files, signed by him.” He stared past her shoulder toward the aisles of the Rhine boxes. “Sometimes I swear they burned everything relevant and just saved the memos. Anyway, his handwriting is all over some of the documents I found.” Laurel started slightly at this, remembering the bold, spiked handwriting on the test documents, which were still tucked in the waistband of her skirt.
“My guess is that he was on another case, or maybe brought in specifically for one—but something went wrong and they’ve buried everything about it.”
Laurel was fighting a whole spectrum of conflicting feelings. “Why are you telling me all this?” Her voice sounded hollow in the cavernous basement space.
“It hasn’t been much fun working on it alone,” he admitted, and his candor tugged at her. “And sometimes what I’m thinking sounds so trippy I’ve just wanted a reality check. I mean, you can tell me—I won’t be offended. Does all of this sound completely nuts?”
“Well, it was nuts,” she responded spontaneously. “They were seriously studying poltergeists.”
He looked caught. “Okay, there’s a point.” Then his face lit up again and he leaned forward on the table so suddenly she flinched.
“I’ve been pulling documents. Some tests. Mostly stuff that I could figure out was in Leish’s handwriting. I compared it to photographs of his writing in several of his books.”
Brendan reached down into the backpack that he’d dropped beside the table and pulled out some manila file folders. He handed them across the table to her. There were pages paper-clipped together, with notes scribbled on top sheets that she assumed were Brendan’s. She lifted a top sheet to look at the first original document, the handwritten notes there. It was without a doubt the black, spiked handwriting from the tests she’d found.
She looked down on the writing without reacting, and flipped through the paper-clipped pages. The documentation in itself was innocuous: standard personality tests, invoices for work-study students.
“I know, I know—nothing earth-shattering,” Brendan said from across the table. “The point is, the notes are in Leish’s handwriting. And I know he wasn’t here to be an office boy.”
What quickened Laurel’s pulse was that the dates on the tests and forms were within weeks of the dates on the extraordinary test scores she’d discovered herself. Brendan was right, Leish was up to something. What Brendan didn’t know was that it was all leading up to something Leish had decided to call the Folger Experiment, that involved three of the highest-testing students the lab had ever seen.
She felt the cool rush of the air conditioner, and shivered.
Brendan was looking across the table at her and this time there was no hint of a smile on his face. “I think they brought him here for a poltergeist investigation. And whatever happened, it shut down the department permanently. They pulled the documentation concerning it—all of it they could find—and covered everything up. Which makes me think: maybe he actually found one.”
Looking into his eyes, she realized it was not the air-conditioning that was giving her a chill.
At that moment a bell jangled through the basement, so loud that both she and Brendan jumped out of their chairs to their feet …
… and then collapsed in laughter, recognizing the library closing bell.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
They sat over Chinese food in a restaurant on Franklin Street, nearby Chapel Hill’s main drag.
“Not so many Dukies, and if you half-close your eyes, sometimes you can imagine yourself back in Berkeley,” Brendan beamed at her over a chopsticks-load of lo mein.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.
“Ages,” he said glumly. “I moved here three years ago. I miss the Left Coast every day.”
Laurel actually had meant his research in the Rhine files, but as his words spilled out she didn’t feel like correcting him.
“At least the beach is close. The Outer Banks are out of this world.” He brightened slightly. “And then there’re the leaves.”
Laurel had never seen the leaves change in the fall. There were the few scattered deciduous trees that you’d see around Southern California, but she’d never experienced a full-color East Coast autumn.
“Never seen them, huh?” he said, reading her mind. “It’s a trip. You’ll see. You can’t even begin to describe it.” He looked a little dreamy and she felt an unwelcome surge of longing, which she quickly pushed down, closing off.
“Actually, I was asking about the Rhine files,” she said, her voice cool. “How long have you been sorting through them?”
“Mid … summer,” he said vaguely. “I had no idea they were there,