Falling Awake, Page 3

  A number of betting pools had been formed to pick the name of the lucky man she would deign to date first but Isabel had a feeling that Amelia would keep everyone guessing for a while.

  “Is something wrong?” Amelia asked, auburn brows drawing together in concern. “Why are you in such a hurry?”

  “Got a meeting with the new director.”

  “Really? That seems strange.”

  Amelia had not been intentionally rude, Isabel decided. It was just that her people skills were somewhat deficient. It was not an uncommon problem among members of the research staff.

  “Why do you say that?” Isabel asked politely.

  Amelia’s fine brows puckered a bit. “I heard that he has scheduled a meeting with each of the various department heads today. You’re only a research assistant.”

  Isabel resisted the urge to grind her back teeth. She admired Amelia in some ways. She had even toyed with the idea of using her as a role model. Lately she had begun to wonder how she herself would look with red hair. But there was no getting around the fact that Amelia occasionally exhibited a certain lack of tact.

  That did not make her unique on the center’s staff, Isabel reminded herself. No one except Dr. B. had ever taken the tiny Department of Dream Analysis seriously and that meant that no one had ever taken her own position as the center’s one-and-only dream analyst seriously.

  She summoned what she hoped was a cool, confident smile. “Shortly before he died, Dr. B. made it clear that he intended to appoint me head of the Department of Dream Analysis. Now that he’s gone, I’m really the only one qualified to take the position.”

  Amelia’s eyes widened faintly. Then, somewhat to Isabel’s surprise, she nodded crisply, as if the thought had not occurred to her prior to this moment but now that it had, it made perfect sense.

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” she said, her expression brightening. “Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks.” Isabel turned to rush off down the hall.

  “By the way,” Amelia said, “I mentioned to Dr. Belvedere that you were the person who found his father’s body.”

  Isabel paused again. “Did you?”

  “Yes. Just thought I’d warn you in case he brings up the subject.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Finding the old man dead at his desk must have been a terrible shock for you.”

  “It was. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Certainly.” Amelia actually winked. “I’ll look forward to seeing your name on the next list of department heads.”

  Absurdly pleased by this small show of collegial acceptance, Isabel inclined her head and tried to appear modest.

  “I hope so.”

  She turned the corner and walked swiftly toward her destination. Visions of her future flashed before her eyes. The promotion to department head would not only elevate her status at the center, it would mean a hefty increase in salary. She did the calculations and concluded that if she was careful, the raise would enable her to pay off her credit card debt ahead of schedule. In a few months, she might even be able to start looking for the Dream House. She was tired of living in apartments. She longed for a home of her own.

  She stopped thinking about her potentially rosy future when she drew closer to the door of the office. A wistful sensation went through her, a mixture of sadness and regret. She was going to miss Martin Belvedere. The old man had been irascible, short-tempered, self-absorbed and secretive. But he had recognized her unusual abilities and gave her the first serious, professional post she’d ever held in the field of dream research. She would be forever grateful to him for rescuing her from the Psychic Dreamer Hotline.

  Belvedere had possessed a number of unsociable traits but there was no doubt about his commitment to dream research.

  In recent years Martin Belvedere had developed an obsession with a phenomenon he claimed to have discovered in a small number of dreamers. He had created the term “Level Five lucid dreaming” to describe it. In his opinion it was a highly developed form of what was commonly referred to as lucid dreaming, the experience of knowing that you are dreaming while you are actually in a dream and the ability to exert some control over the dreamscape.

  Lucid dreaming had been written about and discussed for centuries from the time of Aristotle on down to the present. The phenomenon had been studied off and on in modern laboratory settings but little progress had been made toward understanding the lucid dreaming state. Many scientific researchers had abandoned the effort altogether in favor of conducting research on sleep phenomena that could be recorded and analyzed by their instruments. They preferred to examine changes in brain waves, blood pressure and heartbeat. They talked of REM and NREM sleep and published papers that were heavily weighted with statistics, charts and graphs.

  But Martin Belvedere had gone much further than other researchers. He had taken a bold leap into the unknown and theorized that some people could achieve a very advanced state of the lucid dream experience. He claimed that in what he called a Level Five state, certain individuals could access their powers of intuition, insight, creativity and unconscious observations in ways that enabled them to see what they could not in the waking state. Belvedere was convinced that extreme dreaming was essentially a form of self-hypnosis that had the potential to allow the dreamer to tap into the deep rivers of human intuition and awareness.

  He had even ventured to say that extreme lucid dreaming was as close to a truly psychic experience as human beings could achieve.

  From the day two decades earlier when he had first used the word “psychic” in front of an audience of professional sleep and dream researchers, Martin Belvedere had instantly become a pariah among his colleagues.

  A few weeks ago, in a rare moment of personal revelation over a cup of tea, Belvedere had confided to Isabel how hurt and angry he had been when he realized that his friends and colleagues had gone to great lengths to distance themselves from him after the ill-fated conference. Rivals and competitors, of which there was no lack, pounced upon his allusion to a possible paranormal aspect of dreaming as proof that Belvedere had wandered across the border that separated scientific study from New Age mysticism.

  In the last twenty years of his life, Belvedere had been considered eccentric at best and completely bonkers at worst by those in the field. But the remnants of the outstanding reputation he had established decades earlier had, nevertheless, clung to him like a worn and badly stained lab coat. His early, groundbreaking investigations into the biological and physiological changes that occur during sleep and in the dream state had assured him a place in the textbooks. It had also enabled him to establish the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research.

  The center was located near Los Angeles in one of the untold number of industrial parks that littered the landscape of Southern California. There were two small colleges nearby, both of which provided a steady source of paid research subjects for the various sleep studies conducted in the center’s labs. Students responded well to the idea of earning money while they slept.

  Most of the professional staff at the center was engaged in conducting research into a variety of serious sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnea and narcolepsy. The projects were commissioned and funded by various pharmaceutical companies and sleep disorder foundations.

  But in the year she had been working alongside Dr. Martin Belvedere, Isabel had discovered his great secret: He had set up the center as an elaborate, respectable cover that enabled him to pursue his own, private research into extreme dreaming.

  Extreme lucid dreaming was a valuable talent, Belvedere had maintained, and one that could be cultivated in certain adept individuals and used in a variety of fields, but only if the talent could be properly understood and controlled.

  Everyone knew that the human brain was very good at tuning out most of the sensory stimulation that impacted it twenty-four hours a day, year in and year out. In fact, the ability to exert a high degree of selectivity over what sensory i
nput would be utilized and what would be ignored was the only way the brain could make sense of the dazzling, overwhelming chaos that was reality, the only way it could stay sane. Total awareness would drive the mind mad.

  Belvedere had believed that extreme lucid dreamers were held to the same limitations of sensory selectivity and focus that governed everyone else but that they had an additional gift: They could shift or alter that focus while in the extreme lucid dream state. Furthermore, extreme lucid dreamers—those he labeled Level Fives—could not only perform that feat to a very high degree, they could do it at will.

  The possibilities were intriguing, Belvedere claimed. After all, a person who could selectively alter the way he or she looked at the world while in a dream trance would be able to discern things that would go unnoticed or unheeded while in the waking state.

  He had believed that those born with the talent no doubt used it, either consciously or unconsciously. He suspected that artists who were extreme dreamers envisioned alternate views of reality and preserved them in paint and stone and other media for those who would not otherwise experience them. Mystics and philosophers used their extreme dreams for metaphysical exploration. Scientists endowed with the talent utilized it to find new ways to tackle research problems. Investigators who could drop into an extreme dream at will made use of the skill to pick up clues at crime scenes that others missed.

  It had been Belvedere’s goal to promote the study of extreme dreaming so that individuals who possessed an aptitude for it could be trained to use it more efficiently and to greater effect.

  Extreme dreaming was not without a few problems, however, one of which was that a Level Five dream, for all its power and potential, was, nevertheless, a type of dream. And the dreaming mind often used symbols and elements that were difficult to interpret in the waking state. Some were relatively easy to analyze but others were bizarre and often baffling.

  That was where she came in, Isabel thought. She was a Level Five dreamer who could analyze the most obscure images that popped up in extreme dreams.

  At the entrance to the director’s office, she paused to take a deep breath, straighten her lab coat and push her glasses higher on her nose. Look professional. Look like you know what you’re doing.

  She entered the small outer office. Sandra Johnson was obviously relieved to see her.

  Sandra had served as Martin Belvedere’s secretary since the founding of the center. She was a large, solidly built woman with a helmet of gray curls. Her uniform varied little from day to day. It consisted of an amply cut big shirt that she always wore outside a pair of black trousers, and several items of bright costume jewelry.

  She and Sandra shared a bond of sorts. They had both been able to work with Martin Belvedere, and they were the only two people who had cried at his funeral. They also shared the dubious distinction of being the only two people from the center’s staff who had attended the funeral.

  “Oh, there you are, Isabel.” Behind the lenses of her reading glasses, Sandra’s eyes glinted with anxiety. “I was just about to have you paged.” She glanced toward the closed door of the inner office and lowered her voice. “This is no time to keep the new Dr. Belvedere waiting. He is very tightly scheduled this morning.”

  “Sorry. Got held up.” So much for starting off on the right foot. “Shall I just go on in?”

  “No, no, I’ll announce you.” Sandra flattened both hands on the desktop and pushed her large, plump form out of the chair. “This Dr. Belvedere is a lot more formal than the other one.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Tell me about it. He doesn’t even like the way I make coffee. I have been told that I have to stop at the coffee house across the street on my way into the office every morning to pick up a special double grande latte for him.” She snorted gently. “The old man always said I made the best coffee he ever tasted.”

  She bustled out from behind the desk and knocked once on the door of the inner office.

  A muffled voice instructed her to enter.

  Sandra turned the knob and opened the door. “Isabel Wright to see you, sir.”

  “Send her in.” The masculine voice was brusque.

  Isabel braced herself. The last time she walked through that doorway, she encountered a dead man. Some images could never be erased. For the rest of her career at the center she would no doubt get flashbacks to that moment of shock and dread whenever she was summoned into this office.

  “Please sit down, Ms. Wright.” Randolph motioned toward one of the worn chairs on the opposite side of his desk.

  “Thank you, sir.” She sank down onto the edge of the chair, knees pressed tightly together, hands clasped in her lap. An uneasy sensation stole over her. There was something very ominous about the atmosphere in the room.

  She glanced around, seeing the many changes that Randolph Belvedere had already made in the space that had been his father’s domain for so many years. Sphinx’s scratching post and food dish were gone. So was the mini-refrigerator where old Dr. B. kept a large stockpile of his favorite late-night snack, lemon-flavored yogurt.

  She repressed a small shiver. The room now possessed a stark, sterile neatness that disturbed her on some deep level. The surface of the desk was frighteningly clear of clutter.

  She quickly turned her attention back to Randolph. She had glimpsed him from afar on several occasions during the past few days, including at the funeral, but this was the first time she had seen him at close range. He had his father’s imposing stature, gray eyes and fierce, hawk-like nose. That was where the resemblance ended.

  Randolph was in his early forties, attractive in a stern, square-jawed, distinguished sort of way. He reminded Isabel of an anchor on one of the nightly news broadcasts. His hair was going gray and starting to recede at the temples.

  He frowned as though not quite certain what to make of her. Then he sat forward with a solemn air and folded his hands together on top of his desk. “I have been going through my father’s files. I must admit, I am confused about just what it is that you do here at the center, Ms. Wright.”

  “I understand,” she said quickly. “Dr. Belvedere deliberately kept my job description vague. The clients who contracted with him for my services are very keen on confidentiality, you see.”

  “I noticed,” Randolph said dryly. He unclasped his hands and opened the file folder. “There appear to be exactly two clients who routinely request your services, Ms. Wright. They are identified only by numbers. Client Number One and Client Number Two.”

  “Yes, sir. Dr. Belvedere did his best to honor their requests for anonymity.” She cleared her throat.

  Randolph’s brow furrowed. “Mrs. Johnson informs me that there are no copies of the contracts my father signed with these two anonymous clients. She says that all of the business arrangements were handled verbally and that no written records exist.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t give you any information concerning the contracts,” Isabel said. “I can only tell you that Dr. B., I mean Dr. Belvedere, took care of all the business issues relating to them personally.”

  “I see. Did you ever have any personal contact with either of these two clients?”

  “No, sir.” Mentally she crossed her fingers. Did dreaming about Client Number Two count as some sort of personal connection? What about attaching little tidbits of advice to the dream interpretations she wrote up for him? And then there was that glorious bouquet of orchids he had sent to her after she completed one particularly difficult report. Was that a form of personal contact? Probably not as far as Randolph was concerned, she decided. The bottom line here was that she had never met or spoken with either of the anonymous clients.

  “You must admit that this arrangement between my father and these two clients was highly unusual, Ms. Wright.”

  “I don’t understand, sir. Is there a problem with the anonymous clients?”

  His jaw flexed. She finally sensed the anger that had been seething just beneath the surface of his
distinguished facade and her spirits plummeted.

  “Yes, Ms. Wright, there is a problem with both of them. I have no idea who these clients are. I can’t locate any billing information. I can’t even contact them to find out what the hell is going on because there are no phone numbers or e-mail addresses in the files for them.”

  She seized on that last statement. “I’m sure there must be e-mail addresses. Dr. Belvedere mentioned on several occasions that he corresponded with both clients that way.”

  “If that is the case, he managed to delete or destroy all of the correspondence on his office computer.” Randolph’s mouth twisted derisively. “Just another one of his little eccentricities, hmm?”

  “I’m not sure what—”

  “Come now, Ms. Wright. You worked with my father for several months. You must be aware that he was pathologically secretive and paranoid.”

  She suddenly understood the anger she had sensed a moment ago. Randolph Belvedere had father issues. No surprise there, she thought. Dr. B. had probably not been what anyone would call a great dad. All the old man had ever cared about was his research.

  “Dr. Belvedere was very concerned with confidentiality, but in part that was because those two anonymous clients demanded it,” she said warily.

  “Tell me precisely what you did for these two clients,” Randolph snapped.

  “I performed a special kind of analysis for them on those occasions when the dreamers had difficulty interpreting the symbols and images that appeared in their dreams.”

  “I am aware that there are still some psychologists and psychiatrists who believe they can use the patient’s dreams to help uncover repressed issues. But the field of clinical psychology has moved well beyond Freud and Jung in that regard. Very few properly trained therapists put a lot of stock in old-fashioned dream analysis these days. In any event, you do not appear to have been practicing therapy. You never even met your clients, did you?”

  Okay, that had been a major problem, she thought, one she had complained about frequently to Dr. B. I need context, she had told him time and again. I’m working in the dark.