Mind Games

by Heather W. Petty

  “Conning someone isn’t about getting something for nothing. When you do it right, the mark never knows they were conned. You give them what they want, and they give you a favor in return.”

  “And by favor, you mean money.”

  “Not always.” Alice was trying to play coy, but I could tell how much fun she was having with her lesson. I wondered how many others had been privy to this curriculum of hers. “There may come a time when one of us is in trouble. That man is primed to help us however we need. He won’t forget me and my eyes shining with grateful tears. He’ll think about it all night, smiling every time he does.”

  I released a grunt of a laugh. “Where do you get the ego?”

  “Learned from the best. This was all Emily. Your mom taught me everything I know, not the other way around.”

  I tried not to frown, but I didn’t want to hear any more stories about my mom that day. “Not the mom I knew.”

  “Just because you didn’t know this part doesn’t mean it wasn’t still her.” Alice’s smile widened. “Grifting’s an art. It takes a brilliant mind, fearlessness, and inner strength that few people can even aspire to. It’s how she survived when she had nothing and no one. It’s how she saved me. It’s also how she got stuck with a bunch of losers like Sorte Juntos to feed and care for. Hell, it’s even how she got stuck with that oaf, so don’t—”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked, even though I knew already. My dad had spilled it all. And Alice was right. Emily got stuck with a monster because of her conning. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was why she’d given it up. Maybe she’d finally had to pay a price she wasn’t willing to pay. Maybe it was because of us.

  Alice glared at a fire hydrant, though I was pretty sure she was mostly angry with herself. She hadn’t meant to tell me as much as he had. It was like she had appointed herself keeper of all my mother’s secrets. “Nothing,” she said. She didn’t speak again until we turned onto Baker Street, and then she grabbed the grocery bags from my hands and said, “Don’t be surprised when we get home.”

  “Surprised?”

  “There will be men stationed out in front of the house for a while.”

  “Men? What kind of men?”

  Alice paused, like she was trying to figure out how to say something. “I’ve called in a few favors.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They’re men who owe me.”

  “Owe you?” I’d barely asked when Alice’s own words came back to me. But now I have him, in case I need something later on. “Wait. Are they marks?”

  Alice glanced at all the people on the street around us and scrunched up her lips at me in a reprimand.

  I lowered my voice, but I was by no means done talking. “You brought men from who knows where, and you expect they will protect us from whom? From the policemen my father will send? From the actual criminals he may know? What are you thinking here?”

  She didn’t answer me, but she didn’t seem guilty or upset, either.

  “Have you thought about what will happen if they find out you’ve been conning them?”

  When Alice finally looked at me, a bit of the defiance she’d shown Mallory was back. “I’m not counting on them to play soldier or cop. They’re just window dressing for now, all about appearances. He’s shown his players and we’re showing him ours.”

  “And if he calls your bluff?”

  Alice raised a single brow. “If we need soldiers, I’ll make a different call.”

  When we got home, two men stood on either side of our stoop, staring straight ahead like playacting soldiers and acknowledging Alice with a nod as she passed by. They took their jobs very seriously, it seemed. But something was off. I thought maybe it was that I’d expected to feel crowded by their added presence, but once I started up the steps, it was like they weren’t even there.

  I didn’t realize what was missing until I reached the top step. The noise. I looked behind us and the two men standing guard were the only people on the street in front of our house. No flashes or camera lights, no whirring, buzzing, or clicks. But more important, there were no questions. Not one reporter was left. And that realization alone made me turn toward a confused Alice and say, “Thank you.”

  “What’s this? Are you playing psychological warfare with me? I get a scolding followed by gratitude?”

  I shook my head and glanced back down at the men.

  Alice looked at me, wary. “Okay. You’re welcome.” She pushed my hair behind my shoulder and then rested her hand there. She smiled first, which made me grin, and she didn’t let go of my shoulder until we were in the house and heading toward our rooms.

  Chapter 10

  A violin ringtone whined from my phone the minute I lay on my bed. The Offenbach Barcarolle. Lock was calling, though he should’ve been in class just then. I toyed with the idea of ignoring it and texting him some kind of lecture about his education, but I wanted to talk to him more than I wanted to play with him.

  “Yes, I went to see my father today, but I don’t want to talk about that or about them finding the sword or his—”

  “They found the sword? Wait, never mind.” I could perfectly picture his dismissive hand gesture. “I want to talk about the letter. It definitely wasn’t from your dad.”

  “I know.”

  “Yes, but now I have an address. . . . You know?”

  “An address?”

  “You first. How do you know?”

  “I brought it up when I saw my father today and he had no idea what I was talking about. Now you.  You have an address?”

  “Can I come over? It’s better if I show you in person.”

  I smiled. “You mean that you can draw out the explanation and make yourself look more clever if you show me in person?”

  Lock didn’t laugh with me, but I could picture the rise of his brow as he said, “You are devastating for my ego.”

  “Someone must balance all the adoration you get from my brothers. Very well. Come over after school.” I was so entirely sure of his expression just then, I added, “Don’t scowl, and go back to class.”

  “I’ll be there at lunch,” he quipped back, and promptly ended our call.

  I couldn’t nap after my phone call with Lock, despite my exhaustion. Lying in my quiet room, I couldn’t keep my thoughts from spinning until I sat up, dizzy and desperate for a distraction. I turned to maths first, timing how long it took me to solve problem sets, first in my head and then written out, to calculate how much time I wasted showing proof of work to my instructors. But for no known reason, instead of walking the steps of the equations, my thoughts kept replaying my earlier conversation with my father and, specifically, the way my father had threatened me to help get him out.

  From out there, from in here, it don’t matter where I am. You’ll never see those boys again if you don’t help get me out of here.

  He couldn’t have honestly expected that to work, which made me want to know why he’d said it—why he had wanted to see me at all. It felt like a waste of time for both of us.

  Tired of hearing his voice in my head, I tossed aside my books and ran up the attic steps. If maths wouldn’t work, I would lose myself in training.

  Aikido and Bartitsu are similar in that they are both about balance and focused power. But where Bartitsu is about disturbing your opponent’s equilibrium and taking advantage of every slipup, aikido is about using the force of your enemy’s attack to add to your own. Aikido is all about power, using everything you can steal from your enemy and exerting as little of your own as possible.

  I had to wonder if that was why Mum chose aikido over all the other martial arts she could have learned. It was the perfect grifter’s art—if you do it right, you don’t even look like you’re fighting.

  That morning I focused on the sword forms. I made it through maybe fifteen minutes of ever-shifting stances before I lost my balance to a misstep and tripped back over a stack of attic stuff, falling hard onto the plywood
floor. A few old photo albums fell to one side of me and a metal box to the other. The box opened in the process, spilling out wads of tissue paper and something hard that clattered across the attic boards and plopped into the insulation.

  I pushed the tissue paper back into the bottom half of the box, but one of the bundles was heavier than I expected. I unwrapped it and found a pile of fifty-pound notes in the center.  Another heavy bundle had twenty-pound notes, then fifty-pound again, and the rest of the box was filled with torn, empty tissue sheets shaped like they had once held bundles of cash. In all, it seemed there had originally been thirteen bundles. From what I could calculate, the box had once held perhaps £50,000.

  I crawled across the floor to retrieve the escaped object and found it was a bright silver multitool/utility knife. But when I pulled open the tools, where I expected to see blades, there were long, thin metal picks with odd shapes at the tips. It took me a minute to work it out, but in the end, I grinned and whispered, “Lock pick.”

  I dropped the tool into the box with a clang, then felt around for the lid. It was heavier than it should have been, because of an ornate metal piece affixed to the top of it that was pewter and in the shape of a Celtic cross, with a circle that intersected the upright and crossbar. It had vines winding up the sides to weave through the pattern on the circle. All of that was odd enough, but it seemed like a ridiculously ornate box in which to hide money and a lock-pick tool.

  With the box back in place, I flipped open one of the photo albums, which turned out to be a scrapbook. When I fanned through the pages, some old newspaper clippings fell out. The first had a picture of my dad holding his hand up, as if to block the press from taking pictures of him and a woman with curly hair who stood next to him. POLICE FIND KILLER, NO JUSTICE, read the headline. I skimmed the first paragraph, and apparently when he was just a constable, my father had managed to find the man who had murdered a child, but he was already dead. I vaguely remembered the case from my childhood, something about a boy’s body being found in a dumpster.

  Another of the escaped clippings was about a girl who’d been drowned in an ornamental fountain at Hyde Park—the Joy of Life Fountain, just for some cruel irony. I flipped through a few more pages until I found a picture of a boy who looked to be about Seanie’s age. The accompanying clipping was mostly about Inspector Mallory, or Sergeant Mallory, as he was back then.

  I started turning pages at random, wondering why in the world my mother would put so much effort into compiling something like this for my father. She didn’t seem the type to scrapbook at all, really. It seemed so out of character for her, but apparently this was just one more thing I didn’t know about Emily Moriarty. “Were you really that bored with your life?” I asked aloud, brushing my fingers over a program from the promotion ceremony where my father became a detective sergeant.

  I closed the book with a shake of my head and reached for the photo albums that had once rested on top of it. Somehow, my little trip down memory lane had sapped all my energy. Even the slight effort it took to restack everything made me feel exhausted. Another escape abandoned, I went down the attic steps and headed toward my room, but my way was blocked by Freddie. He sat in the hall, leaning against my bedroom door, spinning his mobile phone on his knee like a top.

  I stared at him for a solid minute with no reaction before I lowered myself to sit on the bottom of the attic steps. “Say it quickly. It’s been a hard day and I need a bath.”

  “Because of Dad?” His words were more blurted accusation than question, punctuated by his gaze, which had become a lot more unflinching in the weeks that Dad had been locked up.

  “Why would it have anything to do with that coward?”

  Freddie scowled so that I almost felt like I was looking at a different person for the second time in just two days. He had never, ever looked at me like I was the enemy. Not in his entire life.

  “I know you saw him today, and don’t lie, because Lock told me that’s where you went.”

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “This morning, when you left without telling us where you were going, Alice sent me over to see if you were with him.”

  I made an irritated face and said, “Lock knows nothing about my day.” I stood and reached for my doorknob, but Freddie was quicker, blocking my hand with his.

  “He knew what I had for breakfast and that I’d bickered with Alice just by looking at me. He knows plenty.”

  I met Freddie’s stare with my own, which usually made him back off immediately, but he was more determined that day. He stood and entered my room. I released a heavy sigh and followed him in. I sat cross-legged on my bed, patting the space in front of me, but Freddie ignored my invitation.

  “I just need to tell you some things,” he said, staring at the floor.

  I gestured to my bed again. “Come on, then. You want to talk? Face me and talk.” It was something our mother had said a lot. I thought maybe it had been a mistake to evoke a memory of Mum like that, but Freddie either didn’t mind or didn’t notice. He scrambled up to sit facing me, taking the challenge more defiantly than I’d expected. “You can’t let him get us. No matter what.”

  I studied his face for a bit, finding new details among all the old features I knew so well. He had a new scar across his forehead from his final beating from Dad, and his jawline had thinned a bit, despite the weight he’d put on from the hearty dinners at Mrs. Hudson’s. And though his face was still healing from the recent fight he’d had, he looked healthy. I felt a part of me relax, releasing a tension I maybe didn’t realize I’d been harboring.

  “Why would you say this to me?” I asked.

  Freddie traced a stitched seam on my quilt as it made a path around one of his knees. “Scared,” he mumbled.

  “Scared of what?”

  “Of things going back like they were.”

  I felt an ache in my chest as I watched Freddie wince away from his own truth, but I figured there had to be more to it than that. “And?”

  “That you won’t be here to help.”

  I was left a little speechless. “I’ll be here.” I only realized what an untrustworthy promise that was after I’d said it. Freddie knew it too, but not for the same reasons I had.

  “Not if he has us taken away from you. Not if he kills you.”

  “He won’t.” I tapped under his chin to force him to look me in the eye. “No matter what happens, he won’t kill me. And as long as I’m alive, I won’t let him keep you from me either.”

  Something relaxed in Fred’s expression, but not completely. I couldn’t blame him for not trusting me. He’d seen the welts and bruises on my face and neck. Despite the way Lock and I had tried to cover all that had happened that night, our dad was in jail for murder and for my attempted murder. Fred knew it had almost happened before. That was why his next expression was more wary than I wished, and why his voice was small when he asked, “Swear?”

  “Swear.  You’ve seen me training, right?” I nodded defiantly, despite the lingering fear in my brother’s eyes that made the ache in my chest intensify until it felt like I’d been stabbed. “You trust Lock, then? Because he’s been training me as well.”

  That brightened Freddie’s expression more than it should have. “Oh yeah? In what?”

  “Hitting people with sticks.” I smirked a little, which made Freddie laugh. “I’m not all that sure it’ll help any, but he, of course, finds it highly important.”

  Finally, a glint of the old Freddie came out as he singsonged, “’Cause he’s your boyfriend.”

  I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “Nope.”

  “Liar. I saw you two kissing. You should just admit it.”

  I tickled him under his chin and did my worst impression of Freddie’s teasing tone. “You should go study something and get out of my room.”

  He started humming some childish kissing rhyme, and I chased him out into the hall before locking my door and falling back on my bed. Freddie had
managed to clear my mind in a way nothing else could, reminding me yet again how much I needed those three brats. And I wouldn’t have them for long—not if our father really did weasel his way out of his cell. They couldn’t be here if he got out of jail—not in London, not in England. It was too dangerous. But they couldn’t leave yet, not while my dad had easy access to the authorities and enough media attention to start an international manhunt.

  We needed to keep our passports somewhere easy to grab, and we needed a plan, which meant convincing Alice to leave. If anything were to happen to me or if Alice was to lose custody, she needed to take my brothers to the countryside and then to America as quickly as possible. Even if that meant leaving me behind to ensure that he’d never threaten any of us ever again.

  Chapter 11

  Lock rushed into my room almost exactly at noon, one hand clutching his tablet, the other holding his mobile to his ear. He immediately started pacing the floor as though I weren’t there at all.

  “How long can it physically take to accept a tip on an actual tip hotline?” he asked his reflection in my full-length mirror. Then he spun in place and paced back to my window.

  I watched him for three full laps of my tiny room before saying, “I thought I said after school.”

  He pointed at me with his tablet hand. “I wasn’t scowling earlier.”

  “Liar.”

  I could tell he was trying not to smile, but then he was distracted by someone on the line. “Yes, this is about the jewelry store that was robbed last week,” he said. “The thief is a woman.”

  His expression went from being pleased with himself to irritated in the blink of an eye. “No, I was not there. I saw a picture from the crime scene that leaked on the Internet and . . . No, this isn’t a prank call. Just listen, because . . .”

  He looked at me in exasperation and I mouthed: Who are you talking to?

  Police, he mouthed back.

  I rolled my eyes, and fell back onto my pillow. He’d seen a picture on the Internet and solved a jewelry heist. Of course he had.