The Unseen (2 page)

But she was not herself; she had no sense of what “self” meant anymore. And buying meant it would be harder to ever go back.

She walked now like a white-robed ghost through the empty rooms—literally, empty: she’d spent her entire savings on the purchase, therefore furniture was not really an option. She maxed out a credit card on a bed, a kitchen table with chairs, and a very large desk for her upstairs study. The kitchen boasted a refrigerator, a stove, and an eating alcove. The rest of the house was entirely bare—but then, so was Laurel, so the emptiness suited her.

She moved across the empty hallway and turned the latch of the door.

She opened it and looked out, like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
—and felt the familiar wave of unreality to see, instead of flat, sunny West Hollywood, the curved, tree-lined street, regal houses with their own wraparound porches with rockers and ceiling fans and hanging baskets of ferns, and yards with huge and lushly flowering trees. A car might pass once every ten minutes or so, and then the thick silence would descend again, laced with the subdued twittering of birds, the low hum of cicadas, wind chimes, an occasional faraway train whistle, even the tolling of church bells.

A white-and-orange kitty with luminous gold eyes sat on the porch, centered exactly halfway between the doormat and beginning of the stairs, and looked up at Laurel expectantly.

“Still here, hmm?” Laurel said to it wryly. “You’re a trouper.”

The cat waited beside the door while Laurel fetched the newspaper and then walked, flowingly, in front of her into the house, through the center hall, straight to the kitchen, where it sat beside the pantry door, waiting to be fed. The morning after Laurel had moved in she’d opened the front door and the cat had walked in as if it owned the place. The cat was light years ahead of Laurel in confidence, and she figured she could learn something from it, so they had been cohabitating ever since, the cat on one pillow of the new bed, and Laurel on the other. Laurel had yet to name it, but felt certain that the cat would let her know in its own time how it wished to be addressed.

She tried not to think what it meant to be so vulnerable that a strange cat could dictate her life.

She reached for the coffeepot that she’d programmed the night before, and her eyes fell on the window.

She looked out on her lovely, alien neighborhood and thought for the millionth time,
What am I doing here? What have I done?

But it turned out to be the day that she found out.

CHAPTER TWO

Late, late, late.

Laurel gunned her Volvo out of the driveway and hit the road with a squeal of tires.
The entire day? I slept the entire day?

But it happened alarmingly often these days. Avoidance. She’d been dreading the Psych department’s welcoming faculty cocktail party all week. For the whole first week of school she’d successfully avoided colleagues and gatherings; she couldn’t bear the thought of having to fend off personal questions. Now, of course, she realized the huge flaw in her plan. She would have to meet them all at once.

At least I made it through the first week,
she thought wryly, as she drove across the railroad tracks out onto the highway.

She had a light teaching load for the first semester, just two lecture classes. The class sizes were amazingly small, and she could teach the Intro to Psychology and Intro to Personality courses in her sleep. Teaching was something she was good at, something safe and known, that kept her mind off Matt and
the dream.

Yes, she’d survived the first week of classes well enough. After all, she had no reason to talk about her personal life with her students.

Tonight would be a different story. She’d have to say something. So after her coffee she’d simply crawled back into bed.

And slept the whole day.

Luckily the first clothes box she’d sliced open in a panic had had her favorite outfit practically on top. Luckily she lived only fifteen minutes from campus and traffic as she knew it was nonexistent.

“I’m not late, I’m
fashionably
late,” she mumbled, with a touch of hysteria, and pressed down her foot on the gas pedal to exit onto Main Street, toward downtown.

Duke University was the center of the city of Durham, a former tobacco town. Through no conscious plan of her own, Laurel had landed in one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. The area boasted three major universities and a burgeoning software park within a half-hour’s drive of each other, and development had exploded in the Triangle cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, all of which consistently made “Top Ten Places to Live” lists.

Durham—the whole Triangle area—was much smaller than Los Angeles, of course. Anywhere would be. The up side was that getting around town was as easy as teleporting. Locals complained about the traffic, but Laurel had no idea what they were talking about; she often drove on the streets feeling as if she’d woken up in some postapocalyptic movie in which all the people on Earth had been vaporized.

She drove too fast now on the surreally empty streets, as always marveling at the sheer number of trees. There were many things about North Carolina that Laurel knew she would never get used to, but above all were the trees.

The trees were
everywhere
. So dense they formed walls—walls lining the highways, walls obscuring the houses and the businesses, vast green walls preventing her from seeing any direction except in a straight line. She sometimes felt as if she had been dropped into an enormous hedge labyrinth. The trees made the nights darker than she’d ever experienced (although that meant you could actually see stars, which was thrilling), and made navigation around town practically impossible. In L.A. Laurel was used to triangulating off buildings. A tree looks like a tree, especially when surrounded by hundreds and thousands of other trees.

She’d spent her first few weeks in a perpetual state of lost, metaphorically and literally, until she’d broken down and bought a GPS for her car. The implacable digital voice was unnervingly like her mother’s. She hadn’t figured out how she felt about that, but on the other hand, also like her mother, the device was rarely wrong, and so far it had kept Laurel from driving off the map entirely.

Prompted by the GPS, Laurel made the turn onto Campus Drive and another sharp right to skid to a stop in the faculty lot. She zapped the car locked and hurried up a stone staircase that opened onto the long, rectangular main yard of West Campus, lined with its magnificent old oaks.

The campus was a Gothic castle of a school, with graystone walls and turrets and gargoyles (actual gargoyles!), arched walkways, a gorgeous medieval chapel, and fifty-five acres of world-famous gardens.

At the top of the stone stairs, Laurel veered onto one of the meandering paths, breathing faster as she hurried, wobbling on too-high heels, following her vague recollection of where the Faculty Club was.

There was apparently some formal event scheduled for students as well; Laurel found herself navigating around packs of young men dressed in what she’d come to learn was the Southern uniform of the privileged: tan khaki pants and navy-blue sport coats and light blue Oxford shirts—and brightly chattering bevies of blond, blue-eyed young women in flowered dresses, today even adorned with pearls and gloves. (
Gloves!
Had she ever even owned a pair?)

The students were … well, interesting. Bright and motivated young people, both wealthier and more driven than the ones Laurel had taught at Cal State. And more homogenous than that melting pot, for sure. Duke accepted students from all over the world, but the vast majority were white, and a good third of them pledged frats and sororities; the Greeks dominated the campus social life.

It all added to Laurel’s constant time-warp,
Twilight Zone
feeling.

A group of the slicked-out boys looked her over as they passed, and Laurel was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how alien she must look to them, in her short black knit dress and matching long black sweater and twisty silver belt.

Yes, I’m from Los Angeles, and we have this color we like called “black.”
She lifted her head defensively. The boys stared back. She turned her head and kept walking, struggling to keep her balance on her heels.

They look and look and never crack a smile. At least in California men smile at you when they check you out.

And they were amazingly predatory for their age.

On the first day of classes Laurel had been trying to acquaint herself with the campus (not an easy task, as almost none of the buildings had names above the doors—evidently people were just supposed to know). She’d stopped in front of a graystone building with medieval-looking leaded-glass panes in the windows, and stared down at the blurry campus map, counting the buildings she’d passed since emerging from the walkway from Bryan Student Center, when a lazy drawl of a voice came from above her.

“Lost?”

She looked up, startled. A young man with longish black hair and a Cheshire cat smile was draped on the stone railing of the—balustrade? Balcony? She needed an architectural dictionary to describe it. The young man who so aesthetically adorned it was elegant and feline, and had obviously been watching her for some time.

“Um … I’m looking for Perkins Library?”

He reached behind to the graystone wall behind him and patted it, a staggeringly sensual gesture.

Laurel felt herself blushing. “Oh.”

“Anything else I can help you with?” the young man said, so suggestively she felt her face burn even more crimson.

You’re the one who’s supposed to be in charge of these kids,
she reminded herself.
No matter how you feel, you can’t show fear.

“I’m fine, thanks,” she said coolly, and all but scurried up the stone steps, like a mouse under his watching gaze. The whole encounter had a prescient feeling of significance, and she was not surprised when on the first day of school the boy with the black hair and Cheshire cat smile strolled into her Intro to Personality class. He slouched into a chair with the same privileged grace with which he had lounged on the balustrade and smiled down at Laurel so smugly she knew instantly he was nothing like a Psych major, not even close, but had signed up for the class for the express purpose of playing with her.

Trouble,
she thought grimly.
There’s always one.

But the young man—Tyler Mountford was his name—turned out to be well-enough behaved in class, although he looked at her as if he knew far too much; Laurel sometimes had the feeling he was just biding his time until he made some startling revelation.

Laurel slowed on the wooded path and looked around her at unfamiliar buildings and a wall of—yes, trees—in front of her.

Completely and totally lost.
Again.

And just as she thought it, there was a lazy and irkingly familiar drawl. “Lost
again?
”

Laurel turned to see—of course—Tyler Mountford. He was stopped on the path behind her, dressed in the same uniform of khakis and sky blue Oxford shirt, but the shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and the navy blazer was thrown casually over a shoulder, and the long black hair and the slouch in his hips made him look more like a cheeky English rocker than a Duke frat boy.

He looked Laurel over, dress, belt, legs and all … and smiled, a slow, lazy smile. “That’s twice now I’ve had to rescue you. You ought to put me on retainer.”

I ought to put you on a leash,
she thought back, but she kept her voice even. “Mr. Mountford.”

“Lookin’ for the Faculty Club?” He turned and pointed down a side path. “Takes you right to the door.”

He swiveled back to her and raised an eyebrow. “I don’t want to go to my shindig any more than you do. We could get a drink instead.”

Laurel felt her face heating in spite of herself. “Thank you, Tyler, no. I’ll be just fine.”

“Have fun now,” he said mockingly, and slouched off down the path after the packs of frat boys.

What am I doing here? What have I done?
Laurel thought for the two millionth time, and turned down the path through the trees, in the direction Tyler had pointed her.

CHAPTER THREE

Laurel drained her champagne glass in one gulp, which she realized seconds too late was probably not the brightest idea, given that she’d had nothing but the one cup of coffee all day. But the bubbles ran through her in a warming rush and it was all she could do not to dash after the waiter to grab another.

Instead, she put the empty glass down on a table of hors d’oeuvres and forced herself to focus. Around her the elegant, high-raftered University Club teemed with the cocktail-fueled chatter of her thirty-five new colleagues on the faculty of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, mingling, jockeying, and cruising.

She took a breath and moved into the crowd, swallowing terror. As she’d started to suspect after that look Tyler had given her, the leggy aspect of her attire was turning out to be not her greatest idea, either. The minimalist black that would have been understated in L.A. made her stand out like, well, like a runway model amid the colorful (and baggy) Chico’s casual of her older female colleagues. Even as she thought it, a short, wiry, bespectacled woman with bad skin turned and gave her a blistering look that made Laurel practically desperate for more champagne.

And she was attracting far more attention than she’d wanted from the male contingent, many of whom couldn’t seem to raise their eyes above her hemline. She glanced back over her shoulder and realized she was still being stalked by a large and flat-footed associate professor with a ruddy face who’d cornered her with obvious lust, eyes crawling over every inch of her body even as he continually called her “Ma’am.” Laurel wondered fleetingly if anyone in the history of hookups had ever actually gotten laid by “Ma’aming” the object of his affection, though she didn’t expect the associate was a representative example.