The Florentine Cypher: Kate Benedict Paranormal Mystery #3 (The Kate Benedict Series) (7 page)

The only flaw was the aura that circled lazily around her head.

The shock made my legs wobble. How could both Claire and Ethan be in danger?

I held out the flowers. “They’re from my dad’s garden.”

Her expression held a hint of disdain, but she took them before leading me into a spacious living room decorated with comfortable-looking furniture and an antique Persian rug on the wooden floor. A single picture hung above a dresser, an oil in a gilt frame of a beautiful Madonna clasping a chubby baby.

For a few seconds, we stood awkwardly, facing each other. “Is Ethan here?” I asked.

“No, not yet. Is there a problem?”

“You haven’t heard from him?”

Her eyes widened at the urgency in my voice. “What’s going on?”

I dreaded telling her, but it had to be done. “It’s complicated.”

“Come with me then and I’ll make us an espresso while you tell me everything.”

She led me into a compact kitchen and gestured to a chair at a tiny breakfast table where I sat while she measured coffee into an espresso machine. The flowers lay on the counter and I felt a faint surge of irritation that she hadn’t said thank you or acknowledged my father’s thoughtfulness.

“So what’s happening?” she asked.

I recounted the events of Friday night, starting with Ethan leaving in the taxi, the directions to the safe and my discovery of the book. My cheeks flushed warm when I described the attack on my cab on the road from the airport. I left out the part about Ethan’s aura. And hers of course. The story was wild enough already.

“Ethan’s missing? Oh my God.”

“You’re sure you don’t know where he might be?” I asked. “The text said he’d be here.”

She shook her head, the color draining from her face.

“Let’s not worry yet,” I said. “He didn’t say
when
he’d be here. He’s certain to be in touch soon.”

In fact, I was panicking. To hear nothing from Ethan for so long scared me.

“Had you seen the book before?” I asked, trying to focus on other parts of the puzzle. “It was a leather-bound version of Alberti’s
Della Pittura
.”

“I never saw it, but I’d heard about it from Dad. And then Ethan told me he’d retrieved it from the bank. My father had a will— he was very organized— but even so it took a while to put his affairs in order after he died. A week ago, Ethan got authorization to access Dad’s bank account and his safety deposit box. He told me the box had the
Della Pittura
in it, as well as some jewelry for me from my grandmother.”

She set down the cups she’d been arranging on a tray and sank into the seat opposite me.

“It’s too bad you lost the book. Now we’ll never know why it was so important to my father.”

I shifted on my chair, embarrassed. “It was stolen,” I replied. “Anyway, I managed to hold on to this.”

The pouch felt soft against my fingers when I took it from my bag and gave it to her. She undid the thread and opened it, tipping the key out into the palm of her hand.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, tracing the engraving of the flames and the letter C with her finger. At once, her aura started moving faster. I leaned forward, staring at the aura to be sure I wasn’t imagining it. I wasn’t. That was interesting. It implied that the key was the source of the threat to her.

“What do you know about it?” I asked. “Why did your father store it in a safety deposit box?”

“I only know what little he told me. Apparently, an Italian man sent the
Della Pittura
to my grandfather a few years after the Second World War. When Grandpa died of a heart attack just after Dad was born, my grandmother stored the book in the attic where it stayed for the next sixty years. My dad found it when she moved to a nursing home a year or so ago. He told me about this key, which was hidden in a cut-out inside the book, right?”

I nodded.

“He intended to write an article about it,” she continued. “But then he… well, there was the car crash. Thank you for coming to the funeral, by the way. It meant a lot to us. Anyway, Dad was researching the history of the book and the key.”

“Did he tell you anything about his research?”

Claire’s eyes filled with tears. “No. We were supposed to spend an evening together in Florence the night before he died, but in fact, we had a bit of a row.”

She put the key back in the pouch. “He phoned to say he planned to come to Florence and he wanted to take me out for dinner. I was excited to see him, and I splurged on an expensive new dress. We’d planned to meet at the station, but then he called to tell me he needed to change his plans, that he had to go to Rome for a meeting. Something to do with his work. We argued on the phone because I was mad that he canceled on me.” She sighed. “My reaction was stupid and irrational. He was an investigative journalist, after all, and often changed plans on short notice to follow a story.”

She stopped talking, holding one hand to her throat. “Then he had the accident the next day, on the journey home from Heathrow airport.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. We sat in silence for a while. Sounds from the street drifted up and a bell tolled somewhere nearby.

“What do you think the key opens?” I asked finally.

“No idea. But I wonder if the meeting my father had in Rome was related to this key somehow.”

“It’s possible, although he didn’t have the key with him. It must have been inside the book at the bank in England by the time your father went to Rome.”

She frowned and then nodded. “I see what you mean. Dad never got home so he couldn’t have taken them to the bank after that meeting.” She clasped her hands together and rested them on the table. “So why did Ethan want me to have them?”

“Probably to keep them safe until he gets here. I’m sure he’ll be able to explain it all when he arrives.”

We both fell silent again, and I guessed we were thinking the same thing.
Where was Ethan?

“I hope to God he’s okay,” Claire said.

I leaned forward and squeezed her hand, which was cold. “It’ll be fine.” I did my best to sound reassuring.

She disengaged her hand from mine and stood to finish making the coffee, placing little cups of espresso on the table. I was already caffeinated from my early breakfast at home, but I drank it anyway. The energy rush would keep me going.

Claire sat again. She glanced at the clock above the window. “I have to go into the office for a couple of hours this afternoon,” she said. “We have a team of art historians coming in for a visit tomorrow and I have to be prepared.” Stirring sugar into her cup, she raised her eyes to meet mine. “What about you? Can you stay until I get back?”

“I have a flight in four hours.” I checked my watch. “Actually, I should get going.”

“Please will you stay until Ethan gets here?” she asked quietly. “I’m worried. If anything has happened to him…”

Her voice broke. I felt a familiar sense of the inevitable. I had to be at work on Monday morning or risk Alan’s wrath, which would undoubtedly descend on my head all the way from the Great Wall of China. But Ethan’s absence disturbed me, and Claire’s aura was like a magnet drawing me in. I wasn’t good at walking away from auras. And although it wasn’t rational, I felt responsible for what had happened, particularly the theft of the book.

“I’ll stay until tomorrow morning,” I said. “I expect he’ll turn up by then.”

“Thank you.” She got to her feet. “There’s a sofa bed you can sleep on tonight. I’ll run into the office and get back as soon as I can, then we’ll have dinner together this evening and catch up. It will be like old times.”

Obviously my version of old times and hers were rather different, but I smiled and nodded, trying to ignore the warning sign flashing in front of my eyes.
Don’t screw up and miss work again
. I blinked a few times until the sign faded.

“I’ll go for a walk,” I said. “It’s been a while since I played tourist.”

“Good idea. I’ll call you if I hear anything from Ethan.” She gave me the key. “Take care of this until he comes. I don’t want it.”

I didn’t either, but I put it back in my bag.

Before heading out, I rang the airline to see if I could fly back to London first thing in the morning. They offered a flight into City airport that would get me into the office by ten, thanks to the one-hour time difference. I booked it, trying not to worry about the triple-digit charge to my credit card for change fees. When I’d finished the call, I began to dial Dad’s number to let him know I planned to stay for another day. Then I decided it would raise too many questions. I’d call him once I was back in England tomorrow.

Enjoying the early spring sunshine, I took a circuitous route towards the Piazza Signoria, mulling the events of Friday night, focusing on the details, trying to think of anything that would cast light on what had happened to Ethan. After twenty minutes of tortured and unproductive thinking, I glanced up to find that I’d walked nearly as far as the Duomo, Florence’s cathedral. On a whim, I joined the queue for the climb up to the dome. It’d been years since I last did it. The exercise would do me good, maybe help me shake off some of the stress I was feeling. The line was long, and from what I could hear, represented a diverse group of visitors from many countries.

Just ahead of me a dozen English tourists talked loudly to each other until their tour guide began reciting the history of the Duomo and the building of the great cupola. “And don’t be confused,” she reminded them, “by the words
duomo
and
dome
.
Duomo
is the word for cathedral, coming from the Latin
domus,
which means house, as in house of God. The construction of the cathedral started more than one hundred years before Brunelleschi designed the dome, one of the greatest architectural achievements in the world.”

The Brits gazed upwards and I wondered if they were silent because they were in awe, or because they had no clue what the guide had been talking about. I suspected the latter when one of them began, “But not as impressive as Bill’s greatest drinking achievement last night—” The other members of the group burst out laughing.

As bells across the city tolled midday, we moved into the cathedral, ready to begin the ascent. I looped the strap of my shoulder bag across my chest so it wouldn’t slip off. The first half of the climb took us up an enclosed spiral stairway, which reminded me of my tendency to claustrophobia, but narrow openings in the walls gave enticing hints of the view to come.

About halfway up, we emerged on to a long, narrow balcony that ran around the inside of the cupola. From this vantage point, the frescoed ceiling was spectacular, the colorful scenes of the Judgment Day looming huge around us. Perched on fluffy white clouds in a perfect blue sky, saints and angels gazed down with smiling faces on scenes of sinners being tossed into raging fires or impaled on pitchforks by leering devils. The contrast between heaven and hell was extreme, no subtlety there. To sin was to be cast into the inferno to suffer for all of eternity.

A guard hurried us along and we obediently advanced, beginning the second part of the climb, up more stairways and along narrow corridors, where I admired the distinctive herringbone brick pattern that added strength to the overall structure. I’d studied Brunelleschi’s astonishing dome as part of my degree. In fact, his dome was made of two concentric shells, one inside the other, and bound with iron rings to prevent the whole thing from collapsing outward. His design was both ingenious and audacious— so much could have gone wrong. But he’d succeeded in creating one of the world’s most stunning architectural monuments in an era long before modern equipment and engineering.

Aware that we were close to the top, the visitors around me chattered with excitement. A flight of steep steps that followed the curve of the inner dome made for a dramatic final ascent before we emerged onto the exterior terrace. It was crammed with people, but I found a space at the railing and peered cautiously over the edge of the parapet. Below, the red roof of the dome curved away in a precipitous drop that made my stomach turn. People on the streets below looked like tiny insects and even the tall palazzos of Florence seemed like dollhouses from here.

A man leaned with his back to the railing, ignoring the view. He had dirty blonde hair and a pockmarked face with a sullen expression that stood out among the noisy, cheerful tourists surrounding him. I caught his eye and turned away. I didn’t remember seeing him in the queue at the entry. For some reason he made me nervous, so I moved on, following the circular terrace to take in a different view. A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed that he was still in the same place. I was just being jumpy, I concluded.

I came up behind the British tour group and listened to their guide telling them we had climbed 463 stairs to get here. After a few minutes, I returned to the exit and the steps that led back down to the cathedral floor.

Back inside the walls of the dome, I followed the crowd, making slow progress. We’d been descending for a few minutes when we came to a halt, waiting for a single-file stretch of corridor to clear. Someone behind me asked what was happening and when I turned to explain, I saw the man with the pockmarked face again. The hair prickled on the back of my neck. Was he following me? No, I decided after a few seconds. I was being paranoid. I recognized other faces in the queue of people behind me, including all the Brits. We’d all gone up to the dome, walked around the terrace, and descended at roughly the same pace. He must be a tourist like everyone else, in spite of his surly expression.

We started to move again, but I couldn’t shake the feeling he was watching me. Discarding my customary courtesy, I slipped in front of a middle-aged couple and sidled past a group of five older tourists who’d probably caused the slowdown earlier. Ahead, the spiral staircase was empty. I trotted down as quickly as I could.

Once or twice, my foot slipped on the worn stone treads, a reminder to slow down. I’d visited some of the castles in Scotland, where I’d learned all about the tricks of their spiral staircases. They wound in the direction that allowed the castle inhabitants to carry swords in their right hands as they ran down the stairs, while intruders fighting their way up were forced to hold their weapons in their left hands. And many of the staircases had trick steps, a rise that was a different height from the others and would cause the unwary to fall.