staring back in at her in the dark.

The gargoyle, of course, and it was already twilight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Back at home Laurel fed the cat and fixed a bowl of Raisin Bran for herself, and then went upstairs to her study with the list of all the students for which the Alumni House had given her numbers.

She spent the entire evening on the phone. She felt increasingly guilty that she was able to reach all but two of the former students in her very first round of calls; it was a heartbreaking characteristic of people of a certain age that they were so accessible by phone, making them vulnerable to canny predators. Laurel chatted generally with the alumni of the Rhine experiments, about the psychology department and the research experiments they’d taken part in. They’d all been tested with Zener cards and dice machines.

But not one of the senior citizens she spoke with admitted to being a high scorer—although Laurel got the wistful sense from several of them that they wished they had been—and when Laurel asked each of the alumni if they had been part of the Folger Experiment, not one of the people she talked to had heard of it.

She also asked about the two missing students: Rafe Winchester and Victoria Enright. Victoria was a dead end—although one elderly woman hesitated when she heard Victoria’s name. When Laurel delicately probed, she finally said wryly, “Dear, in my day, sometimes young women just had to … disappear.”

So was Victoria pregnant?
Laurel wondered. But that didn’t explain why Rafe Winchester had also dropped out.

She got lucky on Rafe, though. Another elderly alumnus recalled that Rafe’s sister was also a Duke graduate, and Laurel was able to get a phone number for Becky Hapwell, née Winchester, from the Alumni House.

Thank heaven for the old school tie, because Becky Hapwell would never have talked to Laurel if not for the Duke connection. But once she got started, Mrs. Hapwell had a lot to say, and none of it pleasant. Laurel had to hold the phone away from her ear as the older woman’s voice rose stridently on the other end.

“That department was the end of Rafe. He turned away from his family, and he turned away from the Lord. Magicians masquerading as professors … they infected his mind.”

Laurel was both creeped out and energized … feeling the possibility of a lead.

“Mrs. Hapwell, did your brother participate in parapsychology experiments while he was at Duke?”

“Call it your fancy names. ‘If any turn to mediums and wizards, prostituting themselves to them, I will set My face against them, and will cut them off from the people—’ ”

Laurel realized from the suddenly stilted cadence of her voice that Rafe’s sister was quoting from the Bible. She hastened to interrupt the woman’s trumpeting rant. “I know Rafe dropped out of school without finishing his senior year. Where did he go?”

“I warned him,” the older woman said with a steely satisfaction. “We all warned him to turn away from the left-hand path. He wouldn’t listen. It was the experimenting—”

Laurel’s pulse quickened. “Experimenting? Do you mean at the university? The Folger Experiment?”

“I mean drugs. I mean those heathen, hippie practices. They ruined his mind. He ended up on the street, in dissolution and degradation—”

“Was that here in North Carolina?” Laurel broke in, trying to keep the conversation on track.

“Atlanta,” Mrs. Hapwell said, as grimly as if she were saying
Sodom and Gomorrah.
“With the hippies and drunkards and prostitutes. Dissolute, depraved, and degraded—”

“Do you know where he is now, Mrs. Hapwell?” Laurel interrupted.

“He is dead to the family.”

Laurel tried one more time. “Mrs. Hapwell, was your brother involved in the Folger Experiment? Did he ever mention the Folger Experiment?”

There was a pause, and then the rasping voice intoned, “Open the door to the devil and the devil will walk through—”

Laurel quickly thanked her and disconnected before the woman got caught up in another rant. She set her phone on the windowsill and stood, too restless to sit. She felt distinctly unnerved, not just by the fanatic religiosity.

She had no concrete proof, but her nerves were jumping, her mind racing:

Victoria Enright and Rafe Winchester dropped out of school—and apparently disappeared from public record—after doing a work-study project in the Duke Psychology department coinciding with the dates of the Folger Experiment.

She stood and pawed through her roller bag for the 1965 yearbook. She flipped the pages of the yearbook and looked down at the photo of the dark-haired girl and the sharp-eyed young man, seated across from each other at the table with the Zener-card board between them. Victoria and Rafe. She was sure of it.

Two students dropped out and were never heard from again. One famous guest lecturer dead. And another student who, while he might have graduated, is not like the other boys and girls …

Laurel stopped her restless pacing and looked at her desk. She approached it with reluctance and looked down at the last name on her list of alumni.

Then she picked up the phone again and called her mother.

She spoke as soon as she heard Meredith’s voice. “I want to know about Uncle Morgan.”

There was an icy silence on her mother’s side. “Know what?” Meredith said finally.

“You know what I’m asking, Mom. What’s wrong with him?”

There was a long silence, then Meredith sighed. “You’re the psychologist, darling, what do you think?

“But I don’t
know,
” Laurel said in frustration. “Was he always this way? Or did something happen to him?”

“He was always sensitive—”

“I’m not talking about sensitive—”

“Please, Laurel,” Meredith said sharply. “Let me speak. He was always sensitive,” she said again. “But he changed.”

“When was that?” Laurel held her breath. She could feel her mother thinking on the other end of the phone, the other side of the country.

“The year I graduated. The year I left,” Meredith said slowly, and there was the heaviness of guilt in her voice.

“Nineteen sixty-five,” Laurel said. She felt hollow to the core. She sat down on the small sofa next to the window. “Mom, did Uncle Morgan ever mention taking part in a study called the Folger Experiment?”

Another silence on the phone as her mother considered. “Not that I recall. Remember, Laurel, I was only in high school. Your aunt and uncle were already at college and I only really saw them on holidays—”

“But when did you notice that Uncle Morgan had changed?”

Meredith took so long to answer that Laurel thought she wouldn’t. “He came home from school in the spring, just before I graduated. I wasn’t able to see him; Mama and Daddy said he was sick, they said he was in the hospital.” She laughed shortly, not a pleasant sound. “I suppose that could have meant just about anything, couldn’t it? A sanitarium, some equivalent of a drug treatment center. You have to remember the times—the whole world had gone crazy. And I was having my own rebellion; I wasn’t the easiest child in the world … not like you.”

That last admission startled Laurel so much she lost her train of thought for a moment. She willed herself back to focus. “But you never heard anyone mention the Folger House, or the Folger Experiment, or a Dr. Leish?”

“No.” Laurel could hear the frown in Meredith’s voice. “Why? Do you think the school involved Morgan in some kind of testing? Mind-altering drugs?”

For a moment Laurel thought of Rafe Winchester’s sister, raving about drugs and degradation.

Drugs, no,
Laurel thought.
But mind-altering? Maybe.

“I don’t know, Mom. Do you know the name Rafe Winchester? Or Victoria Enright?”

Laurel could picture the abstract concentration in her mother’s face as she paused to consider. “I think Morgan dated a girl named Victoria. Before he dropped out of school.”

Dated? Now that could lead somewhere. But …

“But Uncle Morgan didn’t drop out,” Laurel said aloud. “He’s listed by the registrar as having graduated.”

“Well, maybe I’m wrong,” her mother said wearily. “He left school before
my
graduation, anyway, because he was too sick to go. That’s what they said …” She was silent again, and then her voice changed. “What good is it to dredge all these things up, Laurel? Your uncle’s made his way. He’s comfortable. And I don’t want you bothering him with any of this, opening old wounds. I mean that. Promise me.”

Laurel swallowed. “I won’t, Mom.”

“Life isn’t always kind. Just leave it be.”

Laurel put the phone down and stood, lost in a chaos of thoughts.
Two students traumatized. One disappeared. A famous researcher dead. And a lab closed down permanently, with all records sealed.

What in God’s name happened in that house?

A bell suddenly rang, loud and sharp. Laurel jumped, her pulse skyrocketing—before she realized it was her doorbell. She had never heard it before.

She moved out of her study. As she descended the stairs, the bell rang again. She crossed the hall and looked warily out the side window—and felt her heart drop. Brendan Cody stood outside on her porch hefting two large brown bags.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Laurel pressed her back against the wall, but he’d already seen her—he grinned through the window and lifted the bags, nodded to the doorknob. She took a deep breath and opened the door. The night air was warm and laced with the sweet scent of honeysuckle.

Brendan cut off all objection with instant self-effacement. “I know, I should have called. But you are going to be so glad I came. When was your last decent Mexican meal?”

Annoyed as she was, Laurel was already starting to salivate … she could smell pico de gallo, and cilantro, and real chile verde wafting from the bags. She had not, in fact, been able to find a halfway decent Mexican restaurant, or even a burrito, since she’d come to North Carolina, and there were some days she thought she would kill for a tamale.

“There aren’t any,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. “Only this one. And I’m not going to tell you where it is, because that would reduce my leverage. We need to talk, Mickey.”

Mickey?
she thought, confused.

Before she could respond, Brendan had moved past her into the hall, heading unerringly for the kitchen, where he deposited the bags on a counter and pulled a six-pack of Coronas from one of them.

“Church key?” he queried, and when he tapped the bottle top she realized he meant an opener.

“I don’t think I—”

He was already pulling at drawer handles, finding, of course, one empty drawer after another.

He suddenly abandoned the search and fished keys from his pocket—There was a Swiss Army knife on the chain and he used it to open two glistening bottles. He removed a lime from one of the other bags—“Can you believe what a lime costs, here? And don’t even get me started on avocados …”—and snicked open a blade to cut two juicy green wedges. He garnished the bottles, then handed one to her with a flourish and clinked his bottle against hers.

“Salud,”
he toasted, and took a deep drink. Then he was walking out of the kitchen, into the hall.

In the time it took him to cross the hall to the living room it dawned on Laurel how strange her house would look to a stranger. It was still, for most intents and purposes, empty. Not a single stick of furniture in the living room, for example.

She hurried out into the hall and nearly collided with Brendan, who had stopped still in the archway of the living room, she assumed in shock.

He stepped around her and walked the empty room with a poker face. “Love what you’ve done with it.”

“I haven’t been home much,” Laurel started, defensively. Something brushed her ankle and she jumped … looked down to see the cat had appeared to investigate the stranger.

Brendan stooped and held a hand out to the cat, who, annoyingly, came to him in a shot and rubbed her head luxuriously against his hand.

“What’s your name, pretty girl?” Brendan cooed at her.

Laurel shifted, uncomfortable and somehow guilty. “I … haven’t named her yet.”

Brendan stood with the traitorous animal, who was purring so loudly in his arms that Laurel could hear the sound echoing in the room.

“A little problem with commitment here?” Brendan suggested.

“I didn’t—she’s not exactly
mine.
”

“Cats never are,” he agreed. “No stereo, either?”

Laurel bristled, “No.” She had not been able to listen to music of any kind since the night she’d found Matt and Tracey together. It was too painful.

Brendan sighed dramatically and handed her the cat. “Right back,” he said, and was out of the living room, out through the front door.

Laurel stood with the cat, feeling awkward, invaded, and on the verge of tears. Before she had time to formulate a plan, Brendan was back, with an iPod and speakers, beckoning her outside. “I think on the
veranda,
don’t you?” he said, exaggerating the drawl.

She followed him through the entry hall in somewhat of a daze, and stood in the front doorway and watched as he deftly set up the speakers on the porch rail and powered on the music. A familiar piano trill sounded, and Laurel sensed the music before she actually recognized it. Van Morrison, of course … what else from a man named Brendan Cody? The familiar music was clear and heartachingly sweet, and as if drawn by the music, fireflies sparked in the soft darkness beyond the porch.

Laurel steeled herself.
I will not cry,
she vowed, and immediately felt tears hot behind her eyes. She moved quickly back into the house so he would not see, swiping at her cheeks before she stepped into the light of the kitchen, where she swallowed hard and busied herself lifting take-out boxes out of the bags.