never completed, had been a work-study program with the psychology department.
Laurel hung up the phone with her face tingling … she felt cold all over, and exhilarated.
Work-study. Leish’s name was on some of those work-study requisition forms. And Rafe and Victoria never graduated. And Leish … Leish died.
She looked up—and nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of baleful eyes staring back in at her in the dark.
The gargoyle, of course, and it was already twilight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Back at home Laurel fed the cat and fixed a bowl of Raisin Bran for herself, and then went upstairs to her study with the list of all the students for which the Alumni House had given her numbers.
She spent the entire evening on the phone. She felt increasingly guilty that she was able to reach all but two of the former students in her very first round of calls; it was a heartbreaking characteristic of people of a certain age that they were so accessible by phone, making them vulnerable to canny predators. Laurel chatted generally with the alumni of the Rhine experiments, about the psychology department and the research experiments they’d taken part in. They’d all been tested with Zener cards and dice machines.
But not one of the senior citizens she spoke with admitted to being a high scorer—although Laurel got the wistful sense from several of them that they wished they had been—and when Laurel asked each of the alumni if they had been part of the Folger Experiment, not one of the people she talked to had heard of it.
She also asked about the two missing students: Rafe Winchester and Victoria Enright. Victoria was a dead end—although one elderly woman hesitated when she heard Victoria’s name. When Laurel delicately probed, she finally said wryly, “Dear, in my day, sometimes young women just had to … disappear.”
So was Victoria pregnant? Laurel wondered. But that didn’t explain why Rafe Winchester had also dropped out.
She got lucky on Rafe, though. Another elderly alumnus recalled that Rafe’s sister was also a Duke graduate, and Laurel was able to get a phone number for Becky Hapwell, née Winchester, from the Alumni House.
Thank heaven for the old school tie, because Becky Hapwell would never have talked to Laurel if not for the Duke connection. But once she got started, Mrs. Hapwell had a lot to say, and none of it pleasant. Laurel had to hold the phone away from her ear as the older woman’s voice rose stridently on the other end.
“That department was the end of Rafe. He turned away from his family, and he turned away from the Lord. Magicians masquerading as professors … they infected his mind.”
Laurel was both creeped out and energized … feeling the possibility of a lead.
“Mrs. Hapwell, did your brother participate in parapsychology experiments while he was at Duke?”
“Call it your fancy names. ‘If any turn to mediums and wizards, prostituting themselves to them, I will set My face against them, and will cut them off from the people—’ ”
Laurel realized from the suddenly stilted cadence of her voice that Rafe’s sister was quoting from the Bible. She hastened to interrupt the woman’s trumpeting rant. “I know Rafe dropped out of school without finishing his senior year. Where did he go?”
“I warned him,” the older woman said with a steely satisfaction. “We all warned him to turn away from the left-hand path. He wouldn’t listen. It was the experimenting—”
Laurel’s pulse quickened. “Experimenting? Do you mean at the university? The Folger Experiment?”
“I mean drugs. I mean those heathen, hippie practices. They ruined his mind. He ended up on the street, in dissolution and degradation—”
“Was that here in North Carolina?” Laurel broke in, trying to keep the conversation on track.
“Atlanta,” Mrs. Hapwell said, as grimly as if she were saying Sodom and Gomorrah. “With the hippies and drunkards and prostitutes. Dissolute, depraved, and degraded—”
“Do you know where he is now, Mrs. Hapwell?” Laurel interrupted.
“He is dead to the family.”
Laurel tried one more time. “Mrs. Hapwell, was your brother involved in the Folger Experiment? Did he ever mention the Folger Experiment?”
There was a pause, and then the rasping voice intoned, “Open the door to the devil and the devil will walk through—”
Laurel quickly thanked her and disconnected before the woman got caught up in another rant. She set her phone on the windowsill and stood, too restless to sit. She felt distinctly unnerved, not just by the fanatic religiosity.
She had no concrete proof, but her nerves were jumping, her mind