“Who is Tinsley?” Maggie asked.
“He recently joined the faculty, and he’s very highly regarded in the field of parapsychology. He’s also very nice. Everyone in the department was impressed with the demonstration of his new ESP-sensing machine. He met me when I went in for the interview with the director. Afterward he insisted I get the position of research librarian.”
Maggie smiled. “So Attwater had to hire you.”
“Yep. Professors, especially stars like Tinsley, are the equivalent of opera divas in the academic world. But Attwater is not happy about the situation. I get the feeling he’s biding his time, waiting for me to make a mistake, or maybe he hopes I’ll create a scandal of some sort. He’s looking for an excuse to fire me.”
“I’ll bet he’s afraid you’ll end up making him look bad,” Maggie said. “If he realizes just how much you know about the literature of theparanormal and how good you are at research, he’ll start worrying about his own job.”
“I’m being very careful to appear competent but not too competent. My plan is to make Attwater look good.”
“Don’t sell your soul just to make the boss appear smart,” Maggie said.
“Are you kidding? Making the boss look brilliant is a job requirement regardless of the line of work you’re in. As for you, you have no business lecturing me. You’re ghostwriting an advice column for a woman who’s thousands of miles away in the South Pacific. Aunt Cornelia is getting all the credit for the column.”
“Fine by me. I’m not out to take her job.” Maggie picked up her coffee cup. “One of these days, Pru.”
“Yes,” Pru said. “One of these days.”
There was no need for either of them to finish the sentence. They had been repeating the words to each other since they had met at a lecture on psychic dreaming a few months ago. They had each concluded independently that the so-called expert giving the presentation was just another fraud in a field studded with cons and fakes.
She and Pru had found a tearoom, ordered a pot of Darjeeling and a tray of tiny sandwiches, and settled in to discuss their observations. Two hours later the hostess had requested that they leave because it was closing time. It was when they got to their feet and collected their handbags that the two talked about their dreams. Maggie explained she was eking out a living writing for the confession magazines while trying to write a full-length novel on the side. Pru had nodded in understanding and confided her own dream:I want to open a bookstore devoted to the literature of the paranormal.
Neither had yet realized her dream, but they were making progress financially, at least. They both had jobs that allowed them to put aside a little money for the future. They were on their own because neitherof them could look for assistance from their families. The advice from their relatives was to focus on getting married.
Even if they had been inclined to marry, finding husbands would have been complicated, if not impossible. And they were not so inclined. Each of them had an excellent reason to avoid marriage, a reason rooted in that most powerful of all emotions—fear.
“Look at the time.” Pru jumped to her feet and slung the strap of her handbag over one shoulder. “I have to get back to the library. Let me know if your investigator solves the case with those phone calls.”
“I will,” Maggie promised.
Chapter 5
She delayed going to bed as long as possible because she knew the coatrack would show up in her dreams and she would have to deal with it. That was going to be a problem because she had so little context. All she knew about it was that it was standing in Sage’s office and that he and an unknown person had laid down the shadow energy. That didn’t give her much to work with.
She was good at ignoring most of the shadows she encountered in daily life. She’d had plenty of practice since her late teens, when her lucid dreaming abilities had blossomed. There had been no choice but to develop the skill and strength of will required to suppress her sensitivity to the energy left on objects that had been handled by people in the grip of some intense emotion.
It was all too easy to blunder into the shadows cast by seemingly innocuous objects—a fireplace poker, a clock, a letter opener. A coatrack. The trial-and-error process of learning how to control her dream world to some extent had been fraught. Early on there had been toomany unfortunate occasions when things had gone wrong and she had awakened screaming. Her family had been deeply concerned. She had been whisked off to the offices of a series of psychiatrists and dream analysts.
When she was seventeen, two of the experts had diagnosed her as prone to attacks of hysteria and had recommended eight weeks in a private sanitarium to “calm her nerves.” She had learned a valuable lesson during her enforced stay inside the walls of Sweet Creek Manor: She had learned how to keep her mouth shut—most of the time.
These days she was careful to talk about her extreme dreams only with those who understood and accepted her unusual and disturbing ability. She had concluded she would probably always sleep alone. Marriage—a risk on so many levels—could prove catastrophic in her case. It had the potential to doom her to an asylum.
She poured a glass of wine and sipped it while she heated a can of cream of tomato soup and prepared a toasted cheese sandwich. She ate the simple meal at the kitchen table and made some notes for the novel. She did not want to forget the gun in Sam Sage’s desk. It would add an intriguing element to the story and to the character of the hero.
She washed the dishes in the kitchen sink and went upstairs to the room she used as an office. She had mailed the questions and answers for two weeks’ worth of columns to the editor that afternoon. Tonight she had time to devote to her writing.
She sat down at the desk and pulled out the legal pad. As she had explained to Pru, she knew now why the hero, Bennett North, felt wrong.
...The house looked as if it had been constructed from the scraps of a graveyard—bits and pieces of discarded headstones and abandoned crypts. The gray rock walls loomed over the dark mirror of Winter Lake.
The exterior of the mansion was bleak and intimidating, but it was the interior that chilled Grace to the bone. The high-ceilinged room was draped in perpetual shadow, a gloom that could not be chased off by the simple act of opening the heavy curtains.
Flames leaped from the logs piled on the vast stone hearth, but there was little warmth to be had from them. They clawed a path upward through the chimney, seemingly desperate to escape.
There was no escape for Grace. The position of confidential secretary she had been offered was her only hope. If she retreated to her aging Hudson and drove back down the twisted mountain road, she would be dining in a charity soup kitchen that night.
Her future hung on the reception she received from the master of the house, a man with the sculpted features of a fallen angel.
