The Unseen - By Alexandra Sokoloff Page 0,66

…” he whispered. His chest heaved with a sob.

Laurel reached out, covered her uncle’s hand with hers. She felt the gentle pressure of his fingers. “What happened to her, Uncle Morgan?” Laurel asked.

He shook his head, mutely.

“What about Dr. Leish?”

Morgan shot to his feet, so fast Laurel fell back against the sofa. “No. No. No.” His face was crimson, the cords in his neck stood out starkly as he screamed it.

Brendan leapt up and held his hands out in front of him, a gentle, appeasing gesture “It’s all right. No more.”

Morgan sagged. “No more,” he whispered.

Brendan took the older man’s arms very gently and eased him back down into the chair. He looked over his shoulder and said to Laurel, “Go make some tea.”

Laurel rushed to the kitchen, where she fumbled in the cabinet for a mug and found tea bags in a china jar. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely tear open a bag.

They never came back.

By the time she returned to the study, carrying a steaming cup of Earl Grey, Uncle Morgan was slumped back in his chair with his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling in sleep. Brendan stood beside him, two fingers on Morgan’s wrist, looking at his own watch. He set Morgan’s hand gently in his lap.

“It’s okay.” He turned to Laurel, and took the tea mug, set it quietly down on the end table, and nodded to the door. “Better to leave him,” he whispered.

Driving Laurel home, Brendan was silent, staring out at the dark tunnel of road, and that deepened her unease. She was about to speak when he said suddenly, “Well, I understand why …” He stopped. “Has he always been that way?”

He didn’t have to explain what way he meant. Laurel swallowed. “I haven’t seen him since I was a child. I really only met him again a month ago. My mother said he changed the year she graduated from high school, 1965,” she said, her voice hollow. Brendan glanced at her from the driver’s seat. “But he graduated, and the other two work-study students, Victoria and Rafe, didn’t.” She turned to look at him in the light from the dashboard. “What is it, do you think?”

Brendan shook his head, and his usual guileless grin was twisted. “I think he may have had some kind of trauma. But I’m not a clinician, Mickey, and neither are you. Even if you were, it would be unethical and just plain not a good idea to diagnose a family member.”

“Trauma,” she repeated.

“But you heard him: he wasn’t at the Folger House. So let’s not go working this into your conspiracy theory.”

“But what if he was there?” she asked, low.

Brendan turned and looked at her in the dark of the car. “Well, Mickey—I suspect there’s only one way you’re ever going to find out,” he said to her, and she did not have to ask him what he meant.

The answer was in the house.

She tossed and turned in her bed (alone … ) for hours, until she finally gave up and went downstairs and out on the porch, where she stood on the steps, looking up at the black night sky.

She had no other proposal to offer to keep her job, no other plan. And despite her nagging unease, there was no record of anyone ever being harmed by a poltergeist, or by a ghost, for that matter.

But the bottom line was, she wanted to know. About the Folger House, about Leish, about Uncle Morgan, about her dream, about all of it.

She had to know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Laurel announced the research project (which they were calling “Patterns and Personality Factors in Psi Testing” to draw the least attention to themselves as possible) to her Intro to Personality class on a windy fall day. Outside the windows the blazing trees were swaying and rustling, a kaleidoscope of bright acid colors in a warm, dry wind.

Laurel stood at the podium and looked out on her class. “Most of you have probably heard that Duke was the home to the first official parapsychology lab on an American university campus. For thirty-eight years, Dr. J. B. Rhine used scientific methods to test psi abilities like telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis in a laboratory setting.” She saw a number of students nodding their heads.

“I’m teaming up with Dr. Cody to conduct a series of tests based on those original ESP experiments, and we’re looking for student volunteers to be tested.”

A ripple of excitement spread through the lecture room,

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