Chapter 23
Matteo’s light swept the room.
“Sir,” he said.
He had found the wall behind the bookcase.
A section of it had been moved — recently. The dust around it was disturbed, swept into little arcs where something had been pushed aside and pushed back. And behind it, where the paneling had been slid away, there was a passage.
A narrow passage, dark, that ran into the wall.
Dante looked at it.
“It connects to the west corridor,” Matteo said. “The old service stairs. Somebody’s been using this room.”
“Recently?”
“Look at the dust.”
Dante looked.
Somebody had.
Someone had been coming into this room, through the wall, for years.
CHAPTER 9 — THE LOCKED PAGE
They went back to the study because the passage was too narrow and too dark, and because Dante had decided, somewhere between the door and the desk, that he would not walk into a trap with Allesia behind him.
He put the ledger on the desk and looked at it for a long moment.
“Open it,” he said.
Allesia looked up. “You said—”
“I know what I said.” He turned the book over, so the small lock in the back cover faced up. “But we’re not the only ones who know about it. That call told us so. If we don’t open it, whoever’s out there gets to decide when we do.”
“And if he’s waiting for exactly that?”
“Then he’s waiting for it in a house I control, on a night I chose.” He looked at her. “That’s a better position than waiting for it in a hospital parking lot.”
Allesia looked at the medallion in her hand.
She had worn it for ten years. Her father had put it around her neck when she was eighteen, three days before the accident, and he had told her not to take it off, and she had not, not once, through nursing school, through three apartments, through every job, through seven months in this house.
She opened the tiny key.
Dante held the ledger steady.
She slid it into the lock.
It fit.
It turned.
The back cover opened on a hinge she had not been able to see — a thin panel, hollow, with a folded page tucked inside.
She drew the page out and laid it on the desk.
It was Bianca’s handwriting. The same cramped, elegant hand as the ledger, but shakier here, hurried — written, Dante thought, by a woman who was running out of time.