The Unseen

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Laurel pressed her back against the wall, but he’d already seen her—he grinned through the window and lifted the bags, nodded to the doorknob. She took a deep breath and opened the door. The night air was warm and laced with the sweet scent of honeysuckle.

Brendan cut off all objection with instant self-effacement. “I know, I should have called. But you are going to be so glad I came. When was your last decent Mexican meal?”

Annoyed as she was, Laurel was already starting to salivate… she could smell pico de gallo, and cilantro, and real chile verde wafting from the bags. She had not, in fact, been able to find a halfway decent Mexican restaurant, or even a burrito, since she’d come to North Carolina, and there were some days she thought she would kill for a tamale.

“There aren’t any,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. “Only this one. And I’m not going to tell you where it is, because that would reduce my leverage. We need to talk, Mickey.”

Mickey? she thought, confused.

Before she could respond, Brendan had moved past her into the hall, heading unerringly for the kitchen, where he deposited the bags on a counter and pulled a six-pack of Coronas from one of them.

“Church key?” he queried, and when he tapped the bottle top she realized he meant an opener.

“I don’t think I—”

He was already pulling at drawer handles, finding, of course, one empty drawer after another.

He suddenly abandoned the search and fished keys from his pocket—There was a Swiss Army knife on the chain and he used it to open two glistening bottles. He removed a lime from one of the other bags—“Can you believe what a lime costs, here? And don’t even get me started on avocados…”—and snicked open a blade to cut two juicy green wedges. He garnished the bottles, then handed one to her with a flourish and clinked his bottle against hers.

“Salud,” he toasted, and took a deep drink. Then he was walking out of the kitchen, into the hall.

In the time it took him to cross the hall to the living room it dawned on Laurel how strange her house would look to a stranger. It was still, for most intents and purposes, empty. Not a single stick of furniture in the living room, for example.

She hurried out into the hall and nearly collided with Brendan, who had stopped still in the archway of the living room, she assumed in shock.

He stepped around her and walked the empty room with a poker face. “Love what you’ve done with it.”

“I haven’t been home much,” Laurel started, defensively. Something brushed her ankle and she jumped… looked down to see the cat had appeared to investigate the stranger.

Brendan stooped and held a hand out to the cat, who, annoyingly, came to him in a shot and rubbed her head luxuriously against his hand.

“What’s your name, pretty girl?” Brendan cooed at her.

Laurel shifted, uncomfortable and somehow guilty. “I… haven’t named her yet.”

Brendan stood with the traitorous animal, who was purring so loudly in his arms that Laurel could hear the sound echoing in the room.

“A little problem with commitment here?” Brendan suggested.

“I didn’t—she’s not exactly mine.”

“Cats never are,” he agreed. “No stereo, either?”

Laurel bristled, “No.” She had not been able to listen to music of any kind since the night she’d found Matt and Tracey together. It was too painful.

Brendan sighed dramatically and handed her the cat. “Right back,” he said, and was out of the living room, out through the front door.

Laurel stood with the cat, feeling awkward, invaded, and on the verge of tears. Before she had time to formulate a plan, Brendan was back, with an iPod and speakers, beckoning her outside. “I think on the veranda, don’t you?” he said, exaggerating the drawl.

She followed him through the entry hall in somewhat of a daze, and stood in the front doorway and watched as he deftly set up the speakers on the porch rail and powered on the music. A familiar piano trill sounded, and Laurel sensed the music before she actually recognized it. Van Morrison, of course… what else from a man named Brendan Cody? The familiar music was clear and heartachingly sweet, and as if drawn by the music, fireflies sparked in the soft darkness beyond the porch.

Laurel steeled herself. I will not cry, she vowed, and immediately felt tears hot behind her eyes. She moved quickly back into the house so he would not see, swiping at her cheeks before she stepped into the light of the kitchen, where she swallowed hard and busied herself lifting take-out boxes out of the bags.

“No plates, either?” Brendan said behind her, and she jumped.

“I have plates,” she said, defensively, and found all four of them, the sole occupants of one cabinet. Brendan leaned in the doorway, swigging from his beer and watching her as she scooped rice and beans and heavenly smelling enchiladas onto plates. She could feel his eyes on her.

“All right, enough of this mysterious act. What are you doing here, Mickey? What made you bury yourself in Durham, North Carolina?”

She put down the fork and turned, bewildered. “Why do you keep calling me Mickey?”

He looked at her with surprise. “MacDonald? Mickey D?”

She stared at him. “You’re…”

“A nut, I know, thanks, you’re not the first to say so. You didn’t answer my question.”

“What are you doing here?” she countered.

“Ah, well. There was a little problem with a loan shark.”

She was wondering how to take that when he laughed. “Same as you, Mickey. The wait times for tenure track professorships in California are longer than the lines at Disneyland. You gotta follow the money. It hasn’t been a total loss, though,” he added, and eyed her in a way that made her warm and angry at the same time.

He held her gaze until she was breathless, then said “Dinner,” authoritatively. He tucked the six-pack under one arm, picked up the plates, and carried them out into the hallway, toward the front door. She had no choice but to take the rest of the food and follow.

The enchiladas were more than decent, more like divine, and the Coronas and the balmy darkness and the gentle motion of the rockers lulled Laurel into a dangerously comfortable haze.

They ate in almost silence at first, then Brendan leaned back in his chair to study her.

“So, Mickey D. Why are you resisting this so hard?”

“Resisting what?” she said, flustered. “What is this?”

“Only possibly the greatest adventure of your life.”

“Oh, only that,” she said, secretly charmed. And that’s the problem, she reminded herself.

He shook his head at her. “Please, it’s so totally obvious you’re just as into all this as I am. So what’s the holdup?”

She hesitated, not sure how to voice her thoughts about how badly the experiment might have turned out. She’d had no time to process her own thoughts yet.

Brendan pressed on. “First of all, what spooked you the last time we talked?”

Laurel felt her cheeks burn in the dark, remembering with humiliation how she’d run out on their last meeting after she’d realized Tyler had conned her with his phony stories of the haunted auditorium. But she wasn’t going to mention to Brendan that she’d been bamboozled by a student.

“I think a little too much of all this is just wanting to believe,” she said. “Researchers and subjects… they get excited and lose all objectivity. They miss the real life explanations that are right in front of their eyes.” The dream hovered… but she pushed it away hard.

“Absolutely agreed,” Brendan said instantly. “Absolutely no doubt. But doesn’t that make just as—well, almost as good a study? How desire and expectation influence perception?”

“It could,” she conceded. She’d had the thought herself. But that was before…

“And you’ve gotta admit that it’s all a hell of a lot more interesting than vocational testing.” And before she could protest, he barreled over her. “And don’t start in on your human potential speech.” He leaped up out of the chair, startling her. “This is exactly what we’re talking about: human potential! The farthest reaches of human potential.” He was suddenly on his knees in front of her, gripping the armrests of her rocker. “Psi doesn’t happen all the time. It might not ever be scientifically quantifiable. But it happens.”

She could feel the excitement vibrating off him, like magnetism, like heat. He slowly released the rocker and stood, then sat back against the porch railing in front of her.

“So what’s the problem, Mickey? What’s bothering you so much that you’d turn away from an opportunity like this?”

And so she said it. “I told you. I think something bad happened in that experiment. I think that study might have gone terribly wrong.”

Brendan was quiet, so she continued. “Leish died the same month. And I’ve been looking for the student researchers: Subject A, Subject B, Subject C…”

Brendan frowned. “The high scorers? How did you do that? There was no information on them at all.”

She thought of Uncle Morgan, and hedged. “I looked at photographs in the 1965 yearbook—candid photos taken in the parapsychology lab—and then I tracked down those students. I mean, I tried.”

“How do you know the students in the photos were the ones from the Folger Experiment?”

“I don’t,” she admitted. “But I identified all the students in those photos, from yearbook photos, and I think I’ve found”—she hesitated—“two of them. There were two students who took work-study in the Psych department for the Spring semester of 1965.” She paused. “Victoria Enright and Rafe Winchester. They both dropped out of school entirely in late April. I haven’t found any information at all about them after that.”

Brendan was frowning, very focused on her. “I’m still not following. Why would you think those particular students were involved in the Folger Experiment?”

“Work-study,” she said again. “In the serious poltergeist studies I’ve read, the investigators went into the field. That was Leish’s M.O. If you’re right, and Leish came to the Rhine Lab to investigate the occurrences at that house in the police report, that would mean they couldn’t take ordinary classes—he’d have to put them into a work-study program. And you said yourself Leish’s name appeared on work-study requisition forms—”

“You’re assuming a lot,” Brendan pointed out. “But all right. I like how you’re thinking about work-study; that makes a lot of sense. So these students took work-study and then dropped out of school in April…”

“They didn’t just drop out of school. They dropped off the map entirely.” Of course she was leaving something significant out, but she wasn’t ready to talk to Brendan Cody about Uncle Morgan. She’d promised, and she agreed with her mother: she didn’t want to involve her uncle at all if she could help it; he was too fragile. Aloud she continued, “I haven’t been able to track down Victoria Enright at all, but I talked to Rafe Winchester’s sister.”

She relayed the conversation, watching Brendan grimace at her imitation of Mrs. Hapwell’s religious rants.

“Rafe ended up on the street, and the family lost track of him entirely.”

Brendan shook his head. “It was the sixties, Mickey. A lot of kids ended up on the street, or gone for good. And Atlanta was the South’s equivalent of Haight-Ashbury. But let’s say you’re right. Something big happened in that experiment. Don’t you want to know?”

He suddenly kicked the porch railing. “I am so sick of this burying crap. Isn’t that what we went into all this—psychology—for? To unbury stuff? My family, God, they take the prize. Illness, addiction, alcoholism: don’t talk about it, don’t even look at it—”

Laurel sat very still in her rocker, taken aback by the outburst.

Brendan stopped and pulled himself together, with effort. “Sorry. Sorry. What am I talking about, anyway? We don’t even know if the house exists.”

“It does,” she said suddenly.

He turned and looked at her. She hesitated. Moment of truth. Then she plunged ahead. “It does. I’m pretty sure it does. And I’m pretty sure how we can find it, if it’s still standing.” Going back to Uncle Morgan was a last resort, but she thought they might just be able to do it without involving him. She took a breath. “Tax records.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending.

“We need county tax records for 1965. For Folger. The Folger House.”

For the longest moment he was just staring at her, then he was on his feet with his arms thrown up in a “touchdown” gesture.