Brendan was about to speak and Laurel said, “We think it’s fairly close to Durham.”
Brendan turned to her. Eunetta’s eyes narrowed. “How close?”
“An hour’s drive or less,” Laurel heard herself saying, and had no idea what made her say it. Brendan shot a questioning look at her, which she ignored.
Eunetta considered. “The family was named Folger?”
“We think so, yes,” Laurel said. She had a sudden, uncanny feeling Eunetta was about to be worth her weight in gold.
“And it was a rich family, a big house?”
Brendan and Laurel exchanged a glance. “We think so, yes. Tell me what’s going through that mind of yours, Eunetta, my love.”
Eunetta looked down her nose at them, shaking her head. “Y’all aren’t from the South, are you?”
“What gave us away?” Brendan grinned.
Eunetta smiled and left that unanswered. She leaned back on her stool. “Shug, these small towns, they keep clip files on every prominent family. Richer the family is, the more files they’ll have. You get yourself a map and work out from here. Call around to the libraries and ask for their clip files on the Folger family, see if you don’t get you a fish.”
Brendan leaned over the counter to kiss her and she held up a hand, stopping him. “None of that, now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
They found it.
They sat in the marble hall with their cell phones, working their way down a county library list Eunetta had helpfully printed out for them. She had further narrowed their options by instructing them to start with the counties’ main libraries first—and some counties had only one. After a mere half hour of calls, they struck gold. In the town of Five Oaks, the library was very familiar with “the old Folger House,” and the librarian said that there were indeed clip files on the house and family.
Brendan was pacing the polished floor with the cell phone. “Yes. Yes. We’ll be there in an hour.”
He punched off with a whoop that echoed through the hall.
Five Oaks was under an hour away, in Moore County, a region known as the Sandhills.
They drove out of town on U.S. 1, and into the green maze. Within minutes there was not a building in sight, just the road and the walls of trees. It was not until the last buildings had disappeared that Brendan asked it.
“So how’d you know?”
Laurel looked over at him from the passenger seat.
“Under an hour. How’d you know it would be that close? Your source again?”
She half-shrugged, shook her head. “I just figured—work-study, student researchers … they weren’t going to take them that far.”
“Hmmm.” He narrowed his eyes and stared out at the road. “I think there’s something you aren’t telling me, Kemosabe.”
Laurel looked out the window at the—trees—and didn’t respond. It was not that she didn’t trust him, it was that she didn’t trust anyone. And yet here she was, driving into the vast green unknown with a total stranger, in search of—
A poltergeist.
The town was a fair distance off the freeway; they had to take several much smaller roads to get there.
“Freeways get built and these towns just die,” Brendan said somberly. In fact the entrance to the town was a surprisingly extensive cemetery, and that after they’d passed several miles of farms and churches with their smaller, private plots. A lot of dead, Laurel thought, and it’s right there on the surface, all the time.
According to the county Web site, the town of Five Oaks had a population of just under three thousand people, but driving through the almost-deserted streets, it was hard for Laurel to imagine where those three thousand people were keeping themselves. It was a quaintly pretty town, though, laid out roughly in a cross. There was a Main Street with old-timey shops, the requisite post office and barbershop and soda fountain, all with a certain Twilight Zone–meets-Mayberry feel.
Brendan had slowed the car and was staring out the windshield with a look of bemusement that matched what Laurel was feeling. “Can you say, ‘time capsule’?”
The town square was in the center, with four startlingly large churches grouped around a nice little park with various Civil War memorial statues and benches, and of course, the ever-present oaks, though there were considerably more than five of them.
The county courthouse was another solid block of marble, and it appeared from the signage that the sheriff’s department was contained in the building. The library was also on the square. Brendan parked (there was a spot right in front of the