The Florentine Cypher: Kate Benedict Paranormal Mystery #3 (The Kate Benedict Series) (10 page)

“There’s a small grocery store just around the corner,” she said. “I’ll run over and grab some supplies. Why don’t you check to see what the situation is with bedding and towels?”

“Are you sure? You don’t want me prying through your family belongings.”

“No, it’s all right. Mum took her stuff with her the last time she and my stepfather were here, and Dad, well, I don’t know. He was only camping here for a few days.” She hesitated. “I’d rather you did it anyway. I still get overwhelmed if I come across reminders of him.” Her eyes brimmed with tears, which she wiped away with the back of her hand. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

After Claire had gone, I explored. On the main floor, a small kitchen adjoined a formal dining room, a small library, and the living room. Upstairs, I found three bedrooms, one with a massive four-poster bed. I wondered how they’d got it up the narrow stairway. A cupboard in the bathroom stored piles of towels and blankets, an unopened packet of loo rolls and a shelf full of soap and shampoo. We wouldn’t be here for long, but we’d certainly be comfortable enough.

I went back downstairs and into the library, a small room lined with bookshelves full of hardbound classics, French and Italian language textbooks, and a collection of paperback thrillers and mysteries. A battered wooden desk and two straight back chairs were the only furnishings, with another colorful Murano chandelier hanging from the ceiling. I sat at the desk and opened the top drawer, feeling strange about going through another family’s belongings, but I found only a motley collection of paper clips, scissors, staples, and pens. The second drawer held a paperback book— a Penguin Classic translation of
Della Pittura
by Leon Battista Alberti, the same as the leather-bound volume I’d found in Ethan’s safe.

Intrigued, I lifted out the paperback, handling it as carefully as I had the antique version. Tucked inside it was a white envelope with no writing on the front. It wasn’t sealed, but I put it to one side, leaving it for Claire to open. While I waited for her to come back, I flipped through the first few pages of the book, seeing that some of the words were underlined, but I wasn’t sure why.

As soon as I heard the front door open, I hurried into the hall, eager to tell Claire what I’d found. She came in, trailing cold air. Was it my imagination or was her aura moving faster?

“Are you all right?” I asked.

After locking the front door, she turned to lean against it, cradling a brown paper bag of groceries in one arm.

“Claire, are you okay?”

“I think someone was watching me.” She sounded out of breath.

“Who? What did you see?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. Her hands were shaking as she put the bag down on the hall table and undid the buttons on her jacket. “There’s a man smoking a cigarette on the corner of the street. He was there when I went to the shop and when I got back.”

I picked up the bag and carried it to the kitchen, with Claire following. We both peeked out of the window. Fifty meters away, a man leaned against the wall of a house. Since it was growing dark, the figure was barely more than a black shape against the darkness of the stone. The tip of a cigarette glowed orange in the shadows.

“It’s a strange place to be hanging out if he only wants to smoke,” Claire said. “There’s a bar right around the corner.”

“But why be so obvious if he’s watching us?” I wondered out loud. “We can see him as well as he can see us, right?”

We pulled back from the window, closed the shutters and turned on the lights.

Claire rubbed at the bruise on her cheek. “Did you find anything?”

“Yes, it’s in the library.” I thought about the smoker. “Let’s be sure the front door is locked first.”

Back in the hall, we checked the locks and placed a heavy chair under the door handle. All of the windows on the ground floor were covered with decorative, but functional, iron bars. There was no way anyone could get into the house now.

“Show me what you found,” Claire said, looking calmer now that we were barricaded in. She followed me to the library, where I handed her the paperback book.

“An English translation of the
Della Pittura
?” She flipped through the pages. “A few notes, but not many. That is Dad’s handwriting though.”

I gave her the envelope. “This was inside the book.”

She opened the envelope and took out two sheets of paper, put them both on the desk and unfolded the first one. It was a diagram, a line drawing of rough rectangles of different sizes. I couldn’t imagine what it represented. Then she spread out the other page, which was yellow with age and covered in handwriting.

“It’s a list of some kind,” I said. “Almost like a ledger?” There were dozens of entries, each one following a similar format of a set of letters followed by a number and another two initials.

“FA-14361608-AG,” Claire read out loud. “What the heck does that mean?”

When I put my finger on the paper to follow the letters, Claire swatted my hand away. “The paper’s very fragile. The less we touch it the better.” Still, she picked it up and held it to the light from the desk lamp, but she handled the page as gently as the wing of an injured bird.

“This is very old,” she said. “It’s laid paper. See all these embedded lines? Those are from the metal wires that supported the paper pulp during the fabrication process. Paper-making transitioned from laid to woven in the late eighteenth century, so this page almost certainly dates to that time or earlier.”

I peered at the paper, seeing the grid lines she described.

“It’s two hundred years old?”

Claire turned the page over to look at the back. “Most likely more. I’d guess from the texture of the paper and its similarity to other documents I’ve seen from the period, that this could be from the late 1500s.”

“And the diagram?” I pointed at it.

She held it up to the light. “It’s old too, but far less so. Probably mid-1700s. It’s hard to be certain, although I could pinpoint the date if I had more time. But I don’t understand what it is. Just a bunch of lines with no annotations. Very odd.”

We stared at it for a while but it made no sense to me.

“Where did these come from?” Claire asked. “How did Dad end up with them?”

“Remember I told you the lining on the inside cover of the leather book had been cut? I wonder if the lining was a hiding place and the pages had been concealed inside? Perhaps your father discovered them? The incision looked clean and new, not worn down with age or anything.”

Claire placed the page back on the desktop and frowned at it.

“This is good, right?” I said. “We’ve found this.” I tapped the paperback. “And these old documents. That means your dad was working on something related to the
Della Pittura
doesn’t it?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure what difference it makes. We don’t know what the list means, and that diagram thingy is incomprehensible. They’re about as much use as a chocolate teapot.” She stood up. “This is all so frustrating. I thought coming here would lead us to Ethan somehow but….”

She turned and headed to the kitchen. “I need to make some food before I pass out from hunger.”

“I’ll keep looking at the documents,” I said to her retreating back.

After a few minutes, I heard Claire banging pans around. “Penne all right?” she called. “I got spaghetti too but I prefer penne if that’s okay.”

I didn’t bother to respond, focused on deciphering what the ledger could mean. Why were these papers tucked inside a paperback version of the
Della Pittura
? They had to be a clue, but I couldn’t see it.

The kitchen went quiet suddenly. I looked up. Claire had stopped whatever she’d been doing and stood in the doorway with a book in her hand. “This was in the knife drawer. It’s a notebook. I think it was Dad’s.”

She was very pale and tears dripped down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I miss him so much.”

I went to her and put my arms around her, letting go of the bad feelings I’d had about her for the last thirteen years. We’d been immature teenagers. It was silly to hold a grudge for so long.

After she’d stopped crying, I led her back into the kitchen and told her to sit down. “You need to take a break for a while,” I said. “I’ll finish dinner.”

I continued where she’d left off, making two plates of penne with pesto and placing them on the kitchen table.

She put the notebook on the kitchen counter. “I’ll look at it after dinner,” she said. “Just seeing his handwriting makes me cry, but maybe I’ll feel better with some food inside me.” She stood up and took a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the refrigerator. I wondered if she should have any, considering she was on painkillers for her head injury, but I didn’t say anything and let her pour a glass for me, too.

While we ate we speculated about what the two old documents could mean. I was impatient to look at her dad’s notebook, but I could see she was on the verge of tears. She needed time to prepare herself to look at it. When we finished eating, I told her to stay seated while I cleaned up. Just as I started rinsing the dishes, her mobile rang. I hoped it would be Ethan, but she shook her head and, talking softly, disappeared into the living room. A few minutes later, after I’d finished washing and drying the plates, she came back, looking a little flushed. “I forgot I was supposed to meet someone for dinner tonight.”

“A boyfriend?” I asked as I put the kettle on. We hadn’t talked about anything much on the drive up to Venice. In fact, apart from discussing directions from time to time, we’d driven in silence. I’d been preoccupied with trying to unravel the mystery of Ethan’s disappearance, and I assumed Claire had been too.

“Yes,” she said. “His name is Dante and he owns an art gallery in Florence. We’ve been seeing each other for about four months.”

“Sounds nice. What did you tell him?”

She rolled her eyes. “Nothing. I told him that something important had come up and I’d call him in the next couple of days. He offered to come to help with whatever problem I had. And before you say anything, I didn’t tell him where we are.”

“You did the right thing. The fewer people who know our location the better. Until we find out where Ethan is.”

Talking of people not knowing where we were, I thought about how I wasn’t going to be at the office tomorrow morning. It wasn’t good. In spite of my recent hard work, Alan had it in his head that I was a flake. And once Alan had an opinion on something, getting him to change his mind was like bending cold metal. Achievable but arduous, with a high risk of cut fingers. Even though he was out of the country, he’d call in first thing on Monday to check that everyone was present and correct. And I wouldn’t be there. But I had no choice. I couldn’t leave until I knew where Ethan was.

Still, I could only give this another twenty-four hours without risking serious damage to my career. My best plan was to get a flight out of Venice tomorrow evening and be back in the office on Tuesday. Leaving Claire to make tea, I picked up my mobile and called my project manager to tell her that I’d miss work tomorrow. “But I’ll be in first thing on the next day, I promise.”

“It’s okay.” Laura’s tone was reassuring. “We’re all caught up for now. And if Alan calls tomorrow, I’ll tell him you’re in the loo. See you bright and early Tuesday morning.”

“I’m sorry you have to skip work,” Claire said when I finished the call. “But it’ll be okay, won’t it? No one will miss you?”

I bit my tongue and made another call to the airline, this time to change my flight to Monday night. At this rate I could have rented my own private plane, I thought, as I imagined my credit card buckling under the weight of more change fees.

Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked, a reminder that time was passing and we still had no word from Ethan. “Well, shall we take a look at your father’s notebook?” I asked.

Claire came back to sit next to me at the desk, and we opened the notebook. The first few pages were filled with text. Her father’s writing was large, looped and hard to read in places. Claire looked up at me, frowning. “This is the prologue to Alberti’s
Della Pittura
,” she said. “But Dad already had the paperback book, so why did he write out the text?”

“Some of the words are underlined,” I said, grabbing the paperback to compare the printed and handwritten versions. “I don’t get it really. Some of the underlined words are the same in both places. But some aren’t.”

Claire ran her finger along her dad’s script and I saw she was crying again. She rubbed her eyes. “This is just too much for me. I can’t do any more tonight. Do you mind if I go to bed? I’ll get up early and we can look at this together then. You should get some sleep too. Take the blue bedroom.”

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll make myself more tea and be up in a while.”

After Claire had gone upstairs, turning off lights as she went, I sat in the yellow glow of the desk lamp and stared at the ledger or whatever it was. The figures were as dark and impenetrable as they’d been before, so I turned my attention to the strange diagram of hand-drawn rectangles. It looked like one of those dry stone walls that mark field boundaries in England. I gazed at it until the lines blurred on the page. The diagram was telling me something, but I couldn’t see what. It was like having my eyes open underwater. Everything appeared fuzzy, and something that looked close was out of reach.

The clock chimed midnight. My eyes were itchy and my body ached. It seemed like days since I’d had breakfast with Dad in Florence, but it was only fourteen hours ago.

I’d closed the notebook and was tucking the two old documents inside the paperback when I heard Claire hurrying down the stairs.

“That man is still outside,” she whispered.

We tiptoed into the kitchen in the dark to look through the window. A pinpoint of orange light moved at the corner of the street. My heart started thumping. “We should call the police,” I said. “Have them check him out.”

But just as I finished speaking, a fountain of sparks hit the ground, then the shadows shifted, and I heard footsteps moving away from the house. Darkness settled as the street fell deathly quiet.