The Unseen

CHAPTER TWENTY

She sat alone in her office with the door securely locked, lacerating herself.

How could you possibly have confided in him? You don’t even know him. Are you that starved for company?

And Tyler, that whole ruse, the “haunted” auditorium… Her face burned again, thinking about it. Are you so gullible that a twenty-year-old can fleece you now?

Would she ever be able to tell the truth from a lie again?

She swiveled her chair from her desk and stared out her window on the quad. The gargoyle stared back in at her.

And suddenly she felt a surge of resolve.

They can all go to hell. I’m going to figure this out.

She shot to her feet and paced her office—as well as anyone could pace a five-feet-by-six-feet rectangle, and tried to arrange her thoughts.

What do I know about the experiment?

Leish was dead, and quite possibly had died in the middle of the experiment. No one wanted to talk about that, and she wouldn’t trust anyone who did, anyway.

But there were three other witnesses: Subject A, Subject B, Subject C.

A sudden thrill shot through her at the realization. Leish had collected three students with off-the-charts psi scores. Well, all right, she didn’t exactly know they were students, but it was a good bet; she’d noticed from all her research that the Duke lab had favored student participants. They would have been enrolled in the school. There must be a way to find them.

She went to a bookcase for the 1965 yearbook that she had coaxed out of the reference librarian. She’d found one photo in it that she was certain was Leish, and one of Uncle Morgan, and she knew there were photos of other student participants. She stood by the window and paged through the volume impatiently, to the section of photos of the lab and the student participants.

She stopped on the photo of Uncle Morgan watching the dice machine… and felt the same pang as before at the life in him.

Still holding the yearbook, she crossed the few steps to her office door, opened the door, and looked out carefully. The hall was empty. She stepped out of her office and walked quickly to the departmental office. She stopped just before the door and peered in—then breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the secretary’s desk was deserted. Laurel moved past the wall of anachronistic mail slots, with their glass doors and old-fashioned keyholes, and stepped through the door of the copy room.

The room was also empty, and for five nervous minutes Laurel stood in the heat of the copy machine, making copies of all the photos of the lab in the yearbook. The lights of the machine flicked in a regular, steady beat as she paged through the yearbook and her copies snicked into the receiving tray.

She pulled the finished stack from the slot, looked around the small room, and grabbed an empty cardboard box, then returned to her office and locked the door again.

She swept everything off the top of her desk into the box, and lined up the photocopied lab photos on the desk. Then she sat in her desk chair and opened the yearbook to the beginning of the student portraits and started going through the photos one by one, page by page, to see if she could identify the students in the lab shots by name. She didn’t know what she was looking for, exactly, and maybe she was just crazy, but she would start with that and see if that led to any interesting information.

As it turned out, it did.

The students in the yearbook photos of the lab were unidentified, but with the copies of the lab shots in front of her, she was able to match school portraits to all the students in the lab shots, and compile a list of twelve names…

… after which she had to do a mad sprint downstairs to her Personality 101 lecture (where Tyler Mountford was sitting front and center, grinning lewdly at her flushed face and tousled hair).

Lecture accomplished, she hurried back to her office, locked the door behind her, and called the Alumni House. She explained to a secretary that she was trying to track down a number of alumni to interview for a departmental project. The secretary was blessedly cooperative. Out of Laurel’s list of twelve, there were four deceased. Of the remaining eight, the secretary provided contact phone numbers and addresses for six of them, one of which, of course, Laurel knew already.

The other two had never graduated.

Laurel hung up, thinking about this. It was a small piece of information, and it didn’t necessarily mean anything. But the backs of her ears were tingling again. She reached across her desk to pick up a photo and put it in the center of her desk. She was looking down at two students seated on opposite sides of a square table with a black screen dividing it—one of the Zener card boards. On one side of the screen sat a young woman she’d identified as Victoria Enright, a creamy-skinned, dark-haired girl with a Jackie Kennedy bouffant, holding a card in the palm of her hand. On the other side another student made markings on a pad: Rafe Winchester, an unsmiling young man with unnervingly intense eyes, and black hair shiny with Brylcreem, which failed to tame a defiant cowlick.

Laurel picked up the phone again, and this time dialed the extension for the registrar.

The registrar confirmed that Rafe Winchester and Victoria Enright had both dropped out of the university in April of 1965 and had not been in touch with the school ever since. And for both of them, their last class, never completed, had been a work-study program with the psychology department.

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.