The Unseen (a parapsychology mystery) by Alexandra Sokoloff

Author:Alexandra Sokoloff [Sokoloff, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2012-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-one

Move-in day was blanketed with clouds. They had decided to drive down to Five Oaks separately; the house was isolated enough that multiple cars seemed prudent.

Laurel got on the road early. She stopped in to leave the cat with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Morgan, explaining that she was doing a three-week research project without actually saying where she was going. Uncle Morgan looked at her with sad reproach, which both tore at her heart and made her wonder just how much he knew, both about the past and about what she was about to do, but he refused to answer when she spoke to him.

Laurel closed her eyes briefly, thinking about it.

The cat, however, had gone to him immediately and jumped up in his lap as if she belonged there, and Uncle Morgan cradled the animal to his chest and disappeared with her into his library as if she were the only thing he’d been waiting for.

On her own behind the wheel, Laurel paid much more attention to the route. She passed through sleepy towns with no more than a thousand inhabitants, and some obviously with far fewer. “Town” was sometimes no more than a Food Lion, a Family Dollar Store, an Auto Zone, and two or three gas stations along the highway.

With each mile, Laurel had the sense that she was driving off the grid entirely.

She turned off the highway onto the six-mile road that took her out to the Folger House, passing horse pastures and patchwork fields bordered by split-rail fences, then leaving those behind, too, as she drove into the Pine Barrens.

At the foot of the estate the gate already stood open and she drove between the gateposts with their stone dogs, feeling a shiver of anticipation as the wheels crunched over the slate chips of the circular drive.

The house was bigger than she remembered, and more strange, crouched between pines, and white as a shell.

The enormous circular drive was empty; somehow she had beaten everyone here. She shut off the engine and sat for a moment, staring up at the house.

Fine. I’ll wait. No way am I going in there alone.

The car door made a hollow thunk as she shut it, too loud in the stillness. The wind slipped through the tops of the pines, making the long and glistening needles shiver.

As she stood on the slate-chip path looking up at the house, she saw clearly for the first time that it was really three houses, joined by two two-story brick connecting walkways. The front of the structure was the original white house with its white-painted brick and patios and multiple archways and almost Spanish flavor. Then that smaller brick connector, two stories, attaching the Spanish house to the older main house, redbrick with white colonial pillars holding up its double porches. Then another small two-story walkway joining the brick main house to the separate white two-story shingled house that was comprised of the servants’ quarters. The long snakelike corridor she remembered from their first visit must stretch across all three separate parts of the house.

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