not at liberty to say at the moment,” she said abruptly as we reached the top of the stairs. “Which is Jack’s room?”
I led the way, but there was no answer to our repeated knocking. The detective looked frustrated, but I pointed out that it was still early yet and maybe Jack had gone into town to meet her.
“I’ll call and check,” she said. “But just so’s not to waste the trip, let’s take a look in Ms. Morgan’s room. You knew her the best of anyone—”
“I knew absolutely nothing at all about her,” I answered resentfully.
The detective frowned again, but took a key and opened Faith’s room across the hall. “It’s been processed, so you don’t need to worry about disturbing anything. I’m looking for something in particular; let’s see if you notice what I did.”
Smothering my annoyance with the policewoman’s games, I looked around the room, not furnished too much differently from mine. Clothes, tailored to an extreme degree, still expensively perfumed, hung in the closet, with shoes lined up as if for military review beneath them. Books organized by subject were in ranks on the bookcase, all of the bindings exactly one inch from the edge of the shelf, just like the ones Faith had kept on the top of a Victorian drop-front desk. The papers on the work were all lined up at right angles to the edges of the desk.
Unlike my room, however, there were no comforting piles of papers and books and scraps of notes left hither and yon for discovery and inspiration. No heaps of clothing on the floor and all of Faith’s underthings were carefully folded and put away according to type. She had been a person with a high degree of interest in order. A fine layer of dust had settled over everything, only noticeable because of the uniformity of the blanket, presumably only accumulated since last Wednesday night. My room had little patches cleared away where I needed a clean surface, leaving everything unevenly coated.
Something prompted me, and I moved over to the old desk and opened the drop front.
“There’s nothing in there,” Kobrinski said, leaning against the closet door. “Just some Shrewsbury stationery. All of her work was sorted into the files and on her desk.”
Looking at the books, I recognized only the Foucault among the secondary sources, and aside from battered annotated copies of the works of Cooper, Rowson, and Irving, there was no modern or recreational fiction to be found anywhere. There was a gap quite noticeably left on one side.
“That’s where her diaries were,” the detective supplied when she saw me pause. “We’ve taken them to the lab and have been going through them. Absolutely religious about keeping them, every day. They end about two months ago.”
“What are they about?”
“Everything. I wish she had written one during her stay here,” Kobrinski grumbled. “That would clear up a lot for us, the way she wrote. I get the impression that the person who wrote them was a different one than the person all of you knew. It’s…” She shook her head. “cold—”
I thought that assessment was spot on, myself.
“—but you’ll have to look at them and tell me.” She traced a pattern going through the carpet with a toe.
“So why did she stop?” I asked. I closed the desk.
She shrugged. “Most of it was about her recovery, after her suicide attempt. You wouldn’t think that someone would be quite as…analytical…about themselves. Almost like it was about someone else. I don’t know. Maybe she figured she’d done all the work she could and was moving on.”
I arched a disbelieving eyebrow and Kobrinski shrugged again. “The last entry is on the last page of the last notebook,” she said. “Sort of makes me think that there should be another one.”
I nodded. “Yeah, just look at this room. You’d think she’d keep on with something as disciplined as a diary, especially since she brought the others with her. Did you look for another volume?”
The detective nodded and reached for a Tums. “All the usual places, between the mattress and boxspring, in the mattress and boxspring, in the grate, all over. I tried to think like her, I tried to think paranoid, I tried to think scared—perhaps she was already afraid for her life before she was murdered. But we found nothing. I wondered if it wasn’t taken from her the night she was murdered.”
“Well, we’ll never find that out until we get the murderer, or at least know who it