Noble Scoundrel - Amy Sandas Page 0,48

herself.

She decided first to organize them chronologically so she could better review those pertaining to the work he’d been doing in the last years of his life since that seemed the most likely place to start looking for any connection between Charles Blackwell’s work and the current threat.

Though tedious, the project was exactly what she needed.

It had been nearly two days since she last encountered Hale in the entry hall the day of Mr. Newton’s initial visit. Since the bodyguard mainly contained his activities to the ballroom, they rarely crossed paths. Someday soon, she’d have to visit the space to see exactly what he and his trainees were doing to make it sound as though they might be trying to bust through the floor.

At least she could be assured he hadn’t left the house again, as Foster understood to advise her if that happened. She knew from Frederick that his bodyguard also visited with the children rather frequently, though most often later in the day. Katherine told herself keeping her own visits with Frederick and Claire to the hours when Hale was closed up in the ballroom wasn’t at all due to any desire to avoid the man.

She simply preferred the way the sunlight angled through the third-floor rooms at that time of day.

Katherine was thrilled to see her brother starting to once again enjoy some of his previously passionate pursuits. He had begun work on a new maze and she hoped the project would keep him from dwelling on the fact that he was essentially confined to the house for the time being. But she knew his current contentment wasn’t likely to last very long. Her brother needed the freedom to explore, which meant she needed to get to work on resolving the identity of their enemy.

Picking up the first journal, she began by scanning the date noted at the top of the first page and set about arranging the journals in chronological order. At the end of the morning, she had set aside nearly two dozen journals that spanned dates old enough as to make them unlikely to be connected. This reduced her area of focus to a dozen volumes, which she intended to review in depth.

It shouldn’t take too long.

OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL days, she spent a significant portion of each morning reading her father’s notes, beginning with a journal dated to about two years prior to the fire that had ended his life. It wasn’t easy reading. Charles Blackwell had been immersed in his field of study for decades and it wasn’t something he’d shared with his children in any detail. Many of his notations used unfamiliar scientific terminology that made them barely decipherable, but Katherine was determined to go over every little detail.

Approximately a week after her review of the journals began, she noticed something odd.

She’d noticed when she’d first sorted through the full collection that the journals could essentially be split into two categories. One set of journals contained documentation that was strictly limited to the science of her father’s experiments. The pages were filled with chemical formulas and detailed outlines of his experiments, complete with precise measurement and time tables, as well as any alterations in conditions and environments or other variations he introduced as he delved into the chemical properties and medicinal values of whatever plant species Charles was studying at the time. Another set of books contained coinciding dates, but were more of a running internal commentary where Charles theorized and speculated and assessed and evaluated the elements of the prior noted journals. It was also where he recorded the general circumstances or inquiries that prompted each new study or experimental subject.

The oddity was that the journals covering roughly the last six months prior to his death were only those that contained Charles’s personal reflections. She did not have a single volume containing his scientific notations from that time.

The discovery gave her a heavy sense of foreboding. There was no reason for her father’s methods of documentation to alter to a point where he’d eliminate an entire aspect of his work. She had no doubt the journals existed...somewhere. Or at least they had at one point.

Had they been hidden away for some reason?

The chances were better that the journals had been lost in the fire that had taken their father and destroyed their home.

Accidents were not unusual considering the combustible properties of some the elements he worked with in his various experiments. Despite the extreme precautions Charles took to manage any