Alexandra Sokoloff - The Unseen

But why is Aunt Margaret so angry about it? Not even just angry…

Laurel lay still for a minute, trying to identify what she had felt from her aunt’s reaction.

Frightened.

What Aunt Margaret was, was frightened.

She is at a table, a round breakfast table, in a sunny room, arched glass windows on three sides. She is tall but small, not just small, in a high chair, a child, a toddler giggling through wisps of red-gold hair. The sun is dazzling through the windows, warm on her cheeks.

At the side of the table, a beaming man with a round, ruddy face laughs with her, blue eyes sparkling…

…as the forks and spoons dance by themselves on the table in front of them…

Laurel’s eyes flew open. Her cheeks were warm… as warm as if she’d been sitting in sunlight.

But the electronic shrilling she was hearing did not belong in that sunny breakfast room. She moved under the blankets, shaking off sleep, and realized her cell phone was jangling on the stand beside the bed.

To her vast and groggy surprise the caller was her mother. Adrenaline shot through Laurel and she bolted up in bed. “Mom? Is everything okay?” Meredith never called two days in a row, and it was shockingly early in West Coast time.

“Of course,” Meredith’s voice was gravelly, irritable. “I was just calling to see how it went.”

Laurel wrested her co-opted pillow away from the cat and leaned back against it. She wasn’t entirely buying her mother’s sudden attempt to be an involved parent, but saw an opportunity to mine some information herself.

“It was nice,” she said neutrally. For a moment she wondered if Margaret had already reported about the dinner, if there was some conspiracy between the all-but-estranged sisters. And why would you be thinking that?

“So everyone’s well?” Meredith was asking, equally neutrally.

“They seem fine, Mom,” Laurel answered. “It was nice of them to have me.” Then before she could lose her nerve, she blurted out. “Did you know that Uncle Morgan was a test subject in the Rhine parapsychology experiments?”

There was an instantaneous, live silence on the other end of the phone. After an eternity, Meredith said slowly. “Yes, that’s right. I’d all but forgotten about that.” Then she said something that threw Laurel more than anything else that had happened. “He always was like Mama that way.”

Meredith’s voice was far away, and she’d reverted to a Southern accent that Laurel had only heard her use in times of extreme stress. Laurel held her breath, wondering if her mother would say more. When she didn’t, Laurel hazarded:

“Like Grandma—in what way?”

“What?” Meredith snapped, and there was a hint of outrage in her tone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. How in the world did that business come up, anyway?” Meredith’s tone was back to her usual crisp irritability, and the Southern accent was gone.

“Oh, I saw an exhibit in the library and wondered if they remembered the lab,” Laurel said vaguely. She hesitated, then took the plunge. “All of those experiments must have been a huge deal on campus when Aunt Margaret and Uncle Morgan were there, at Duke.”

The silence on the other end was icy. “I hope you haven’t been upsetting your uncle.”

What? What was that?

Laurel swallowed. “I don’t think I have, Mom. What do you mean?”

Her mother ignored that entirely. “I have to run. I’m speaking at a conference this morning—”

“Wait—Mom,” Laurel said quickly. “I wanted to know… when we visited Aunt Margaret and Uncle Morgan and Grandma—when I was three or four—were they living in the same house? The two-story with that glassed-in breakfast room?”

Her mother paused. “Yes, the house on Steeple Street. Why?”

Laurel closed her eyes and saw the sunny alcove from her dream, the silverware dancing on the table in front of her uncle.

“I thought I remembered it. I just wanted to know.”

Again, silence, something unspoken. Then Meredith said, “Don’t forget to write your aunt a thank-you note; they live and die on those things there.”

As usual Meredith disconnected without saying good-bye, but Laurel had gotten what she needed: Uncle Morgan wasn’t fantasizing; he really had been a test subject in the lab. And Meredith’s unexpected admission kept playing in her head.

“He always was like Mama that way.”

The thought, coming from her supremely rational mother, gave Laurel an eerie thrill. It meant Meredith believed that Morgan, and their mother, had some kind of—and Laurel had to pause even mentally before she even thought the word—

Power.

She felt caught in something huge, something bigger than herself, and yet about herself—something almost inevitable.

I have to know what happened.

Laurel was barely able to focus on her “Theories of Personality” lecture, a fact that was not lost on Tyler Mountford, who smirked down at her knowingly from his front and center seat every time she drifted off in thought and lost her place.

As soon as she uttered the last word she dismissed the class without discussion and raced through a morning drifting with gray fog across to the Administration Building.

“No Alaistair Leish on staff,” said the blond clerk in the registrar’s office, with red, white, and blue salon nails clicking on the computer keys.

“Could you check for other years besides 1965?” Laurel asked. “Or how about as a guest lecturer?”

“It would have come up in the search,” the clerk said. “There’s no record of an Alaistair Leish ever being on the university payroll.”

Laurel turned away from the counter, murmuring thanks, and stood for a moment on the marble floor, frowning and frustrated. But Leish must have been at the lab. All those shots of Duke in the film… so why no record of him?

She left the Administration Building and crossed the quad under the massive oaks. She paused on the path and stared through the fog at the Psych Building.

Now what?

She knew there might well be professors in the department who would have been at Duke in the sixties, but she felt an instinctive reluctance to approach any of her department colleagues on the subject. It wasn’t paranoia, really, but she didn’t want someone co-opting her project, even though she didn’t exactly have one, yet.

And there was no one yet that she could talk to, anyway. She’d seen Brendan Cody around campus, of course, in the halls of the Psych department, holding seminars outside on the lawn under the trees. It was impossible to miss his constant whirl of energy and exuberance.

He was always surrounded by coeds, psych students who obviously had more interest in the young professor than in the study of the mind. And the sight of Brendan surrounded by sighing females made Laurel even more determined to avoid him, for her own self-preservation.

She turned on the path and glanced toward the circle of oaks where she often saw him with his study groups, but on this chilly day the lawn was empty, dotted with little white daisies.

She was not aware that she herself sighed, as she turned away from the tree.

It’s fine. I can do this by myself. She stood for a moment, looking at the buildings around her, then she started off through the drifting gray fog across to East Campus.

It was unmistakably the same building.

She stood on the rough marble of the portico, looking up at the building from the Leish film, an elegant copper-domed structure, Greco-Roman, with four tall white columns on the portico.