True believer - Nicholas Sparks [74]
He blinked, as if to reassure himself that it had really happened, then checked his watch again. The whole event had taken twenty-two seconds from start to finish. Though he knew he should get up to check the equipment, there was a brief instant in which all he could do was stare at the spot where the ghosts of Cedar Creek had made their appearance.
Fraud, honest mistakes, and coincidence were the most common explanations for events regarded as supernatural, and up to this point, every one of Jeremy’s investigations into such events had fallen into one of these three categories. The first tended to be the most prevalent explanation in situations where someone stood to profit somehow. William Newell, for instance, who claimed to find the petrified remains of a giant on his farm in New York in 1869, a statue known as the Cardiff Giant, fell into this category. Timothy Clausen, the spirit guide, was another example.
But fraud also encompassed those who simply wanted to see how many people they could fool, not for money, but just to see if it was possible. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, the English farmers who created the phenomenon known as crop circles, were one such example; the surgeon who photographed the Loch Ness Monster in 1933 was another. In both cases, the hoax was originally perpetrated as a practical joke, but public interest escalated so quickly that confessions were rendered difficult.
Honest mistakes, on the other hand, were simply that. A weather ballon is mistaken for a flying saucer, a bear is mistaken for Bigfoot, an archaeological find is discovered to have been moved to its current location hundreds or thousands of years after its original deposition. In cases like these, the witness has seen something, but the mind extrapolates the vision into something else entirely.
Coincidence accounted for nearly everything else and was simply a function of mathematical probability. As unlikely as an event might seem, as long as it is theoretically possible, it more than likely would happen sometime, somewhere, to someone. Take, for instance, Robert Morgan’s novel Futility, published in 1898—fourteen years before the Titanic sailed—which told the story of the largest and grandest passenger liner in existence that sailed on its maiden voyage from Southampton, only to be ripped apart by an iceberg, and whose rich and famous passengers were largely doomed in the icy North Atlantic because of a lack of lifeboats. The name of the ship, ironically, was Titan.
But what happened here didn’t fall neatly into any of those categories. The lights struck Jeremy as neither fraud nor coincidence, and yet it wasn’t an honest mistake, either. There was a ready explanation somewhere, but as he sat in the cemetery in the rush of the moment, he had no idea what it could be.
Through it all, Lexie had remained seated and hadn’t said a word. “Well?” she finally asked. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know yet,” Jeremy admitted. “I saw something, that’s for sure.”
“Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“No,” he said. “Actually, this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything that even remotely struck me as mysterious.”
“It is amazing, isn’t it?” she said, her voice soft. “I’d almost forgotten how pretty it could be. I’ve heard about the aurora borealis, and I’ve often wondered whether it looked like this.”
Jeremy didn’t respond. In his mind’s eye, he re-created the lights, thinking that the way they’d risen in intensity reminded him of headlights of oncoming cars as they rounded a curve. They simply had to be caused by a moving vehicle of some sort, he thought. He looked toward the road,