Running her eyes in all directions, she took a folded white card out of her pants pocket and thrust it at me. Stapled shut on all four corners.
I started to pull it open.
'
'Okay, I'll look at it in secret.' I palmed the card. She started to leave, but I held her back.
'When did Dr. Bill give it to you?'
'This morning.'
'To deliver tonight?'
'If he didn't come to the kitchen.'
'If he didn't come to the kitchen by a certain time?'
She looked confused.
'Why would he come to the kitchen, Cheryl?'
'Tea. I fix the tea.'
'You fix tea for him every night at a special time?'
'Gotta go!'
'One second. Tell me what he told you.'
'
'If he didn't want tea.'
Nod.
'When do you usually make him tea?'
'When he
She started to whimper. Looked down at my hand on her arm.
I let go. 'Okay, thanks, Cheryl.'
Instead of running off, she held back. 'Don't tell momma?'
Moreland's trusty courier. He'd figured her limited intelligence would keep her on track, eliminate moral dilemmas.
Wrong.
'All right,' I said.
'Momma will be
'I won't tell her, Cheryl. I promise. Go on now, you did the right thing.'
She hurried away and I took the card to Robin. It was too dark to read and I didn't want to put on the lights. Hurrying back up to our suite, I popped the staples.
Moreland's familiar handwriting:
DISR. 184: 18
'What?' said Robin. 'A library catalogue number?'
'Some kind of reference- probably a volume or page number. He's been leaving cards since we got here. Quotes from great writers and thinkers: Stevenson, Auden, Einstein- the last one was something about time and justice. The only great thinker I can come up with who matches 'DISR' is Disraeli. Did you notice a book by him up here?'
'No, only magazines. Maybe there's an article on Disraeli.'
'
'Sometimes they run features on ancestral homes of famous people.'
She divided the magazines and we started scanning tables of contents.
'French
She discarded an
'Using poor Cheryl as a messenger,' I said. 'If he had something to tell me, why couldn't he just come out and say it?'
'Maybe he feels it's too dangerous.'
'Or maybe he's just going off the deep end.' I picked up a six-year-old
'You think he faked it?'
'Who knows what goes on in that big, bald head? I sympathize with the fact that his life's falling apart, but the logical thing would have been to beef up security and wait until Ben's lawyer arrives. Instead, he lets the staff go home early and puts his daughter through this.'
Rain hit the window so hard it shook the casement.
I ran my finger down another contents page, tossed it. 'Why choose
'He obviously trusts you.'
'Lucky me. It makes no sense, Rob. He knows we're leaving. I told him this afternoon. Unless in his own nutty way he thinks this'll keep us here.'
'Maybe that or something else spurred him to action. But he could also be in real trouble. Knew he was in danger and left a message for you because you're the only one he's got left.'
'What kind of trouble?'
'Someone could have gotten in here and abducted him.'
'Or he fell, like he did in the lab.'
'Yes,' she said. 'I've noticed he loses his balance a lot. And the absentmindedness. Maybe he's sick, Alex.'
'Or just an old man pushing himself too hard.'
'Either way, his being out there on a night like this isn't a pleasant thought.'
The rain kept sloshing. Spike listened, tense and fascinated.
We finished the magazines. Nothing on Disraeli.
'There are books in your office,' she said. 'In back, where the files are.'
'But they're not categorized,' I said. 'Thousands of volumes, no system. Not too efficient if he's really trying to tell me something.'
'Then what about that library off the dining room?' she said. 'The one he told us wouldn't interest us. Maybe he said that because he was hiding something.'
'A book on or by Disraeli? What is this, Nancy Drew and Joe Hardy's blind date?'
'Let's at least check. What could it hurt, Alex? All we've got is time.'
We went downstairs again. The house was a scramble of streaks and shadows, hidden angles and blind corners, ripe with charged air.
We passed through the front room and the dining room. The library door was closed but unlocked.
Once inside, I turned on a crystal lamp. Dim light; the salmon moire walls looked brown, the dark furniture muddy. Very few books. Maybe a hundred volumes housed in the pair of cases.
Unlike the big library, this one
I found the Disraeli quickly: an old British edition of a novel called
I turned hurriedly to page 184.