Lock & Mori

by Heather W. Petty

  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.

  I knew only one place to do that. And it was more dangerous than stealing a thousand police files.

  Chapter 9

  The next two days I came home from school fully intending to make a thorough search of my mother’s things, but Dad was always in my way. It was as if he had returned to his old, lingering ways, from before Mum was sick. He went from never home to always home in the space of my decision to invade his and Mum’s personal belongings, which almost made me think he’d gained psychic powers. Psychic powers that could only ever come from the bottle, the office, or home. He never went anywhere else. Not since I’d decided to pry, anyway.

  Lock and I met in the hall at school and again at drama, in the very back row of the theater. We compared notes and read through the articles I’d committed to memory the very first time he’d handed them to me. We talked details and argued theories, but the longer we went with only the papers as our source, the more frustrated we both became with merely guessing. Lock’s frustration, however, seemed to outstrip my own by miles. I was starting to suspect there was more to his mood than just his desire to solve the case of a murder in Regent’s Park.

  “One of the park regulars then,” he proposed, for only the third time in so many days.

  “Still a theory.”

  I watched his grip tighten on the papers in his hands. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s what we call it when there’s no proof. And there’s no more proof of that today than there was the last time you said it.”

  “We don’t have enough data!” He tossed the papers in the seat between us with a carelessness that instantly set me on edge. Nothing I said was adequate that day, even when I was blatantly and obviously right. He was being an idiot, and I might have explained that to him at length, but I was in too foul a mood to be bothered.

  Instead, I snapped back, “I said I’d get the file and I will.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds and then stood and started down the aisle. “Find me when you do.”

  Getting the chance to go through my mother’s things was still top priority, but in the interim, I spent the rest of my spare time trying to find a way to retrieve a bloody police file without my dad finding out about it. I looked through his bag every night after he sloshed into his room to sleep off the drink. I even tried going down to the station, twice, to see if I could talk my way onto a computer or into a file room. With almost fifteen hundred officers in the Westminster Borough, one would think I could slip in and out anonymously, but both times I was forced to hide and sneak out to avoid what few detectives I knew.

  Really, I should’ve just told Lock it was impossible, but every time the subject came up, I managed to lose my head in the challenge of it, in the imperative to find out more about the deaths of my mother’s friends, and then I’d renew my promise. As I did that Wednesday out on the lake in the park.

  Sherlock was in a particularly awful mood, which I at first attributed to the fact that he was nine full minutes late to the time he’d set (and proceeded to text me reminders of every ten minutes for an hour). It was the first time he hadn’t been waiting for me, which wouldn’t have mattered at all if he hadn’t blurted the word, “
Apologies,” at me in a tone more suited to insult than regret.

  We went out in the boat, but I was quickly aware that his mood hadn’t improved in the twenty-four hours we’d been apart—only now I was stuck out in the water with his stormy demeanor. It took exactly thirteen minutes for me to tire of his thunderous barking and heated silences.

  “Take me back,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You can either row me back to the dock or I will row myself, but I’m done being subject to this mood of yours that obviously has nothing at all to do with me or the file, which I will get when I am able to and not before.”

  I thought he might take advantage of the opportunity to rid himself of me, or perhaps call my bluff to row myself with another of his pouty silences. Instead, he stood up in the boat. I resisted the urge to grasp the edges as we began to rock. He quickly sat down again with a sigh. I wasn’t sure what exactly this little departure had accomplished, but it seemed to loosen his tongue.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. I started to speak, but he interrupted. “And yes, I know what for.”

  But he didn’t say what for, just stared across the water in the direction of Baker Street, though he couldn’t see anything through the fog. Finally, he turned back and rested his hands on the oar handles.

  “My mother is ill.”

  A flare of something painful went off in my chest. Those were the exact words I’d said to Sadie Mae just months before. Hearing them, I felt like the air had been sucked from me, but I still managed to say, “You don’t have to say more.”

  He didn’t speak for maybe a full minute, didn’t look at me, didn’t move—except for his hands. His fingers grasped and released the wooden seat at regular intervals, then reached up to hold the oar handles again.

  “She won’t go to the doctor.” His voice broke at the end of his statement, but he cleared his throat and listed the rest of what he had to say as though he were recounting the facts of our case. “We’ve tried to convince her, but she won’t go, and now she can no longer move from her bed. We don’t know what there’s left to do—”