The Unseen (7 page)

She felt movement from the doorway behind her and turned with a start—to see a ruddy, sweet-faced man of around sixty hovering shyly behind her, in the doorway of the study. His eyes were an amazing crystal blue: Carolina blue, they called it here.

“Well, come in, Morgan—say hello.” Margaret spoke irritably, as to a child. The man blushed and dipped his head. “Morgan, you remember Laurel. Laurel, your Uncle Morgan.”

Laurel smiled at her uncle and he sidled into the room, peering at her worriedly. Laurel was starting to wonder if he could speak at all. Then suddenly he beamed at her, his whole face lighting.

“Meredith.”

For a moment Laurel thought he was in a fog of age, mistaking her for her mother. Margaret frowned and opened her mouth to speak, when Morgan shook his head.

“You look just like her,” he said softly, and Laurel felt her eyes brimming with unexpected tears.

Dinner, thankfully, commenced almost immediately, with Margaret serving from a sideboard and delegating a few trivial tasks. They sat down to the formally laid table with no grace said or even alluded to; in that, family was family.

There was no sign of a cook or any other household help, though Laurel couldn’t imagine that Aunt Margaret had made the gargantuan dinner on her own. Along with both fried chicken and steak, there were biscuits, three kinds of casseroles, and two kinds of pie, along with bottomless glasses of sweet tea. Laurel kept murmuring, “Yes, please,” to refills, even though one of the first things she’d had to learn was to order her iced tea “unsweet” to avoid the syrupy concoction that was the regional standard.

Even with the distraction of eating, Laurel was almost paralyzed with awkwardness. Every few minutes she found herself straightening her spine, anxious to sit properly. Questions about her mother were quickly floated and answered, Margaret’s work in recombinant DNA discussed, and Morgan’s reduced hours at the tobacco shop he had owned for years took mere minutes to relate, as Margaret did all the talking and clearly had no use for her brother’s shopkeeping activities. Morgan himself barely said a word beyond “please” and “thank you” throughout the entire meal, and Margaret answered any questions directed toward him for him. Laurel began to think her uncle might be simple (“simple” was the word that went through her head, instead of “autistic” or “borderline” or “schizotypal” or “developmentally disabled”). She was vaguely aware that he had lived with Margaret for some time, but had no idea if that was because he was unable to take care of himself on his own or simply that, as a lifelong bachelor and spinster, the living arrangement was more convenient and economical for both of them. But she also knew he was educated, a Duke graduate himself.

Something doesn’t fit,
she thought.
I wonder.

She became aware that an appalling silence had fallen around the table, and she leapt to fill it without entirely thinking.

“So I’ve been doing some research into the Rhine Laboratory.”

Margaret instantly stiffened. The air around them seemed to thicken. Morgan was industriously bent over his plate, cutting his steak, his face not visible.

Margaret touched her napkin to her lips. “What”—her tone added “on earth”—“is your interest in the Rhine Lab?”

Laurel felt as if she were walking around mines. She realized instinctively she should not mention her book. If she’d been thinking at all she would have taken the clear warning in Margaret’s tone and dropped the subject altogether, but the fact was, she didn’t know what was driving her fascination with the lab, and she had no one else to talk to about it. And somewhere in her mind, without being aware of it, she’d done the math: both Margaret and Morgan would have been at Duke in the early sixties, so surely they had anecdotal knowledge of the parapsychology lab. It had been too famous by the 1960s—the entire world had known about Rhine; as Duke students, they must have been acutely aware of the lab. She tried to keep her tone light, to diffuse the strange tension.

“I’m not sure exactly. It hadn’t even occurred to me that it was here, at Duke. I’ve heard so much about it… .” She laughed slightly. “Well, it’s almost mythic, isn’t it?”

“Mythic,” Margaret repeated, tonelessly.

Laurel pressed on. “I was wondering why it was closed. So abruptly. I haven’t been able to find much about that.”

Margaret set down her glass with a thud.

“It was closed because people came to their senses. Balderdash. All of those years—all of those resources squandered on something purely unprovable. People wanting to believe and making up facts to support it. Gullible people buying into a fraud. I’m surprised you’d waste your time on something so silly.”

Her aunt was near trembling with anger. Laurel was stunned into silence. Morgan had not once raised his gaze from his plate during the entire exchange.

“I was only … curious,” Laurel stammered.

“Curiosity killed the cat.” Margaret stood, and lifted her plate. Suddenly the storm had passed and her face assembled itself into something more dignified. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get dessert.”

As Margaret left the room, Laurel could have cut the silence with the silver butter knife she still held limply in her hand.

Morgan had raised his head and was looking at her from across the table. “I did it,” he said quietly, conspiratorially.

Laurel looked at him, startled that he’d even spoken. She had no idea what he was confessing to.

He nodded solemnly. “I did the tests. Dr. Rhine tested me. I did it.”

Margaret’s steps clicked in the hall, approaching, and Morgan went back to mopping up gravy on his plate as if nothing had happened at all, leaving Laurel stunned speechless.

After dinner Morgan promptly disappeared for the rest of the evening, which didn’t last much longer beyond dessert. Laurel helped Margaret clear the dishes and load the dishwasher; they talked of her house purchase and of reliable plumbers and yard services, and steered far clear of the Rhine Laboratory. Morgan had retreated to the dark-paneled study; when Laurel stopped in to say good-bye he rose vaguely from a large leather armchair, book in hand, and bowed graciously. His blue eyes were so hazy Laurel had no idea if he was even aware of who she was.

At home in bed, with the still-unnamed cat purring like a diesel combine on the pillow beside her, Laurel tossed restlessly and pondered the chances that she would be related to an original Rhine test subject.

Not so entirely surprising, is it? Rhine and his researchers had conducted their experiments for thirty-eight years and had used hundreds, maybe thousands of student volunteers. Morgan had been attending the university at the time. Why wouldn’t he have participated?

She rolled over, resettled her pillow, stared up into the dark.

But why is Aunt Margaret so angry about it? Not even just angry …

Laurel lay still for a minute, trying to identify what she had felt from her aunt’s reaction.

Frightened.

What Aunt Margaret was, was frightened.

CHAPTER TEN

She is at a table, a round breakfast table, in a sunny room, arched glass windows on three sides. She is tall but small, not just small, in a high chair, a child, a toddler giggling through wisps of red-gold hair. The sun is dazzling through the windows, warm on her cheeks.

At the side of the table, a beaming man with a round, ruddy face laughs with her, blue eyes sparkling …

… as the forks and spoons dance by themselves on the table in front of them …

Laurel’s eyes flew open. Her cheeks were warm … as warm as if she’d been sitting in sunlight.

But the electronic shrilling she was hearing did not belong in that sunny breakfast room. She moved under the blankets, shaking off sleep, and realized her cell phone was jangling on the stand beside the bed.

To her vast and groggy surprise the caller was her mother. Adrenaline shot through Laurel and she bolted up in bed. “Mom? Is everything okay?” Meredith never called two days in a row, and it was shockingly early in West Coast time.

“Of course,” Meredith’s voice was gravelly, irritable. “I was just calling to see how it went.”

Laurel wrested her co-opted pillow away from the cat and leaned back against it. She wasn’t entirely buying her mother’s sudden attempt to be an involved parent, but saw an opportunity to mine some information herself.

“It was nice,” she said neutrally. For a moment she wondered if Margaret had already reported about the dinner, if there was some conspiracy between the all-but-estranged sisters.
And why would you be thinking that?

“So everyone’s well?” Meredith was asking, equally neutrally.

“They seem fine, Mom,” Laurel answered. “It was nice of them to have me.” Then before she could lose her nerve, she blurted out. “Did you know that Uncle Morgan was a test subject in the Rhine parapsychology experiments?”

There was an instantaneous, live silence on the other end of the phone. After an eternity, Meredith said slowly. “Yes, that’s right. I’d all but forgotten about that.” Then she said something that threw Laurel more than anything else that had happened. “He always was like Mama that way.”

Meredith’s voice was far away, and she’d reverted to a Southern accent that Laurel had only heard her use in times of extreme stress. Laurel held her breath, wondering if her mother would say more. When she didn’t, Laurel hazarded:

“Like Grandma—in what way?”

“What?” Meredith snapped, and there was a hint of outrage in her tone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. How in the world did that business come up, anyway?” Meredith’s tone was back to her usual crisp irritability, and the Southern accent was gone.

“Oh, I saw an exhibit in the library and wondered if they remembered the lab,” Laurel said vaguely. She hesitated, then took the plunge. “All of those experiments must have been a huge deal on campus when Aunt Margaret and Uncle Morgan were there, at Duke.”

The silence on the other end was icy. “I hope you haven’t been upsetting your uncle.”

What? What was that?

Laurel swallowed. “I don’t think I have, Mom. What do you mean?”

Her mother ignored that entirely. “I have to run. I’m speaking at a conference this morning—”

“Wait—Mom,” Laurel said quickly. “I wanted to know … when we visited Aunt Margaret and Uncle Morgan and Grandma—when I was three or four—were they living in the same house? The two-story with that glassed-in breakfast room?”

Her mother paused. “Yes, the house on Steeple Street. Why?”

Laurel closed her eyes and saw the sunny alcove from her dream, the silverware dancing on the table in front of her uncle.

“I thought I remembered it. I just wanted to know.”

Again, silence, something unspoken. Then Meredith said, “Don’t forget to write your aunt a thank-you note; they live and die on those things there.”

As usual Meredith disconnected without saying good-bye, but Laurel had gotten what she needed: Uncle Morgan wasn’t fantasizing; he really had been a test subject in the lab. And Meredith’s unexpected admission kept playing in her head.

“He always was like Mama that way.”

The thought, coming from her supremely rational mother, gave Laurel an eerie thrill. It meant Meredith believed that Morgan, and their mother, had some kind of—and Laurel had to pause even mentally before she even thought the word—

Power.

She felt caught in something huge, something bigger than herself, and yet
about
herself—something almost inevitable.

I have to know what happened.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Laurel was barely able to focus on her “Theories of Personality” lecture, a fact that was not lost on Tyler Mountford, who smirked down at her knowingly from his front and center seat every time she drifted off in thought and lost her place.

As soon as she uttered the last word she dismissed the class without discussion and raced through a morning drifting with gray fog across to the Administration Building.

“No Alaistair Leish on staff,” said the blond clerk in the registrar’s office, with red, white, and blue salon nails clicking on the computer keys.

“Could you check for other years besides 1965?” Laurel asked. “Or how about as a guest lecturer?”

“It would have come up in the search,” the clerk said. “There’s no record of an Alaistair Leish ever being on the university payroll.”

Laurel turned away from the counter, murmuring thanks, and stood for a moment on the marble floor, frowning and frustrated.
But Leish must have been at the lab. All those shots of Duke in the film … so why no record of him?

She left the Administration Building and crossed the quad under the massive oaks. She paused on the path and stared through the fog at the Psych Building.

Now what?

She knew there might well be professors in the department who would have been at Duke in the sixties, but she felt an instinctive reluctance to approach any of her department colleagues on the subject. It wasn’t paranoia, really, but she didn’t want someone co-opting her project, even though she didn’t exactly have one, yet.

And there was no one yet that she
could
talk to, anyway. She’d seen Brendan Cody around campus, of course, in the halls of the Psych department, holding seminars outside on the lawn under the trees. It was impossible to miss his constant whirl of energy and exuberance.

He was always surrounded by coeds, psych students who obviously had more interest in the young professor than in the study of the mind. And the sight of Brendan surrounded by sighing females made Laurel even more determined to avoid him, for her own self-preservation.

She turned on the path and glanced toward the circle of oaks where she often saw him with his study groups, but on this chilly day the lawn was empty, dotted with little white daisies.

She was not aware that she herself sighed, as she turned away from the tree.

It’s fine. I can do this by myself.
She stood for a moment, looking at the buildings around her, then she started off through the drifting gray fog across to East Campus.