Crossing the Lion (a Reigning Cats and Dog) (2010) (27 page)

“Maybe she was just tense,” I commented. “She probably wanted to make sure everything went
smoothly, since it was such an important day in Linus’s life.”

Studying his face for his reaction, I added, “From what I’ve observed, she seemed to think the world of him.”

“Hmph,” Jonathan sniffed. “Or maybe she was tense for another reason—like she had a few tasks on her to-do list that had nothing to do with planning a dinner party.”

I stared at him. I was learning that maybe the walls in this place didn’t have ears but the servants certainly did. And they seemed to know plenty about what went on with the Merrywoods and their associates.

I knew I’d do well to pay attention to whatever observations Jonathan had made about the dynamics of the household.

“Are you saying you think Scarlett is responsible for Linus’s death?” I finally asked. “That she’s the one who switched the birthday cakes?”

“I’m just saying that I’m convinced there was more to their relationship than her making his plane reservations,” Jonathan said dryly. “Much more. And when strong feelings come into play, especially in a situation that’s bound to be a dead end for one of the parties … well, that person could decide it should become a dead end for the other.”

Wait a minute
, I thought.
Jonathan is trying to make it sound as if Scarlett killed Linus, yet he’s one of my prime suspects
.

“I suppose everyone who was in the house that
night had a motive for murdering Linus,” I said. “Including you and Gwennie.”

“Well, we didn’t kill him,” he said with a little pout. “And the police have no reason to suspect us. After all, we weren’t even in the will.”

“Yes, but—” I quickly cleared my throat, wanting to disguise the syllables that had jumped out of my mouth. I’d started to point out that Jonathan and Gwennie hadn’t learned that they weren’t in Linus’s will until just a few hours earlier.

Which meant there was a good chance that the phony butler’s attempts at casting suspicions on Scarlett could well be a way of deflecting them from himself and perhaps from his pal, Gwennie.

After all, if there was one thing actors were good at, it was acting. And being considered a murder suspect was undoubtedly the best time for someone to muster up all of his talent.

•  •  •

I dashed across the main floor of the house, anxious to tell Nick about my conversation with Jonathan—especially with respect to his comments about Scarlett. I assumed he was holed up in our bedroom, studying away. But as I reached the staircase, I saw that the man who played Romeo to my Juliet was heading in the same direction. So were his two furry sidekicks, who lit up like fireworks when they spotted me.

“Nick!” I cried, stopping in my tracks. “I was looking for you!” I immediately crouched down to give Max and Lou the greeting they deserved.

“That’s funny,” he replied, “because I was looking for you.”

Nick’s serious tone caused me to glance up. His voice, combined with the expression on his face, gave me the feeling there was nothing funny about his decision to seek me out.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, still scratching two furry necks, one with each hand.

Nick’s frown deepened. “Jess, I just found something I think you ought to see.”

W
hat is it?” I asked, my mouth already dry.

“You should probably see for yourself,” Nick replied mysteriously. If he hadn’t looked so earnest, I’d have thought he was playing a joke.

I followed him through the house. Max padded along happily beside me, his eyes bright and his red tongue hanging out as if it were a necktie, while Lou kept darting ahead to sniff things that, to me, were invisible.

I expected Nick to lead our little parade to Linus’s study or the kitchen—or at least the conservatory. Instead, he stopped when we neared the front door.

“Are we going somewhere?” I asked in confusion. Max kept glancing up at me expectantly, as if he assumed
we were all going out for a walk. I scooped him up in my arms and gave him a hug, which I figured was the next best thing. As for Lou, he plopped down on the floor, no easy feat given how slippery the marble was.

Nick shook his head, then pointed to one of the two dusty, tarnished suits of armor standing against opposite walls. “This is what I was talking about.”

So much for clearing up my confusion. “What about it?” I asked, examining the decrepit metal structure. It was in such bad shape that it looked as if it really could have been used in the Middle Ages.

“Look inside it.”

“Why would I do that?” I asked. “Better yet, why would
you
do that?”

“I didn’t intend to,” he replied. “Actually, I was staring at it, wondering how the whole thing stayed together. I got up close to study it better. That was when I noticed a piece of paper sticking out of the visor. That prompted me to look a little further.”

I frowned. Paper and suits of armor were definitely two things that did not go together. So I plopped Max back down on the floor and watched him embark on a sniff fest. Then, as Nick suggested, I reached for the visor designed to protect the wearer’s face—one of the few pieces that appeared to open and shut—and lifted it gently.

“Oh, my!” I cried.

While I’d expected to encounter empty space, instead I found paper. Not wadded up, exactly, but not stored with any sense of order, either. In fact, what I
saw appeared to have been stuffed in there, either carelessly or because someone was in a hurry.

“What is all this?” I wondered aloud.

“I didn’t get that far,” Nick replied. “I didn’t think I was in a position to start taking stuff out.”

I, however, did not possess his sense of responsibility. Certainly not his self-control. I couldn’t resist reaching into the imaginary knight’s head and pulling out the first thing I could grab.

I just stared at it, blinking.

“What is it?” Nick finally asked, peering over my shoulder.

“It looks like an electric bill,” I said. “According to the postmark, an electric bill from two years ago.”

Nick frowned. “It was mailed to this address. And the name on it is Linus Merrywood.”

“Maybe Linus started paying his bills online,” I suggested. “Or at least having Scarlett do it that way.”

“That would explain part of it,” Nick commented. “But what about the fact that Linus, or whoever did this, decided that a good place to store his unpaid bills was inside a suit of armor?”

“Hiding
his unpaid bills is more like it,” I said. “After all, whoever did this went to a lot of trouble to make sure these were out of sight.”

“That’s true,” Nick agreed. “Which means there’s bound to be other stuff in there that’s much more interesting than an electric bill.”

“Love letters?” I suggested, thinking of Jonathan’s claim that Scarlett and Linus had been more than employee and employer.

Nick cast me a questioning look. “What do you think? Should we try to find out?”

I thought for a few seconds. “If someone comes out here and finds us, we’re going to have some serious ’splaining to do,” I said, quoting the late, great Ricky Ricardo.

“In that case, we’ll have to act fast,” Nick said, glancing around nervously. “Look, at least we can get an idea of what else is hidden in here.”

I didn’t wait another second. I reached into the no-longer-errant knight’s face and pulled out a bunch of papers.

It immediately became clear that most of them were bills, as well. But there was also plenty of junk mail—envelopes full of coupons for car washes and pizza parlors, credit-card offers, and all the usual detritus that somehow finds its way into everyone’s mailbox.

How it had subsequently found its way into someone’s personal suit of armor was another matter entirely.

“What does this mean?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.

“Maybe someone mistook Sir Galahad for Sir Garbage Pail,” Nick suggested.

But my thoughts were heading in a different direction. “Or maybe this is a decoy,” I said. “Maybe whoever did this stashed the real thing deeper inside.”

“Good point!” Nick said brightly. “Should we keep digging?”

We took turns at reaching inside the suit of armor and pulling out papers. The next few batches proved
to be more of the same—junk mail, unpaid bills, and, finally, unopened Christmas cards, all from two years before. But then, when we reached the middle of Sir Galahad’s chest, we encountered a big gap.

“Is that it?” Nick asked, sounding disappointed.

“I bet it’s not,” I replied. Maybe my arms weren’t quite as long as Nick’s, but they were considerably narrower. So I stood on tiptoe and was barely able to reach way inside to the torso. I wasn’t surprised when my fingers touched what I instantly identified as a stack of papers.

“Eureka!” I cried.

By rolling up the papers I now held in my fingertips, I was able to extract the whole thing at once. As soon as I held the sheaf in my hand, I studied it eagerly, certain that whatever I’d found would explain this absurdity.

“Legal documents!” I said breathlessly. “That’s what the person who did this really meant to hide!”

However, as soon as I glanced over at Nick, I saw that he didn’t share my enthusiasm.

“But why would someone hide legal documents?” he asked. “And look at the date. This was filed only a few months ago, back in March. It’s not as if stashing away the paperwork can make a legal action go away.”

He had a point. “Well … maybe Linus hid this because didn’t want Charlotte to know about some lawsuit that was going on,” I said, trying to come up with an explanation.

Reaching for the papers, Nick said, “Why don’t we
see what this is all about? Maybe that will help us understand why someone hid it.”

I held the documents so both Nick and I could read them at the same time. I was glad to have a lawyer-in-training on hand to help me decipher their meaning. But it didn’t take a year and a half of law school to see that they involved one of Linus and Charlotte’s neighbors in the high-rise building in New York City that housed their co-op. Just from perusing the first few lines, I surmised that the Merrywoods had put something large and bulky on their balcony that blocked their next-door neighbors’ view of Central Park.

I handed the documents to Nick, then waited in silence while he read through them.

“That pretty much sums it up,” he concluded as he gave them back to me. “The Merrywoods’ neighbors certainly had a right to an unobstructed view. I can’t imagine that Linus wasn’t fully aware of that. He shouldn’t have been the least bit surprised that they sued him over it, either.”

“This whole thing is so strange,” I commented. “Not only that someone hid these legal documents, but also that Linus and Charlotte were doing something so annoying.”

Nick nodded. “And given that everyone thinks Linus was a pretty reasonable guy and the fact that I can see for myself that Charlotte’s a real sweetie, it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t have been more neighborly.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “You’d think they’d willingly take down a … a big plant or an umbrella or whatever
else they put on their balcony as soon as their neighbors pointed out that it was a problem.”

The sound of voices in a not-too-distant room made us both start. Even Lou rose to his feet, preparing to greet whoever happened our way, while Max stood at attention and wagged his stub of a tail.

Nick and I looked at each other guiltily and, without another word, began putting everything back inside the suit of armor, exactly the way we’d found it.

•  •  •

“That was close,” Nick whispered as we tiptoed away. I’d scooped Max up into my arms again, while he had taken hold of Lou’s collar to keep him from wandering off in the wrong direction and revealing our presence. The last thing we wanted was for anyone to wonder what we’d found in the front hallway that was fascinating enough to hold our interest for such a long time. “What do you say we hightail it upstairs and get away from all this?”

While I’d been planning exactly that a few minutes earlier, I’d just noticed Townie heading toward the back parlor—by himself. Since Missy’s husband was barely allowed out of her sight—clearly a rule that was good for the goose but not for the gander—I decided to jump on the chance to talk to him alone.

“Why don’t you take the dogs back upstairs without me?” I told Nick distractedly. “I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.”

Nick’s eyes traveled to the doorway through which Townie had disappeared.

“Go for it, Jess,” he said. Then he took Max into his own arms, leaned over to give me a peck on the cheek, and dashed off with Lou in tow.

I found Townie standing at the dry bar in one corner of the room, pouring a pale golden liquid from a crystal decanter.

“Oh, hello, Townie,” I greeted him, doing my best to sound surprised instead of letting on that I’d been stalking him. “I was looking for Nick.”

“No Nick here,” he replied with a smile. Holding up his glass, he asked, “Can I offer you some brandy?”

“No, thanks, I’m fine,” I said. Letting my eyes drift to the window, I commented, “This storm is brutal.”

“And endless,” he added.

We were both silent as lightning flashed, Townie sipping his brandy and me staring out at the storm. A few seconds later a powerful roll of thunder sent the crystal glasses lined up in the cabinet clinking against one another.

“We may lose the electricity again,” I commented.

Townie frowned, locking his jaw even more than usual as he commented, “As if this place wasn’t already gloomy enough.”

“It is pretty gloomy,” I agreed. “But at least the whole family is together.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s important at a time like this.” He held out his brandy snifter as if to toast the concept of families being together.

“I’ve been amazed at how closely knit the Merrywoods are,” I went on. “Oh, sure, I can see that there are the usual family tensions.”

Anxious to follow up on Gwennie and Jonathan’s mysterious comment about Brock and Townie being “in bed together,” a situation Missy was supposedly aware of, I added, “The tensions between Missy and Brock, for example.”