The Unseen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There was no record of a Folger House, or a Folger investigation. Not on the Internet, not in the catalog list Laurel had been carefully compiling of the Rhine files, not in any of the texts she’d been using as supplemental material to her research into the boxes.

It was almost dawn when Laurel finally looked up from her computer. Rain was pouring outside the window. Lightning branched across the sky, illumining the street in blue-white light.

Laurel stood from her desk and paced her study (which had somehow acquired a red couch and bookshelves, already filled almost to overflowing with what had now become several hundred books, library books, new purchases, almost entirely to do with psi and the paranormal). She stopped and stood facing the array of books, flooded with doubt.

Is any of this real at all?

Her uncle’s grasp on the present, the past, on reality in general could not by any stretch of the imagination be called solid.

But the card trick!

No, even the perfect layout of cards, as dazzling as it had been at the time, could have been nothing more than a common magician’s sleight of hand.

But she had a feeling—no, more than that, a nagging, tickling certainty—that there was such a thing as a Folger House, and it was exactly what she’d been looking for all along, the mystery that had shut down the parapsychology lab for good. In her mind she kept seeing Uncle Morgan holding up that Jack of Diamonds, and she believed.

She reached for the 1965 yearbook and opened it to the page she’d marked, the one with Uncle Morgan’s senior portrait. She studied the photo, his smile, his clear and sparkling eyes.

What happened?

Thunder rumbled through the dark again, and the wind hurled rain against the windows.

Laurel went downstairs to the kitchen to make coffee, sleepy but wired. She stepped out on the front porch to watch the rain, brooding as she sipped the hot, bitter liquid, staring out into the dark.

We’re going to have to be careful, now.

The encounter with Kornbluth made it clear that she was not alone in her interest, and Kornbluth was as competitive a competitor as she could have drawn. But she felt on the verge of a breakthrough, and she had a plan. She stepped up to the porch railing and tipped her face up to the rain.