Lock & Mori

by Heather W. Petty

  I swallowed, waited. A thousand worst-case confessions slid through my thoughts, emptying my mind. He didn’t say any of them.

  “I can’t stop thinking of ways to make him pay for hurting you.” He slipped his arm around my waist and pulled me closer. “I thought I was more evolved than that. But my obsession with revenge”—he slid his hand up my back—“with wanting to keep you near me from now on, I fear I’m outing myself as the Neanderthal I never thought I’d be.”

  I leaned in and rested my lips against his for as long as I could, partly to shut him up, partly because he was making me cry again, and I couldn’t let him see.

  “You should be offended for your entire gender.”

  I smiled and this time pressed at least ten minikisses to different parts of his lips before he spoke again.

  “You really shouldn’t reward me in this way. I’ll become an insufferable brute.”

  “You’re right,” I said with a sigh that blew up my bangs. “I suppose I should leave.”

  I started to roll away from him, but he caught me and pulled me back into his arms, into his warmth, his smile. We were still playing a game, I thought, until our gazes locked and our smiles fell. The silence made our breathing loud, but louder still was the way he looked at me then. A white noise of a look. Everything else fell away and still I became fully aware of every place his body touched mine, of how my hands splayed across his chest.

  But my body held too many memories to be silent for long. My stomach started to ache again and I looked away, remembering what a swollen monster face I had. I could suddenly feel Lock’s gaze on my hot, damaged skin, studying my cheeks, maybe deducing what kind of hit would cause each mark. I wanted to squirm away, or at least turn in his arms, but he leaned forward and rested his forehead against my temple so that I could feel his whispered words against my cheek.

  “He can’t make you less than you are. No one could.”

  Before he spoke, I might have said there was nothing anyone could say to make anything better. But Sherlock wasn’t anyone. He was mine. I felt that in the way his fingers slid down my cheek, in the racing of his heart, and the way his eyes called mine back to his. His lips found mine slowly, warm and soft as he kissed me, then again, and again, until I was breathless and kissing him back.

  I wanted to tell him that night all that I’d held back. More than once I parted my lips to explain about the photo, but he kept finding new places to kiss me, washing away anything that wasn’t a sigh, a caught breath, a breathless silence. I stared into his eyes, readied myself to tell about the symbols on Mum’s coin, on the fountain, but the heat of his hands on the bare skin of my back distracted me from my suspicions. His touches so gentle, always aware of my pain, made me believe it was possible to replace bad with good.

  His bare skin against mine, and I could be someone else. Someone he’d still like once he knew what I’d been hiding. I could be us for as long as I needed and not remember anything at all. I could be lost, and forget, and pretend it would be right as rain in the morning.

  So I did.

  Chapter 14

  I didn’t know how long I’d been staring at Sherlock’s string map of the crimes when I finally realized that he was right. Maybe it had been minutes. Maybe hours. It was so easy for me to get lost among the lines. To trace them over and over, even when I knew their outcomes so well, I could’ve re-created the diagram in all its complexities for myself. But lying in his bed tilted the string world just enough to make me see the whole.

  I slipped from under the covers, pulled the closest piece of clothing I could find around me, which happened to be Lock’s crisp white uniform shirt, and watched the way the moonlight highlighted some paths and not others. I saw each piece slowly, the dates, the faces, the times, the geography, pins marking the places within the park that had become crime scenes. I watched as they came together into something I could see all at once—the shape the crimes made on the map, the dates the victims died as related to where they stood in the photo I still kept in the pocket of my jeans.

  But there was something about the dates. Something familiar when I looked at them as a whole. I saw them in a line, the dates of the crimes. Then saw another line, the dates of my dad’s song. I could trace it so perfectly then, Lock’s deduction. It had to be a policeman, but probably not for the reasons he thought. It was because of the dates.

  September 18. The day of my mother’s funeral. The day Todd White died at the planter.

  November 23. My mother’s birthday. Our first without her. Grant Reeves’s—Mustache Man’s—last day alive.

  February 10. When Mum and Dad met at the tea dance. When Francisco Torres died.

  I could hear their song. In my mind, as I recalled the dates and added them to the spaghetti of clues on the wall, I could hear the trembling piano, the bleat of the trumpet. And standing in the dark of Lock’s room, far away in time and space from Dad’s turntable, I felt my heartbeat speed in my chest.

  March 4. Not even my brother’s stupid ringtone could drown out the trumpet as it came in. Mr. Patel.

  March 26. Stepdad? Blue-Haired Girl? I didn’t even know their names yet, didn’t know if either one was really dead. But there had been another murder last night. In the park. That meant there was only one left. One person left in the photo. One last chance to know anything at all about my mother and her secrets. Why this was all happening.

  Somehow, I’d gotten dressed. Somehow, I’d made my way outside and down the block to where the song should have been playing. But wasn’t. Not anymore.

  I paused at the front door, my hand trembling as it hovered over the knob.

  The boys. I had to check on the boys.

  I needed clothes for tomorrow.

  Her things. They might still be sprawled out across the patio. Someone needed to rescue them.

  I had so many reasons to be there, but the minute I opened the door and found my dad missing from his bed, I headed straight for his closet, where I knew the box would be—returned to its rightful place, though warped with water damage on one side, and ripped along the corner seam.

  This time there was no careful method to my search. I ­riffled through what remained in the box until my finger sliced open on a broken shard of glass. It was still there. I wrapped the sleeve of my shirt around my finger as best I could and kept searching until I had three broken pieces of glass and a metal frame. I pieced the glass together in the frame, then slid the photograph out of my back pocket and smoothed it out on top of the glass, smearing my blood through the shirt across the back.

  I didn’t care. I was too close.

  It took what felt like hours to bend those filthy little metal pieces down to secure the frame backing. But then it was done. I swiped my fingers across my forehead and stared at the back of the frame. At the useless thin metal triangle that made like it would hold the thing up on the wall. At the little easel stand that would hold it up on the table.

  I might have stared for minutes before I realized there was a flick of white escaping from under the easel stand—a tiny wisp of a thing, but I pushed my fingernail under the stand to follow it and saw two words written in my mother’s perfect script: “Sorte Juntos.” I was sure I’d seen those words before, but they didn’t seem important enough to distract me from my true task—that thing I was afraid to know, but knew already.

  I turned the frame over.

  Little orange Xs marked out each face on the photo perfectly. There was even a fifth. He’d marked off his latest victim—Stepdad. That must have been when he’d seen that I hadn’t put the things back in the box correctly—why he took everything out to be burned, the reason for his tirade—because he’d gone into the box to mark off the victim from yesterday. That left only one face unmarked, Blue-Haired Girl.

  What was it I’d said? That it was like the killer was using my photo as a checklist?

 
He didn’t need mine. I’d thought the park had been our killer’s ritual, or maybe the sword, but clearly it was this. He had Mum’s copy of the photo, and just like every other serial murderer, he had his own ritual—to come home and mark out the face on the glass. Only, he was smart enough to remove the photo, so that no one would know what the mark was for. Perhaps he’d been carrying it around in his back pocket. Just like me.

  Sherlock had been right. The killer was police. The killer was Detective Sergeant Moriarty.

  Sitting there on the floor of my mom and dad’s room, I closed my eyes and saw everything again. Like the killer stepped out of the shadowy blur he’d been hiding in since that first night in the park. And his face . . . he was my dad. My dad with a knife.

  The knife. I thought I’d have to rip apart his room to find the short sword from my mom’s aikido kit, but it wasn’t even hidden. When I tried to return the box to the closet, this sweater kept getting in the way, so I finally pulled it out, and the sword clattered to the floor, sliding free from its hilt just enough to glint at me in the soft light streaming in from the hall. The house creaked just as a sleeve of the sweater fell free and swayed in front of me. My heart jumped and my face ached as a chill spread through my chest. My hands trembled as I rolled the short sword back into the sweater and shoved it up next to the box as quickly as I could. Then I closed the closet doors and leaned against them until I could breathe again.

  I’d left the frame on the floor. The orange crosses seemed to glow on the glass. I half expected the metal of the frame to feel hot when I reached for it. I couldn’t seem to pick it up. It felt heavier than before when I finally did. I hid it up my sleeve, for lack of a better place, and walked out into the hall.

  Sorte Juntos.

  As I crossed the spot where I’d tripped over DI Mallory’s briefcase, the words flashed through my mind. They had been typed atop one of the files in his bag. He’d left more than the Patel file to see, and I’d ignored the rest like an idiot. Mallory was clearly starting to put it all together, and now the files were gone and I couldn’t find out what he knew.

  I took the stairs up to my room slowly, my mind racing through every possible logical reason why Mallory would bring those files for my dad to see.

  I made it up only three steps before I heard footsteps behind me. Running footsteps and then soft puffs of air. I turned quickly, clutching the frame to my chest, but the silhouette in the doorway wasn’t the right shape to be my dad.

  “What are you doing here?” Lock asked. He stepped into the light as he closed the door behind him, and everything about him being in my hallway, half naked, with his hair sticking up on one side—it all should’ve shocked me from the thoughts pounding in my head like a heartbeat. But all I could think to do was get upstairs and hide the frame where no one could ever find it.

  “The boys,” I said, in this weird, quavering voice. “I have to check on my brothers.”

  “They’re not here.”

  I glanced up the stairs as if I didn’t believe him. “Where are they? Seanie will forget to brush his teeth.”

  Sherlock paused before he answered. “Mycroft said he took them to stay with Mrs. Hudson. He woke me and told me to go after you. That you’d want to know.”

  I still stared up into the darkness. Only a few steps separated me from my room. “Who is Mrs. Hudson?”

  “She was our nanny when my mother still worked and comes to help out now that she’s ill.” When I said nothing, he added, “She makes sandwiches for tea.”

  “Sandwiches,” I echoed. Like the ones Lock had served me.

  “They are safe.” Lock crossed from the doorway to the stairs in three steps, and was standing on the step right below mine when he said, “You’ve got blood on your forehead.” He looked me over. “And on my shirt.”

  “I need fresh clothes.” My voice was still this high-pitched wavering thing that didn’t sound like me at all.

  “Are you hurt? Will you show me?”

  He was staring right in my eyes, though he was standing below me. The steps made us exactly the same height. I untangled my injured finger from the shirt and held it up, while still clutching the concealed frame with my other hand. A bead of blood blossomed out until it was so heavy it dripped down my finger as Lock and I watched.

  “What happened?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

  And I didn’t, just then. I felt like I was walking in a dream. Only the sharp edges of the metal frame digging into my skin made me realize it was real. I slowly let my arm fall then slide behind my back, counting off seconds in my head to make sure I wasn’t being too obvious about it.

  Our eyes met again and I realized this was the moment when I could tell him everything. I could show him the photo and the frame and admit all that I’d held back. It was probably my last chance to share it all and have him still forgive me for keeping it secret. My heart sped up at the thought, and I caught myself studying his eyes, like anyone could see anything in a person’s eyes. Like they wouldn’t just tell me what I wanted to hear. Like somehow the look of his eyes would make me say what I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

  Perhaps I could have, if only there were more than one of the group left. But he’d waste all his time thinking the Blue-Haired Girl was the killer, and I knew better. I knew she was in danger. But more important, she was my last tie to the version of my mom from the picture. And I had to know her secrets. I couldn’t live my life not knowing.

  He’d have to understand that someday.

  I parted my lips to speak and closed them again. And before I could say anything, I threw my arm around his neck and kissed him. The skin on his back was cold, but everywhere his body pressed against mine was warm. I held him close even after our kiss ended, rubbed my uninjured fingers across his shoulder, as if I could warm him in that way.

  “Why did you leave?” he whispered.

  “I was coming back.” I kissed his temple and reached up to smooth down his hair. “I’ll always come back.” I don’t know why I said it. It was one of those stupid unkeepable promises that are worth nothing. But the words made him grin, so they were at least worth that. “I need fresh clothes.”

  “We have nowhere to be. Besides, you look good in my shirt.”

  I smiled. It was too tempting to hide in his room for a day. For two. Forever. I kissed the cold tip of Lock’s nose and said again, “I need fresh clothes.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  I shook my head. “Stay here, so we have warning if he comes home. I’ll just be a minute.”

  Lock stared after me as I ran up the stairs, and our eyes met just before he turned to face the closed front door as sentry and I turned the corner toward my room. I stopped in the bathroom, avoiding the mirror as I washed my face and then dressed my wound. But I slipped up when I brushed my teeth and came face-to-face with my swollen cheek, my cut and swollen lip, the darkening bruise on my temple that was spreading down to my chin. I didn’t even look like myself. Didn’t feel like myself either, so maybe it was for the best. I had this sudden feeling that I was on the verge of something—­that something big was about to happen. That if I wasn’t prepared, it would run me over or pass me by, and I couldn’t decide which was worse.

  I shook off the thought and escaped across the hall to pack an overnight bag and change out of his ruined shirt. I pulled the shirt tight around me for a few seconds before taking it off. It was cold in my room—a cold that wouldn’t go away, even after I’d changed into my own clothes.

  Nowhere in my room seemed a safe enough hiding place, but it wasn’t like I could carry the frame around. At the last minute I tucked it into my overnight bag and headed out, grabbing an oversize hoodie from a hook by my door for Lock. I froze when I heard the front door slam and practically ran into Sherlock, who was suddenly in the hall. I grabbed him and yanked him into my room, then stood
by the door.

  I didn’t even have to see my dad. It was like my body reacted to his presence without my say-so. My fingernails dug into my palms. My jaw clenched. And I was angry, so angry I was calm. Still. Like a still pool of molten lava, burning from my insides out. I knew if I moved even an inch, it would take me over. If he moved even an inch closer . . .

  His bedroom door slammed shut, and the burning broke like a wave, leaving me a trembling mess. I stood at my door listening, counting off the time it might take him to start up that wretched song, but he didn’t. The woman in the photo was safe for another day.

  I turned, still leaning against the doorjamb, desperate for Lock not to notice my breakdown. He wasn’t looking at me. Lock sat on my bed, staring at the program for my mother’s memorial, propped between the alarm clock and lamp. He lifted his hand like he was going to touch it, and I said, “I keep it there so—”

  “I know why.” With his eyes still on the program, he reached up to take my hand. “Of course I know why.” I stayed silent, my gaze on him, his on the program, for a long, awkward minute before he asked, “Does it work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does it keep you from forgetting?”

  I ignored the question and pulled my hand free. It was jarring to have him in my room, seeing what no one else could see. But worse was how comfortable I was with him there. Knowing this. Knowing me like this. I glanced around my room, wondering what else of me was on display for his deductions—what else he’d seen already.

  The pictures of friends that I’d shoved into the frame of my mirror to make my mom happy. Did he know that I only knew half the names that went with the faces there? Notice that none of the pictures was of me standing with them, except for the pictures of Sadie Mae and me from last year? Did he notice that the only picture of my mother in the room was the one on the front of the program? Did he gain some insight from how tidy I kept the room? From the colors?