might just not have been happy having the parapsychology lab here—but if there was some trippy experiment that shut down the lab? It doesn’t matter what anyone thought or thinks. That’s instant publication, no matter what the story is. And not just in some obscure journal, either. That’s worldwide attention.”
But it’s my book, Laurel was thinking. At the same time, she was feeling a thrill that they had been thinking exactly the same things. All of a sudden it was all feeling real.
Brendan Cody looked like he was deciding something, perhaps struggling with himself, and then he leaned slightly forward.
“Okay, look. There was a new guy they brought in, as far as I can see, no more than four or five months before the department got shut down. Alaistair Leish. Ever heard of him?”
Inwardly Laurel froze. But she kept her face neutral, furrowed her brow. She was still light years away from trusting this man. He may even have stolen your notebook, you don’t know. “Not that I remember,” she said aloud.
He nodded. “I’m not surprised. I hadn’t either, by the way, but for a while there, he was a big thing in British parapsychology circles. I’ve been going through the files—it’s a bitch, isn’t it?” he interrupted himself to say directly. She found herself smiling back at him in spite of herself.
“A bit of one, yes,” she admitted. “Just a bit.”
He beamed at her as if they were long-lost siblings. “I had to start somewhere … so I’ve been concentrating on documents just from 1965, to see what they were up to right before the department shut down.”
Laurel felt again that eerie excitement—to realize he’d been following exactly the same path that she had.
Brendan frowned at her from across the table. “What?”
She shook her head, fighting the completely irrational urge to tell him everything, to show him the tests, the scores of the anonymous students. You know nothing about this man. Nothing. She bit down on her lip and kept silent.
“Anyway, I found Leish’s name several times in documents, although he was never on staff here—not officially, that is: I checked with the registrar. But I saw the name enough times that I looked him up. He was a parapsychologist from London—the Society of Psychical Research. Made a reputation investigating haunted houses, lecturing to parapsychology societies—and he wrote a book specifically on poltergeists. But I couldn’t find anything for him after 1965. He disappeared.”
Actually, he died, Laurel thought. He died the same month the lab closed down. But she kept the thought to herself.
“Except he was here. In 1965.” Across the table, in the dim light, Brendan’s eyes gleamed. “Like I said, he’s not on record with the school as ever being part of the Duke parapsychology lab. But his name is on the roster in several memos, and he’s listed as being present at some meetings.”
More proof, Laurel thought, exhilarated. Her pulse spiked, but she kept her face neutral.
Brendan slammed his palm down on the table top, startling her. “He was definitely here. And there’s no official record of him, no acknowledgement of having someone that big around, when they kept records of everything else under the sun?” He leaned back in his chair. “I think not. I’m pretty sure that anything really relevant has been lifted. They took his name off documents, and something happened that year that shut down the lab and sealed these files.”
Laurel was reeling, although she was careful to keep her face expressionless. Her hands were pressed into the table so that she wouldn’t move or betray her excitement. Between what Brendan had and what she had, there was a good chance they could piece together the Folger Experiment.
Brendan was already off again, talking a mile a minute. Laurel was sure by now that he was manic, maybe even clinically, and it wouldn’t be much effort at all to keep him talking. In fact, he did exactly that.
“Now, as far as I can see Leish was involved in some way with the poltergeist investigations. He wasn’t in on the ones that Roll and Pratt did, the obvious ones like Seaford and Newark …” He glanced at her to see if she were following the references, and she nodded. “There was so much press coverage on those, it would have been easy to find out if Leish had been involved, and yeah, I checked. But he was reviewing all of the poltergeist cases. I know that because I found a requisition form for back