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To my mother,
who will never read this
but lives on every page
London, Present Day
Chapter 1
I wore a hat with a feather plume the first time I met Sherlock Holmes. It was the fourth of March. I only remember the date because all three of my brothers glommed onto the Marching Forth pun for the entirety of breakfast. Freddie even had a stupid, hollering ringtone for his mobile that shouted, “March FOOOORTH!” over and over until I threatened to flush the thing down the toilet. For once, leaving for school felt more like bliss than drudgery. But the bliss didn’t linger.
First was double maths, where yet again I was forced to explain that just because our professor was ignorant of the latest in math theory, it didn’t mean he could mark my homework wrong when clearly it was the book that was in error. Next came economics and a lecture from books I’d read for fun last summer’s break. Lunch was followed by a long, boring lab as Marcus Gregson turned our chemistry experiment into a black, smoldering thing that stank up the entire room. How he managed to do so, despite the two contingencies I’d put in place to make it impossible for him to ruin it, the greatest detective in history would never be able to deduce. I warned Marcus his calculations were off, but Professor made me promise to let him run at least one lab on his own before term was over. Not my fault her room would smell like chemical warfare for months.
I thought I’d escaped the madness when I settled into my final class of the day, but even that turned into a colossal cock-up. Still, I hadn’t quite expected that a fire drill would send me into the inner sanctum of the most eccentric, highly notorious boy in my class. And by the time that happened, it had already been a very, very long day, to say the least—the kind of day that could only ever end with me wearing a feathered hat.
The very minute the fire alarm started to simultaneously scream and flash lights at us, Miss Francis, the drama teacher, instructed the class to calmly make their way out of the theater, except for me. She said, “Mori, do be an angel and nip downstairs to storage to fetch our Mr. Holmes.”
Miss Francis was always calling us angels and champs. “Can he not hear the alarm on his own?” I asked.
She might have nodded or shook her head, but she was already pushing me out the theater’s side door, so I couldn’t see. “Sherlock doesn’t seem to pay attention to things like alarms when he’s working. Be quick about it, will you?”
I, of course, had heard of Sherlock Holmes and his secret lab in the basement of the theater. It was just cartoonish enough of an image to spread widely around the school. He found the chemistry lab inadequate to his needs, which was the only part of the story that had intrigued me, and his mother had somehow talked the headmaster into letting him have a space of his own. I suspected she used Headmaster’s favorite kind of persuasion—the monetary kind.
I spent my trip down the steps to the shadowy basement hall picturing what a lab that so outshined our chem lab would be like and wincing against the flashing fire-drill lights, which were all the brighter in the dim. It wasn’t until I swept open the double doors of the storage room he used as a workshop that I remembered I was still in full costume, from hat to lacy trim, which barely brushed the dusty linoleum floors of the hall. I wasn’t too embarrassed, however, because Sherlock’s hair stood up on one side, almost as tall as my plume. With his back to me, he ran fingers through his mop, readily displaying how it had gotten that way.
The lab itself was fairly unimpressive—two long tables with all the basics: glassware, tubes, flames, and even a centrifuge and an autoclave. But instead of brown glass bottles full of chemicals for experiments, Sherlock’s shelves were stacked with specimen containers, Baggies filled with various samples, and books—stacks and stacks of books on every subject imaginable, from Who’s Who to physics, mountaineering to criminology. I probably would have continued to explore were it not for the constant screeching reminder of why I was there.
“What is it?” Sherlock shouted over the alarm, without turning to acknowledge me. Instead, he hunched farther over the table in front of him, one hand typing furiously at a tablet, while his other carefully turned a small plastic knob to adjust the flow of red fluid from what looked like an ancient glass IV bottle. The red substance dripped down a tube and into a cup with a rather alarming rhythm.
“I’m to fetch you,” I shouted back. My voice barely carried over the blaring fire alarm.
“I cannot hear you, so you might as well go away.” His arms flew into the air as he spoke, then dived down again, adjusting vials, tubes, and the flames of several Bunsen burners. He moved around the table with an odd sort of violent grace, like a mad symphony conductor directing the bubbles and billows, until finally he was facing me, though he did not look up. His school uniform was as disheveled as his lab: white shirt wrinkled and untucked, with sleeves rolled up to his elbows; navy-and-silver-striped tie loosened and askew; and blue sweater flung over the side of a chair so that one sleeve pooled on the dusty floor.
“I’m to fetch you,” I shouted again, adding, “because of the alarm,” which immediately silenced.
He did look up then, his dark blue eyes fiery with what appeared to be a form of righteous indignation, though his expression dulled to pure intrigue as he took in my appearance.
“You must come out to the courtyard when the alarm—”
“Edwardian?” He focused in on the buttons of my bodice, and it was all I could do to keep my hands from adjusting the neckline rather higher.
“Late Victorian,” I corrected. “But you—”
“Just a moment.” Sherlock scowled as he reached to flip his tablet back around to face him. He squinted at the screen and mumbled, “Period costuming,” as he typed one-handed.
“What about it?”
He followed my gaze down to his screen. “Topics I have not yet mastered.”
“You wish to master period costuming?” My hand slid up to rest on my hip as my lips formed the smile that most infuriated my father. It appeared to have no such effect on Sherlock.
“Asks the girl dressed to meet Her Highness Victoria.”
“Point,” I conceded.
“Ah, we’re keeping score. Good to know.”
I rolled my eyes, and then a silence fell between us that normally would have been my cue to dash, but the way he was staring made me feel squirmy. “I came from the theater, just now.” I waved my copy of the play in the space between us by way of explanation, though I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to explain myself to him. “It’s a graded performance of—”
“An Oscar Wilde. I’m not sure our school’s theater performs anyone else.”
I started to affirm that it was indeed an Oscar Wilde, but apparently the boy wasn’t finished with his guessing.
“You’re the understudy, though you’d rather not be. You took this class for some reason other than your love of the art form.” I opened my mouth to speak, but he stepped closer, his finger in the air. “Possible that it’s a family craft, and you do it to please a parent. Father? No, mother.”
I held back a sigh and stared at him until I was very sure he was done. He had already interrupted me three times in our short conversation, and I wasn’t sure I could repress my violent tend
encies were he to cut me off once more.
“Close, but no.” Truth? He was almost exactly right. But I wasn’t about to feed the enormous monster of an ego that he displayed with every condescending quirk of his thin, girlish eyebrows. He would score no more points off me.
“Nonsense. That dress is at least two sizes too small, and not at all fitted for your figure, which is”—a soft pink skirted his cheek as he stared at my corset again—“endowed.” Only his deepening blush saved him from my outrage. “And despite my admitted lack of mastery on the subject, I do not for a moment believe that orange trainers were popular in late Victorian times. Then there’s the matter of your worn and tattered copy of the play, which, by the dated doodles I can now see on the cover, definitely belonged to your mother.”
“Are you quite done?” I asked, much more gently than I felt. I might also have slid my hands over the doodles in question. My mother had gone through some kind of Duran Duran obsession, apparently.
“Are you ready to admit that my observations are correct?”
“There are more pressing concerns.” I glanced behind him, but he didn’t take the cue.
“Nothing is more pressing than the truth.”
I gave him one last chance to follow my gaze back to his table, and when he did not, I sighed. “Fine. I am always the understudy, as I learn lines rather more quickly than is typical. I also have no interest in any of the graded tracks in class, and being on call for the actors gets me out of having to paint sets, run lights, or direct. In all, it is easy and makes me look well rounded to university gatekeepers. That, and that alone, is why I take drama.” I nodded to sell the lie but betrayed myself by clutching the script more tightly in my hands. He stared into my eyes, but I didn’t for a moment think he’d missed my gaffe. “The trainers are what I brought to wear home from school today. As you noted, the ailing actress whose place I’m taking in the rehearsal is smaller than me, and while I can stuff myself into her costume, I could not make my feet shrink three sizes to wear her slippers. Now, as to the more pressing matter—”
“Eidetic?” Sherlock asked, adding, “Your memory. It is what allows you to learn the lines.”
If I hadn’t thought it would entertain him utterly, I might have growled aloud before I answered with a curt, “Yes.”
I shouldn’t have said. He stepped toward me, some of the fire returning to his gaze—as though I were a flask of liquid that had suddenly turned an intriguing shade of scarlet. But then he narrowed his eyes, studying my face as he spoke again. “I’m not wrong about your mother. That copy of the play was hers.”
I narrowed my eyes in mocking return, but the way he spoke of my mother so freely set me on edge.
“My mother is—is dead.” I hadn’t meant to say that, exactly. But I was determined not to show him my internal surprise. Nor was I ready to hear his theories on why I kept taking drama in homage to her memory. So I leaned enticingly close to Sherlock Holmes, so close that I noticed how the blue of his eyes was the exact same shade as my own. And then I whispered, “I believe that you should go back to your tubes and burners now.”
He took in a deep breath, and I felt a trace of his exhale against my cheek as he asked, “And why is that?”
I leaned back enough to stand up straight and offered him my best smile. “Your blood is overflowing.” I spun round to leave just after I’d spoken, though I took enormous pleasure in the fading sounds of his scrambling and cursing as I walked away.
Chapter 2
Albert Einstein once said, “The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”
Gandhi said, “Monotony is the law of nature,” like the rising of the sun day after day.
I tend to side with the ladies on this subject, like Edith Wharton, who called it “the mother of all the deadly sins,” or Anaïs Nin, who, in her simple way, said, “Monotony, boredom, death.”
It’s why I carried dice in my pocket, one black and two whites. Running probabilities was an easy way to calm my thoughts, and the fall of the dice was unpredictable but straightforward, while still providing an uncomplicated backdrop for my thinking. I’m not some übergenius who feels compelled to chant equations while tromping the halls, but maths come rather easier to me than to most. I follow the path of an equation like a string through a maze. And I enjoy the puzzle of it.
Some days, like that March 4, when the idea of taking the same bus home to the same stop to the same sidewalk made me want to shriek loudly and in public, I used my dice to break the monotony. The dice gave me an excuse to try something new. And after my ridiculously irritating day, a little newness appealed.
After a late rehearsal I changed out of the gown and into jeans and a sweater, instead of my uniform. I hated wearing my uniform home; it drew the worst kind of attention. It made me approachable. Once my costume was put away, I pulled out the dice and rolled them across the dressing room counter, with a result of Black = 1, White = 1, White = 1. One chance in 216 to get a roll like that. The strangeness of it might have been an omen, if I believed that the hidden powers of the universe applied omens to dice games. Or if I believed in omens at all.
In my game, the black die told me what transport I’d take, bus for odd and tube for even, and the whites told me which bus and stop to take. Any cockeyed dice meant I’d be walking the whole way. I had to completely plan the trip in my mind before taking my first step. It was my way of memorizing my part of London. My roll meant I’d take the first bus and get off at the first stop.
Unfortunately, the first bus that came was the 27, which was the bus I would’ve taken without the game, because the first stop was less than a block and a half from home. It was literally the shortest possible commute to come from the longest of odds. So, I decided to go with the spirit of the dice rather than be ruled by them, and walked down to Gloucester Place, then didn’t cross over to Baker until Crawford. It was technically going the wrong way first, but it turned a two-minute walk into a ten-minute walk, the longest way round the block.
Near the corner of Baker Street and Crawford, the odds really took over. Sadie Mae Jackson walked out of Boots pharmacy just as I was walking past. If one of us had been looking down or even out at traffic, we might have pretended not to see each other, passed without acknowledgment, and carried on with our lives, as we did whenever school forced our proximity. But that day our eyes met directly when we were mere feet apart.
I was taken once again by their disarming shade of amber—the very thing that had made me stare at her that first day we’d met. Maths, of course. As was typical, I was done with our class work when we still had a half hour of class left, and with nothing to do, I glanced around, tried to see if I could guess when the rest of the students in class would be done as well. I’d only noticed her eye color when she’d given the equations scrawled out on the side chalkboard a strangled look. I grinned at her expression, and she caught me staring.
“Or you could just keep sitting there like a possum playin’ dead,” she’d said, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, not the beginning.
I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed her saying anything else. Her eyes weren’t that disarming. “Or what?”
“I thought you were fixin’ to help me with this impossible graphing nonsense, but if you’d rather stick with the possum eyes . . .”
That’s when she’d bugged out her amber eyes, evidently like a possum, and I’d narrowed mine. I helped her, though, even when it meant meeting after class to explain all the math theory behind the problem dating back to the beginning of the school year. She’d offered to help me with literature, and I let her, despite the fact that I’d done all the reading months prior. She was keen on paying back a favor—not that I ever felt that Sadie owed me anything.
She definitely didn’t owe me anything outside of Boots on this day. And she almost immediately looked past me, which for a moment made me think we were g
oing back to pretending, but then her body moved toward me, like I was pulling a lifeline secured around her middle. When she moved close enough for me to recognize the smattering of darker brown freckles that didn’t quite blend into the brown of her skin, I noticed she was still wearing the locket her grandmother had given her before she left America. Her hair was longer now, the soft spirals falling around her ears rather than spiking out from her scalp in what had been her signature look all last year.
We stood awkwardly for a few fidgety seconds that felt like eternities before she spoke. “Somebody ought to say something, I s’pose. Might as well be me.”
Say something, I echoed bitterly in my mind. As if saying something now would erase the six months of nothing we’d had. Sadie had been the closest to a best friend I’d ever known. She’d come to England for what was supposed to be just a single school year. She’d stayed on, though, to try for A-levels and a spot at university. At least, that had been her plan before. I had no idea what she was planning now.
I tried very hard to shrug and walk away, but her too-familiar American drawl tugged something loose in my mind until all my favorite memories of her filled all the empty gaps between my thoughts like sand pouring through stones in a jar, shifting away the time we’d spent apart like it was nothing. I grinned, despite the ache of that.
My smile was seemingly all the encouragement she needed. She said, “I shouldn’t have stopped calling, and I know that, I do.” She twisted her shopping bag until the canvas handles creaked, then watched as it spun loose. “I told myself I was giving you time and space, but then the not calling came easier than the calling. Truth is, I didn’t know what to say.”
There was nothing to say—that’s what I wanted to tell her right then, but the aching got worse with the thought of the nights I’d spent wishing the phone would ring to help me escape. And by the time the words tumbled out, I said, “You don’t have to say this.”
Lock & Mori Page 1
