Free The Unseen by Alexandra Sokoloff Page A

but she felt a rush of triumph at this proof of her intuition.
    So it’s true: Leish was at the Duke lab. I knew he couldn’t stay away from the poltergeist research.
    He was here, and he died.
    She sat very still … then started turning pages impatiently. When she found the photo, she recognized it instantly: a handsome, ruddy, round-faced young man with bright, clear eyes that she knew were blue, Carolina blue.
    Uncle Morgan …
    There were no captions identifying the students, either. In the photo he was standing beside a lab counter, watching a dice machine with its rotating oblong cage.
    To be sure, Laurel flipped to the senior portraits, and found his photo in the Ms—Morgan MacDonald. It was the same boy. He was laughing and glowing with youth and health, his eyes and face animated. There was a string of initials and notations under his name: Varsity Football, Varsity Baseball, Kappa Alpha …
    Laurel felt an ache in her heart.
    What happened, then? He was at university, he was in a frat, he played sports—he was alive and sound. He had a life.
    She stared down at the yearbook.
    I have to know what happened.
    She was still brooding on the question as she halted in the upstairs hall of the psych department and reached for the door of her office, carefully balancing the armload of yearbooks (1960–1965) she’d persuaded the reference librarian to loan her, as she fished for her keys. A gratingly familiar voice called from behind her.
    “I’ll get that for you.”
    She half-turned, almost losing her stack completely, and saw J. Walter Kornbluth bustling up behind her. He deftly plucked the books from her arms. Unable to protest, Laurel forced a smile, unlocked her door, and pushed it open. Kornbluth marched into the tiny office and unloaded the books on the desk.
    “Thanks, I appreciate it,” Laurel said dutifully from the doorway.
    “Happy to help,” Kornbluth said expansively. He looked over the volumes he had deposited with a frown. “Yearbooks?” Laurel thought his eyes lingered on the dates.
    “Yes, my … my aunt is an alum … ,” she hedged.
    Kornbluth turned, took in the office with a sweeping glance, and sat on the edge of the desk. “How are you settling in?”
    Laurel paused, disoriented by the sudden and seemingly unwarranted attention. “Well … it’s a big change from L.A., that’s for sure. At least I’m not getting lost every time I get on the freeway. I’m enjoying the teaching—the kids are top-notch. And the campus is gorgeous… .” She stopped, painfully aware she was rambling, but Kornbluth smiled at her tolerantly.
    “You’ve been putting in a lot of library time,” he said, and she froze. So there is an agenda here.
    “Yes, it’s like working in a castle, really—” she started, flustered.
    “And then there’s the lure of the Rhine files,” he said cheerfully, but the look he gave her was shrewd. He was firmly planted on her desk, and short of leaving him unattended in her office, she wasn’t going to be able to avoid this conversation. Also, she was suddenly acutely aware that she had parapsychology notes all over her desk: all he had to do was glance down at a page and he’d know exactly what she was up to.
    “It is fascinating, that all of that actually happened here,” she agreed, inching toward the desk.
    “Finding anything of particular interest?” he pressed on.
    “It’s all interesting, isn’t it?” she countered. “But it would take about twenty years to go through everything properly. They saved everything from soup to nuts.” (She had in fact found a can of petrified peanuts in one of the boxes.) “At a certain point …” She gave what she hoped would come off as a nonchalant shrug.
    “It’s overwhelming, I know.” Kornbluth smiled with easy and completely false camaraderie. “Seven hundred boxes.” He widened his eyes.
    Laurel smiled back, tightly.
    “And it’s not really your thing, after all. Vocational testing, Myers-Briggs, a