Crossing the Lion: A Reigning Cats & Dogs Mystery

by Cynthia Baxter

As I patted them, I realized they were no longer covered in plaster or drywall or whatever else had made them perfectly smooth during the early part of my trek. I was now touching the rough surface of what felt like stone. Cold, hard, unyielding stone.

  And I still didn’t know where I was or where I was going.

  Suddenly a horrible thought occurred to me. What if this secret passageway led to a dead end—and I returned to the dining room to find that a sudden draft had blown the door leading back into the house shut?

  In other words, what if Linus’s killer had noticed that sending me a message in fake blood hadn’t succeeded in getting me off the case—and decided to try something more effective, such as sealing me inside the bowels of the house?

  I can’t worry about that now, I insisted to myself. I’ve come this far, and I’ve got to see this through.

  I’d barely had a chance to form that thought before I felt the top of my head brush against something hard.

  Something really hard.

  “Ow!” I cried, without thinking.

  It wasn’t until after I’d let out that yelp that I realized I should probably be as quiet as I could. For all I knew, I wasn’t alone in here.

  But at the moment I was more concerned about the fact that, when I’d reached up, I discovered that the ceiling in this section of the passageway was much lower. And with every step I took, it got even lower.

  The walls were getting closer together, too.

  Okay, I thought, crouching down to keep from doing any more damage to my head, so you’re moving through a tunnel that’s getting smaller and smaller, and there’s no light and the walls are so thick no one could hear you even if you screamed—

  It was at that point that I realized I was right about not being alone in there. I heard a skittering sound that could only be the pitter-patter of little feet.

  Rodent feet.

  “Eeek!” I cried, as something soft and furry brushed against my ankle.

  You’re a veterinarian, a voice inside my head scolded me. You’re supposed to love animals.

  Not rats, another voice shot back. Especially when they’re running around at the bottom of a dark, damp secret passageway.

  I paused, wondering if maybe it was time to head back and see if the door to the dining room was still open. But, rats or no rats, I wanted to find out where this darned thing ended up.

  I kept going, walking with one hand to the side and one above me. Even though I’d been walking with my knees bent about as far as they’d go, I finally had no choice but to crawl.

  The ground was made of mud. With puddles. And plenty of stones.

  Between my wet, sore knees, the rats I kept picturing, and the fact that the space I was moving through kept getting smaller and smaller, I was starting to give serious thought to the increasingly appealing concept of giving up.

  It was only about five seconds later that I spotted the light.

  It was a tiny speck, off in the distance—so tiny that at first I thought I was hallucinating. Or maybe seeing a glimmer reflecting off some nasty rodent’s eye.

  Whatever it was, the sight of it motivated me to go on. I could hear my own breathing as I became more and more excited over the prospect of actually finding—well, the light at the end of the tunnel.

  As I crawled along, aware that I’d be picking dirt and pebbles and who knew what else out of my knees for days, the small spot of light kept growing bigger. The walls around me got lighter, too.

  Finally I was close enough to see that I was looking outside, into the fog. Just beyond the opening was the dock.

  So this secret passageway was built to be another way out of the house. It led directly to the dock—and the boats that could get people off the island.

  Epinetus Merrywood’s taste in architecture might have been good for making a quick escape, but when it came to my search for answers, this hadn’t exactly turned out to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  Yet even though my first reaction was disappointment, I decided that I couldn’t completely rule out the possibility of finding something of value at the end of this rainbow. Especially since I quickly realized that while the tunnel led to the dock, it also led to the boathouse at the end of the dock.

  The tiny wooden structure had no function other than storing tanks of gas, rope, oars, and other boating supplies. Which made it a place where, I suspected, hardly anyone ever went.

  Especially in winter.

  Since I’d discovered that the latest editions of Linus’s diaries were missing, I’d been looking for interesting and unusual hiding places. And I couldn’t ignore the fact that I’d just found myself right outside something that fit that description perfectly.

  • • •

  Does it have to rain every minute of every day I’m here on this island? I wondered crossly as I ventured outside the tunnel.

  Even though I made a mad dash for the boathouse, I couldn’t stop the cold rivulets that trickled down the back of my neck, unpleasant as icy fingers. My feet were already wet from sloshing through puddles, but that didn’t mean it felt any better to go squeaking across the damp boards of the dock in sopping sneakers.

  I made a mental note to dress more appropriately the next time I decided to climb through a wall into a dark, damp, rat-infested tunnel that spat anyone who walked through it out into the rain.

  All the same, I was glad that fog still enshrouded the island, since it would help keep me from being noticed by anyone who happened to look out the window and wonder why one of their houseguests was running around in the downpour like a maniac.

  The boathouse was in a state of deterioration, probably because Linus and Charlotte didn’t use it much now that the kids were grown. It looked as if a single substantial gust of wind could reduce it to a bunch of wooden planks littering the dock and floating out to sea. The fact that it hadn’t happened over the past few days of nearly constant storms struck me as miraculous.

  The door had been painted blue—about a hundred years ago. Peeling paint chips clung to the roughhewn wood for dear life.

  I placed my hand on the door, hoping I wouldn’t get any splinters. Then I pushed, holding my breath and expecting it to be locked.

  Instead, it gave way as soon as I applied a little pressure.

  I stepped inside, immediately searching for a light switch. I didn’t see one. In fact, it appeared that this little wooden shack wasn’t wired for electricity. Even so, with the door open, there was enough light to find any old notebooks that happened to be lying around.

  Doing that wasn’t going to be all that difficult, either. The boathouse was tiny, with barely enough room to turn around—literally.

  The place was packed to the rafters, positively stuffed with everything any boater could ever need. Coiled ropes hung from big rusty nails that protruded from the walls at odd angles, along with a few plastic buckets that smelled as if their last few occupants had been unlucky fish. Lying on the floor or on the built-in wooden benches that encircled the interior were folded-up tarps, a couple of oars, and a rusted metal box that looked as if it had been designed to hold fishhooks and other fishing supplies. There was a lot of other paraphernalia, as well, but, not being a boater, I couldn’t readily identify the purpose of any of it.

  Aside from all that junk, the crowded little building wasn’t exactly the most pleasant place in the world to conduct a search. The interior was draped in cobwebs, and as I looked around, a spider the size of a gerbil lowered itself from the ceiling about three inches away from my nose. Fortunately, I’m not an arachnophobe.

  But while I wasn’t afraid of spiders, I was afraid of getting caught. I did my best to conduct a hasty search, picking things up and looking under them. Nothing. I crouched down and looked under the built-in benches, but that didn’t yield any hidden treasure, either.

  And then I noticed a shelf in the back left-hand corner. It was small, just big enough to store a stack of well-worn books. When I pulled them down and leafed
through them, I saw that they contained nautical charts.

  I was about to put them back when I realized there was something else on that shelf. Four slender volumes had been lying on their side, directly underneath the map books. But since they were smaller, they had pretty much been concealed.

  Even before I picked them up, I knew exactly what they were.

  Black-and-white notebooks. Linus’s missing diaries.

  Just then a powerful gust of wind blew the door shut. At least, I thought it was a gust of wind. Alarmed, I turned and tried the doorknob, afraid that someone had spotted me, followed me—and decided to lock me in.

  But the door opened easily, which meant it really had been just the wind.

  While it was damp and cold and just generally creepy inside, I couldn’t wait to read these notebooks. Especially since I now had a sense of how much trouble someone had gone to to hide them.

  My heart was pounding ferociously as I opened the most recent notebook and began to read.

  • • •

  My first reaction was surprise over how difficult it was to make out a lot of the words that were scrawled across the page.

  It took me only a second to realize why I was having such a hard time. The handwriting in Linus’s earlier journals had been easy to read, characterized by clear, precisely formed letters. The page in front of me, however, was much sloppier. The Ts weren’t always crossed, the Is weren’t necessarily dotted, and the sentences he’d written didn’t always begin with capital letters.

  Maybe he was in a hurry when he wrote this, I thought.

  As difficult as his prose was to read, I forged ahead.

  I planned to spend the morning working in the garden, he wrote. But I couldn’t remember where Charlotte had stored the tools. So instead I came back inside and read the paper.

  Then Charlotte invited Harry and Scarlett for lunch, his writings continued. I could hardly follow what they were saying. Something about a merger. I was too embarrassed to ask what they were talking about.

  There was more, but I couldn’t make it out, given how badly his handwriting deteriorated.

  I supposed poor Linus had started to experience the symptoms of old age. Maybe he’d developed arthritis in his hands and found it hard to hold a pen. He was certainly becoming forgetful.

  I read on. At least, I tried to. By this point there were more words I couldn’t make out than words I could actually read.

  I frowned. Maybe he was taking medication—or dealing with some ailment other than arthritis that affected his dexterity. I made a mental note to ask Charlotte, figuring that she had decided not to mention either of those possibilities for some reason.

  I flipped further ahead in the notebook. I was now looking at the last few pages Linus had written before he’d died—or before he’d decided to stop keeping a journal. I looked for the date of the last entry but couldn’t find one.

  That was odd, I thought. He’d been so conscientious about dating every entry before this.

  Confused, I started checking backward. There were pages and pages of undated entries. Instead of organized reports of what he’d done that day, the pages were filled with scribblings, all in the same wild handwriting. It looked as if he had just rambled on about anything that had come into his head.

  After backtracking nearly a quarter of the way through the book, I finally found an entry that was dated.

  October 12 of the previous year. More than thirteen months before his death.

  There weren’t thirteen months’ worth of entries written in the pages that followed, though. Which told me that Linus had, indeed, stopped keeping up with his daily journal at some point.

  Yet someone had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to hide them. Given the sorry state of the boathouse, it didn’t strike me as possible that there could be any other reason for them to be here. Even if the outbuilding had been in better shape, it was much too small and packed with junk for anyone to consider it a hideaway. At least not anyone over the age of eight.

  Which made the effort that had gone into stashing them in this unlikely place all the more mysterious. Unless, of course, whatever that person wanted to keep a secret had occurred much earlier, back when Linus was still recording all the details of his life.

  All these unanswered questions fueled my determination to find out what, if anything, Linus had written in his notebooks that might be tied to his murder. I started to read again, this time starting with the page dated October 12.

  Charlotte says the children were flowers in the garden are not coming spring the dogs keep barking someone else on the island …

  A wave of heat washed over me.

  Gibberish, I thought. Linus was writing nonsense. Why would he choose to write something like this, something that was completely meaningless?

  And then I realized what I was looking at. He hadn’t chosen to write this way at all. Over the past year, it wasn’t only Linus’s handwriting that had deteriorated.

  So had his mental faculties.

  In fact, while I was certainly no expert, I was pretty sure that what I was looking at was a sign that in the final months of his life, Linus had suffered from Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia.

  I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.

  Oh, my, I thought. That poor man. Poor Charlotte, too.

  I even felt sorry for his three children. At least, until I reminded myself that my discovery didn’t do a thing to remove suspicion from any one of them.

  Still, the ramifications of what I’d just found out were mind-boggling. Not only for Linus’s wife and children, either.

  If the man’s writings were any indication, in his final months Linus Merrywood had been in no condition to run a huge corporation.

  My mind was reeling as I tried to sort through all the possible scenarios that simple fact unleashed. My thoughts immediately went to Harry Foss.

  What if Linus had become unable to run the business in a responsible way yet had refused to step down as president and CEO? Was it possible that Harry had seen the impending eruption of chaos throughout Merrywood Industries as a reason to kill a man—even one for whom he had so much respect?

  Or perhaps Scarlett had taken it upon herself to remove him from power. After all, she was as close to Linus as Harry had been. If Linus was losing his ability to run the company, she could have had the same motivation as Harry.

  I was about to consider all the other suspects on my list—including the members of the family as well as the three staff members at the house—and how this new information might have affected them when I heard a noise. It sounded like a soft footstep, as if someone was walking on the dock.

  Horrified over being found here in the boathouse with Linus’s diary in my hand, I turned. Standing in the doorway amid the thick fog was Charlotte.

  The expression on her face was stern. As for me, I was pretty sure I looked really guilty, since that was exactly how I was feeling.

  “Hello, Charlotte,” I said. “I—I was just—”

  “I know what you’re doing, Jessica,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Exactly what you’ve been doing ever since you got here.”

  Gesturing toward the notebook in my hand, she added, “Only this time, you hit pay dirt.”

  “I can explain everything!” I insisted. “It all started because Betty and Winston were concerned about what happened to Linus. From the very start they were certain there was foul play, mainly because Linus called Winston right before he died and told him he thought someone was trying to kill him.”

  “I know all about that phone call,” Charlotte said with an eerie calmness. “That one and many other calls he made.”

  What other calls? I wondered.

  Yet even though I didn’t understand that last part, I wasn’t about to start asking her questions. Not when, at the moment, she was the one who had the right to be doing the asking.

  “I have a feeling you know quite a bit, Jessica,” she continued, “thanks t
o all the prying you’ve done while you were in my house. As my guest, I might add.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I insisted. “Like I said, Betty and Winston were concerned about Linus’s death. They asked me, as a favor to them, to—”

  It was only then that Charlotte pulled her hand out from behind her long skirt, the same one she’d been wearing the first time I met her. As she did, I saw that she had something in her hand.

  A sick feeling came over me as I realized what she was holding: the silver dagger that up until recently had been hanging in the front hallway.

  Chapter 18

  “A lion sleeps in the heart of every brave man.”

  —Turkish Proverb

  I decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed that Charlotte was holding a weapon. True, it was a weapon that probably hadn’t been used to hurt anyone for a good century, if not longer. Still, the point looked sharp enough to kill.

  Instead of acknowledging that the person who’d come after me was armed, I did my best to converse with her as casually as possible. My goal was to act as if being caught in a dilapidated old boathouse shrouded in fog, reading personal journals that someone had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to hide, was an everyday occurrence.

  “Anyway,” I went on, completing my sentence as soon as I got my bearings, “I was only trying to help.”

  “Is that one of Linus’s journals?” Charlotte asked, gesturing toward the black-and-white notebook in my hand. I noticed that her tone of voice had changed. Instead of sounding accusing, it now sounded vague and faraway. Dreamy, almost. “It looks just like all those others he kept throughout his life.”

  So she had known about the journals.

  But even though she hadn’t been truthful with me, I didn’t see a reason to be anything but honest. Especially since I’d been caught red-handed.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what this is,” I replied calmly. “These others, as well. They’re the diaries from the final months of his life.”

  “Have you read them?” she asked.

  I nodded, since, once again, I had no choice but to admit what I’d been up to.