“Lock.”
“She is the most stubborn woman, and neither of us has ever been good at telling her no—”
“Lock.”
“We’ve tried everything to get her help. She tells us we’re the men of the house but then won’t let us do this most important thing—”
“Lock.”
When he finally did stop talking long enough to look up at me, I thought perhaps I could see what he must have looked like as a child. A lost child.
His right hand gripped and released the oar handle, and I reached out, covered his hand with mine. I didn’t know what to say. Of all people, I probably should have. But nothing anyone said had ever helped me.
He opened his mouth to speak and then shut it and furrowed his brow. He pulled out his cigarettes and stared at my hand covering his a moment, before shaking the box and pulling one free with his lips. He lit it one-handed and blew the smoke out to meld with the fog coming off the lake, all without looking away from our hands.
“I know,” I said at last, though I couldn’t look at him when I said it. “I mean, I understand . . . how it changes everything.”
He cleared his throat and shifted his hand a bit under mine.
“I never asked why you were crying that first night—the night you told me your name.” He took a deep drag and blew it out across the lake. His voice lowered. “I never thought you’d tell me if I had.”
I withdrew my hand. “You were right.”
He nodded and didn’t seem like he would ask again. Still, I said, “Six months ago. Cancer. She wasn’t even herself anymore for the last three.”
“Was there nothing that could be done?” he asked quietly.
“We thought for a little while that there was a treatment, but it was experimental and we didn’t have the money. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.” I paused, wondered why I was telling him any of it, before adding, “There’s not always something to be done.”
Sherlock didn’t look at me or register any emotion, really. He just nodded again and threw his cigarette into the lake. “I’m thinking of switching to a pipe,” he said.
And that was the end of our sharing. We sat in silence the rest of the time we were out in the boat. An odd silence, really. He didn’t fidget once. I didn’t feel the need to speak. And even though we never touched each other or made eye contact, even though the lake was fogged in and I had only my cardigan to warm me—I felt comforted. Better, somehow, for the silence than I’d been before it.
I had to wonder if this was what people meant when they said it was “a comfortable silence.” I wondered what it meant to feel better sitting silent with a boy than to pour your heart out to a best friend or diary or stranger. Sherlock Holmes surprised me again that day by saying just the right thing about my mom’s death—which was to say nothing at all.
Chapter 10
The next day I met Sadie in front of her favorite place in the entire world. The London Library is a members-only institution that boasts decades of high literary tradition, dating back to its opening. Sadie Mae became a member before she’d finished registering for her first set of classes at our school and bought me a membership of my own for my sixteenth birthday. Even at the student rate, I was pretty sure it was a spendy gift.
Sadie Mae couldn’t be bothered with menial things like money, which meant she’d always had plenty. Though she’d more than once protested loudly about how much it cost to own even a tiny flat in London, comparing it to the palatial mansion she could own in Georgia for the same price. But a library membership was worth every penny, she assured me.
The minute we stepped through the little glass gate and into the main hall, Sadie breathed in deeply. “I’m home,” she whispered, with all the quiet reverence most might reserve for only the holiest of chapels. I was entirely sure she was talking to the books. “Meet me at our spot in twenty?”
It really was like picking up where we’d left off. Sadie had spent our first few visits trying to convince me to read novels—as if I hadn’t been forced to read enough of those in school. So this became our tradition, go our separate ways to gather what we needed, then sit together and read or study until they kicked us out. “Better make it thirty. I’ve actually got a few things to look up in periodicals.”
Sadie made a face at my clearly inferior choice. “If I didn’t know you meant the science journals, I might get my hopes up.” She ran off toward the stairs up to the literature section. At least, that’s where I assumed she was going. Sadie managed to find fiction in every building where there were books. Or magazines. Or words. I pulled my hands free of my pockets, then trotted off to start my search.
I spun my mother’s coin across the table with one hand while typing in search terms with the other. I should have been studying, of course. The class had almost caught up to where I’d left off in trigonometry a month ago. My mind, however, wandered continually back to the photo, to Mr. Patel’s death in the park. Had he even had time to think about his daughter before the short sword paralyzed him?
For all its boasts of subscriptions to 750 periodicals, the London Library didn’t supply me with any plain news. They were all very dignified and posh journals of higher learning, which is to say, complete rubbish when it came to gossip. I tried first to do a search of my mother’s name, and then her maiden name, but there were only a few hits and none seemed to have anything at all to do with her. I spun the coin once more, only this time toward me, and when it finally landed, the glow of the monitor made the clover stand out from its background.
On a whim, I typed “four-leaf clover” into the search bar and stared at it awhile, knowing it wasn’t near enough to get anything other than garden and superstition responses. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. So far, I only knew that every man who had been in Mum’s photo had died, and they’d all been in trouble for the same thing.
I quickly added the words “coin,” “theft,” and then “robbery,” just in case.
Most of the hits were rubbish, but about halfway down the second page was a link to a journal article on unsolved crimes that contained the words “named for the clover seen on a coin” and “the robbery of four major targets.”
I checked my watch while the article loaded, noting my thirty minutes were nearly up, and clicked print, to read it later. I pulled up a new tab and glanced over my shoulder before typing “serial murder” in the search bar. The results were a mix of articles on “How to tell if your child will be a serial killer” and lists of the traits and characteristics known serial murderers exhibit—none from any kind of reliable source. Until I found the U.S. FBI report from some kind of symposium about serial killings.
I was lost in that for a time, skimming through points about psychopathy and motivation, through myths and misunderstandings, through pages and pages of theories all punctuated by the truth that there is no one reason or one pattern of behavior for a serial killer. They all do what they do for their own reasons and in their own way.
“Comforting, that,” I said quietly.
The word “ritual” jumped off the page at me, however. Ritual seemed to be the one most common trait. As the paper stated, the ritual was the way most serial killers were identified. They killed with the same weapon or left behind a calling card. Our killer was still a mystery, and we didn’t know enough to identify his ritual. Or hers. Perhaps Regent’s Park was the ritual.
“Or not,” I whispered, sitting taller. Wondering was as useless as my search had been, and I had somewhere to be. I checked the time again and clicked print.
I was almost ten minutes late when I snatched the pages from the printer on my way to the reading room. Sadie was already tucked sideways into one of the leather chairs by the fireplace, a giant book propped up on her knees. I took a moment to figure out an answer for when she asked what I’d been looking into, and she’d inevitably ask, but even afte
r I’d thought of three different lies to tell, I found myself still reluctant to take my leather chair and face her.
So far, she’d mostly acted like our little parting hadn’t happened, but I knew she could at any point decide we needed to talk things out—my worst nightmare. As if in the history of humanity anything has ever been truly accomplished by talking.
I folded the pages into my bag and grabbed a wayward book from a table. Then I wandered toward my chair, plopped down, and pretended to be deeply interested in whatever book it was. I couldn’t seem to read past the first sentence of the page I’d opened at random.
“Found God, have you?”
I glanced up at the top of the page and held in a reflexive sigh. Of all the books in this blasted place, I’d managed to pick up the least likely I’d ever, ever read: the Bhagavad Gita. It wasn’t even about God, though I didn’t feel the need to correct Sadie. I grunted and shrugged, forcing myself to look at every word of a paragraph farther down the page, though I probably couldn’t have repeated any of them had my life depended on it.
After a few moments of silence I traded the Hindu text for my trigonometry book and a pencil, but Sadie never did let me study for too long.
“Did you know there are fifteen miles of books in the London Library?”
“Yes, Sadie.”
“Some dating back to the fifteen hundreds?”
She had, of course, used these very facts in an attempt to entice me on my first visit to the place long ago, but I refused to look up and nodded before saying, “Yes, Sadie.”
“Over a million books—”
“You should, perhaps, busy yourself reading, or you’ll never get through them all.”
“Ha. Ha.” She paused, just long enough to make me think our little chat was over, and then said, “I would, but they add eight thousand books a year, you see.”
I offered her my most weary expression just as she threw her head back to stare up at the stacks of old leather bindings behind our chairs. It really was a sight to see. I’d bet all the gold in the palace that no one had disturbed any of the books in decades. I had no idea what that section was even supposed to be. Probably the biographies of the forgotten.
Sadie, of course, took a different view. “Heaven, Mori. When I die, this place will be transported right up into the clouds, so I can flit about the stacks for hours on end, reading into eternity.”
“You’ll run out of books,” I mumbled, three lines into a trigonometry problem that had stumped me in class. Now it seemed so obvious.
Sadie gasped. “You take that back, Moriarty. Like you mean it.”
“Eternity is a long time.”
“You think there’ll be no writers in Heaven to make me new books?”
I grinned without taking my eyes off my text. “None of the good ones.”
Sadie’s laugh tinkled quietly. “Dammit, Mori. Right’s right, but you don’t have to dash a girl’s eternal dreams.”
I finally joined in her laughter—a disarming laugh as it turned out, because she didn’t wait for me to stop before asking, “Do you forgive me?”
“I have to study.”
“Course you do.” I managed to almost finish the problem before she said, “But how can you concentrate with all this tension between us?”
I could have concentrated just fine before she mentioned the tension. She stared at me, which made me look away, at the walls, the floors, the staircases and stenciled signs. I’d never bothered to look around before, and now I could only seem to notice the inconsistencies. Perhaps someone more bohemian might have found the arbitrary nature of the decor to be homey. I found it—mismatched.
When I thought about it, Sadie and I were a bit like the London Library, really. Mismatched. Ancient wooden panels covering an entry wall, modern glass surrounding the stair. An ornate wooden banister to one floor, and a sleek, minimalist metal sweeping down to another. The whole building was made from a bunch of old residences, cobbled together in a way that would never have made sense to its original members but felt like home to Sadie.
She and I didn’t make sense either. I often found her down-home Americanisms more cloying than charming. We had different interests, different goals, and widely different plans for our lives. Our friendship had more or less been cobbled together in a way that probably didn’t make sense, and still, being with her felt . . . familiar. Normal.
Like maybe I could remember what my life was like before. Back when she’d be waiting for me outside the theater, like the time maybe a month before we found out Mum was sick, and instead of groaning when I pulled out my dice to determine our way home, she pulled out two red dice of her own.
“To add spice,” she’d said.
“You’re ruining my probabilities.”
“I believe ‘enhance’ is the word you’re looking for, as in, ‘You are enhancin’ my probabilities.’”
I’d just stared at her.
“It can’t be all that ruined, girl. What, so, one in three becomes one in five? What is that, like twenty percent harder?” I was about to give in to one of my most long-suffering sighs, but she didn’t even wait for me to react before she added, “And before you fuss at me, Miss Math Genius Moriarty, just remember our conversation about the difference between being smart and being crazy smart.”
I’d rolled my dice without comment, though internally I was calculating the actual difference between a 1 in 216 chance and a 1 in 7,776 chance.
It was 3,600 percent harder.
She had decided her dice would represent how many shops we had to stop at on our way home and how many things we had to buy at each shop. This, of course, meant that she immediately rolled double sixes.
“This game is my absolute favorite,” she’d said, evidently forgetting every other time, when it was the absolute worst. I negotiated her down to one shop and one food stop, where we would try six things—all puddings as it turned out. I had never in my life tried six puddings at once, but there were a lot of things I’d never done until I’d met Sadie.
I had spent the better part of our day together wondering how in the world we were even friends. But that was the day I’d realized there isn’t always a reason why. Sometimes you don’t even decide to be friends, it just creeps up on you. Sometimes there are just these moments you share, when you buy six different headbands at Boots and each wear three on your way to Canteen for a crazy amount of cake and ice cream, moments when you take a train down to Brighton in the middle of the night and barely catch the next train back, or when you buy two bouquets each and see who can hand all her flowers out to people on the street first. When there are enough of those kinds of moments, sometimes you can’t imagine not having that person around.
Until she’s gone. Until that thing that only ever happens to other people is happening to you and no one is calling to help you escape it. I did escape, though. Even without Sadie around, I escaped into the memories of all that we did together the year before. And in those few times Dad would let me sit with my mother while she was mostly unconscious, I told her about all our crazy adventures. If I’d been gone, my mom might never have known about it. If Sadie had called, if I’d missed that time to sit with Mum at her sickbed and listen to her breathe, I might never have forgiven either of us. Maybe Sadie being around while Mum was sick would have ruined her as a friend for me anyway.
So, with her question still hanging in the balance, I found I could honestly answer, “I was never angry.”
“You should’ve been.”
I shook my head. Sadie pulled her chair closer to mine and leaned down in an attempt to pull my attention away from my notebook. Annoying, but effective.
“I should’ve been there.”
“It would’ve changed nothing.” I was surprised at the lack of emotion in my voice.
“You wouldn’t have been alone.”
�
�I might have sent you away, regardless.”
“You might’ve tried.” Her smile was sad but not forced, and she reached up to drape her hand over my arm—her warm brown skin and my cool white providing yet another mismatch. “I should’ve fought harder, Mori. And I’m sorry about that, because you deserve a better friend than me.”
I shook my head again and tried to go back to my trigonometry, but she attacked me in possibly the most awkward hug that ever was. I forced my arm around her back and endured it. Then spun in my chair, the minute she let go, to stare at my trig work until my eyes cleared enough to see the next problem.
x x x
I didn’t manage to gather any more information on our case the next day, or the day after that, but our next trip out on the lake was decidedly different. Lock had centered on a new theory that I was pretty sure he only brought up to tease me.
“I’m telling you, it’s the police,” he said for maybe the fourth time since we’d started our discussion. “Maybe it’s one. Maybe more. But everything points to a policeman being the killer.”
By “everything,” I was pretty sure he meant “every made-up fantasy in my own little brain,” so I challenged him. “How exactly do you come to that?”
“Well, the most obvious reason is that all the victims are criminals who weren’t fully punished for their crimes.”
“That’s more a reason for the people they robbed to be mad than the police.”
“Yes, but it’s more than that. It’s what the police aren’t saying.”
“Oh, really. And what is it that they aren’t saying?”
“Serial killer.” He paused for a twitchy little smile, which I valiantly refrained from mocking openly. “They haven’t made the connection yet, between all the killings, and it is perhaps the most shockingly apparent pattern that has ever been.”
“You don’t know what they are or aren’t saying. You only know what was and wasn’t said that night.”
Lock & Mori Page 7
