Crossing the Lion (a Reigning Cats and Dog) (2010) (34 page)

“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 to 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.

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.

I decided to take a direct approach. “Your husband had Alzheimer’s, didn’t he?” I asked, holding up the notebook that had clued me in.

“That’s right,” Charlotte replied. “Alzheimer’s or some other type of dementia. I didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Why not?” I asked, sincerely curious. “It’s a serious illness; people who have it have no control over it. Surely you don’t think anyone would have thought less of him.”

“It wasn’t my decision to keep it quiet; it was his,” she replied sharply.

Her voice softened as she added, “I’m sorry, Jessica. I don’t mean to sound so cross. It’s just that this is something Linus and I discussed at length. How all
this would be handled, I mean. He’d been experiencing symptoms of dementia for at least two years. He went in and out of a state of confusion. When he was his usual, sensible self, he was actually quite willing to talk about what it all meant.”

Charlotte’s grip on the dagger loosened. In fact, her entire body slackened, as if she was suddenly drained of all energy.

“My poor Linus,” she said in a breathless voice, sinking onto the wooden bench. “These last two years have been so difficult. Every day became a trial. At first, it was just little things, the kind everyone experiences as they get older. He’d forget where he’d put his keys or whether he’d hired a new gardener or whether he’d already read that day’s newspaper. He’d forget what he had for dinner the night before—or even the name of the restaurant where he’d eaten it.

“Oh, we laughed about it at first,” she went on, her eyes clouded. “He joked about how he was getting old and that it was a good thing he had a wife who was fifteen years younger to help take care of him. But after a while it stopped being funny.”

Charlotte was silent for a few seconds, as if she needed to get her bearings. “Over time, those amusing things Linus kept doing like losing his keys became more serious. He started forgetting important things, mostly the details of his business—meetings he had scheduled, the names of his company’s different divisions, even the names of people he’d worked with for years. Decades, in some cases.

“Fortunately, the people closest to him did a
wonderful job of covering for him,” she continued. “Harry, mostly. But Scarlett, too. They both took care of the things Linus simply wasn’t capable of dealing with any longer. Harry went to meetings in his place, and he read every document that came across Linus’s desk. He even spoke to people on the phone on his behalf, telling them Linus was out of town or tied up in a meeting.

“As for Scarlett, she began to accompany him everywhere. She did a valiant job of concealing what was going on. She got in the habit of sitting next to him at business luncheons so she could feed him clues like the name and title of the person they were talking to. Both Harry and Scarlett could see the writing on the wall, but they were able to ward off the inevitable. At least for a while.

“But then Linus started to forget things that were even more basic,” Charlotte went on. “Like how old the children were. I remember the first time I noticed that. It was a Sunday afternoon last winter. Linus had fallen asleep in front of the fire with
The New York Times Magazine
in his lap. I was in the room with him, reading the rest of the newspaper. When he woke up, he turned to me and said, ‘Is Tag home from school yet?’

“I told him that he was confused because he’d nodded off and he’d been dreaming.” Charlotte’s voice had become strained, as if simply remembering such a heartbreaking event still caused her great pain. “But I knew that wasn’t the case. By that point it had become impossible not to understand what was happening
to him. How could I not, when it was right in front of my eyes every day?”

“Did Linus ever see a doctor?” I asked.

Charlotte shook her head. “He seemed convinced that there was nothing anyone could do. I kept showing him articles about promising new drugs, but he refused to believe any of it. I think he’d begun to think of himself as an old man. He had pretty much become resigned to what he saw as his fate.”

“What about the children? Were they aware of what was going on?”

“I didn’t say anything to the boys,” Charlotte replied. “But Missy was another story. She and her father had always been close, and she came to visit much more often than either Tag or Brock. She could see for herself what was happening to him. And it hurt her as much as it hurt me. Still, I don’t think even she understood how far it had progressed. How badly it affected him, either.”

“Is that why you hid the notebooks?” I asked. “To keep Missy from finding out?”

Charlotte looked startled. “I didn’t hide Linus’s notebooks. I knew he’d kept a journal for years. He kept them right in our bedroom. But it wasn’t anything we ever talked about. And I just assumed that at some point he’d stopped—probably because it simply became too difficult for him.”

“He did stop,” I said, glancing down at the notebook I was still holding in my hand. “But not until fairly recently. Still, I can see by what he was writing the difficult time he was having.”

“To stand by and watch a man deteriorate like that, someone who was so capable and so strong, was painful beyond belief,” Charlotte said, shaking her head sadly. “But it turned out that the way he was for all those months paled beside what happened to him over the past few months.”

I waited in silence, able to see for myself how hard she was wrestling with the demons in her head.

“Starting last spring, poor Linus became afraid of everything.” She swallowed hard. “Even things that didn’t really exist. At least not outside his own mind.”

“Are you talking about paranoia?” I asked.

Charlotte nodded. “I can’t think of anything else to call it.”

“What was he afraid of?” I asked gently. The image of all those bills and legal documents stuffed into the suit of armor in the hall flashed through my mind.

“Linus became convinced that all kinds of people were out to get him,” Charlotte explained. “At first it was people he knew. He thought Harry was trying to destroy him. Then he became convinced that Scarlett was stealing corporate secrets and selling them to his competitors. It reached the point where he didn’t trust anyone at work.

“But it got even worse,” she continued, her eyes distant as she gazed off at something I couldn’t see. “He began to distrust the children. He would rant and rave about how they were trying to steal from him. He believed they were determined to take away this house and all his money. Then it spread. He decided all the usual suspects were after him: the FBI, the CIA, even
the Boy Scouts. He must have been in one of his paranoid states when he hid those notebooks. In here, of all places.”

“But why here?” I asked.

“I can’t be positive,” she replied, “but he probably wanted to put them in a place where no one would find them—including the servants. He didn’t want anyone to find out, even though you only had to spend five minutes with him to see it for yourself. I’m sure he chose the boathouse because in his muddled mind he decided it was a place he could reach in an emergency by using the secret passageway that his ancestors had built into this house.

“You see, it all ties in to the later stages of his illness,” Charlotte went on. “It got to the point where he was terrified all the time. He would drink cup after cup of coffee at dinner every night because he was afraid to go to sleep. He talked about having locks installed everywhere, but I kept telling him that no one could get onto this island without our permission.

“Given the state he was in, it’s not surprising that he also began to mistrust the servants. Even Cook, who had been loyal to him and this entire family forever. I know she thought the world of him. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve even thought at times that she had a crush on him.”

“Charlotte, did Linus also begin doing things that were … strange?” I asked cautiously.

“What do you mean?” she asked, sounding suspicious.

I hesitated, wondering how much to reveal about
all the papers Nick and I had found stuffed inside the suit of armor—including legal documents.

But it didn’t take me long to decide that I had nothing to lose. “I understand your neighbors initiated a lawsuit over something he put on the balcony of your apartment in the city.”

“Oh, dear,” Charlotte said, her face crumpling. “That … that contraption he built last winter. It was a monstrosity he constructed out of cardboard and coat hangers and aluminum foil. He was convinced it would help keep away the evil forces that were after him.

“I tried every way I could think of to make him understand that what he was doing made no sense. But logic didn’t mean much to him over this last year or so.” Raising her eyes to meet mine, she said, “The man suffered, Jessica. He was so terrified. It was horrible to witness.”

The more I listened to Charlotte describe what Linus’s final days had been like, the more compassion I felt. Not only for Linus but also for her. Charlotte had watched the man who was the center of her world, someone she had loved and shared nearly her entire adult life with, fade away before her eyes.

“Then there were the physical changes,” she went on. “He lost the ability to take care of himself in even the simplest of ways. I was afraid that if I brought him to a hospital, he’d be forced to live in a horrible state for a long time. He couldn’t stand to be reduced to such humiliation.”

“It must have been awful for you,” I said, sincerely sympathetic.

“It was,” she said sadly. “But it was even worse for poor Linus. He became someone else—or, even worse, nothing more than a shell. He was frightened and unhappy all the time. No one should have to experience what that man experienced.
No
one. Which is why someone had to do something to help him.”

I froze. Those words—and the way she said them—shot through me like an electric shock.

Suddenly everything was clear.

“You killed him, didn’t you?” I asked calmly.

For a few seconds, she simply stared at me.

“You have to understand,” Charlotte finally replied, “that he wasn’t Linus Merrywood anymore. He was already gone.”

“She loved him,” another voice interjected.

Startled, I looked up and saw that Missy had appeared in the doorway of the boathouse.

“Mother thought the world of him,” she continued. “She couldn’t bear to watch him suffer.”

“You knew about this?” I asked, surprised.

Missy nodded. “Mother and Daddy had a relationship that was truly special. They were practically the same person. The two of them adored each other. In fact, I don’t know how she’s going to manage without him.”

She kept me fixed in an intense gaze for what seemed like a very long time before she said, “Whatever she did, it was only because she loved him so much. She couldn’t bear to see him in such agony.”

Turning to her mother, Missy said, “Why don’t you give me that silly dagger, Mummy? Surely you didn’t expect to use such an ancient thing, did you?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Charlotte said, looking distraught. “I just need everyone to understand.”

“Jessie understands,” Missy assured her in a soothing voice. “And we can trust her, Mummy. She’s not any danger to us. She’s not going to say a word.”

Meekly, Charlotte handed the dagger to her daughter.

I held my breath, afraid that Missy might change her mind. For all I knew, she could impulsively decide she needed to do what she believed her mother was incapable of doing.

But I started to breathe again when she leaned over and put the dagger in the corner, out of her reach as well as her mother’s.