The Busy Body by Kemper Donovan

Author:Kemper Donovan [Donovan, Kemper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

Dorothy was halfway down the hall by the time I let go of the handle. I hurried after her, trailing Officer Choi as we made our way to the “E” elevator.

“Well,” I said, sidling up to her as she pressed the call button.

“Well,” she agreed. “Do you have any idea what the hell is going on here?”

I shook my head.

She spread out her hands with a chuckle. “Nor do I! And I’m getting the sense I may not be helping here at all. Maybe Leila was right. She usually is.”

The elevator dinged open and we got in. I didn’t ask her where we were going, because it was obvious. We were leaving. What else do you do when someone screams at you to get out?

* * *

I had to physically restrain myself from gasping when we reached the ground floor. We were in the library—or Reading Room, to use its proper name—on the other side of the hall, the counterpart to the Reception Room. The two walls of this giant space that weren’t glass were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and featured one of those wheeled ladders you can roll back and forth to reach the highest shelves. If I ever manage to buy my dream house, it will one hundred percent feature one of these ladders.

Unlike the Reception Room, the Reading Room was filled with furniture: armchairs, end tables, lamps, rugs. I even saw a few bean-bag chairs scattered here and there, and the buttercup shape of a papasan.

I wanted to stop, turn round and round, sing a song about how wonderful it was à la Belle in Beauty and the Beast. But Dorothy hadn’t stopped, so I marched along with her through this marvellous room and out into the Great Hall . . . where the Shahs were waiting for us.

It was Anne who stepped forward.

“We were hoping we’d catch you. Do you think we could talk?”

* * *

The Recreation Room was next to the Reading Room. It was easily the biggest space I’d seen yet, taking up the same acreage as the kitchen and dining room across the hall. The four of us—Samir, Anne, Dorothy, and I—stepped into it, blinded for a moment by the drastic change in lighting. The ceiling was much lower here, dropped several feet to give it more of a den-like feel. And even though two of the walls were glass, they looked onto the eastern part of the sky, which by then (four o’clock on a December afternoon) was dark enough that it looked more like night than day.

A multitiered bar had been built into the wall opposite the door, and in the vast space between were little seating areas arranged for socializing: teeny-tiny cocktail tables that looked like pedestals missing their statuary with tall, giraffe-legged stools surrounding them; long leather couches in muted browns and reds, low coffee tables in front of them. On the northern end of the room, next to the elevator marked “N,” was a

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