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."
Kane sat on the arm of the couch near her chair. "And you have no idea what book would be important." He didn't say it derisively or accusingly, just matter-of-fact.
She pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes. "No. But I..."
Her head lifted abruptly, and she stared at him.
"Did Dinah use a day planner? A date book?"
"Two of them. One she kept with her in the jeep, for business, the other one here for personal stuff."
Kane got up and went to the antique desk near one of the windows. He took a black leather book out of the top drawer and came back to hand it to Faith.
"I've been through it a dozen times," he said, sitting on the couch. "So have the police. In the first few weeks, we retraced her steps those last days, trying to find some clue to what happened to her."
He paused. "I never saw anything unusual in there, nothing that drew my attention."
But that would have been the point. Not to draw anyone's attention. Faith examined the book carefully. It was the usual sort of day planner, with an address book and calendar and tabbed sections for appointments and schedules and notes. There was a pocket in the front cover for Dinah's business cards, and several pages of clear plastic sleeves for the cards people had given her.
There was, as far as Faith could see, nothing out of the ordinary. She looked through the sections one at a time, turning each page slowly. It wasn't until she reached the second-to-last section intended for notes that she looked up at Kane.
"There are no pages here. The tab says notes should be in this section, but all the pages are missing."
"I didn't notice that. But it might mean nothing. Dinah could have torn them out one or two at a time, never intending to keep them. People do that."
Faith closed her eyes, thinking. "if I knew somebody might try to get some information I had, that someone could come looking for it, I just might write it down twice. Once in a reasonable place where I could be fairly sure it would be found — and then again somewhere else."
"Where?" Kane asked.
Faith stared down at the planner. "When you're looking for something and you find it, you stop looking. Right?"
"Right. "
She turned the final tab, which was labeled misc, and discovered several lined pages with a scattering of reminders written in Dinah's hand. Faith ran her finger down them slowly.
Get the jeep's tires rotated.
Find out Sharon's birthday.
Have a putting green installed in Conrad's office.
Faith looked up at Kane and repeated that one aloud. "Conrad?"
He smiled slightly. "Conrad Masterson. A financial manager who's also a golfing nut. Dinah was wondering what to get him for Christmas."
"Oh." Faith returned her gaze to the pages. More reminders.
To trace the whereabouts of a catalog order that had not arrived.
To schedule a routine checkup with her doctor.
To return a Stephen King novel to the library.
Faith stopped again at that one. "But she buys his books."
"What?" Kane leaned toward her.
She looked up at him with a frown. "This note says she has to remember to return a Stephen King novel to the library. But she buys his books in hardcover I found half a dozen."