In an anonymous hotel room overlooking the lake, Lucia Marini sorts out the investigation's most enigmatic clues: seemingly silent scraps of paper that actually speak a precise and disturbing language. With Lisa's help, what seems like a marginal detail turns into a potential key to understanding the deaths, linking them to ancient, technical knowledge.
Through meticulous analysis, sudden insights, and unspoken tensions, the idea emerges that someone is communicating through carefully studied, not random, paths. The trail leads to places of knowledge and power, where silence is a form of defense. Entering the abbey library and confronting its resistance marks a point of no return in the investigation. From this moment, every gesture becomes a carefully observed move, and every page consulted can become evidence. The killer no longer hides merely in the shadows, but in the knowledge he has chosen to use.
Silent Clues, Forbidden Libraries, and the Killer’s Hidden Language in Corenno Plinio
Detective Novel. The Secrets of the Abbey of Piona. Chapter 9: The Paper That Speaks
The hotel room carried the mild scent of old wood and perfumed fabrics. In Corenno Plinio, at that hour, the lake reflected almost nothing anymore: it was an immense dark slab, broken only by a few distant lights, like a signal that promised no salvation. Lucia had chosen that hotel for precisely this reason. It wasn’t an elegant place, it wasn’t a “safe” place. It was a place where people passed through and didn’t look. And for an investigation that was growing more dangerous the more precise it became, that was already a lot.
She had turned off the main light. Only the bedside lamp remained on, casting a cone of yellowish glow that cut the room like a blunted blade. On the table, near the telephone, she had arranged everything with methodical order: a notebook, a pencil, a folding magnifying glass, two transparent envelopes sealed with tape, and on top of the envelopes—like an almost involuntary gesture of defiance—two thin paper fragments, laid on a dark cloth to make them stand out.
They were not whole sheets. They were pieces. Tears. Portions of something larger. She was waiting for Elisa to arrive so she could talk to her about them.
Lucia looked at them once more, as if the paper might change shape if stared at too long. One fragment had a curved line, like the torn edge of a notebook or a folded map. The other was more regular, but it had a different texture: extremely thin, almost transparent, with micro-perforations at intervals. Neither of the two contained complete words. And yet both seemed to be trying to say something.
The slip of paper from the first body was stained with a barely perceptible halo, a shading, as if it had absorbed a liquid and then dried. Lucia couldn’t stop thinking about that gesture: someone who soaks, closes, deposits. A calm gesture. A working gesture.
A soft knock. Two taps. Then a third, lighter one.
Lucia took the pistol from the bedside drawer without flaunting it, kept it low along her thigh, and only then opened.
Lisa was there, still wearing her coat, her hair loosely gathered as if she had left in a hurry. Her face was pale, but her eyes alert. She didn’t look frightened: she looked tense. And Lucia recognized that tension. It was the same she felt when she sensed a detail was about to become evidence.
“Come in,” Lucia said.
Lisa stepped inside and turned to close the door, then stood still for a moment, looking at the half-dark room.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
Lucia gave a bitter half-smile.
“I don’t want them to understand who comes in and who goes out. Here in Corenno everyone sees.”Lisa moved closer to the table. Her gaze slid over the envelopes, then stopped on the fragments. And there Lucia saw the change: Lisa’s eye wasn’t looking the way a person observes. It was looking the way someone reads.
“Are they them?” Lisa asked, in a thread of voice.
Lucia nodded. “One was near Brother Leone. The other near the second dead man. I call them ‘pieces of paper,’ but I don’t know if that’s what they really are. That’s why I called you.”
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