She wanted to laugh at the idea that their two subjects were adults. Twenty-one was barely the age of reason.
“But they don’t know.”
“Know what?”
They don’t know what I know and don’t know.
She lifted her chin. “They don’t know any of this. It’s time to tell them.”
He stood looking at her for a moment, then turned up the palms of his hands. “All right. Let’s tell them.”
They found Tyler and Katrina standing over the monitors, their chairs beside the pool of water abandoned.
Brendan was instantly alert. “What? Did something happen?”
Tyler looked up with a scowl, and Katrina tendered Laurel one of her patented loathing looks. “No—it’s stopped happening,” Tyler said. “The pool stopped growing. It’s been at ten inches for half an hour—”
“Since she came back,” Katrina said pointedly, with a sideways glance at Laurel.
“The EMF readings have dropped back to normal, too,” Tyler said, without looking toward Laurel himself.
“Good. We all need to talk,” Laurel said firmly.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The three of them refused to budge from the room, in case the pool “became active” again, so they were seated stiffly in the embroidered straight-backed chairs with the pool of water at their feet.
“We both feel you should know,” Laurel looked from Katrina to Tyler. “There’s more that’s gone in this house than we knew going into this investigation. There was a murder/suicide here—a sister and a brother, Caroline and Paul Folger. Paul Folger was discharged from the army because of paranoid delusions—he suffered from schizophrenia. The family kept him here instead of institutionalizing him… .” She glanced at Brendan, who was pointedly not looking at her. “They kept him in this house for fifteen years, until the sister killed him and herself on the same day.”
She looked from Tyler to Katrina. They were watching her, Katrina with a blank and unreadable look, Tyler with a faint smile. He raised his eyebrows, as if inviting her to go on.
“The Duke group who came here in 1965 did so after a report of poltergeist activity. It was an experiment—the one that we’re duplicating. It ended … badly. The researcher in charge of the investigation died, and as far as we’ve been able to determine, at least two of the student participants, maybe all three of them, suffered severe mental trauma.” She paused to let that sink in, and looked again from Tyler to Katrina.
“I’m sorry for my part in bringing you here, because I feel strongly that we don’t know enough about what we’re dealing with and we need to terminate the experiment and leave this house.” She looked around at all of them. She could feel Brendan bristling beside her, and Katrina’s contempt, rolling off her in waves. Tyler was studying her, a thoughtful, curious gaze.
“This guy … this researcher—,” he began.
“Leish,” Laurel supplied.
Tyler raised an eyebrow. “Leish. You mean the guy who wrote that article?” Laurel nodded. “How did he die?”
“We don’t know that. But he died in the same month as the experiment.” Laurel could hear the agitation in her own voice.
“And then what happened?”
“Well, the lab was shut down, and the files were sealed. They were only recently opened, in fact.”
Tyler leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked intently at Laurel. “I don’t think I get it. Those things happened—when?”
Brendan spoke before Laurel could. “Over forty years ago. Both of them.”
Tyler barely glanced at him, his attention was completely on Laurel. “So you’re thinking—we’re in some kind of danger from that? Forty years later?”
Laurel found her certainty wavering, just as when Brendan had asked the same question. It did sound far-fetched when anyone said it aloud.
She looked at the reflection of the group in the cloudy mirrors on the walls.
“Is this because of that trauma imprint you were talking about?” Now Tyler did look at Brendan.
“It’s one of the theories,” Brendan answered. “That an imprint of trauma—an echo—can remain in a house.”
“And it could hurt us?” Katrina was taking her cues from Brendan; her voice fairly dripped condescension.
“I have never read or seen any proof of that. Ever. We wouldn’t be here if I thought that,” Brendan assured her.
“So what do you think got imprinted, Dr. MacDonald?” Tyler asked. “Are you saying that the murder/suicide got imprinted on the house and somehow caused someone else’s death? Or caused someone else to go nuts?”
I don’t like the coincidence, Laurel thought.
“It is a creepy coincidence, I guess,” Tyler said, and hearing her own thought voiced, she started, staring at him. “But it was forty years ago. Could