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