Hiding in the Shadows (27 page)

It was half a sheet torn carelessly from a notebook, and the single handwritten sentence on it sprawled across the page as if the author had been in a hurry.

Faith, look in my apartment inside the book
.

“It isn’t my writing,” Faith said.

The words blurred before Kane’s eyes. “No. It’s Dinah’s.”

She didn’t want to go into Dinah’s apartment. Beside her, Kane was still and silent, and she was vividly conscious of his anger and disbelief.

He didn’t believe she had never seen the note before or that it had not been in her bag a few days before. Nor did he believe she hadn’t written it herself, somehow aping Dinah’s handwriting well enough to fool his incredulous eyes.

He didn’t believe, because any other explanation chipped away at his sanity. And he was angry with her because … what? Because he thought she was playing with his emotions, mocking his grief?

Faith didn’t know what she believed. All she knew was that the note had
not
been in her bag before today and that she had
not
written it herself in some inexplicable attempt to deceive Kane—or anyone else. She knew Dinah hadn’t written it, because Dinah was dead.

And she knew one last thing, one final stark fact she was absolutely certain of: Wherever the note had come from, the message it contained was from Dinah.

She knew that.

Kane said, “If it takes longer than … If it looks like I’ll be late in meeting the inspector, I’ll call and have him wait.” He sounded calm, but she thought it was a precarious calm.

He’s angry at everybody because she’s gone. And now this has to happen. And I make a handy target for his anger
.

She didn’t blame him for what he felt, but there was an anger in Faith as well, and she didn’t know how much longer she could handle it in silence.

When they reached Dinah’s apartment building, the driver went around the block once so they could make certain no media lurked in the area. But since no crime had been committed there, since her apartment was empty and her neighbors had long since stopped responding to questions from the press, the journalists who had camped out there in the days just after Dinah’s disappearance had finally gone away.

Even so, the bodyguard insisted on going with
them up to the third floor, insisted on checking the apartment door carefully with a little electronic gadget he carried, and, after Kane had disarmed the security system, insisted he go in first to make certain there was no danger. It was, after all, what Kane was paying him for.

Faith was grateful for the few minutes allowed her before she had to go inside.

“Do you know if I’ve … ever been here before?” she asked Kane, after the bodyguard closed the door, leaving them alone.

“She never mentioned it.”

Angry. He’s so angry
.

Faith didn’t say anything else. She felt Kane’s gaze on her.

The bodyguard came out and said they could enter.

Faith walked slowly into the living room and looked around. The apartment smelled of lemon; Kane had told her that he’d had a cleaning service come in every week, just as Dinah had, but it had been vacant for many weeks and there was an air of emptiness about it.

Faith shivered and wrapped her arms about herself as she tried to remain detached and study the room. Plenty of natural light, spacious. The furniture was high quality, the wood pieces gleaming with lemon oil and the upholstery constructed of expensive material, but the appearance was casual, the cushions overstuffed and comfortable.

The neatness contributed to the empty feel, with accent pillows placed precisely, and magazines on the stone-topped coffee table aligned exactly, and no clutter anywhere.

Looking around, she was sure that she had been here before, and more than once.
I know there are two bedrooms and a bathroom. And even though I can’t see it from here, there’s a clock near the kitchen table, and the dish towels have apples on them. And she loves plants, but hers are silk because she forgets to water the real ones and they die.…

Shaking off the odd sensations, Faith walked over to a wall between two large windows where a bookcase was filled to bursting.

 … Inside the book
.

Which book? There must have been a hundred on this set of shelves alone, and she didn’t have to look down the hallway toward the bedrooms to know that it was lined with bookshelves just as filled as these were.

Conscious of Kane behind her, Faith reached up to a shelf and began running a finger along the spines of the books, stopping on each just long enough to read the titles.

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

She looked back over her shoulder at him. “No, I don’t know. I have no idea which book she—which book the note meant. Do you?”

“The note was directed to you,” he answered implacably.

“Okay, fine. Why don’t you go on to your appointment with the inspector? Leave the guard outside and take the driver with you. I’ll stay here and look through these books.”

His mouth tightened. “I’m not leaving you alone.”

“I’m not alone. The guard can stay.”

“It’ll take hours to go through all her books,” Kane said roughly.

“Then I’ll stay here for hours.”

“Goddammit, Faith, you know Dinah didn’t write that note!”

She didn’t flinch. “I don’t know who wrote it. But I am absolutely positive the
message
is from Dinah.”

“Dinah is dead.”

“Yes.” Faith made herself go on in the calmest voice she could manage. “And I’ve known things about her all along, Kane. The flashes of those scenes with you. The dog attacking her. That room in the Cochrane warehouse where they—where they hurt her. And the sound of water near where she was found. I knew all of that, saw it or heard it or felt it. And I’m telling you now that the message in the note is from Dinah.”

“Are you channeling the dead now, Faith?”

“I’m just telling you what I know. There is something in one of these books, something Dinah wants me to find. I have to look for it.”

Kane stared at her for a long while, then swore and reached for his cell phone. “All right. I’ll reschedule with the inspector for tomorrow.”

He stepped away to use the phone, and Faith didn’t try to talk him out of it. She knew he still didn’t believe her about the note, but at least now he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Faith turned back to the bookshelves and began scanning the titles again. She really had no idea what she was looking for. All the books were novels, ranging
from mystery, romance, and science fiction to blockbuster best-sellers and literary fiction.

If nothing else, Dinah had certainly ranged widely in her reading.

Faith plucked a few titles off the shelves and flipped through them, feeling helpless and frustrated. Which book? How could she possibly guess what might be important?

“We’ll have to go through them one by one,” Kane said behind her. “Check every book. That is—if you really don’t know what we’re supposed to find.”

“I really don’t know,” she said.

He let out a short breath that sounded impatient. “Okay. You start in here, and I’ll take the hallway.”

“She had a lot of books,” Faith murmured.

“There’s another wall of shelves in her bedroom,” Kane said, then turned and went into the hall.

An awful lot of books.

More than an hour later, Faith had taken down, searched, and replaced on their shelves nearly half the books, without finding anything out of the ordinary. A few bookmarks. A years-old grocery list. Theater ticket stubs.

She sat on the floor, her legs out before her, touching her toes and stretching her sore muscles gingerly. She was tired. And she was frustrated.

Dammit, Dinah, where is it? Where do I look?

She didn’t know. And if it had been Dinah trying to help her find some necessary clue, she was being silent and unhelpful now.

Faith got to her feet and went into the hallway, intending to ask Kane if he’d found anything. She assumed he would have told her if he had, but the
silence was wearing on her nerves and she wanted to hear the sound of his voice.

He wasn’t in the hallway, though books stacked neatly on the floor gave evidence of his efforts. Faith went on down the hall, moving noiselessly, not sure why she felt the need to be silent. At the end of the hallway were the two bedrooms and bathroom.

In the room that had undoubtedly been Dinah’s, Kane sat on the bed, his bowed head in his hands, shoulders hunched, utterly still.

Faith had a confused impression of a lovely room decorated in cool shades of blue, of patterns and materials that were feminine without being frilly, of more bookshelves and oil paintings of seascapes and a few figurines that were beautiful and tasteful and didn’t clutter up the room.

Then she crept away silently, back to the living room. Mechanically, she continued searching through the books, looking at each one from cover to cover before returning it to its shelf. She didn’t realize she was crying until everything got blurry and she saw wet splotches on the page she was staring at.

“Dammit,” she whispered. “Dammit.”

“Any luck?”

Faith put one last book back on the shelf, got to her feet, and looked at Kane as he stood in the doorway. She thought he was calmer, less angry. Or maybe he was simply as tired as she was. They’d been in Dinah’s apartment nearly three hours.

“No. How about you?”

“Not so far.” He frowned at her, seemed about to ask something, but in the end didn’t.

Faith wondered if her eyes were red. She said, “I thought of something a few minutes ago. My apartment was searched at least a couple of times. Do you think this place might have been searched too?”

“Maybe. Right after Dinah disappeared, I went through here with a fine-tooth comb, and the police searched it as well. The security system has been active, and the only ones who are supposed to come in are the cleaning crew. But there’s always a chance somebody else got in. If they did, though, they were neat about it. The cleaning service was under orders to report anything out of the ordinary—and I certainly haven’t noticed anything out of place.”

Faith went over to sit in an armchair near the fireplace. “I keep thinking I should know just where to look. That note … it
assumed
I’d know. ‘Inside the book,’ it said. As if there were only one book. One important book.”

Kane sat on the arm of the couch near her chair. “And you have no idea what book would be important.” He didn’t say it derisively or accusingly, just matter-of-factly.

She pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes. “No. But I—” Her head lifted abruptly, and she stared at him. “Did Dinah use a day planner? A date book?”

“Two of them. One she kept with her in the Jeep, for business, the other one here for personal stuff.” Kane got up and went to the antique desk near one of the windows. He took a black leather book out of the top drawer and came back to hand it to
Faith. “I’ve been through it a dozen times,” he said, sitting on the couch. “So have the police. In the first few weeks, we retraced her steps those last days, trying to find some clue to what happened to her.” He paused. “I never saw anything unusual in there, nothing that drew my attention.”

But that would have been the point. Not to draw anyone’s attention
.

Faith examined the book carefully. It was the usual sort of day planner, with an address book and calendar and tabbed sections for appointments and schedules and notes. There was a pocket in the front cover for Dinah’s business cards, and several pages of clear plastic sleeves for the cards people had given her.

There was, as far as Faith could see, nothing out of the ordinary.

She looked through the sections one at a time, turning each page slowly. It wasn’t until she reached the second-to-last section intended for notes that she looked up at Kane. “There are no pages here. The tab says notes should be in this section, but all the pages are missing.”

“I didn’t notice that. But it might mean nothing. Dinah could have torn them out one or two at a time, never intending to keep them. People do that.”

Faith closed her eyes, thinking. “If I knew somebody might try to get some information I had, that someone could come looking for it, I just might write it down twice. Once in a reasonable place where I could be fairly sure it would be found—and then again somewhere else.”

“Where?” Kane asked.

Faith stared down at the planner. “When you’re
looking for something and you find it, you stop looking. Right?”

“Right.”

She turned the final tab, which was labeled MISC., and discovered several lined pages with a scattering of reminders written in Dinah’s hand. Faith ran her finger down them slowly.

Get the Jeep’s tires rotated. Find out Sharon’s birthday. Have a putting green installed in Conrad’s office
.

Faith looked up at Kane and repeated that one aloud. “Conrad?”

He smiled slightly. “Conrad Masterson. A financial manager who’s also a golfing nut. Dinah was wondering what to get him for Christmas.”

“Oh.” Faith returned her gaze to the pages. More reminders. To trace the whereabouts of a catalog order that had not arrived. To schedule a routine checkup with her doctor. To return a Stephen King novel to the library.

Faith stopped again at that one. “But she buys his books.”

“What?” Kane leaned toward her.

She looked up at him with a frown. “This note says she has to remember to return a Stephen King novel to the library. But she buys his books in hard-cover—I found half a dozen.”

“I found two,” Kane said slowly.

“Does—did she even take novels out of the library?”

Kane had to think about that for a moment. “I don’t think so. She used the library for research, but she was always willing to buy a book, even by a new author. Building a personal library was important to her.” He indicated the bookshelves throughout the apartment. “Obviously.”

“Then I think,” Faith said, “we should look for more Stephen King novels.”