The Florentine Cypher: Kate Benedict Paranormal Mystery #3 (The Kate Benedict Series) by Carrie Bedford Page A

early Tuesday morning.”
    “I’m sorry you have to skip work,” Claire said when I finished the call. “But it’ll be okay, won’t it? No one will miss you?”
    I bit my tongue and made another call to the airline, this time to change my flight to Monday night. At this rate I could have rented my own private plane, I thought, as I imagined my credit card buckling under the weight of more change fees.
    Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked, a reminder that time was passing and we still had no word from Ethan. “Well, shall we take a look at your father’s notebook?” I asked.
    Claire came back to sit next to me at the desk, and we opened the notebook. The first few pages were filled with text. Her father’s writing was large, looped and hard to read in places. Claire looked up at me, frowning. “This is the prologue to Alberti’s
Della Pittura
,” she said. “But Dad already had the paperback book, so why did he write out the text?”
    “Some of the words are underlined,” I said, grabbing the paperback to compare the printed and handwritten versions. “I don’t get it really. Some of the underlined words are the same in both places. But some aren’t.”
    Claire ran her finger along her dad’s script and I saw she was crying again. She rubbed her eyes. “This is just too much for me. I can’t do any more tonight. Do you mind if I go to bed? I’ll get up early and we can look at this together then. You should get some sleep too. Take the blue bedroom.”
    “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll make myself more tea and be up in a while.”
    After Claire had gone upstairs, turning off lights as she went, I sat in the yellow glow of the desk lamp and stared at the ledger or whatever it was. The figures were as dark and impenetrable as they’d been before, so I turned my attention to the strange diagram of hand-drawn rectangles. It looked like one of those dry stone walls that mark field boundaries in England. I gazed at it until the lines blurred on the page. The diagram was telling me something, but I couldn’t see what. It was like having my eyes open underwater. Everything appeared fuzzy, and something that looked close was out of reach.
    The clock chimed midnight. My eyes were itchy and my body ached. It seemed like days since I’d had breakfast with Dad in Florence, but it was only fourteen hours ago.
    I’d closed the notebook and was tucking the two old documents inside the paperback when I heard Claire hurrying down the stairs.
    “That man is still outside,” she whispered.
    We tiptoed into the kitchen in the dark to look through the window. A pinpoint of orange light moved at the corner of the street. My heart started thumping. “We should call the police,” I said. “Have them check him out.”
    But just as I finished speaking, a fountain of sparks hit the ground, then the shadows shifted, and I heard footsteps moving away from the house. Darkness settled as the street fell deathly quiet.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Once we were sure that the cigarette smoker had left, I sent Claire back to bed. I checked the doors and windows again before going up. Although it seemed ridiculous, I grabbed a carving knife from the kitchen drawer and took it up with me.
    Claire was asleep by the time I tiptoed past her open door. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep but, when I sat on the bed to take my shoes off, I felt my eyelids droop. I sprawled on the blue comforter with my clothes on and went straight out.
    I wasn’t sure what woke me. At first I only heard the faint gurgle of the refrigerator downstairs. Then I heard something else, a sound of something scraping against metal. It was coming from the front door. I hurried to Claire’s room and shook her awake.
    “There’s someone outside,” I whispered. She looked dazed as I pulled her to her feet.
    “What do we do?”
    “We call the police. Where’s your phone?” I knew mine was down in the library.
    Light from the hallway spilled into the room. She