Crossing The Lion Part 26

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 doork.n.o.b, 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 embarra.s.sed 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 stas.h.i.+ng 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 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.

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.

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 doc.u.ment 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sumed 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 doc.u.ments 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 compet.i.tors. 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 pa.s.sageway 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.