The Unseen (32 page)

She shook her head and continued down the hall. As she approached the door of Brendan’s room, she felt again a sense of foreboding.
How can a door be ominous? That makes no sense.
Still, she hurried by it, staying as close to the opposite wall as she could.

The hall ended with the small study …
or whatever this room was used for—a sitting room, a communal room?

As she looked around the room with its bookshelves and slanted ceilings, she noticed again the newspapers framed on the walls, and remembered her intention to read them. She moved to the wall. Someone in the house had collected front pages of significant events: there were front pages from December 9, 1941: WAR DECLARED!! August 7, 1945, the bombing of Hiroshima: it’s atomic bombs!! and then peace!!! in red ink and sixty-four-point type: August 15, 1945.

Laurel moved on to another framed page: November 10, 1947. Not a date that registered any significance for her, and she stood reading with increasing puzzlement. Unlike the others, it was not a front page: there were no eye-catching headlines, no sixty-four-point type; the articles on the page were completely mystifying in their ordinariness, compared to the apocalyptic events of the other framed pages. Laurel took down the framed page and sat on the small chintz-covered sofa to skim through columns on horse races, a garden show.

What on earth would inspire someone in the house to keep this page, much less frame it? Whoever it was who had framed the newspaper pages had been capturing world-changing events, life-changing events. Why
this
page?

And then she spotted it: an article on the Dorothea Dix mental hospital in nearby Raleigh. On a spring day in 1947, a main building had caught fire. All the patients were successfully removed from the building, with no injuries but minor scrapes and smoke inhalation, but the entire building burned and the institution lost a full quarter of its capacity.

Among the patients who were displaced were two dozen servicemen who were housed in a separate ward …

Laurel raised her head and looked up at the faint square outline on the wall from where she’d removed the framed newspaper.

Had Paul Folger been at Dix, then? If Audra’s story was to be believed, was the fire the reason he was brought home to this house?

Laurel read carefully through the rest of the article, but the patients’ names were not listed.

She lowered the framed article and put her head back against the sofa, looking up at the slanted roof above her.

Would Dix Hospital tell me about a former patient? Can I call?

She stood, and replaced the framed newspaper article on the wall before she left the room.

When Laurel opened the door of her room, her robe was on the floor again. She frowned and stooped to pick it up, hung it back on the hook of the door. Then, thinking better of it, she lifted the robe off the hook and stepped to the clothes cabinet to hang it up there. She opened the cabinet door—and gasped.

Every single piece of clothing was on the cabinet floor. All the hangers hung on the rod, empty and still.

Laurel’s pulse skyrocketed, and a chill shot through her entire body. Then her anger rose.
Katrina.

She whirled to the door, ready to march out and confront the girl … but she stopped herself, just short of reaching for the knob.

And what, look like a screaming harpy? You’re the adult, here. Let her play if she wants to. You’re here to observe. Keep it professional and lock the door next time. Or let her do what she wants and write it down. It’s all part of the experiment in the end, isn’t it?

She crossed back to the closet, knelt, and fished through the heap of clothes to find her purse. She extracted her cell phone and tried dialing 411. No signal, of course; she hadn’t really expected there to be. She hadn’t switched her service from Los Angeles and could barely get a signal most places even in town. But she hadn’t been spending much time on the phone—there hadn’t been anyone to call.

She sat back on her heels, thinking.

So should I just get in the car, go to Dix? I might have more luck getting information just showing up anyway, and Raleigh is only an hour’s drive or so from Five Oaks.

She and Brendan had agreed that no one was to leave the house except in case of emergency, but it was suddenly very urgent that she know more about Paul Folger.
I just want to
know.
Was he imprisoned here? How bad was he?

She stood, opened the glass door to the balcony, and stepped out, with the faint hope that she could get reception outside. Mindful of the treacherously low balcony, she leaned back against the side of the house and tried the phone again—but nothing.

She punched off and looked out. The day was crystal clear after the hard rain; she could see straight to the white gazebo, with its crown of roses and frame of firs. A bird swooped through the garden, too small to be a hawk, but with the same graceful glide. The quiet was seductive.

Then she saw a figure moving in the tangled undergrowth of the boxwood labyrinth … no, two figures. Katrina and Tyler were walking together, meandering really, with no apparent purpose.

Laurel stood looking down on them. She glanced back through the door into her room at the mess of clothes on her closet floor, and another thought struck her.
Are they both conspiring to juice up the investigation—Katrina to please Brendan, Tyler for his own amusement?
It was more than possible.

She was both shocked and uneasy that Brendan was being so credulous, and she wondered if the whole experiment was already compromised beyond repair. On the other hand, they had carefully set up the project to be a study of the participants more than the phenomena. There was still an interesting study to be made here, if she could keep her own head.

Part of her whispered that she’d already lost her head, or she’d be gone from here, already.

And there’s no mistaking who you’ve lost your head to, is there?

She pushed that thought away and looked out over the gardens again.

Tyler and Katrina had disappeared in the paths beyond the labyrinth. Now they reappeared suddenly beside the reflecting pool, two tiny figures, far away.

Tyler glanced back toward the house—
surreptitiously,
Laurel thought, and then led Katrina toward the overgrown garden house.

Looks like Tyler’s about to execute Plan A. Miss White Sugar is toast.

But it’s Brendan who Katrina wants—that’s entirely obvious.

She stepped back inside her room and looked at the scattering of clothes, dumped out on the floor.

Someone did it. Both of them?

Time to find out.

CHAPTER FORTY

Outside Laurel moved down the brick steps and onto the gray gravel path toward the garden house. The path meandered along the reflecting pond and she was startled to see large orange and white shapes in the murk: Koi, overgrown and bloated and barely able to navigate the snarls of weeds and straggling lilies, yet somehow still surviving.

Even as neglected as the pool was, Laurel could feel the power of that carefully designed meditative walk: the long pool on one side, the soaring wall of weeping cherry on the other. Ahead, the garden house was a hobbit den of river rock; the roof had caved in in places and the yellow jasmine had done its aggressive damage, working tendrils in through cracked windows and wrapping itself around the beams of the covered patio until the wood splintered and sagged, but the structure was still reasonably in one piece. Laurel approached it cautiously, debating …

If they’re only out here having sex, I definitely don’t want to see it.

And it was a perfect spot for a tryst—given the social history of the house it had no doubt been used hundreds, even thousands of times for that very purpose.

She was about to turn back, when she heard Tyler’s voice. There was something stilted about it, not his normal speaking voice, but almost a stage voice. She frowned and moved quietly up along the side of the house toward a broken window.

She inched closer, and could now distinguish Tyler reading aloud from something.

“ ‘Every poltergeist haunting is a contract between the percipients, the investigators, and the house… .’ ”

Laurel felt a jolt of shock.

What?

She leaned closer to listen in at the broken window, fascinated.

“ ‘In its first stages the poltergeist plays with ordinary reality. It breaks down the laws of physics, and in its very randomness creates a sense of helplessness and dependence among its human observers. As there is no predicting what the poltergeist will do, it is completely in charge of any given situation. Further, there is an order to the occurrences that is seductive, they have a logic all their own. A logic that is incomprehensible to the human percipients, yet undeniably a logic, and thus all the more fascinating—’ ”

Tyler broke off for a moment to break into an eerie “Mwah hah hah.”

Katrina’s voice overlapped his, an irritated drawl. “Shut
up
.” There was the sound of a slap, though not very hard.

Tyler said something that Laurel couldn’t catch and then there was a pause… . Laurel suddenly smelled a strong, familiar green odor drifting from the cottage.

Oh, great—on top of everything they’re getting stoned.
And then she almost laughed.
That might have an interesting effect on the experiment. I wonder if Dr. Leish had this problem.

Inside the room, Tyler spoke again. “Wait—this is where it really starts getting good—

“ ‘The poltergeist has all the power, because the human percipients give it that power. It seeks to lull the percipients into a state of amusement and fascination and gradually seduces them into complicity.’ ”

Laurel moved closer to the door. There was something familiar about the ideas, the rhythm of the prose.

“ ‘The percipients come to crave manifestations, and when they are not forthcoming, manufacture them, either by fraud or by RSPK. The poltergeist ultimately takes complete control of reality. And like drug addicts, the human percipients cut their ties to the world and in effect become addicted to the whims of the poltergeist.’ ”

Laurel walked in. Tyler and Katrina reclined on the same dusty divan, one propped up against the armrest on one end, the other propped up on the opposite side, their legs entwined in the middle. Tyler held a sheaf of printed-out pages in his hand.

Katrina dropped her hand holding the joint behind the couch to hide it, but Tyler didn’t bother to move.

Laurel strode forward and snatched the sheets out of his hand, scanning what looked like a professional article. The title of the article was “The Poltergeist Effect,” which was intriguing all on its own. Then Laurel froze at the name of the author.

Alaistair Leish.

“Where did you get this?” she demanded, looking up at Tyler.

He shrugged. “The Net, where else?” His eyes gleamed at her, catlike. “Just thought we should know something about what we’re getting into. Right, Dr. MacDonald?”

Laurel didn’t answer him for a moment; she was too riveted on the pages in front of her, on Leish’s name. The pages were from Leish’s long out-of-print book,
The Lure of the Poltergeist.
In all her research she had never come across this particular excerpt and analysis.

She looked up from the pages. “You found
this
on the Net.”

Tyler was watching her. “I thought you’d want us to do some research.”

“You know the rules, Tyler,” she said evenly. “We said specifically, no Internet.”
He has an iPhone, of course,
she thought, furious.
I’m sure they both do.
And then immediately realized—
But he couldn’t print it, unless he brought a printer, too …

“I haven’t been on the Net since we got here,” he was protesting. “I looked that stuff up the first night you told us about the project. I swear, Sugar … I mean Dr. MacDonald,” he said in that buttery voice that probably had gotten him exactly what he wanted for all of his life. “You wouldn’t expect anyone to go out hunting or backpacking without knowing the lay of the land, would you?”

And all those innocent questions the other night about the difference between a ghost and a poltergeist. Total sham,
she thought, but said none of that.

“What else do you know about Dr. Leish?” she asked instead.

“Who’s—,” Tyler started, and then seemed to realize what she was asking and glanced at the pages she was holding. “Oh, the—I don’t know anything about the guy, except that you mentioned him. It just sounded like he got it right.”

Laurel stared at him. “You just Googled ‘poltergeist’ and
this
is what happened to come up.” She held up the pages.

Tyler looked back at her. “Well, yeah. I mean … no, it wasn’t the first link. I read through a bunch of articles, but that one just kinda said it all.”

Laurel stood for a moment, looking at him, then turned and walked out with the pages.

Back in the house she found Brendan in the small downstairs library, in front of his laptop at a marble-topped table. She put the confiscated pages down on the table in front of him.

“What’s that?”

“Read it.”

Brendan looked at her oddly, then leaned back in the chair and read. After the first few sentences he said aloud, “What the … ?” and started to read faster; she could see his eyes skimming quickly through the paragraphs.

Laurel waited while he read it; she’d already been through the document several times on the veranda outside.

Brendan finally looked up. “Where did you get this?

“Tyler had it. He said he got it off the Net. I found him and Katrina with it. Getting stoned,” she added.

An almost comically dismayed expression crossed Brendan’s face, then he laughed. “Well, we didn’t say they couldn’t. Maybe it will be good for the experiment.”

That’s a whole other experiment,
Laurel thought,
but that’s not the point.
“I never came across that article, did you?”