Page 44 of When She Dreams

Margaret Smith was attending the conference.

No, her name was Lodge. Margaret Lodge. Not Smith. It didn’t matter. She was here, and he had recognized her immediately.

Emerson Oxlade could scarcely suppress the feverish excitement that threatened to consume him. He loosened his tie and gulped some of the whiskey he had poured for himself. He was dazzled by his good fortune. He had literally dreamed of finding Smith-Lodge again, and now his dream had come true.

He had been afraid he had lost her forever when she had suffered the attack of hysteria and stormed out of his office. He had dared to hope she would show up at the conference—after all, she was an astonishingly talented lucid dreamer, and the Guilfoyle Method was focused on lucid dreaming. There had been a chance she would buy a ticket, but no guarantee. He had known it was a long shot, yet here she was.

It was as if he had willed her to attend through the power of hisown dreaming. After he had spent all these months searching for her, she was finally within reach again.

He opened the windowed doors of the guest villa and went out onto the front steps. He was too restless to sleep, torn between excitement and dread. There was so much at stake. He had sensed from that first meeting in his office that Lodge was the key to the success of his life’s work. Now the Guilfoyles had the power to give her to him. Tonight he had made it clear she had to be part of the arrangement. They were not pleased, but he intended to stand firm.

It wouldn’t be difficult to manage the Guilfoyles. He had learned everything he needed to know to manipulate them when he had met them all those years ago.

Admittedly, the realization that Lodge was attending the conference in the company of a man had come as a jolt. Sam Sage did not look like a scholarly research assistant—there was nothing bookish about him. Sage was in the way. He posed a problem, but surely not an insurmountable one.

Oxlade swallowed some more whiskey and considered the death of the Nevins woman. It was obvious the discovery of the body had alarmed the Guilfoyles. They were worried about the image of the Institute. That made three of them.

Yes, Arthur Guilfoyle had some lucid dreaming talent, and the enhancer had allowed him to access some of his latent psychic talent, but that didn’t change the fact that he and his wife were con artists. They didn’t care about the astonishing potential of his drug. They wanted to use it to make a great deal of money.

But when it came to lucid dreamers, Margaret Lodge put Arthur Guilfoyle in the shade. Oxlade’s euphoria spiked. Lodge was the one who would make him famous and cement his reputation as a true genius. He would be known worldwide as the brilliant scientist who could unlock psychic doorways.

Chapter 17

Sam peeled off the evening jacket, removed his shoes, and loosened his tie. He stretched out on the bed to try to catch a few hours of sleep and set his mental alarm clock for three in the morning. Hotel hallways were quiet at that hour, and the hotel dick would most likely be napping or reading the paper.

He needed sleep—he hadn’t been sleeping well for a while now—but he lay awake for some time, thinking about Maggie on the other side of the connecting door. Her fascination with dreams and metaphysics probably ought to worry him. Maybe the fact that it didn’t was what should alarm him.

But what really concerned him were two dead women and the obsession in Dr. Emerson Oxlade’s eyes.

After a while he drifted off...

...and woke with the realization that he needed to do something important. He sat up on the side of the bed, turned on the lamp, and checked his watch. Five minutes to three.

He pushed himself to his feet and paused for a moment tocontemplate the rumpled bed. He had slept more solidly in the past few hours than he had for a long time. There had been no disturbing dreams involving a madman trying to crush his skull with a coatrack.

Interesting.

As he had anticipated, the hotel was asleep. The lounge was closed. The guests had retired to their beds. Most were attendees at the dream conference. They had a full day of seminars and lectures ahead.

He went down the stairs to the front desk. There was no sign of the clerk. A quick glance at the guest register told him Nevins had been given room 357. He went behind the counter, took the key off the board, and headed back upstairs.

When he reached the third floor, he walked down the empty hallway, his evening jacket draped casually over one arm to conceal the flashlight he had brought with him. Just another guest returning from a late night on the town.

He stopped in front of the door marked357and checked the corridor to make sure there was no one in the vicinity.

Satisfied he was alone, he started to insert the key into the lock.

The knob turned easily in his hand. The door was unlocked.

He hesitated, running through the possibilities. There were a couple of logical reasons why the door would not be locked. Detective Brandon had stopped by earlier to take a look around Nevins’s room. Maybe whoever had opened the door for Brandon had neglected to lock up afterward. The death of a hotel guest and the presence of a police detective would be enough to make a clerk nervous.

Maybe a bellhop or a housekeeper had already been sent to pack up Nevins’s things and had forgotten to lock up afterward. But it seemed more likely that project would have been delayed until morning. There would have been no rush.

There was, of course, a third possibility—someone else had goneinto the room before him, someone who, like him, had no right to be there.

He eased his way into the darkened space and closed the door as quietly as possible. He gave himself a moment to adjust to the deep gloom. The lamps were off and the blinds were closed, but a rectangle of hall light glowed through the transom window over the door.

The room felt empty, but he had learned he could not depend on that sensation. He had encountered killers who were so cold inside, they did not give off the warmth of normal human beings—or so it seemed.

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