Crossing the Lion (a Reigning Cats and Dog) (2010) (32 page)

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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.

I
t 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.

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—