City of Dark Magic Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the Boston Hyatt. But George had smelled like oranges and leather and he had bent her over one of those carts housekeeping wheeled around with soaps and shower caps and dry-cleaning request forms. That had been fun, and afterward she had pocketed some shampoo and conditioner. There probably wasn’t time to get the zipper fixed.
    Sarah realized she was focusing on inanities in order not to think about Sherbatsky. And leaving poor Pols.
    Sarah let herself into the apartment. Alessandro was out, and she decided to take a bath. Stripping down, flinging clothes around her room, she almost tripped over something hard and sharp. Funny. Her father’s toolbox was in the middle of the room. She kept it in the back of her closet. What was it doing out? Sarah glanced up and noticed something else. Her computer laptop was open. She never left it open. And Alessandro, as odd and boundary-free in many ways as he was, would not have touched her computer. Had someone been in her room? She hadn’t turned on many lights when she came home. Had there been a break-in? Was she not alone in the V in apartment?
    Sarah looked around for a weapon. Not seeing anything more threatening than her
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, she knelt down, opened her father’s tool kit, and grabbed a hammer.
    The good thing about the kind of square footage two young academics in Boston can afford is that one can conduct a thorough investigation of it in just under fifteen minutes. Sarah wondered how this previously overlooked feature of her apartment might be condensed for a real estate ad:
Must see! This easy-to-search-for-lurking-psychopath 2 bdrm charmer with orig wd floors will go fast!
    As empowering as it was to walk around her apartment like Thor, it was also tiring. Returning to her bedroom, Sarah examined her computer to see if any files had been deleted or anything looked tampered with. She searched through the papers on her desk and then examined the toolbox more closely.
    Her mom had given it to her the Christmas before she went off to college, although Dad had already been gone for a decade by then. It had been a weird, startling thing to see on Christmas morning. Intensely familiar yet upsetting. And she had felt an unreasonable rush of disappointment when she opened it up and found only tools. She wondered what she had expected—a last letter from her father telling her how much he loved her? A CD of his voice? Her father himself, emerging cramped but whole from this tiny hiding place? It was all she had of her father’s possessions. Perhaps that was why she had added The Page to its contents, which was her own secret bittersweet talisman. The Page was just an ordinary sheet of ruled paper, covered with Sarah’s fourth-grade writing.
Sally and Cindy walked around the house and counted the windows again. Sally went one way, and Cindy the other. They met up again on the sagging porch by the front door.
“Fifty-two,” said Sally firmly.
“Fifty-two,” said Cindy, just as firmly.
They marched back into the ancient old structure.
“I’ll start at the top,” said Sally. “In the attic. You start in the basement.”
The two girls went from room to room, counting the windows. They were very careful, counting little round windows and big dormers. French doors onto balconies counted as one. The rules were very clear to both of them, for they had been counting for days.
Once again, they met by the front door. “Fifty-one,” said Cindy.
“Fifty-one,” said Sally.
There was a window missing. If they counted fifty-two windows on the outside of the house, then the house had fifty-two windows. But they could only find fifty-one windows when searching the rooms. That meant only one thing.
“There’s a secret room,” said Sally.
C [on ’indy looked at her sister and nodded. “We have to find it.”
     
    The scene did not come from Sarah’s imagination. It was from a book, whose title she did not know, whose author’s name she could not