The Unseen

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The morning sun streamed through the wavery windows, casting shadows like rippling water as she descended the main staircase, past the recessed window seat. She stopped in the entry, just inside the archway. The great room was empty but she could hear them…. They were all downstairs already: Brendan had them at the table in the dining room, filling out their journals and mood questionnaires.

Laurel was afraid even to walk into the room, to feel her body flame with heat, her cheeks flush—it was obvious, so obvious; she felt everyone would be able to see her shame. But when Brendan looked up at her from the table there was nothing in his face. “Dr. MacDonald, you survived the night. So nice to have everyone still with us,” he joked.

He was either the best actor she’d ever seen, or he actually didn’t remember.

The alternative was something she didn’t even want to contemplate.

She took a chair, and Tyler watched her with a secretive smile, until she felt quite insane with doubt.

But surely I would have been able to tell. Yes, they’re both tall, with good muscles on slender frames. But I would have known. Surely. Surely.

The thought was creepily incestuous.

Katrina was looking at her and Laurel forced her face still. Calm down. Calm down.

“Miss Sugar had another interesting encounter last night,” Tyler drawled, and for a horrified second Laurel thought he was talking about her, but Katrina stiffened and glared at him.

“Not an encounter. I said someone was in my room. A man with a clipboard. He was watching me sleep.”

Tyler snorted. “If you were asleep, you knew he was watching—how?”

“He thought I was asleep but I wasn’t,” Katrina said loftily. “First I heard footsteps….” She frowned, a pretty picture of concentration. “I thought they were coming from above me, but then they were in the hall. That’s what woke me up. He was standing in the doorway. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t move.”

Laurel felt a paranoid surge of horror. What if she’s telling the truth? Was there someone wandering around last night? She flashed on the black-clad apparition in the garden.

She tried to keep her voice level. “What did he look like?” Despite herself, she glanced across the table to Brendan and Tyler.

Tyler raised his hands in aggrieved innocence. “I swear, I never touched her.”

“He was blond,” Katrina said definitively. “Older… maybe forty. Blond, with…”—she raised her fingers high at the sides of her face— “cheekbones.”

Laurel looked at her, startled. Blond, cheekbones. It was the thing she had noticed about Leish—the cheekbones. But that’s absurd. Leish is dead.

“Don’t stop now.” Tyler prodded suggestively. “Then what?”

“Nothing,” Katrina glared back at him. “He just stood there watching—and then…” Her eyes widened. “I guess I fell asleep, because then it was morning and he was gone.”

Laurel was torn. The girl was clearly fabricating and yet…

Could there be someone else in the house? Who looked in on Katrina and then…

She forced the thought away. Not possible. It was Brendan or it was your imagination.

“Hmm,” Brendan said neutrally. “All right, Katrina. Since that room seems to be active, I’d like to put a camera directly in your room.”

Laurel jolted a little.

“Now this is getting interesting,” Tyler said.

Brendan ignored him, focusing on Katrina. “You’d be able to turn it off when you want privacy—but when you’re sleeping… so that maybe we can catch some of this activity.”

“Anything that will help,” Katrina said breathlessly.

“Good,” he smiled at her. “Mr. Mountford will set up another camera.”

“Yaaas, boss,” Tyler drawled.

“Good; let’s get upstairs and do it.” Brendan stood and gestured, letting the two students precede him through the door, but he lingered, looking back at Laurel.

Ask him. Say something, she ordered herself, but she could not.

“Are you feeling better this morning?” he asked suddenly, as she stood to leave.

“Just fine,” she said, and felt herself going crimson.

She rose to leave and he stepped in front of her. “You would tell me if there was something wrong? You were really out, yesterday.” He seemed completely guileless, merely concerned about a colleague.

“Of course,” she said, and fled, leaving the room with no destination in mind and no idea what was happening to her, moving blindly through the great room, past the main stairs.

And again, she found herself in the green room with the painting. That hideous painting. She sat on the bench to catch her breath. Her mind was racing.

Last night was a dream, she told herself. He obviously knows nothing. It was because of yesterday. It makes total sense. I was thinking of weddings. I was thinking of my wedding. My subconscious created a wedding night. Plus there’s enough sexual jockeying going on in here to fuel a porn movie. It wasn’t real.

“It wasn’t real,” she said aloud.

I’m just going to focus on something else.

She looked up at the painting, at the two figures seated too close to each other on the steps of the house.

And that’s where I’m going to start.

The Folgers, Paul and Caroline. What really happened here.

There’s the library, and those newspapers framed in the lounge. Maybe the stolen clip files are somewhere in this house, even.

“I’m going to find you,” she said to the painting.

The watched feeling was back as Laurel stepped into the library upstairs, but then of course there were hundreds of pairs of eyes staring out of the photos on the walls, not to mention the large portrait of James Folger above the bar. She looked across at it, the crude but powerful style.

She crossed to bar to look more closely at the signature—but the painted line was an indecipherable scrawl.

Well, if it was Paul Folger, he had talent.

Laurel turned from the painting and looked over the rest of the room, then stepped to the long wall opposite the windows to look at the photographs. As Laurel walked slowly along the wall, she noticed that most of the photos were professional studio shots, and of only one person, or two. No family shots, she realized. These are celebrity guests.

Looking closer she also noticed that judging from the clothing there didn’t seem to be any photos taken past the 1940s.

Which means they’ve probably been up since James and Julia Folger were entertaining, and for whatever reason Caroline left the room exactly as it was, as if life stopped, or time stopped, inside the house. There’s no history past 1950.

She suddenly felt—not a chill, not anything so definable, and not static either. It was a magnetic feeling, in the most subtle of ways, and there was that faint tingling behind her ears. She turned to the wall and found herself directly in front of a photo of a slim and handsome young man in an army uniform, with dark curly hair and an aquiline nose. His elegant posture was more aristocratic than militarily rigid. And his eyes… deep set, almost sunken; there was a wariness about them and at the same time a profound sadness.

It’s him, she thought. Paul Folger. She would have staked her life on it at that moment, it was so clear to her. She felt a thrill that was almost sexual—that was sexual.

There was no identifying signature or caption. She lifted the photograph from the wall to check, but there was nothing written there, either. She studied the face, looking for any sign of the madness to come: the flatness of affect, the absence of life force, the disconnect that often showed itself in schizophrenics. But this young man was alive.

She replaced the frame on the wall and now circled the room looking at all the photos, looking particularly for more of the young soldier. On the wall behind the door, hidden from view unless the door was shut, she struck gold: a photo of the young man with a young woman who had the same hair, dark curls pulled back from a high forehead with a band. They were sitting on the brick steps of the house, this house; Laurel recognized the white columns of the Spanish section. The young man’s knees were spread, his hands on his knees, and they did not touch each other, but the girl’s hair fell against his shoulder and they both gave the impression of leaning in to each other, though they did not look at each other. The same pose so weirdly distorted in the painting downstairs.

Laurel felt gripped by an uncanny sense that she was looking at herself. She knew the young woman in the photo looked nothing like her but she had a feeling of overwhelming familiarity, or really, empathy.

There was a palpable eroticism about the photo, as well.

Don’t read into it.

Alone in the house, for all those years…

You’re making up a story.

Paul Folger would have been only twenty-two when he got back from the war…

Just stop it—

Someone stepped into the doorway from the hall and she turned to see who it was.

There was no one.

Her heart leapt in her chest and her mouth went dry as a bone.

There was still a sense of presence in the room—she felt absolutely as if someone were standing in the doorway.

Impossible. You see there’s no one there.

But she was frozen, completely unable to move.

And then just as suddenly, the feeling was gone. She forced herself to take a breath in, and out, and then she could move again.

All right, look—you have got to get hold of yourself.

She turned away from the door and continued her walk-by of the photos, but found no others of Paul and Caroline. Then she remembered that there were photos in the other room as well, the fox room. She left the library with some relief and moved into the hall.

The fox room—the trophy room is what it was probably called—was painted a pale institutional green that evoked a hospital, even though Laurel could not herself remember ever seeing a hospital wall painted anything but some variation of white. French doors led out onto the round balcony over the front porch—again, with a distressingly low balcony rail. Maybe people were just shorter, then, she thought to herself. A lot shorter.

The built-in shelves were crowded with silver hunting and riding cups; in fact, the lamps in the room were themselves made of silver trophies. The walls held paintings of the hunt and riders in hunting “pinks” (though the pink was as red as blood), and strange long-billed caps. Laurel walked along this wall as well, looking over sketches and old photos, of riders and horses and dogs—dozens of dogs. She stopped still, fascinated, in front of one grisly photo of a grandfatherly man with two small children, a boy and a girl no more than six or seven years old, impeccably decked in hunting costume—both with dark smears of what looked suspiciously like blood painted on their faces. The boy held up the severed head of a fox and the girl held the bloody tail.

Paul and Caroline?

They were avid hunters, Audra said in her head.

What a way to raise children, Laurel thought, and shuddered…

“The mask and the brush,” a voice said behind her and she spun around in shock.

Tyler was draped in a tall-backed armchair in the corner, one leg thrown casually over the armrest. He must have been there all along, but he seemed to have materialized out of thin air.

“God…,” she gasped.

He half-smiled and nodded to the picture behind her. “That’s what they call the trophies, the head and the tail. ‘The mask and the brush.’ Nice photo, isn’t it? Kinda Friday the 13th.”

Her pulse was still pounding and she sat down hard at the table, the twin of one in the library, a round one of solid oak, with a lazy Susan built into the top.

Tyler watched her with those eyes, without moving a muscle, and she could hear her heart pounding, slow, steady thumps. It couldn’t have been him, last night. He wouldn’t have dared… And tried to make herself believe it.

He tipped his head back on the chair, without taking his eyes off her. “You’re not very comfortable here, are you?”

She half-laughed in spite of herself. “You could say that.”

He shrugged. “I could stay here a while, myself. I think it suits me. My plantation-owner roots and all.”

She felt an uneasy jolt at the thought.

He laughed. “Oh, now, that’s transparent of you. Yes, you’re in the bad ol’ South, now. Soaked in blood. You shouldn’t trust him, you know.”

The segue was nonexistent, but she knew exactly what he meant.

“Who?” she said stupidly.

Tyler didn’t even bother responding, but went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I really don’t think you should. I know guys like that.” He shot a veiled look in the general direction of the door. “Always scrambling for money ’cause they never had it and don’t know what to do with it when they do get it.”

She felt a chill as he said it—there was the unmistakable ring of truth, there. She heard Brendan’s voice in her head: “A little problem with a loan shark…”

Tyler was watching her with a knowing look on his face. “Uh-huh,” he said, as if he’d heard her thoughts. “I’m telling you—you’re dreaming if you think he’s in this for science.”

“There’s not a lot of money in academic publication, Tyler,” she said.

“Maybe he’s thinking bigger than that,” Tyler said cryptically.

But what money is there in this? she wanted to say. A movie? TV? Even if they did something more sensationalized with the book, she knew from her years in Los Angeles that the chances of getting anything going on that level were like winning the lottery, and Brendan certainly hadn’t said anything about it.

Exactly. He never said anything about it.

Aloud she said only, “That’s very interesting, Tyler; thanks for your input. If that’s the way you feel about it, why are you here?”

He looked at her as if at a slow but cherished child. “Full course credit for three weeks of this? Please. Who wouldn’t?” He thickened his drawl. “It don’t matter to me none if we see ghosts or not.” He dropped the country accent suddenly. “It’s a cakewalk for credit. Not to mention Miss White Sugar is practically panting for it. Plan A is to get myself laid.”

Tyler seemed unaware that Katrina wasn’t exactly panting for him, and for a moment Laurel envied his brash adolescent confidence. She was also profoundly relieved to hear she herself was not the object of Tyler’s intentions.

He eyed her speculatively. “No, the real question is, why are you here, Chère?”

She almost answered without thinking, Because I have nothing else. She barely stopped herself in time. “No matter what, it will be an interesting study in expectation and personality.”

“Is that what you call Miss Priss making things up?”

She fought a smile, lost, and somehow felt better. “We’re here to observe everything that happens.”

He tilted his head back against the chair, looking at her. “But you don’t really think this place is haunted. It’s all just some big mind fuck for science.”

She looked at him—the aristocratic features, the lazy indolence—and suddenly leaned forward on the table.

“Tyler, if you’re just going to play around, you should leave. It might not mean anything to you, but this is my job, and Dr. Cody’s job, and it’s pretty fucked of you to be here just for a laugh.”

He was still in his chair, gray eyes like ice, no expression at all, and then he half-smiled.

“But you’re wrong, Professor. I want to prove something’s out there, something real—just to see my father’s face. He might just drop dead on the spot.”

And for a moment his gaze was fevered; then in one of those instant, mercurial changes, he smiled at her. “That Freudian enough for you?”

So was all that a game, just now? she wondered. Do you ever tell the truth at all? Aloud she said, “Not bad. I’ll make a note of it in your file.”

“Always happy to be of service.” His eyes gleamed at her and her stomach did an uneasy little flip.

No, she told herself. There was no one in my room last night. It was a dream.

She stood to leave, and could not resist a dig. “You’re right. This place suits you.”

She moved out of the library and through the hallway into the older part of the house. The conversation had left her queasy.

She walked the upstairs hall from the front side of the house this time, marveling again at the slow and sickening rise and fall of the floorboards.

Katrina’s door on the right side of the hall was closed, but the door next to it was open into the nursery, with the sleigh beds. Laurel paused in the doorway, frowning in. Why preserve it as a nursery? she thought again. If Caroline Folger was a recluse, it’s not like they had children visiting that they would need the room for.

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.

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.