someone else was doing it too, and I guess …” He trailed off. “I wasn’t feeling all that mature about it in the moment. That happens, sometimes,” he admitted.
She was starting to feel less fight-or-flight about it, her terror replaced with a limp adrenaline-crash sense of relief, although she still had no idea what she was in the middle of.
“I’m really sorry I scared you,” he said. “You scared the shit out of me, too, if it’s any help.”
“It’s not,” she snapped.
“Totally understood.” He glanced behind him at the rows of long tables. “Look, can we sit down? I’m feeling a little shaky.”
“You are?”
“I know. Just let’s—sit down.” He backed up slowly, toward the center table section, hands lifted.
After a long moment, she followed him, warily.
When she stepped into the center space, he was standing beside her table with its row of boxes. She glanced pointedly at the five laid-out Zener cards and he grimaced. “Not my brightest idea,” he said again, and hastily scooped them up, shoving them into a front pocket of his khakis. Then he eased himself into a seat, keeping his hands well above the table.
Laurel sat slowly across from him, as if they were gunslingers in the Wild West, sitting down for a summit.
Brendan looked at her across the table and suddenly smiled, a huge great heartfelt warming smile.
“Well. I guess we’ve got a little more in common than California,” he beamed.
Laurel felt herself closing off immediately. She stared across at him stonily.
His smile dropped a few watts. “Um. So—what’s your interest in the Rhine files?”
“Uh-uh,” she said coldly. “You first.”
“Okay, okay, fair enough.” He looked at the boxes on the table, and broke into that grin again. “Well, it’s just freaking awesome, isn’t it? Forty-four years these things have been sealed and suddenly we get access? Criminy.”
Criminy? She thought, bemused.
“And obviously there’s something someone was trying to hide. I mean, the chaos in those boxes. Nothing is that random.” He looked around them at the shelves and shelves of boxes. “There’s a treasure trove of knowledge in there. But it’s like—like someone took the whole history of research in the lab and shattered it into a million little pieces and dumped it willy-nilly into all those boxes. And then sealed it up, to boot. What are they hiding?”
She had to force her face to keep still, not to give away that he’d just voiced the precise thought that had been plaguing her for weeks.
He leaned his elbows on the table, looking across at her with those earnest blue-gray eyes. “But you know what really bugs me? The department was just shut down cold. Sure, Rhine was retiring, but obviously he had no intention of really retiring, because he worked another good fifteen years, right up until his death. But the school shut the whole department down, right? Not only shut the department down, they sealed the files. Why?”
Laurel was listening with a sense of unreality, hearing her own thought process spilling out of his mouth.
“Right,” she heard herself saying, against her will. “Why?”
“So here’s what I’m thinking. You gotta admit, things were getting pretty wild there, by ’64, ’65. The whole poltergeist stuff. The sixties were just starting to explode, and people were testing the boundaries of consciousness. The lab was sending researchers out into the field to study the weirdest stuff in the actual environment it was happening in.”
His eyes sparkled at her with contagious excitement. “I think they did something revolutionary. I think that there was some experiment that was so trippy, that so freaked out the powers that be, it made Duke shut the whole thing down cold, and bury it. Not just whatever happened in that experiment, but everything. They just wanted the whole thing buried.”
An experiment. The Folger Experiment, Laurel was thinking, but said nothing. She could feel the test charts with their amazing scores against the bare flesh of her midriff, scratchy and insistent and real.
Brendan Cody looked at her, and she found herself nodding warily. His face was intense in the dim light. “I don’t know what it was, but it’s in there.” He looked at the boxes on the table, then off into the aisles. “And I’m going to find it.” He turned that blue-gray gaze on her again. “Or we, if you like,” he added hastily. “We’re going to find it.”
“We are?” she said, startled.
“Sure.” He suddenly looked grim. “In case you haven’t noticed—this department gives ‘publish or perish’ a new meaning. It’s true, Duke