Suspicious Minds (Stranger Things Novels #1)(26)

“How’s everyone else doing there?” Andrew pulled Terry down to the floor in front of him so he could knead her shoulders. She hadn’t realized how tight and tense they were.

“They seem fine. Alice wasn’t feeling well, but I think she was just under the weather.”

“You could ask them what they think.”

He was right.

“I will…But I want to try to find out more about what this experiment is for, too. Why is it classified? Does it have something to do with this kid?”

“Babe, could it just be because they’re giving LSD to young, healthy adults?”

Terry sighed. “Yeah, obviously, at a minimum.” A chilling thought occurred to her. “What if they’re giving that little girl drugs?”

“Surely not,” Andrew said. “Did she seem out of it?”

“No, she seemed fine.”

But in his assurance she heard the echo of her mom all those years ago, telling her dad the things he’d seen in the war couldn’t happen here. Terry knew they could. But she also believed that people could and would work to stop them.

“I just have to see what I can find out,” she said. “About all of it. I want to know what she was doing there. It’ll make me feel better.”

“You know I believe in you.” He gave her shoulders another knead. “If you need to do this, you need to.”

“I know.”

Who was Brenner and where had he come from? What had he been doing before this? Terry had more questions by the second, which meant she needed to go somewhere good at providing answers.





2.


The library was hopping with action the next day. They were close enough to the beginning of the semester that everyone’s best intentions of getting ahead, keeping up, and making the dean’s list were still in play. Terry waited for a librarian in a line four deep beside a tall bookshelf filled with leather-spined reference volumes.

She took the tattered paperback of The Fellowship of the Ring out from her bag and returned to chapter three. Might as well make some headway on Tolkien until she could make headway on digging into Brenner’s background.

“Miss?”

Terry blinked up from a scene involving the hobbits. Andrew wasn’t wrong. She’d gotten sucked in.

The librarian had a weary face and a bun bobby-pinned within an inch of its life.

“Hi,” Terry said. “I was hoping you could help me with something.” She explained that she wanted to find information about a doctor who’d recently moved to the area—presumably a Ph.D. but maybe an M.D. or possibly both—and his past research.

“And you don’t know where he last worked or what university he attended? Nothing about his area of expertise?” The librarian made it clear that only an idiot wouldn’t bother to find out at least one of these things.

“I’m afraid not. But it might have something to do with psychology.”

“Hmm.” The librarian gazed past Terry, at the growing line behind her.

“Anything you can point me to that might help,” she said, a plea. “I don’t mind spending time on it.”

That earned her an approving nod. The librarian took out a notepad and wrote a list in tidy handwriting. “Check these places for his name. If we have anything, it’ll probably show up in one or the other. Good luck.”

First up was a shelf of thick books called Books in Print that turned out to catalog titles, authors, and publishers. After trial and error at picking the right volume, she finally checked the BR’s and found three Brenners but no Martin. Strike one.

Next. She consulted the list.

That led to Who’s Who in America, a list of biographical sketches that seemed to include every person who had ever been important and then a bunch of other people. Lots of researchers showed up as she flipped through, and hope rose in her chest as she finally got to the B’s…

She recognized some of the names there, but again, no Martin Brenner.

The librarian had scribbled a note by the last item on the list: a long shot but worth a try. She had to go back to the desk to ask where the vertical files were. Once on the second floor, she went through a row of tall file cabinets with a mishmash of pamphlets and republished scientific articles. The collection sprawled, and so she gamely went through each file. This might be the one…Whenever she started to skip one, she stopped and went through it.

Her fingertips were numb from shuffling through paper by the time she neared the end. The lights in the library swooned once, and then a crackling announcement over the PA informed students they had ten minutes until the library closed.

Terry had to face it. She’d come up with nothing. A big fat zero. It was as if Martin Brenner hadn’t existed before he moved to Indiana and took over a prestigious government lab. Obviously that wasn’t the case, but what did she do now?

The librarian who’d helped her earlier caught her eye as she trudged back to the first floor toward the exit, and Terry gave her a sad head-shake. The librarian nodded as if to say, Oh well.

But this wasn’t an “oh well” kind of topic. She walked to Andrew’s, fighting how tired she felt.

“It would’ve been a lot easier for the hobbits to stay in the Shire,” she told him when he opened the door. “But they don’t, do they? Frodo ends up with the ring and they leave with it.”