Lock & Mori (5 page)

“What is it?” His eyes brightened as they met mine. “You know something! Tell. It's the rules.”

I shook my head. “Don't get your hopes high. It's nothing a quick search wouldn't have uncovered.”

I paused but was too distracted to think of something to tell him. I was determined not to touch my handbag, or look at it too much. Then again, I didn't want to be seen to avoid
it. And the more these directives spiraled around my mind, the fewer ideas I had for some great reveal. In the end, I said, “I just heard a bit of gossip, which may not be true. But this woman said Mr. Patel had been in trouble when he was a kid.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“She made it sound like his trouble was with the police.”

The light left Sherlock's eyes and he took another long drag from his cigarette, and then tossed it into the gutter. “Nothing of note. Still, a wasted day.”

I didn't know why his declaration upset me like it did, but I couldn't even speak to him after that. I took perhaps too much time to offer him a directed glare, and then I stormed down the road, leaving him the way I'd just wished he would leave me.

Unfortunately, I stormed in a direction opposite the train and ended up walking the six blocks to the stop at Monument. It, of course, didn't have my line, so I ended up taking the bus, walking to Moorgate, and catching a late train back to our station. By the time I got to Baker Street, I could think of nothing I wanted less than to go home. I walked to the park instead, as if I were hearing its call.

I practically fell onto my beloved bandstand. I resisted the urge to crawl across it to my seat on the other side, but I was tempted. Later, I would blame the fact that I was too exhausted from the day to explain how I could fail to notice my smoking gent standing in the shadows beyond. When the scent of Sherlock's cloves finally did strike me, it sent me into the foulest of moods.

I decided to pretend he wasn't there, which worked for a while. He smoked, and I stared out across the lake, wishing the light from the rising moon would strike him into oblivion like a million bolts of lightning all at once. Violent fantasies aside, the longer we stood in silence, the less worked up I became, until finally he rubbed out the filter of his clove and walked over toward me.

“I'm sorry,” he said with finality, as though his words were the solution to something and not the opening of our conversation.

I shrugged and kicked my feet out a few times, letting my heels fall back to strike against the cement with a rubbery flop.

Sherlock cleared his throat and came around to face me. “I am sorry.”

I slid down from my perch so that we were eye to eye—or would've been were he not eight inches taller than me. “For what?”

He was taken aback by the question—looked almost indignant about it, really, which lightened my mood for some reason.

I said, “You don't even know what to apologize for.”

I turned to go, and he stopped me with a soft, “Wait.”

I met his gaze again, determined not to let him off the hook, though my anger somehow managed to evaporate for no good reason at all.

He dipped his hand into his pocket and brought out his pack of cigarettes, then thrust them back in and sighed. “It's
for whatever it was I saw in your eyes before you left me at the church. I'm not sorry for saying what was obviously correct, but I am sorry for causing that.”

I stared him down until he was forced to look away, which would have made me smile on any other night. How he managed to insist on his own rightness and still make me feel better, I'd never have been able to say. But he looked so handsome standing there with his hands in his pockets, his eyes open to the sky, as if the very air held answers to the question of me. I couldn't help myself. I grasped the lapels of his wool coat and drew him down so I could press a soft, chaste kiss. His struggling to free his hands made me smile against his lips. But I spun out of reach before he could hold me in place.

“What . . . ?”

I must admit watching the great mind of Sherlock Holmes struggle to ask even a single question was perhaps the best part of that wretched day. Other than the kiss itself. I caught my fingers touching my lips and turned my back to him, looking over my shoulder briefly to say, “Looked like you needed a distraction.”

I walked across the lawn to the lit-up path. Listening to his hurried steps as he scrambled to catch up with me was definitely the second-best part.

Chapter 8

I had too much in my head when I went to sleep that night, and spent most of Sunday staring at the picture of Mr. Patel and Mum. I took time between homework assignments to memorize the minutiae of the background until I was sure I'd know the room they were in were I to walk into it by accident, regardless of any changes to the decor. I'd been reduced to naming the people by appearance to keep them in my head. There were seven in all—Mr. Patel, my mother, the Blue-Haired Girl, the Man in Green, Striped Man, Mustache Man, and the man with his arm around my mom, whom I called Stepdad.

When I finally went to bed Sunday night, my sleep was troubled. Each member of the snapshot played a part in my dreams, leading me down paths, promising to reveal their identities if we could just get to the paths' mythical end. I woke with the quest at the forefront of my thoughts and was so distracted, I washed my hair three times and only realized I'd forgotten to put on makeup entirely when I was most of the way to school.

It wasn't like me at all to have flitting thoughts. I was out of control. Off plan. I should've told Sherlock I wasn't interested in his little crime the very minute I discovered my mother's picture at the funeral. I should've placed the photo in my little box of my mother's things and left it for after school—after I'd graduated and escaped Baker Street and all that held me there. After I'd discovered a way to take my brothers with me.

But I couldn't quit. Not now. The closeness of Lily's dad's murder had made the crime interesting to me. The photo brought it even closer, made solving it feel like an opportunity to discover another one of Mum's secrets. That it also was an opportunity to get lost in the confusing mire that was Sherlock Holmes? I couldn't let that stop me.

I took a deep breath and grabbed my book for maths, shoving it into the messenger bag at my hip. Then I stood, perplexed, staring at my locker and wondering where my book for maths had escaped to.

Sherlock appeared at my side so suddenly, I half expected a soft puff of smoke to surround him. “Morning,” he said, his lips jerking into a grin like a nervous tic. Without warning, he pushed his face too close to mine.

I fell into my locker door to escape him, so that the edges dug into my back. “What are you doing?”

That was apparently not the answer Sherlock expected. I could almost see his mind racing for some possible context. It took only a second or so for him to snap back, “Kissing you.”

“You can't just walk up and kiss someone like that.” He
was still too close, so I sidestepped to put more space between us and then slammed shut the locker door.

His confusion elongated his face. “But I thought—”

“Thought what?” Admittedly, my tone was angrier than I felt.

Sherlock scowled and turned so that it looked like he would just walk away, but at the last moment he turned back, pointed a finger at me, and said, “You did.”

He was right. I had. And in some fool moment, I'd even meant it. But I wasn't about to start up some dumb teen fling. Not now. I had too much else to do.

“It was just a kiss. God, Lock. You're like a kid sometimes.”

“A kid,” he echoed.

“Like when I hold your hand to calm you down when you get worked up, right? It's what I do with my little brothers.”

His eyes went blank, like he just turned off. “And the kiss?”

“I only kissed you because you needed a distraction. And it had been a long day.” And because I wanted to. But that wouldn't help, so I kept it to myself.

I watched his coldness return, watched everything about him harden to glass, and wondered if the next thing I said wouldn't be the divot that started a spider's web of cracks. Would I eventually shatter him? I wondered. That'd be a trick. I was the one who felt too fragile to keep talking.

I softened my tone. “I—I just can't now.”

He nodded as though I'd said the sky was blue.

I was practically whispering when I said, “You wouldn't like me if you knew me.” And I had plans for my life. Plans
that didn't include a boy or his junior detective crime-­fighting fantasies.

He nodded again and looked to the ceiling when he said, “Boats today. I think I found a pattern.”

And then he stormed down the hall away from me, leaving me with my plans. Only, just then, they didn't feel like nearly enough.

x x x

Sadie Mae stood in my way in the hall, so that I might have stomped straight into her if she hadn't put her hand on my shoulder at the last minute. “Wow, bad day?” was her only reaction to the seething glare I offered whoever it was that was in my way. She laughed after she said it, of course, in that way she had that always pushed me off my guard.

“Not many good ones this week. You?”

“I'll just say right here that whoever thought up the idea of paying dead white authors by the word should have a special place in hell with the rest of the sadists.”

“Literature, then?”

Sadie opened her giant bohemian bag, which she'd probably sewn herself, to show me the tonnage of paperbacks she was hefting around campus with her. I was surprised the stitches weren't giving way. “No idea why I thought I'd want to go to Oxford. I mean, what self-respecting Southern belle chooses to do this to herself?”

“If only you were better at maths.”

“Math,” she corrected. “This is not a plural word in my culture.”

I laughed for the first time that day—perhaps the first time that month, if I were to think back. It was barely a stuttered hiccuping thing, but the sound brightened Sadie's whole expression.

“I don't suppose you'd want to study together, like we did back when?”

That thought was sobering. Sadie used to come to my house and stay deep into the night, sprawled on the floor with one of my pillows and her stack of reading. My house didn't even seem like the same place anymore. I was pretty sure Sadie wouldn't stay long if she did come over now.

“So, that's a no.”

“No,” I said quickly. “I mean, yes. We could. Just not at my house. Things are . . . different.”

I knew we couldn't go to Sadie's dorm. Her dorm mother was the second coming of Stalin when it came to guests. That Sadie managed to regularly sneak in past curfew was a testament to her criminal tendencies.

“Library, maybe?” I offered.

“Say the London Library and I'll be yours forever.”

“Sure,” I said with a grin. “London Library.”

Sadie's expression brightened again and she batted her eyelashes. “You do know the way to my heart.”

“I can't tonight. I've got to get out of this thing I said I'd do. But Thursday?”

She prattled off a where and when we'd meet, and I wondered if she'd actually be there when I showed up. All I could do was try.

x x x

By the time Sherlock and I were in the middle of the lake in an orange boat with a light-yellow bottom, I had almost decided it might be easier to duck out of our little game and discover what I could on my own. But the minute he pulled a stack of papers from his messenger bag, all my thoughts of leaving shimmered from my head. Front and center on the very top page was the Man in Green from the photo, one of the three men Mr. Patel stood behind.
FRANCISCO TORRES, FOUND DEAD IN PARK
, the headline screamed above his head. I snatched the printout from Sherlock's hands and skimmed the ­article, which pointed to the irony of an infamous bank robber, who'd been released on a technicality after serving only half his sentence, falling victim the very next day to the petty theft of a mugging in Regent's Park.

“What does this have to do with anything?” I managed to choke out. I forced myself to return the article with a smidge of disinterest in my expression, but not before memorizing the date and page number so I could find it later.

“You said Patel was in trouble with the law. So was this one.”

“Two isn't a pattern,” I said, though my mind was already weaving together too many ways that it could be.

“Correct, which is why . . .” Sherlock slid another printout from the middle of his stack and handed it to me. A smaller headline this time, with a head shot of Mustache Man, who had been tried for some elaborate banking scheme but never convicted. He, too, had been stabbed to death in Regent's
Park, the apparent victim of a robbery gone wrong.

Sherlock's final printout was an obituary for Todd White, sparse on details other than a long list of family who'd survived him and now lived in Lewes, where they ran some kind of herbalist shop. It felt more like an advertisement for the shop than a write-up of his life. The obituary didn't even have a picture, but Sherlock never did anything halfway. Stapled to the printout was what looked like a cabbie license picture of the Striped Man from the photo of my mother. All four of the men standing in a group were dead, as if the killer were using my photo as a check-off list for his victims.

“Three more victims. All petty criminals not paying for their real crimes. All dead of stab wounds. All found in the park.”

My eyes roamed around each of the articles as though some secret were hidden in the speckled margins. “How did no one see this before now?”

“You ask this? After the endless incompetence we saw the other night?”

“Not every policeman is like those we saw.” Only Blue-Hair Girl and Stepdad were left, and their faces swam through my thoughts as I handed the pages back to Sherlock. “Were there no others? It can't be so rare for there to be stabbings.”

“None in Regent's Park. These all happened within the past six months. But I went back three years.”

“None in the park in three years? That can't be right.”

“Lots in the alleys and streets surrounding the park, and one man beaten pretty badly, but none in the park that I could
find in the papers. Of course, if we want to do a thorough search, we'd need access to police records.”

“I can get that,” I said without thinking. By the time I realized what I'd decided to do, I looked up and Sherlock was smiling. “Why so smug?”

“I thought you might quit our little game. In fact, I was pretty sure you'd do it today.”

“And maybe I still will.”

Sherlock shook his head. “You're hooked. But never mind that. I'm hooked as well. It's compelling work, this.” He leaned back, his elbows resting on the prow of our little boat. His smug smile lingered as he stared out across the lake.

“Truly, Lock, just when I find a way to tolerate you.” I attempted a burdened sigh to accompany my words, but Sherlock sat up again, his eyes alight. I thought perhaps he'd come up with another clue.

“‘Lock.' You called me that earlier. I like it. Never had a nickname before.” He leaned back again, this time crossing his arms behind his head and closing his eyes.

I slid the pages off the seat and read the story of Todd White, ex-con-man turned cabdriver. He'd been off the police radar for fifteen years before he was found dead—stabbed cleanly in the heart, his body sprawled across one of the large planters on a central walkway in Regent's Park. He'd been the first, actually. The second page of the article had a picture of the planter. I'd walked past it a few times in the past six months. I even remember wondering what had happened to the flowers on the one side, never for a moment
imagining they'd been crushed under the weight of a dead man or ripped out to remove blood evidence for the police.

The crimes were starting to feel too close. One dead man in a photo with my mother could still have been coincidence. Four dead men felt like it meant something. It suddenly felt imperative to know my mom's part in this group. Were they merely friends at university? Did they work together?

“What do you see?” Lock asked.

“Nothing.”

“You've been staring at that page for minutes. It's not nothing.”

I didn't really want to admit that I'd just been lost in my own thoughts, so I let myself really study the planter for a few seconds before answering him. It looked like an old fountain with two tiers that had been filled in with soil and then lush plants. It even had a large finial at the top. But I kept coming back to an ornament on the side that I could barely make out in the pixelated reprint of the original photo.

“There's something here on the planter where the first one was found.” I held the page up and pointed to where I meant. “Can you see what that is?”

“It's a four-leaf clover,” he said, without looking closely at all.

I looked again. “It could be, I suppose.”

“No, it is. I went by there earlier today. There's a clover on one side and a tree on the other.”

“A tree.” I looked from where we floated to the boathouse and wondered how I could convince Lock we needed to get
back to shore and over to the planter without telling him why.

“Want to see it?” He'd sat up and had his hands on the oars before I could answer, and sooner than I'd imagined, we were standing in front of the six-month-old crime scene.

I ran my hand over the Celtic knots mixed with leaves that flowed from the branches and down to entwine with the roots at the base. Just like Mom's coin. She was everywhere in this game, connected to these people, possibly even to their deaths. I had to know that connection. “They don't really seem to fit the planter's other decorations, do they? The symbols?”

Sherlock walked from our side to the other and then back. “You're right. It's like they've been plastered on, not carved from the original stone.” He grabbed an edge and tried to shake it, but the medallion didn't come loose. “Long time ago, maybe.”

It had to mean something—this man who'd known my mom, dying at a planter that held the symbols of our secret coin. But I couldn't indulge in those thoughts just then. I couldn't let Lock see me indulging them anyway. What I could do was find out more about Mum—who she really was when she wasn't being our mom.