Crossing the Lion: A Reigning Cats & Dogs Mystery

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” she cried. “That’s not your—”

  But before she had a chance to stop me, I’d pulled open the zipper far enough to see that stashed inside were clothes folded so loosely and unevenly that they’d obviously been tossed in. But I was much more interested in what was sitting on top of them: a small burgundy-colored rectangle that I immediately recognized.

  “Since when do you need a passport to go shopping?” I demanded, grabbing it and holding it up in front of her face.

  “When you use traveler’s checks?” she replied meekly.

  “You give that back to Gwennie!” Jonathan ordered, without a trace of his usual British gentility. Instead, he sounded like a Dickens character. One of the really nasty ones, like Bill Sykes or Uriah Heep.

  “I don’t think you two should be going anywhere,” I insisted. “Not when the police explicitly said that no one should leave Solitude Island.”

  “We don’t care what you think,” Jonathan sneered, yanking Gwennie’s passport out of my hand. “Why don’t you mind your own business and go back to bed?”

  “I’m not letting you leave this island!” I exclaimed. My eyes darted around as I searched for the means to prevent them from escaping. I’m not sure what I had in mind—a rope, a drill I could use to put a hole in the dinghy—but I certainly didn’t spot anything that might be helpful.

  I didn’t even have a cell phone on me. Then I remembered that it wouldn’t have done me any good, anyway.

  “Come on, Gwennie,” Jonathan barked. “If we’re going to make that flight, we’d better get a move on.”

  I had just opened my mouth once again, hoping some argument I hadn’t yet thought of would come flying out, when I heard what sounded like voices in the distance.

  At first I thought they were only those annoying seagulls again. But a second later I realized they were human voices. Male ones.

  I heard dogs barking, too. And then: “Jessie! There you are!”

  That was a voice I recognized.

  I turned, still trying to process the fact that I wasn’t alone out here with Gwennie and Jonathan after all. A few more seconds passed before Nick emerged from the thick swirls of fog, his cheeks flushed and his eyes wild. Brock, Tag, and Townie followed right behind him. Nick had brought Max and Lou with him, while Corky and Admiral trotted along behind the group.

  “What’s going on?” Nick demanded. “The front door is wide open. What are you doing out here?”

  He’d barely gotten the words out before his eyes—and everyone else’s—traveled over to the dinghy and the two people who were dumping so much luggage into it that it would be a miracle if the thing didn’t sink as soon as they climbed in.

  Which I had no intention of letting them do.

  Gesturing at Jonathan and Gwennie with my thumb, I cried, “They’re the ones you should be asking! But before we give them a chance to answer, I suggest that you gentlemen escort these two back inside.”

  • • •

  “I can’t believe Jonathan and Gwennie were trying to escape,” Nick said as we sat side by side in front of the fire he’d built in our bedroom fireplace.

  The tattered Oriental carpet was just big enough and just soft enough to provide a comfy cushion. And leaning against the bed kept our backs from suffering. Our canines sat beside us, Lou dozing with his chin resting on his paws and Max gazing at the fire like some prehistoric cave dog who couldn’t get over such a wonderful invention.

  “They’re not going anywhere now,” Nick commented. “Not with Brock and Tag keeping them practically under lock and key until Falcone gets here. Imagine poor Townie having to take the boat over to Long Island just to use his cell phone.”

  “Trying to sneak back to England while everyone was asleep doesn’t do much to make them look innocent,” I noted.

  “Neither does Gwennie’s claim that the only reason they were trying to leave is that they didn’t do anything wrong,” Nick added. “All they’ll say is that they had nothing to do with Linus’s murder and they didn’t want to be accused.”

  “Thanks for helping me reel them in,” I said. “You and the other guys showed up in the nick of time—no pun intended.”

  Nick grinned. “Glad I could help. When I came back here and saw that you were gone, I got nervous. That message that was left for you in pretend blood sure didn’t help.”

  “Hey, where were you, anyway?” I asked. “When Corky and Admiral’s barking woke me up, I looked over on your side of the bed and you were gone.”

  “I went down to the kitchen to get something to drink,” he replied. “You were fast asleep when I left, and I did my best to be quiet.”

  “And here I was afraid you’d been spirited away by poltergeists,” I said.

  “Nothing that dramatic,” Nick assured me. “Now, why don’t we try to get a little more sleep? I’d say we earned a couple more hours.”

  A minute or two after we climbed back into bed, Nick’s breathing became low and even, a sign that he was already asleep. A few seconds later, Max began making wheezing sounds, and soon afterward Lou started to snore.

  But I wasn’t even close to falling asleep.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about how Gwennie and Jonathan’s attempt to sneak away from Solitude Island—to head back to England, no less—made them look as if they were the ones who had killed Linus.

  Yet as guilty as they appeared, I couldn’t conclude that they were the killers. Not when there were so many other people in this house who could have been at least as motivated as those two.

  The fact that I still couldn’t put my finger on Linus Merrywood’s murderer made me more determined than ever to put all my energies into finding those missing diaries.

  After all, I was running out of options.

  And given the fact that it was now Sunday and I had a life to get back to, I was also running out of time.

  • • •

  I spent the next two hours searching for the missing diaries. I brought Max and Lou with me as I sneaked around from room to room, once again planning to use them as my excuse if anyone happened upon me in a place where I didn’t belong. How else could I keep them from getting into mischief—such as treating some innocent needlepoint pillow or other family heirloom as a chew toy?

  As for why their owner was prowling around all the common areas and bedrooms, opening closed doors and rummaging through the occasional drawer, that was something I hadn’t yet found a way to explain.

  Still, I hoped that if I did my snooping quickly and quietly, I wouldn’t find myself in that difficult position. And as my search progressed, that part was going fine. The part that wasn’t going even close to fine was tracking down those darned notebooks.

  Where are they? I wondered for the thousandth time.

  I wasn’t ready to accept the possibility that they could have been destroyed, since that would mean giving up on the one good lead I had so far. Instead, I stubbornly clung to the belief that they still existed—and that I could find them, if only I looked hard enough.

  Yet I finally decided I had no choice but to admit defeat.

  I’ve looked through this entire house, I thought. Every shelf, every cabinet, every closet. Short of prying up the floorboards or rummaging around in the basement, if there even is one, I don’t know where else to look.

  I was about to head back upstairs to snuggle in bed beside Nick. But then I realized that I wasn’t quite out of options.

  I had yet to look in the safe—or whatever it was—hidden behind the oil painting hanging in the dining room.

  Frankly, I’d had high hopes that those missing notebooks would turn up somewhere else. My résumé might include a few unusual skills, but safecracking wasn’t one of them.

  Still, now that the idea had popped into my head, I wasn’t giving it up. I’m kind of like a terrier in that way: unable to let go of something once I’ve got it in my jaws, even if I’m starting to feel as if it will pull out all
my teeth.

  “Come on, Max,” I said quietly, knowing that Lou would follow. I was about to try something that would be really hard to explain away, and I was going to need all the help I could get.

  The dining room wasn’t the easiest spot to conduct a treasure hunt, since anyone could venture in at any time, through either the doorway that opened onto the hallway or the one that led to the kitchen. Taking down a huge oil painting and tapping on the wall behind it wasn’t exactly standard operating procedure for houseguests.

  I hoped the members of the Merrywood clan who hadn’t been involved in preventing Gwennie and Jonathan from fleeing would sleep in. As for Cook, as dedicated to the Merrywoods as she was, even she needed a break. And Sunday morning seemed like the perfect time for her to take it.

  Despite all these rationalizations, once my entourage and I had stolen into the dining room, I closed the door to the hallway and checked to make sure the kitchen door was closed. My hands were clammy as I planted myself in front of the same painting I’d stood at the night before, my eyes focused on the telltale break in the wall peeking out from behind the ornate gilt frame.

  I hoped Max and Lou would act as lookouts, barking or at least wagging their tails if anyone approached. But Lou seemed absorbed in the croissant crumbs he’d found pushed into a corner, no doubt the result of Gwennie being better at sweeping onstage than at actual sweeping. As for Max, he was busy looking for some goodies of his own, sniffing the Oriental carpet with the intensity of a pig rooting for truffles.

  So I was pretty much on my own as I reached up and grabbed hold of the picture frame. As I lifted it off the wall, I let out a grunt. The thing was a lot heavier than I’d expected. Awkward, too, since the portrait of the scowling woman—whose fashion sense had just earned her the nickname Morticia—was more than four feet high and close to three feet wide. Maneuvering it through the air and over the coffee urn made me look like a comic actor in a silent movie.

  The fact that I was experiencing difficulty prompted Max to come running over, wanting to see if he could help or, even better, engage me in a game. His interest in what I was doing piqued Lou’s, and before I knew it, my struggle with the painting was made even more complicated by the two four-legged creatures dashing around me in circles and wagging their tails excitedly.

  Even with all that canine distraction, I somehow managed to set the painting safely on the carpet without breaking any antiques or making enough noise to bring the entire household running. In fact, so far the only person who was aware of what I was up to was the woman in the painting. While she didn’t look the least bit happy about it, at least she wasn’t about to stop me.

  But once I’d managed to wrestle Morticia to the ground, I had a much bigger problem: finding a way to open what I could now clearly see was a door that had been cut out from the wall. I stared at it for a few seconds, wishing an idea would simply come to me out of the blue.

  Surely Nancy Drew encountered something like this along the way, I thought, growing more and more frustrated. If only I could remember how she figured out this kind of thing.

  But at the moment I couldn’t remember the details of any of Nancy’s successes, much less one that had specifically involved burrowing through plaster or picking locks. And I seemed incapable of coming up with any ideas of my own. The fact that my dogs had also decided to do their best to engage me in playtime, rather than going back to their crumb hunt, made it even harder to focus.

  Finally, I reached up and pounded the wall lightly, hoping I’d hit a button or a switch or some other device that would open the door and reveal the safe on the other side. Nothing happened.

  Then I remembered that I’d already encountered another throwback to the Nancy Drew years here in the Merrywoods’ spooky mansion: the hidden staircase. And I’d gained access by taking a copy of Frankenstein off the bookshelf. In other words, the mechanism that did the trick was located someplace other than on the door itself.

  I glanced around, desperately hoping that something would catch my eye. But there were no bookshelves in the dining room. No books, either. And as hard as I tried, I didn’t spot anything else that looked as if it might be capable of opening the hidden door.

  Once again, I was wondering if I should just pack it in and go upstairs to spend what was left of the weekend with Nick. But my ruminations were interrupted by the sound of Max letting out a yip.

  “Quiet, Max!” I whispered.

  When I looked down, I saw that he and Lou were struggling to beat each other under the table, no doubt because they’d just smelled another tasty treat lying somewhere in the vicinity. The force of two dogs charging through the linen tablecloth that reached nearly to the floor threatened to topple the coffee and tea urns, which I knew were filled with hot liquid.

  “Okay, you guys,” I told them impatiently, “if you’re going to act like boors, I might as well help you. At least that way you won’t cause any more damage than you absolutely have to.”

  I got down on my hands and knees to pull back the tablecloth and help them find whatever it was they were both so determined to scarf up. As I did, I noticed a chunk of a muffin. Even though I don’t generally let my dogs eat people food, it was small enough that I knew it wouldn’t do them any harm.

  Max darted under the table and grabbed it—not surprising since he’s smaller, faster, and more determined than Lou. He was still chewing happily as I started to drag them both out of there.

  But I froze when I noticed a small white button on the wall, about a foot above the floor.

  The button was directly underneath the door.

  “Eureka!” I muttered, feeling a surge of excitement as I crawled a little farther under the table. When I got closer to the button, I pressed it.

  Up above, I heard something move.

  “Double eureka!” I cried, hoping that what I hoped had happened had indeed happened.

  Sure enough, when I crawled back out, I saw that the secret door had swung open. Even so, I warned myself against getting too excited, since there was still that safecracking thing to deal with.

  I stood up, my heart pounding so hard that I knew it wasn’t even trying to listen to what my brain was telling it. I leaned forward to get a better look at what was behind the door, my eyes prepared for a hard metal safe that would probably turn out to be impenetrable.

  I blinked in confusion.

  There was nothing there.

  And by nothing, I don’t mean nothing as in a wall with no safe. I mean nothing.

  On the other side of the secret door was a gaping square hole.

  A wave of disappointment came over me. But only a second or two passed before my entire mood shifted.

  Oh. My. God. I found a secret passageway.

  Maybe Epinetus Merrywood really had built a system of underground tunnels, as Falcone had joked.

  By this point, my heartbeat had escalated to the jackhammer mode. In fact, I was convinced it had to be even louder than that little bark Max had let out.

  What should I do? I thought, my mind racing.

  But I already knew the answer to that question.

  Chapter 17

  “At 20 a man is a peacock, at 30 a lion, at 40 a camel, at 50 a serpent, at 60 a dog, at 70 an ape, and at 80 nothing.”

  —Baltasar Gracian

  It took me about one and a half seconds to convince myself that Max and Lou would be fine closed up in the dining room without me. Knowing those two, they’d probably find a nice comfy spot on the Oriental carpet and snooze once they realized their favorite playmate wasn’t around anymore.

  The next step was a little harder. Whoever had designed this secret passageway clearly had access to a stepladder, since the bottom of the opening was a good four and a half feet off the floor. I, however, wasn’t that lucky.

  So I grabbed one end of the table and lifted it enough that I could pivot it on one leg, moving it away from the wall at a wide angle. Then I grabbed one of the dining-room chairs, dragged it
over to the space I’d created, and climbed up onto it.

  If anyone comes in, it’s all over, I thought. There was no way of hiding the fact that I’d just rearranged the furniture in the room.

  The first thing someone would see was the open door, meaning they’d immediately know what was going on—especially since I had no intention of closing the door to the secret passageway and sealing myself in.

  But I wasn’t about to worry about that now. After all, how many times in my life would I be handed the chance to explore a secret passageway?

  Yet while the concept sounded thrilling at first, it didn’t take me long to change my attitude. As soon as I climbed through the opening in the wall and lowered myself onto the ground on the other side, I realized that this wasn’t exactly going to be a pleasant stroll.

  For one thing, it was dark. Completely dark. I took only a few steps before I discovered that whatever light there was in the dining room wasn’t going to do much to help me find my way.

  I had no flashlight. Not even a candle.

  I wasn’t willing to turn around, however. Not when I wanted to do this as fast as possible. Besides, for all I knew, it would be a dead end. And even if that turned out to be the case, I wanted to find out as quickly as I could, go back to the dining room, close the secret door, put the furniture and painting back where they belonged, and get the heck out of there before anyone found out what I’d been up to.

  So I kept going, feeling my way by running one hand along the wall and telling myself that, sooner or later, I’d come across a light or a window or something else that would enable me to find out exactly where this mysterious secret passageway led.

  It was hard to tell how far I’d crept along, taking care not to fall. It could have been five minutes or it could have been fifty—I simply had no way to gauge the time.

  In addition to not having any light, there was no noise, either. I was surrounded by complete silence.

  These walls must be thick, I thought.