sound displacement is classic. I should have had a monitor out here, damn it. Maybe something will have recorded through the windows… .”
She had said nothing for some time, and finally he turned to look at her. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s a little too perfect, isn’t it?” she said slowly. “Exactly like the police report?”
His face closed, but she could read his thoughts perfectly. She was resisting again, she was fighting the evidence, and he hated her for it.
“I’m going in to check the monitors,” he said flatly.
There was a man with a clipboard in my room, she thought. I know it.
But she said nothing as she followed him into the house.
The playback of the rest of the night showed no movement, and registered no sound, either in the great room or the dining room or upstairs—although the clocks in the dining room continued implacably to tick. Brendan stared into the monitor screen with a intensity that unnerved Laurel, but there was only dark beyond the windows of the dining room; no sign of movement, no bodies sneaking around placing rocks.
In her head Laurel was thinking of a dozen ways it could have happened. After all, Brendan had taken the DVDs out of the computers after the crashing incident and replaced them with new ones. The DVDs could have been switched and replaced with a recording of a previous, quiet night, or could simply have been stopped, while someone crept around outside setting out rocks. Laurel kept thinking of Katrina watching her and Brendan from the window, thinking of how the crashing sounds of the night before had oh-so-conveniently put a stop to her encounter with Brendan.
She was worried that Brendan was far too invested in the occurrences, when another explanation should have been obvious: they were in a house with two unprincipled, self-centered adolescents who more than had their own agendas. And there was Pastor Wallace/Rafe Winchester—who wanted God only knew what from them and the house. He’d been in the garden before, and he would have known about the rocks from the police report of the 1965 rock incident.
But Laurel bit back her objections and watched.
Tyler and Katrina surfaced within the hour and were suitably bowled over by the rocks. Their surprise seemed genuine, but Laurel was aware that they were expert manipulators: the more sincere they were, the more she doubted them.
“You mean we heard the rocks first and then they fell?” Katrina asked breathlessly, all blue-eyed innocence. She was practically batting her eyelashes at Brendan, who visibly brightened at her interest.
“Sound displacement is a commonly reported characteristic of poltergeist manifestations,” he explained, and excitement was a crackling current in his voice. “For some reason no one’s ever been able to explain, the sound often seems to be out of sync with the actual breakage or falling.”
“That’s so awesome,” Katrina said, practically swooning.
Tyler was uncharacteristically silent, walking slowly around the rocks. “Of course, we didn’t ever go outside on the veranda last night,” he pointed out. “The rocks could’ve been there all along and we wouldn’t have known.”
Laurel was surprised at his return to skepticism. She found herself both suspicious and strangely relieved that someone besides her was not swallowing this latest occurrence whole.
She could see Brendan bristling, even as he struggled for a neutral tone. “I’ve watched the recordings ten times by now. There’s no movement through the windows.”
Tyler half-smiled. “It was dark.”
Tyler was clearly intrigued, but at least he was fighting against instant belief. Laurel could see him struggling to maintain objectivity. Brendan and Katrina, on the other hand, were off in their own fog of fascination.
Laurel left the three of them to their obsessive viewing of the night’s recordings (it would take hours … hours). They didn’t even notice her leaving.
She walked first into the dining room … and felt a frisson of unease when she was face to face with the newly ticking grandfather clock. To her side the antique clock in the dome ticked along in tandem.
Explain that; something whispered inside her.
Well, it’s a great parlor trick, isn’t it? she argued back. A clock that has wound down … set the other clock to the same stopped time … for all I know it could all be set up so it would just take the slightest tremor to start the clocks again, and in the moment, it looks like magic.
She continued out of the dining room, through the kitchen to the stairs. As she climbed she was strategizing. Yesterday’s paranoia—maybe it had even been