the door open a few inches more, his face both bright and uneasy.
“Hello, Uncle Morgan.” He shuffled shyly behind the door, without speaking. She stepped forward. “Can I come in?”
“Margaret isn’t here,” he offered. Laurel knew that, of course—she’d been careful to check her aunt’s schedule at the hospital and had chosen a day when she was sure Margaret would be tied up in consultations.
“I came to see you.”
He looked pleased, and then alarmed. “Oh, no no no. Probably not. Most probably not.” His eyes were hazy and she thought possibly he had been drinking. He started to close the door, but she reached out and held it, gently but firmly.
“But I did. Won’t you let me in?”
He stood in the door for a long moment, then backed up into the hall. Laurel stepped inside cautiously, careful not to make any sudden moves. She eased the door shut behind her.
“Can we sit down?” she asked.
Morgan looked around him vaguely, shifting from foot to foot. “How about in the study?” Laurel suggested, as the stiff-backed chairs and low divans in the parlor hadn’t seemed in any way conducive to conversation.
Morgan turned on his heel abruptly and scurried down the hall. Laurel followed him down the windowless corridor to the walnut-paneled room. The light was clear through a triple window, but the built-in bookshelves and dark wood of the ceiling and walls kept the room dim. As Laurel had suspected, Morgan relaxed considerably in the encompassing quiet of the room; she’d noticed long ago that bookstores and libraries were both alluring and calming for people with troubled minds.
Morgan remained standing until she remembered to sit down herself (she was still getting used to these ingrained Southern manners), then he settled happily into what was obviously a favorite soft leather armchair.
Laurel noticed a leather-bound book with an embroidered marker on the marble-topped end table beside the chair, and a pair of half-spectacles beside it. There was a faint, sweet smell of Scotch.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
He shyly held up the volume: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic science-fiction fantasy A Princess of Mars. Laurel felt a pang. It couldn’t have been easy for this gentle, dreamy man to grow up in a house with two Amazonian sisters. No wonder he’d retreated into a fantasy life … maybe retreated so far he hadn’t come out.
She forced herself back to the matter at hand. She smiled at him and spoke in her gentlest voice.
“Uncle Morgan, I need your help with a paper I’m doing. When we were talking about the Rhine Laboratory, you said that you were tested. What do you mean?”
Already the words, “Rhine Laboratory,” had made him flinch and blink rapidly, nervously. He started to shake his head and Laurel said quickly, “Aunt Margaret isn’t here. And I won’t tell. I just want to hear about it.”
Morgan glanced behind him toward the kitchen as if to verify they were alone in the house. After a moment he leaned toward Laurel stealthily. “I was good at cards.”
She felt a thrill. “The Zener cards, you mean?” She reached into her purse for the pack of the cards she’d printed out that morning. She’d found templates easily available on many Web sites on line, formatted for printing.
But before she could draw out the pack, Morgan was shaking his head. “Cards. I was good at cards. Always won. Fellows said I should go get tested.”
“What fellows, Uncle Morgan?”
He extended a shaky hand, displaying the heavy gold ring on it like a proud new bride-to-be. Laurel saw the Greek letters—KA—and realized it was a fraternity ring.
“Your fraternity brothers?”
He smiled with a touch of smugness. “I beat them. I beat them all.”
“So they said you should go to the Rhine Lab … when was that?”
Her uncle looked vague, and then worried. He twisted the ring on his finger, without responding.
“What did you do in the lab?”
Her uncle brightened. “I won. A-plus.”
Now Laurel did take out the pack of Zener cards and showed them to him. “You won at these cards, you mean?”
He beamed, nodding. “A-plus. One hundred percent.”
Laurel felt a thrill of unreality. “You got every card right?” Except for very short trials with one exceptional subject, only two of the cases she’d read about so far had come even close to perfect results, even when the scores were far above chance.
“A-plus,” he repeated. “And the dice.”
She knew he must be referring to the dice-throwing machines, which could test either ESP through prediction of the toss, or PK, psychokinesis, in