at first. The unsealing of the files has not been all that widely publicized, bizarrely. It’s almost as if …” He stopped.
“As if what?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been trying to find out. The official story is that the files were sealed for a generation to protect the privacy of study participants. But anyone who would have known the real dirt is dead, and no one associated with the university wants to talk about it.”
“And why are you so interested?”
He broke into a huge, irresistible smile. “Oh, please. How much cooler does it get? You start reading this stuff, the field reports of clairvoyance, crisis apparitions, telepathy … and it’s like, whoa. It happens all the time. The dying relatives appearing to their family members. The brides-to-be who dreamed their fiancés’ mistresses.”
Laurel froze.
But Brendan Cody rolled right on, oblivious. “You read these same stories, over and over, and you know they’re true. They’re all the same. From all over the world. It happens. To perfectly ordinary people.”
Laurel felt the cool tingling behind her ears, the excited fluttering in her stomach. It was exactly the way she had felt. Exactly.
“And then you get to the poltergeist stuff. I mean, man.”
In front of them, the water glass suddenly slid across the table by itself.
Laurel gasped. Brendan’s eyes were almost comically bugged out, glued to the glass. Laurel realized what had happened just as he laughed and reached for the glass, shaking his head.
“No, look. I couldn’t resist.” As she watched, he slid the glass over a puddle of condensation on the smooth surface of the table, then took his hand away. A few seconds later, the glass slid several inches on its own.
He shrugged apologetically. “Old bartender trick. Put myself through grad school behind the bar at O’Houlihan’s on Geary.”
Yeah, and I can just imagine the tips you were getting—from women and men. Laurel pushed back her chair, overcome with the instinct to flee, when he reached across the table, practically lunging, and grabbed her arm.
“Come on come on come on. I was just trying to prove a point. You should have seen your face—you lit up like a Fourth of July sky when that glass moved.” Before she could protest, he tightened his grip on her arm. “You know it’s true. This stuff is exciting, home girl. It’s out-of-this-world exciting.”
Laurel felt a rush of blood through her body, to her head, as if the very fact of him saying “exciting” could elicit a physical reaction.
Just stop it, she warned herself.
But Brendan was not only oblivious, he was on a roll. He nodded to the long bar along the side wall. “I was reading the other night about a pub in Denver that had a ghost that walked down the bar and blew on the backs of all the women’s necks.” Laurel laughed, startled, and he grinned at her. “Yup. The bartenders said you could watch it happening. A woman sitting at the bar would suddenly turn around as if someone had touched her neck—and there was no one behind her. And then you could see it happening all the way down the bar, one woman after another turning to look. Only the women, ever.” He laughed aloud, his eyes shining. “You want personality, Dr. Myers-Briggs? There’s personality there, no doubt about it. Pure personality.”
Well, he has your number, she thought in a daze. Watch it, she warned herself again.
He leaned forward on his elbows. “What I’m really interested in is the evolution of the character of the poltergeist. The word started appearing in general usage in the late nineteenth-century, with Catherine Crowe’s The Night Side of Nature, and people were starting to use ‘poltergeist’ to differentiate a certain set of phenomena from more sedate hauntings. Poltergeists were the ones that threw things around, that made noises, that pulled pranks. Some psychic researchers wrote that boisterous ghosts tended to show up in houses where children were living.”
“Children—or hysterical young female servants,” Laurel pointed out.
“Hah. Exactly. I’m getting to that, just hold your horses.” He slurped down another tangle of noodles, and took a large swallow of beer. It was his second pint, and it was already almost gone, and Laurel wondered about that, too.
“But no one disputed that poltergeists were ghosts—they were just a more violent or mischievous kind of ghost. It wasn’t until Freud—psychoanalytic theory and unconscious motivation and covert sexual drives—that this person-centered theory evolved to explain what a poltergeist was. The afterlife was out; neurosis was in. So suddenly