into the great room, barefooted, hair mussed, his sweater hanging on him. After a moment Laurel ran in after him.
Watching herself on the screen, Laurel was absurdly relieved that she looked reasonably dressed.
One after the other, Brendan then Laurel ran across the great room on one screen and appeared on the next screen in the dining room.
Tyler ran in from the opposite side of the room and they all stood shouting at each other, Brendan looking up at the video screen. Katrina appeared onscreen in the great room.
Brendan leaned forward abruptly and backed up the recording. They watched the same sequence again, in slow motion. Aside from the crashing sounds, there was no other sign of anything going on.
Brendan hit Replay and they waited in silence for the recording to back up.
But no matter how many times they watched there was nothing to be seen.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
She lay in her narrow bed, trying not to let on that she was awake. A man … she knew it was a man … stood in her room, a man with a clipboard, standing over her, watching. There was a heaviness beside her, holding the blankets down—
Laurel forced open her eyes. The room was filled with gray light, and empty. No sign of the man with the clipboard. But there was something cold and hard in bed with her, pinning the blankets so she couldn’t move. She gasped and shoved out, and there were multiple loud THUMPs on the floor. She froze, fighting against panic.
Some of the heavy pressure was gone, but not all. She reached out gingerly—and her hand found a rough hard lump. She closed her fist around it.
A rock?
She sat up and in the dim light from the window she could make out several lumps of rocks in the bed beside her. She looked over the bed and saw several more on the floor, the ones she’d shoved off the bed. She was alone in the room. But there had been someone. There had.
What? Who?
She threw the blankets off her and stood.
She tried the door—it was locked from inside, but she hadn’t propped the chair under the doorknob when she’d come back upstairs, after they’d all stayed up for hours waiting vainly for more crashes.
She turned to the balcony door.
She opened it and stepped out on the balcony into the chilly morning air, under a sky blanketed by dark layers of clouds. She looked to her left and right. Both of the other doors leading out to the balcony were closed. In front of her, fog snaked through the garden, through the pines …
Laurel edged cautiously to the low railing to look down—and gasped.
The brick patio below her was littered with rocks. Hundreds of them.
Back in the upstairs hallway, Laurel pounded on Brendan’s door. When there was no response, she hesitated, then took the knob and twisted it, shoving open the door.
Brendan sat up groggily in the narrow bed. His face was gray and his eyes were dull; he was clearly hungover. Even so, Laurel’s body flushed with heat. She could smell him, too: the warm scent of skin and the faint aftershave he’d been wearing the night before. Her heart beat faster and she clenched her hands against the vertiginous feeling of desire.
“Something happening … ,” he slurred, not yet awake.
She forced herself to focus. “You need to see. Now.”
As he grabbed for his pants, she turned away and lifted the digital camera from the small writing table under the window.
They stepped out the French doors of the dining room and Brendan stopped on the bricks, staring stupefied at the rocks. There were even more than Laurel had thought from looking down at them, hundreds and hundreds, from pebbles to baseball-sized stones to rocks as big as her head.
They both walked slowly around on the brick veranda, Brendan clicking off photo after photo. His whole body was tense with excitement. “It’s exactly as in the 1965 police report—the sound first and then the stones later.”
“Yes, exactly,” Laurel said in a thin voice. But Brendan seemed oblivious to her—all he could think of was the rocks. He had already pulled out the EMF reader and was waving it around.
“Two-two … three point three … ,” he mumbled, and she had the sudden and disturbing thought that he looked like a mental patient, measuring his own unquantifiable reality. “I’m not getting any raised levels. It must have happened hours ago.” There was disappointment in his voice; then his face brightened. “But the