Free The Unseen by Alexandra Sokoloff Page B

little Allport, a little Maslow …”
    She fought not to let her surprise show. He’d obviously been checking up on her. So he’s interested in the files. He thinks there’s something there, and he wants to make sure I’m not going to beat him to it, she thought, and was immediately annoyed by her own paranoia.
    “Yes, I did a lot of vocational testing analysis in Los Angeles,” she agreed.
    “And I thought everyone there just wanted to be stars,” he quipped. True enough, but Hollywood’s not the only place you find aspiring stars, she thought, while on the surface she laughed at his wit.
    “So are you doing work with the files?” she asked, when they’d finished their mutually artificial chuckle.
    “Oh no,” he said, heartily. “No no. You’ve seen them—it’s just a mess. Total waste of time. It seems the entire lab was operating under a mass delusion.”
    “My thought exactly,” she said, and immediately wondered if she’d said too much, as the idea of mass delusion was increasingly interesting to her. “A total waste of time,” she repeated, to clarify.
    “Well,” he pushed off from the desk and stood, energetically. “Feel free to run your research by me any time. I know a thing or two about proposals.”
    “How nice of you to offer. I will do that,” she said sweetly, half a second from batting her eyes.
    She was still smiling a strained smile as she closed the door on him. Then immediately was flooded with a surge of possessiveness the likes of which she had never felt before.
    Oh, no you don’t. This is my book. Mine. And you can’t have it.
    It was more than a book. It was looking very much like her life.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    Dr. J. B. Rhine and Dr. William Roll, of the Duke parapsychology lab, developed the theory of RSPK: “Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis,” to explain poltergeist phenomena. Dr. Roll coined the term in a research paper cowritten with Duke researcher J. Gaither Pratt, detailing their investigation of the “Popper Poltergeist” at a house in Seaford, Long Island, in 1958. According to Rhine and Roll, the poltergeist energy originates in the mind of a single human agent, or focus, who deliberately or unconsciously projects that energy outward, causing the movement or breakage of objects, inexplicable noises, and apportation characteristic of poltergeist occurrences.
    —Dr. Alaistair Leish, The Lure of the Poltergeist
    It was two more days before Laurel could contrive to catch Morgan alone. It had to be alone; her uncle was clearly not willing to talk in front of Aunt Margaret. She headed over to her aunt’s house on Steeple Street on a crisp fall day, the temperature suddenly cooler, and the air laced with a light wind that rustled the still-green leaves.
    Laurel stood between the white columns of the porch and rang and knocked. She waited for a good ten minutes, knocking several more times, and was just turning to give up when the door opened behind her with a soft creak. She looked back to see Morgan peering out from a crack in the door. Seeing her, he pulled the door open a few inches more, his face both bright and uneasy.
    “Hello, Uncle Morgan.” He shuffled shyly behind the door, without speaking. She stepped forward. “Can I come in?”
    “Margaret isn’t here,” he offered. Laurel knew that, of course—she’d been careful to check her aunt’s schedule at the hospital and had chosen a day when she was sure Margaret would be tied up in consultations.
    “I came to see you.”
    He looked pleased, and then alarmed. “Oh, no no no. Probably not. Most probably not.” His eyes were hazy and she thought possibly he had been drinking. He started to close the door, but she reached out and held it, gently but firmly.
    “But I did. Won’t you let me in?”
    He stood in the door for a long moment, then backed up into the hall. Laurel stepped inside cautiously, careful not to make any sudden moves. She eased the door shut behind her.
    “Can we sit