Free The Unseen by Alexandra Sokoloff

slowly. “You’re really into it, aren’t you?”
    “Curious,” she said, briefly. “It’s all curious. So what else have they told you, the ‘old guys’?”
    He shrugged, pushed off the granite slab on which he was leaning. “What were you looking to know?”
    Good question, she thought to herself. “Has anyone ever said why the lab closed down?”
    He smiled, a strangely humorless smile. “Well, it’s kind of a shock they ever let it happen at all, isn’t it? Studying ghosts and such on a college campus?”
    “Have you ever seen anything happen, in there?” she said suddenly.
    He looked at her, and after a long moment he smiled. “Can’t say I believe in that stuff, Dr. MacDonald.” His smile broadened. “It was just you were interested, and all. Has anything spooky ever happened to you?”
    She found her skin heating. “I—no. You mean ghosts? Nothing.”
    He sat back, studying her. “Ghosts—or anything. You’re into this for a reason, aren’t you? Doesn’t just come out of nowhere …”
    She looked into the drifting fog, and her dream came back to her. The clock that read 3:33 A.M. The dog barking in the distance. The fire siren. The curtain blowing at the window.
    I saw it all.
    She snapped back to the present. Tyler was still watching her, leaning on the base of the statue again, ankles crossed, smiling faintly.
    “Well, thanks, Tyler,” Laurel said stiffly. “You’ve been very helpful.”
    “Anytime,” he drawled, and dipped his head, a mocking little bow. She could feel his eyes on her back as she started off across the lawn.
    She suddenly turned back to him and called out. “Have you ever heard of a Dr. Alaistair Leish?”
    He looked at her for a long moment. “Can’t say I have.” He tilted his head. “Why?”
    Laurel had a strange impulse to answer, when she noticed two coeds with Duke sweatshirts approaching the statue behind Tyler. One scrambled up into Washington Duke’s lap, while the other giggled and aimed a camera phone. At the flash of the camera, Laurel halted in her tracks.
    “Of course,” she said aloud. “Of course.” Before Tyler could speak, she had turned and was running, across the grassy yard again toward Perkins Library.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    Laurel pushed through the doors of the Special Collections room and approached the rolltop desk. Ward gave an exaggerated sigh and reached for the keys to the basement.
    Laurel gasped out, still breathless from her mad dash across campus. “Actually … I was wondering if the library kept a collection of school yearbooks … and where I might find those.”
    On the third floor, Laurel sat at a table with stacks of yearbooks in front of her and a panoramic view out the window in front of her. After two weeks in the basement it was strange to sit at a library table with a view of trees and Duke Gardens and the spires of the Chapel, rather than the windowless gloom of the underground.
    As she began to browse the yearbooks, one thing was immediately clear: the parapsychology lab had been a vital, vibrant part of university life. In nearly every yearbook since the lab’s opening there were candid and posed photos of Dr. Rhine, his wife and colleague Dr. Louisa Rhine, other professors and assistants, and students. Laurel turned the pages and saw history go by in the progression of photos on the lab, the evolving postures and attitudes of the students, along with the changing hairstyles and tie widths and skirt lengths.
    She skipped through to the sixties, reached for the 1965 yearbook, and opened it to the inevitable section on the Rhine Lab. Her eyes were immediately caught by a candid black-and-white photo of a mesmerizingly handsome, light-haired man. Laurel felt an electric thrill: the man was unidentified in the photo caption but she recognized Dr. Alaistair Leish from the film.
    “Yes!” she said aloud, so forcefully that several students looked out from their study carrels. Laurel blushed to the roots of her hair,