The Unseen

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

He took her arms, steadying her, and the story spilled out of her as they moved together down the stairs. “There was a man. Pastor Wallace, he said his name was,” she said in a rush. “From the Baptist church down the road.” Except that they hadn’t actually driven by a church, had they?

“He knew about the Folger Experiment,” she continued, her voice shrill with tension. “And he knew that we were here from Duke, somehow. I think… I think he’s been watching the house—” She stepped into the archway of the great room, and stopped still, mid-sentence. Brendan bumped into her from behind.

“What—”

Then he stopped, too, staring.

There was a pool of water in the center of the floor, in the same place that they had first seen the footprints in the dust, a shallow pool about a foot and a half in diameter. There was something odd about it, and it took Laurel a moment to identify it: the pool was almost perfectly round.

She felt a flare of fury, and started across the floor toward it.

“Wait!” Brendan caught her arm. “Mickey, wait. Let me measure and get photographs—”

Laurel shook herself free of his hold. “Why? He did it, obviously.”

Brendan turned and looked at her. “Wait, Mickey, did you see him do it?”

“No, I—”

He interrupted her. “Where was he?”

“I put him in the library, and then I went for coffee,” she started, defensively.

“So he was three rooms away?”

She opened her mouth to respond, then was silent. It was starting to sound odd.

“And you went through this way to the kitchen”—Brendan pointed, then turned—“and you came back through this room on the way to the library? Was there a pool here when you brought the coffee back through?” Laurel saw where this was going. Brendan lifted his hands. “If he’d followed you and poured water out, you would have seen it when you walked back through the room.”

“He knows the house,” she protested. She stepped to the tall back windows and looked toward the garden room, on its perpendicular angle to the main house. “When I went back, he was in the garden room. He could have gone out through the outside door and walked in through that one.” She pointed to the French door of the great room.

Brendan walked to the door and tried the knob. It was locked.

“Then he has a key,” she insisted. “He’s been watching the house. I saw him in the garden the second day we were here.”

Brendan looked toward the pool of water. “But why? Why would he do that? Specifically that?”

“Why would he come here at all?” she said, her voice raw. “He has some weird thing about the house, and he obviously doesn’t like us being here—”

“All right, then, all right,” Brendan said, and his placating tone just infuriated her more. “Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me what he said.”

Laurel looked out the French doors to the veranda, the gardens beyond. “He knew all about the experiment, and about Paul and Caroline Folger, too. He thinks the house is evil.” Well, so? She was already answering herself in her own head. He’s a small-town minister, it’s not exactly a stretch.

Brendan was already smiling. “Honey, that’s what ministers say. These fire and brimstone guys down here… I have news. You’re evil, too, and I’m definitely evil. We’re all going straight to hell.”

“He knew about the experiment. He talked about the University being here, to study the house, and he knew that that’s why we’re here.”

Brendan stopped smiling. “Well, that’s interesting,” he admitted. “I wonder what else he knows?”

No one ever got out, is what he knows, she thought, with a chill. And then she frowned, realizing. But that’s not right, because Rafe’s sister said that Rafe was living on the streets in Atlanta after—and then she stopped, and there was a thought there, just out of reach….

Brendan was speaking again, oblivious to her sudden turmoil. “But that doesn’t mean he put that water there. That’s what we have monitors for.” He crossed to the bank of monitors and reached to rewind the tape—and his face darkened. “It’s off,” he muttered. He looked at the time code. “Stopped at 7:30 A.M.”—he checked his own watch—“forty-five minutes ago.” He stared at it, turned to her abruptly. “Did you turn off the cameras?”

She felt her face flush. “Of course not,” she said in total disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d even ask.”

He turned back to the monitor without responding and backed up the recording. The screen image showed the room with no puddle of water.

Laurel was feeling a growing sense of unreality. “It was the minister… pastor. He turned off the monitor, he poured water on the floor. He was right here when this happened, Brendan, of course that’s what happened.”

She could feel his impatience rising. “Why are you doing this?”

“What am I doing?”

“Why are you fighting this so hard?”

“We’re supposed to be objective—”

“You’re not being objective. You’re looking for reasons to poke holes in everything that happens.”

That stopped her for a moment, and of course the truth was, she was afraid. Things were moving too fast and she didn’t know who she could trust, and she didn’t like the feeling of skidding out of control.

She forced herself to be calm, forced quiet into her voice. “The pastor came in. At the same time that he was in the house, the monitors were turned off and that water poured on the floor. There’s no mystery about it.”

Brendan took her shoulders and forcibly turned her toward the pool of water. “Look at that water, Mickey. Look at it. Have you ever seen water poured in that perfect a circle? That’s a characteristic of pools of water in the literature.”

Now she was starting to feel crazy herself. Something was real that she’d thought was just in her imagination and it was wobbling her sense of reality. She pulled free of his grasp.

“All right, then he poured out the water in a perfect circle. He knows about the study, Brendan. He would know how it’s supposed to look. You’re seeing what you want to see.”

Brendan looked at her with a stony expression, then turned his back on her without another word, returning to the monitors.

She stared at his back, then turned and walked out of the room, carefully steering clear of the pool of water.

Upstairs she stalked the length of the hallway, past Katrina’s closed door, through the lounge and linens room, to Tyler’s little room at the end of the house. She knocked sharply and he answered, “It’s open,” in an awake enough voice. She opened the door and saw him lounged back on the bed, with a book splayed on his bare chest. She jolted a little at the raw sensuality of the picture. He smiled lazily, seeing her, as if she’d come to service him.

“I need your iPhone,” she said.

He assumed a look of injured innocence. “But Dr. MacDonald, you said phones were off-limits—”

“Just hand it over. Are you getting reception?”

He opened the drawer of the nightstand beside the bed, and tossed her the phone. She caught it with a steel resolve that surprised her.

“On and off,” Tyler answered. “Outside is best. Anything else I can help with?”

“I’ll bring it back,” she said, ignoring his inviting look.

“Well, just let me know what I can do,” he said, with a smile that was not a smile.

And for a moment they were together there in that little room of endless white that was no place on earth…

She turned on her heel and walked out, closing the door behind her.

Back in her own room she locked the door and sat on the bed, dialed 411 to get the number for the Five Oaks Baptist Church. Tyler’s phone did get reception and the cheerful church secretary confirmed Pastor Wallace had been with the church for ten years now.

Laurel sat with the phone pressed to her cheek, her mind racing.

Just ten years? So how does he know about the house? Or more specifically, how does he know about the Folger Experiment? That was over forty years ago, and he’s only been here ten. Leish’s study, the Folger Experiment, everything that happened at that house was meticulously covered up. So how does he know?

And why would he fake a poltergeist manifestation?

“Where is Pastor Wallace from, originally, do you know?” She said into the phone.

“He came to us from upstate New York,” the secretary responded.

That doesn’t fit, either, Laurel thought. He has a Southern accent as thick as molasses. So maybe he was here before, and knew about the study?

“Oh, so he’s not from around here originally?”

“Not that I ever heard of, ma’am.”

“Thank you for your help.” Laurel clicked off the phone.

He’s mid-sixties. He could have been a student at the time.

A lurking suspicion started to grow. A Duke student? she wondered. He could have been…

And then the thought that had been just out of reach a moment ago dropped into place.

The pastor’s religious ranting. “Lewdness and perversity.” “Open the door to the devil, and the devil will walk through.”

She’d heard it before.

She looked up at the raven lithograph above the desk. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” she said aloud.

She stood, opened the door of her room, and walked down the hall to the library.

She crossed to the shelf where she had seen the Duke yearbook from 1965, and grabbed the navy blue volume. She dropped onto one of the window seats, opened the book, and flipped to the section that was so familiar to her by now—the section with the photos of the Rhine lab.

She stared down at the testing photos, at the black-haired young man she had identified as Rafe Winchester. Those unnervingly intense eyes, and the cowlick was unmistakable.

The same cowlick as Pastor Wallace’s. The pastor was Rafe Winchester.

Could it really be? Had Rafe Winchester been in this town all along?

Doing what?

She looked out the window, out toward the gateposts. The yard was empty; no sign of the black-clad figure.

I keep an eye on the house, he’d said.

Was that actually, literally true? Had he set himself up as a guardian?

Of what? Against what?

She stood and put the book down on the window seat and circled the room, trying to work through what she knew.

Rafe had been here—a part of the original Folger Experiment. He had known Leish, and Victoria Enright, and possibly her Uncle Morgan. (And what had Uncle Morgan said? “They never came back.” And Rafe: “They didn’t get out. No one did.”)

But Rafe Winchester/Pastor Wallace did make it out of the house.

Or did he, really? Certainly he may not have made it out intact. Not with his whole mind. There were years on the streets, drugs, degradation… and then apparently a turnabout at some point—a return to religion.

But not to sanity. He may have made himself a place in the community, but there was nothing right about him.

He had seen what had gone on in the house, had experienced it; he might know details of Leish’s death, and details of Uncle Morgan’s… breakdown? Shattering?

Laurel was certain that the timing of the pastor’s visit and the “manifestations” in the great room were not coincidental.

She felt a powerful need to find out more about him, and a sense that it couldn’t wait. The pastor knew a lot about the house, and he wasn’t right in the head. If he was lurking around, and even possibly had a key to the house, she wanted to know as much about him as she could find. She forced herself to think through the specifics of what he’d said.

Perversity. A young woman alone with her unstable brother. Laurel flinched at the thought, but it provided a motive for a murder/suicide, if there had been one, and the pastor had confirmed the story of Caroline Folger taking in and caring for a schizophrenic Paul.

And then that strange statement: “The hospital claimed more than one.”

The hospital.

She sat at a round table, pulled Tyler’s iPhone out of her pocket and called information again, this time asked for and was connected to Dorothea Dix Hospital.

“I’m Dr. MacDonald, from Duke Medical,” she said, then took a breath and took the plunge. “I’m calling about a patient.” She mentally crossed her fingers and said the name.

And maybe it was the Duke reference that did it, or maybe she was just lucky, because the receptionist actually answered her, with a bit of information that floored Laurel… at the same time that she had been completely, utterly sure that she would hear it.

Victoria Enright was committed to Dix mental hospital in April of 1965 and had resided there ever since.

There was no one in the upstairs hall, and Katrina’s bedroom door was closed, as Laurel took an outwardly leisurely walk back toward her room. Inside her thoughts were racing. Front stairs or back? How do I get out without drawing attention?

Brendan was likely still in the great room, obsessing over the pool in the living room, which made the back stairs a safer bet. Then Laurel’s stomach dropped as she realized: If he’s at the monitors, no matter which stairs I take he’ll be able to see me walking down the hall. He’ll know I’m leaving.

She stopped at her bedroom door and stepped into the room, found her purse on the writing desk, and reached into it for her wallet and keys. Then she put the purse under the bed, slipped her wallet and keys and Tyler’s phone into her pant pockets, and pulled a sweater on over her head to conceal the bulges in her pockets.

She opened her door and shut it behind her, and walked down the hall toward the back, again affecting an idle stroll. She moved through the den, pausing to browse at the titles of books on the shelf, and selected one without actually registering the title. It was all to show Brendan that she was not going anywhere. And the feeling of being watched was overwhelming; she felt as if she were a rat in a maze in a lab.

She strolled out of the den with her book and walked down the short set of stairs to the last part of the hall. The door of Tyler’s room next to the kitchen was shut, as she had left it. She moved casually into the kitchen and took a minute there to rummage in the random snack food spread out on the table. She selected a green apple and bit into it, looking contemplative. Then she turned and walked down the stairs, again, with apple and book, pausing to look out the window at the landing, gazing out over the back garden…

Then she walked down the last stairs to the back door, bracing herself for Brendan to call her name—but not a word.

Fuck the house quarantine, she thought grimly. We’re getting some answers today. She eased the back door open, stepped out of the house, and hurried down the gravel drive toward her car.