Twenty years in this department meant he’d been here when my dad and Teague were here, and when they left. It also meant he’d been one of those who’d chosen to stay behind.
“Well?” he barked out.
I looked back at Em for visual confirmation and then pushed the door open. I was immediately assaulted by shiny black leather, Art Deco prints, and a giant moose head on the far left wall. A tiny placard hung underneath it, with one word, Freddy. A fedora hung on the topmost point of each antler. One of the hats had a cheetah print hatband.
A man with a head full of white hair, and a black goatee sprinkled with silver, sat behind a desk. His skin, the same color as cocoa powder, sported deep wrinkles in his smile lines. His gaze lingered on Em when she stepped into the doorway beside me. “Can I help you?”
I felt out his emotions. Curiosity. Mild impatience tempered with tolerance.
“Are you Dr. Turner?” Em asked, not crossing the threshold. Waiting to be invited in, like a vampire.
“That depends. Are you two ghost chasers?” He considered us over his bifocals as he pulled a bag of pipe tobacco out of his top desk drawer.
“No, sir,” I answered, frowning at Em. “We aren’t ghost chasers.”
“Good. Reality television has created way too many amateurs, if you ask me. None of them ever finds a damn thing. It’s because they’re looking in all the wrong places.”
“I’m Emerson, by the way.” She pointed to herself and then to me, as if the professor might have a hard time coming to the conclusion himself. “This is Kaleb.”
This time, he looked at me a little bit too long.
“I’m Dr. Turner. Head of the physics department. Nice to meet you both.”
In an un-vampire-like fashion, I stepped into the room without being asked. “We were wondering if we could talk to you.”
“Certainly. As long as you were telling me the truth about the ghost chasing.” He spun his chair around to turn down an ancient-looking record player. The scratchy sound of the blues faded away and he faced us again, waving his hand at Em. “Come in.”
He wore a bow tie, and a pink carnation hung haphazardly from a buttonhole in his vest. When he pulled his pipe from an inside pocket, the flower fell on his desk. He picked it up and twirled it between his fingers.
“Had a visit from the grands this morning. Youngest girl brought me a gift.” He smiled, tucked it into a leather pencil holder on the corner of his desk, and gestured with his pipe. “May I?”
“Sure.” Em nodded. “I like the smell of pipe tobacco. My granddad smoked one.”
“Good, then.” He scooped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, the movement habitual. He was going through the motions, but it felt like a thinly veiled distraction. “Have a seat.”
Em chose a leather wingback, studded around the edges with brass tacks. The only other chair in the office looked like it might crumble into a heap if I touched it, so I leaned my shoulder against the bookshelves built into the wall, taking note of the many family pictures as well as the titles on the shelves. Quantum Physics for Dummies, Holographic Man, The Tao of Physics, and a decent collection of what looked like first-edition Twain.
“How can I help you, children?” Direct but kind.
“We had some questions.” Em bounced slightly in her seat. It was either exceptionally springy or her nerves were getting the best of her.
“About the physics program?”
“No,” Em said, drawing the word out, looking at me for backup.
“No,” I said, wishing we’d discussed a plan. “We were talking about the … um …”
“About the parapsychology department,” he said, like he’d said it a million times before. “You discovered it on the Internet.”“Um, yeah,” Em said, smiling in a slightly unbalanced way. “That’s it.”
I could feel his hesitation. Still, somehow, he miraculously asked, “What do you want to know?”
“We were just interested in … the basics about the department.” Em looked up at me for confirmation.
“The basics.” I nodded. We sucked at subterfuge.
“We’re doing … a school project?” Em said. It came out sounding like a question.
Dr. Turner pressed down on the contents of the pipe bowl with his thumb and looked at Em from the corner of his eye. “First of all, it was never truly a department, not an acknowledged one, anyway. It fell under engineering and physics. Started as a graduate project on random event generators and machines. Spun off into all kinds of fantastical research.”
“What kind of fantastical research?” I asked.
“Life beyond our airspace, remote viewing.” He took out another pinch of tobacco, placed it in the pipe with practiced ease, and then closed the bag. “Archeocoustics, dowsing.”
“I’ve never even heard the word archeocoustics.” Em perched eagerly on the edge of her chair, her toes barely touching the floor.
“Tricky theory, that. Idea is that objects record sound. Memories of conversation.” He shrugged. “And a perfect example of one of the things that drove the traditionalists here crazy.”
“And the university made the grad students stop?”
“They did.” His fingers tightened on the pipe bowl. “The department was shut down.”
“But the research continued.” Em wasn’t reading his body language, or she didn’t care. “Right?”
“There were certain things everyone was curious about.” He spoke carefully, as if everything he’d said up until this point had been canned, and now we were approaching unknown territory.
“Like what?” Em pushed.
His spike of irritation made me wonder if we’d gone too far.
Keeping my eyes on Dr. Turner, I moved to stand beside Em, my arm on the back of her chair. He stared at me for a moment, as if he were weighing something. Then he seemed to make a decision.
“Most specifically, they were curious about the manipulation of the space time continuum.”
Em gasped, then tried to cover it with a cough.
Dr. Turner didn’t take his eyes away from me. “Not solely in the realm of physics, but in the realm of something … beyond.”
“I thought universities were supposed to encourage free thinking.” I didn’t break the stare. He was either testing us or playing us. Either way, I didn’t intend to lose.
“Testing a hypothesis and getting a concrete result is challenging even when the research can be proven.” He removed a small metal object from his inside jacket pocket. It was flat on the bottom, and a sharp curve of metal arched over a tiny gargoyle— like a handle. He held it carefully as he used it to push the tobacco down. “The abstract idea of a person with preternatural abilities doesn’t fit into pure science. But too many believed the abstract was a possibility.”
“You did,” Em said.
“I believe in the abstract and the concrete.”
I decided to stop wasting time and show my hand. “Then why didn’t you follow Teague when she left for Chronos?”
The smell of sulfur filled the air when he lit a wooden match, touched it to the tobacco, and took a few puffs. “I wondered when that was coming.”