Mind Games

by Heather W. Petty

  “He says if we don’t show up by seven, he’ll come arrest you at school tomorrow.”

  “Then I won’t go to school.”

  Alice grunted out a laugh. “You want to run? Over some witness who might not be any threat at all?”

  I loved Alice for posturing just then. Her false confidence was probably the one thing I needed to bolster mine.

  I sighed. “I’ll be home in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll call a taxi.”

  • • •

  I was approaching the end of hour two of being stuck alone in the flickering fluorescent-lit nightmare that was Interview Room 2A. I sat in an orange chair that once was cushioned but had probably been in active duty for at least a decade. It was a mirrored room, rather than one with a camera, which meant there was at least one officer silently watching me through the glass like a creeper in the night. Worst of all, the vent just above my head had a rattling part that was starting to tear at my reason and sanity.

  “Police interview rooms are inhumane,” I declared for whoever was behind the mirror to hear. “If you’re going to waste so much of our taxes on chasing after innocent schoolgirls, you should at least spend a little to fix your ventilation system.”

  I’d given up on my original plan to affect a stony silence until I was allowed to leave. I justified my talking into the void by deciding that as long as I cut off all speech the moment they came in the room to question me, my protest of silence would still stand. But perhaps I was just drunk on boredom.

  “Could you at least give me something to read?”

  A sudden scuffle in the hall distracted me from my request. The door burst open, but instead of Mallory, the Lady Constance of Regent’s Park barged in with a constable struggling to restrain her.

  “You!” she said, thrusting a finger at me so that the bag wrapped around her wrist swung out and knocked the interview table sideways a few inches.

  Mallory rushed in, red faced and angry like I’d never seen him. “Get her out of here!” he bellowed. I honestly didn’t think he had it in him.

  Try as the poor constable might, however, Lady Constance would not be moved. “Vivian can never win!” she cried, smacking the constable with her clutch. “You can’t keep him locked away forever!”

  More King Arthur references? She was calling me “Vivian” this time, which was just another name for the Lady of the Lake from the Arthurian romances. But I had to wonder if the “him” I was keeping “locked away” referred to my father or to Merlin—or if they were both the same in her mind.

  That’s when everything fell into place. As Mallory and his constable tried their best to guide and then push Constance out of the room, I realized that this was their witness. Or, rather, the Lady Constance had witnessed Nimue returning Arthur’s sword to the lake in Regent’s Park, and she’d come to the police to name me as Nimue. That meant she was also the figure whispering about what she’d seen to the artist in the drawing. And now that I knew who she was, finding the artist couldn’t be all that hard. The relief I felt was matched only by the slapstick humor of the Lady Constance and her constable punch doll.

  Alice rushed in when they were gone and looked relieved herself to see that I was okay. “What happened in here?”

  “A miracle,” I said with a grin.

  She raised a brow and sat next to me. “Who was that woman?”

  “I believe she is the witness against me.”

  Alice opened her mouth to ask something else, but then Mallory came in, looking more harried than I’d ever seen him. That didn’t seem to strip any of the all-knowing condescension out of him, however. He took his time sitting down across from Alice and me, and even spent a few vital seconds looking through the papers of his manila folder.

  “Do you have any enemies, Miss Moriarty?”

  I had not been expecting that as his first question. “Just the one you’ve got locked up in your jail.”

  Mallory didn’t scold me for bringing up my dad like I’d expected. Instead, he pulled a glossy picture from his folder and pushed it toward me. “Do you know this man?”

  The face looked familiar in a face-in-the-crowd kind of way—like maybe I’d seen him around our neighborhood enough times. But I shook my head.

  “Do you know the name Charles Ross?”

  “No. What is this about?”

  Mallory took the picture and straightened all the papers in his folder, then he leaned back in his chair and stared at me expectantly. Though I had no idea what he was presuming I’d do.

  “Why am I here?”

  “That may be something only you can tell me.”

  “Is she free to go then?” Alice asked.

  After nearly a minute of more silent staring, Mallory seemed to come to some kind of decision, but instead of sharing it with us, he opened his folder and started to arrange the papers inside of it for us to see. Once they were all laid out, he pointed at the photo of the familiar-faced man, which was farthest to my left.

  “This is Charles Ross. His hand was in your bin.”

  I looked more closely at him, wondering if I might have recognized him better from his back—if he was the man in my drawings. It was possible, of course.

  “Are you sure you don’t know him?”

  I shook my head. “Never met. Should I know him for some reason?”

  “A reason other than his severed hand in your bin? He’s dead, by the way. The coroner believes he was dead when the hand was removed, though we have yet to recover a body.”

  My heart sank a little. That was a detail I’d forgotten. If the man in the drawings was the artist, then he was the one missing a hand. That also apparently meant that he was dead. I didn’t figure the artist was the one sending them to me, but now we’d never know whom he’d given them to either.

  Mallory pushed a statement forward next, which was typed out but lengthy. “This is a statement given by Constance Ross.”

  I looked up. “Ross?”

  Mallory nodded. “The wife of Charles. Constance was in the Master of Letters program at Oxford twenty years ago when Charles was completing his Doctorate in Fine Art.”

  Which meant he was the artist. He had to be.

  “Charles Ross secured a teaching position for a time, but they both mysteriously left the school and the city of Oxford two years ago. Neither has a current permanent address that we could find, but it appears Constance spends most of her days in Regent’s Park, which is where she claimed to see you returning Excalibur to the lake.”

  “Me?” I wasn’t even slightly nervous, but I did try to act surprised.

  Mallory narrowed his eyes. “Here is where I wonder about your enemies.” He pushed a single sheet of paper forward that said “Call Log” at the top. “A female witness called in to tell us you’d put the sword in the lake, three days ago. That woman was not Constance Ross.”

  But it was Constance who had seen me and relayed the story to our artist, which is why I was drawn in Arthurian clothing on the card. If the foreground of the illustrations meant anything, Lady Constance was the princess whispering what she’d seen into our artist’s ear, and my second sin he’d seen for himself. And if the man with the severed hand in the drawing was our artist, then Charles Ross was our artist.

  And now he was dead, and no longer able to confirm or deny what he’d seen or who he was. I hardly expected we’d get a straight answer from his widow. Which meant we really would never know who was dropping the cards into our postbox or if that person had also made the phone call three days ago.

  “Someone out there is doing a fair job of pointing fingers at you, Miss Moriarty. Are you sure you want to leave here without telling us who that might be?”

  “She’s a sixteen-year-old child,” Alice interjected. “What kind of enemies could she possibly have made?”

  “No threats have come to your house? No one following you around?”

  I stared down at the picture of Charles Ross and said, “Does this mean I can go?”


  Mallory gathered all the papers up but one, straightened them, and placed them in the perfect center of the file folder. I glanced over at the remaining paper long enough to see that it was a custody form with my father’s name at the top. He was evidently fighting Alice’s guardianship. “I expect we’ll find a body soon for Mr. Charles Ross. I also expect we’ll find some kind of evidence of you on or around that body.”

  “What are you trying to say?” Alice asked.

  Mallory pushed the custody form toward Alice, but she didn’t bother to look down. Instead, she kept her hands folded neatly in her lap and her gaze zeroed in on the inspector. He was focused completely on me. “I’m saying, Mori, that you should be very careful whom you trust. We found evidence of a murder in your rubbish and have a witness statement that you hid evidence of five more murders.”

  “Four,” I corrected him. “He killed Sadie with his bare hands. He didn’t use the sword on her.”

  I thought perhaps I saw a glint of pain in Mallory’s eyes, but he quickly covered. “Someone is orchestrating this campaign against you.”

  That’s when Mallory finally looked at Alice. He suspected her. But then, he would. Regardless of whether or not he was still in my father’s camp, I was sure he’d heard a mountain of stories about Alice’s evil ways.

  Alice, unfazed, said, “Exactly. And I hope that the police catch whomever it is and bring him to justice.”

  Mallory’s smile was tight lipped and short lived, and still he didn’t take his eyes off her for a long moment. But when he spoke, he addressed only me. “Leave this to the police. This is no place for that little detective boyfriend of yours to stick his nose in. Let us handle it.”

  “The way you’ve always handled my problems?” I asked.

  He tried not to react, but I could see his anger in the clenching of his jaw.

  “If we’re done here.” I stood, and Alice followed suit, but Mallory reached across the table to grab my upper arm.

  “If you keep secrets from us, we can’t help you.”

  I pulled free of his hand. “If I need your kind of help, all is lost anyway. But I’ll make sure to keep that in mind.”

  Chapter 18

  In the middle of the night, my phone blared the barcarolle through my dreams until I finally found it with one fumbling hand and answered. “Sleeping.”

  “I can’t find him.” It was Mycroft’s voice, only barely recognizable. And as the silence opened up between us, I started to realize why. He coughed to clear his throat, but he sounded like he was about to weep. “I can’t find him, and it probably wouldn’t matter if I could. He needs you.”

  “What’s happened?”

  He didn’t respond, and suddenly I remembered standing in the hall of my mother’s ward, facing the patient, expectant faces of three nurses who wanted me to answer a similar question. And I couldn’t seem to say the word “dead.”

  “Where would he go?” I asked.

  Mycroft barely answered, “I don’t know,” then ended the call.

  I didn’t know what to do at first. The ringtone was Lock’s, which meant Mycroft had his phone. And Sherlock could have been a thousand places or even on his way to my house. Still, I got myself together and went out with no real plan.

  I doubted heavily that he’d be at his house, but I decided to check there first. The door was locked, so I used the key hidden in the rocks to let myself in. I could tell no one was home the moment I stepped into the entry. The house had that empty feel to it, like no one had been there for a long while. But I ran up the stairs just in case, deciding to start at the very top floor of the house and work my way down.

  His mother’s room was spotless but not sterile. It was welcoming, actually. Her bed was turned down and a side table lamp was on, spotlighting a novel that she’d never finish, despite the silver marker holding her place. Next to it, an ornate frame housed a picture of the brothers from when they were young. A floral robe was draped across the foot of the bed, slippers lined up perfectly beneath. It was a room waiting for someone to come home.

  It was also the only tidy room in the house. The rest were in more of a crumpled state, where perhaps the boys had rushed home to change clothes or grab belongings before heading off to school, work, or the hospital. Regardless, Sherlock wasn’t there, so I pocketed the key and went back downstairs.

  I checked my phone for the time. Four in the morning meant there were more places he couldn’t be than could. The school was locked up. Technically, the park was closed too, though that didn’t mean he wasn’t there, or one of any number of places that were important to him and I wouldn’t know about. There was also the very real possibility that he was going nowhere. Wandering around London like I would, taking trains or buses just to be moving, but with no real destination in mind.

  Out of desperation, I thought to go back home, hoping to find him at our kitchen table with a cup of tea and a hovering Alice. But as I stepped out onto the landing of Sherlock’s stoop, the headlights of an oncoming car revealed a silhouette moving toward me, a recognizable shadow man, made ever more defined by the orange glow of his cigarette.

  It hit me, then, the level of his despair. It wafted off him with every step. Or perhaps I was transferring onto him how I’d felt on a similar night, pressing my swollen face to the cool wrought iron fencing of his stoop.

  Lock didn’t see me until he was standing on the bottom step, and when he did, he immediately looked away.

  “Didn’t bring my keys and the spare is missing.” He took one last, long drag and then ground out the embers and tossed the dark brown butt down into the rocks. “Seems I left my bag at the . . .” He paused and then never finished what he was going to say. “I can’t get into my own house.”

  I moved down a couple of steps and held out the key as an offering, but he only stared at it for a moment before fixating on my shoes.

  “You rushed out tonight,” he said. “Your laces are undone.” His gaze slowly drifted up to my face, and then away as he stepped up until he was on the stair below mine. He grasped my wrist, as though he thought I might get away if he didn’t hang on to me, and he turned to face me, eye to eye, pulling me to the left until I was leaning against the wrought iron. I didn’t realize why until his fingers came up to my cheek, never quite touching my skin. “Are those tears for me?”

  The street lamp. He needed light to be able to see my face. I wanted to wipe at my cheeks, bat his hand away, but I couldn’t move for the pain in his eyes. I could feel it, like it was happening again to me, only the ache was different, compounded somehow.

  A few of his own tears fell just as his thumb came up to brush mine away. “I don’t like to see you cry.”

  I composed myself as best I could and wiped the rest of the moisture from my cheeks with my shirtsleeve. “Then I will not.”

  He took my face in his hands and shook his head, staring into my eyes. “No. Don’t hide from me. Will you . . . ?” His eyes pleaded with mine, and his voice sounded almost as broken as we both felt. “Will you tell me something true?”

  I nodded, and then couldn’t think of a thing to say. Was my life so much a lie that I no longer knew truth? Or was it that I didn’t trust anything I knew to be the truth?

  He waited with expectation, and I could only gaze blankly back, my mind a scattered mess. “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me your last thought.”

  “Your pain hurts me more than my own.” His eyes widened in a way I could only see because of our closeness. “And it scares me.”

  “Why does it frighten you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t stop the pain.” I blinked away a few more tears, which he smeared with his thumbs. “I can’t make her come back and I know what that means. I can’t make it better.”

  He was still for a long time. Another tear dripped from his eye to his cheek, and before I could lift a hand to dry it, he pulled me into him, wrapped his
arms around me as tightly as they would go. I stood frozen in his embrace for a few seconds before I lifted my hands to hold him, tracing them up his back to his shoulders.

  “You do,” he gasped in my ear when he could find his voice again. “You do make it better. Even when you shadow yourself. Just knowing you are there in the world makes it better.”

  I felt something tear inside me, a gaping, open thing that left me out of breath and out of restraint, out of everything that held me together. More concerning, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to fix it.

  • • •

  Sherlock slept fitfully and ate hardly anything that day and the next. I didn’t press. I still didn’t remember more than bits and pieces of the days directly after my mother died. My strongest memory was thinking that everything was just too much of itself. It was too quiet. The boys were too loud. My bed was too soft. The shower too harsh on my skin. My tea was too hot and then too cold and definitely too bitter. The world felt like it was sensory overload, but hiding from it meant facing silence and my thoughts, and that was worse.

  So I sat by his bed and brought him food, just in case. I waited and watched. I’d gotten so used to his fitful tossing and turning, I didn’t recognize when he was dreaming. When his huffs and grunts turned to cries and then Lock shouting my name, I didn’t know what to make of it at first. I sat frozen as he yelled for me twice, then came to myself enough to wake him up and hold his hand while he recovered.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. “Whatever you saw was just a dream.”

  He scrubbed his eyes with his palms and cursed. It took him a few moments to go still, and then he sat up and stared at me, like perhaps I was just a dream as well.

  I reached a hand up to smooth his hair. “Are you hungry yet?”

  He shook his head and I dropped my hand to his forehead, which was still dewy from his nightmare.

  “Do you want anything?”

  “I want you to stay.”

  “I won’t leave.”

  He scooted closer, so he could grasp my hands. “I want you to stay with me.”