Кей Хупер - Hiding in the Shadows

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 bestsellers 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."