I made my final turn onto a narrow, bendy road that had no placard to name it, and an odd feeling pricked up my neck. Not so much déjà vu as familiarity—not that I’d walked this road before, but rather that I should remember it. The closer I came to the address, the more intense the feeling became, until I found myself picturing how the road might have been different sometime in its past—a space that might have once been filled with a shack, a giant tree that might once have been thinner.
Walking around the final bend of the narrow road was almost surreal. I saw a blue house first, and immediately felt like I’d drifted back into the earliest of my memories, heedless of the fact that this couldn’t possibly be the home of my imagined grandparents. I must have continued to walk forward, because soon I was standing at the top of a gentle hill of bright-green garden plants, poking up from rich, black earth. Flashes of ripe red strawberries and deep purple aubergines peeked out from between leaves, beckoning me to toddle between the plantings on that tiny path, to skirt the bees flying around bright-orange squash blossoms, and to look for ladybugs in the shady places.
It was real, my memory. Which meant I had been there before.
I could almost see a blurred vision of my mother, her arms crossing her chest as she watched me play, her head turning as a woman with bright blond hair emerged from the house—a woman who punched through the vision and continued on a path right for me.
“This is private property,” she shouted. Still lost in memory, I needed a fraction of a second to realize she was talking to me, even when she followed up her greeting with, “Who are you?”
She had an American accent, which I didn’t expect, and she was older than the blue-haired girl in the photo, older than the blonde in my memory, but still the same person. Her bright blond hair had been replaced with a shiny black that changed her coloring a bit, but it was definitely her. The woman from the photo was standing in real life in front of me, and I could say nothing.
Her eyes went squinty and I thought she might charge up the hill toward me, but she managed only one step before turning back to stare at the blue house, like something tethered her to it. “Who are you? What do you want?”
It was awkward, to carry on a conversation from so far away, but I finally managed to speak up. “I think I was here when I was small.”
“That’s impossible. My family’s owned this farm for generations.”
I nodded and stepped down the hill, slowly, like I was afraid the whole place might disappear if I got too close. Before I’d halved the distance between us, the woman’s expression changed completely, and she ran up toward me, until we were barely a step apart.
“It’s impossible.” Her hand came up like she would touch me, and I flinched. She looked past me toward the road and then out across the fields, for a reason I was pretty sure I could deduce.
“I’m alone.”
“How are you here? How did you get here?”
“You know who I am?”
The woman smiled the same smile from the photo and raised her hands again. I forced myself to stay still as one hand rested on my shoulder and the other smoothed over my hair. “Anyone who knew her would know who you are. I can’t believe . . .”
She grabbed me into a hug, which I tolerated as best I could, and when she finally released me, I managed to step back without being too obvious. “What is your name?”
She laughed. “I’ve never been good at English manners. I’m Alice. Alice Stokes.”
“Alice,” I echoed. “I need to ask you questions.”
Alice’s smile dropped. “Does he know you’re here?”
I knew whom she meant, but still I asked, “He?”
“Moriarty,” she said, like there was something bitter in her mouth. Though she offered me an apologetic grin just after, perhaps realizing she’d spoken my surname too. And my mother’s. Thinking of my mother while standing near this woman made me want to climb inside her brain and search for all the answers only she could provide. I suddenly found I had to know everything. Now. I couldn’t seem to wait even another second to know.
“I have questions,” I blurted.
She stared at me just long enough to make me think maybe the makeup wasn’t covering all my fading bruises and then turned to walk toward the house. “Come inside,” she called over her shoulder. “We’ll talk.”
Alice led me to a French door that took us directly into the kitchen. Despite her self-proclaimed lack of English manners, she went immediately for the kettle when we walked through the door, which probably meant she’d lived in England quite a while. Before the water boiled, she managed to scrape together a board of cheese and grapes, some fresh strawberries and cherry tomatoes that looked more the size of golf balls than cherries. I picked one up and smelled it.
“You really do remember this place? You couldn’t have been more than three.”
“I remember a man and a woman. White hair.”
Alice nodded and brought over our mugs. Mine had milk, I noticed. Hers did not.
“My parents.”
“I always wished they were my grandparents. Mine are a little awful.”
“God, you talk like her and everything. I still can’t believe you’re here.”
I felt a tearing in my chest and furrowed my brow at the sensation. I’d been told of my resemblance to Mum all my life. I half thought it might be the reason why it took Dad so long to come round to hitting me. But this woman said it differently. She made me wish so much that Mum were here sitting with us. I wished it in a way I’d not dared to in six months. I looked down at the scuffed-up table to hide the way my eyes glazed over for a few seconds, then reached in my back pocket and tossed the picture on the table between us to give my voice time to recover as well.
Alice’s eyes went wide and she smoothed the photo flat against the table. “Where in the world did you get this?”
“I saw it at a memorial.”
Alice grinned. “And you took it? It really is amazing how like her you are.”
“Are you saying my mother was a thief?”
“Whose memorial?” she asked, as if my question had never been voiced.
I paused, just long enough to study her face when I answered. “Louis Patel.”
She tried to cover her surprise, unsuccessfully.
“His daughter goes to school with me.”
“Louis Patel is dead?”
They’re all dead. You’re next. That’s what I wanted to tell her, but something stopped me. Instead, I said, “Sorte Juntos.”
Her expression changed again. She was studying me now. “Well, it seems you already have answers.”
“Not enough. What does it mean?”
“It’s Portuguese.”
“I know that. ‘Lucky together.’ What did it mean to—to her?”
“To us.” Alice turned the photo back around so that it faced me, then pointed to the man in the green shirt. “That’s Francisco Torres. He’s the one who gave us the name, and—”
“He’s dead.”
Alice frowned. “How?”
“A sword,” I said slowly. “In Regent’s Park.”
“And Patel?”
“A sword. In Regent’s Park.”
Fear in her eyes then, and I wondered if I’d messed up. “Both?”
I stared at her, tried to read deeper into her expression, but all I could see was the fear. “No more answers from me. I have to know about my mother. I have to know everything.”
“No. Not everything. No one should ever know everything about her parents.”
“I need to know.”
Alice shook her head, her fingers slowly pushing the photo back toward me. I picked it up and turned it toward her.
I pointed to Mr. Patel. “Dead.” To Francisco Torres. “Dead.” To each face in turn, and after each face I said,
“Dead.” My finger hovered over my mother’s face, and then I looked up into Alice’s eyes and exhaled before I said, “Dead.”
She barely breathed. Her expression went blank as what I was telling her sank in.
“They are all dead but you, and you are next. I have to know why. It’s the only way I can protect you.”
“You know who is doing this?”
I tried not to react as I ignored her question. “I have to know everything.”
I sat back to let her process what I’d said, afraid to push any harder, afraid perhaps I hadn’t pushed hard enough. It took her maybe five minutes to decide to tell me, but I knew she would three minutes in, when she traced my mother’s hair with her finger. It didn’t lessen the wait, but it kept me from speaking.
“I loved your mother,” she said. “We were babies when we met. Younger than you, even. Fourteen, I think. And from the first moment I met her, I knew she would change me. I counted on it. I was just this American stranger, country bumpkin, lost in the city. Your mom knew London like it was her play yard. At fourteen, she’d already managed to charm every street vendor in a ten-block radius.”
I instantly had hundreds of questions but bit them all back to let her tell her story. I couldn’t risk that she’d change her mind and go silent again.
“I followed her everywhere, through school, through university. I even stood by her side when she married him.” Again with the sour face.
“You never liked him?”
Alice shook her head. “I never understood it. He was just some cop. And it wasn’t like she was the cop’s-wife type.”
“And what type is that?”
She refilled our mugs with tea and leaned back in her chair. “Not your mom’s type.”
For some reason, Alice’s answer made me try to picture my dad out in her garden, but I couldn’t see it. He didn’t fit here among the safety and peace of this place. Though it occurred to me just then that if he knew about the farm, perhaps it wasn’t the safe place I imagined it to be. I tried desperately to keep the emotion from my voice as I asked, “Has my father ever been here?”
Alice shook her head. “No. Your mom used to bring you here when things would go sideways at home. And they were always going sideways. Those two fought harder and louder than any couple I’d ever seen. There were times I was sure it would come to blows.”
I must have reacted to that, because her expression was suddenly pained and she seemed to be scrutinizing my face. I tipped my head so that my hair hid the cheek that had gotten the worst of it.
“It never did,” Alice said. “Or, at least, she never told me.”
I shook my head and couldn’t look at her when I said, “He never hit her.”
She drank half her tea and sighed. “Well, when Freddie was born, a lot of things changed. I saw her less. Once Michael came along, she stopped coming to the farm, and since I couldn’t even seem to visit without causing some kind of argument between your mom and him, I stopped coming around.” She stirred the dregs of her tea with the sugar spoon and sat quietly for a long time. “I went back to America for a few years.” More silence. “I don’t know.” The pain on Alice’s face caused a stabbing sensation in my chest that I couldn’t explain. It was like a deep sadness radiated off her in pulses. “I don’t know much that’s happened since then.”
I waited a few long moments for her expression to dull before saying, “That’s not everything.”
She stood up and walked our mugs to the sink, then stared out the window. “Like I said . . .” She drifted off with her words, into her mind, where my answers were still locked away.
“And I said that I can’t help you if I don’t know it all.”
“I promised your mom. I can’t tell until you’re older.”
I checked my tone before asking, “How old must I be?”
“Older than now.”
“And what if something happens to you?”
She turned back to me, still clutching our mugs to her chest. “There’s a letter. It’s supposed to go out to all of us automatically when something happens to one of us.”
“But you are the only one left!”
Alice scowled and dropped the mugs to the counter by the sink with a thud. “You said.”
“Where are your letters?”
She slumped back into her chair, her face scrunched up like she didn’t want to talk about it. But she didn’t seem to understand the importance of my question. “I haven’t been home in a few weeks.”
“Mr. Torres died six months ago.”
“That’s impossible.”
“You keep saying that, but obviously it’s not. They have all been killed but you and my mother, and you haven’t received any letters.”
Her eyes shifted left to right as she stared at the table, like she was reading words written there, and then she looked up at me. “You know who is doing this. You know who it is.”
I sat very still, trying to decide how to answer that accusation. My thoughts teemed with all the reasons I shouldn’t say—should never, ever tell anyone what I knew. But I had to keep her safe, and she couldn’t be safe if she couldn’t see it coming. She was my last connection—the last person who knew my mother before.
I nodded.
“But you don’t know why. That’s why you’re here? You thought I’d know why?”
I nodded again, waiting for her to put together all the pieces. I should’ve known my mother wouldn’t have surrounded herself with anyone who wasn’t clever enough to keep up.
“It’s him, isn’t it? It’s your—it’s Moriarty.” Again the disgust in her voice, like she was incapable of saying the name without it.
“What is in the letters?”
“The letters are everything. The letters are your why. But I don’t know how he’s stopping them from sending. I don’t even know how he could know what’s in them.”
I knew. I didn’t want to let the memories back in, but I knew how. “Mom.”
Alice stabbed a finger toward the table as she said, “She’d never do that. Ever. She didn’t trust anyone.”
I closed my eyes and covered them with my palms. I suddenly felt exhausted, like I’d been at this for days and days rather than a few hours. “She was drugged out of her mind in the end.” I dropped my hands to the table but kept my eyes shut. Remembering what I most longed to forget. “She’d call for us, but he wouldn’t let us in with her unless she was sleeping. He said she was talking madness, and he didn’t want us to remember her like that.” I spent so much of my focus trying to keep the tears away, I wasn’t able to soften the bitterness from my voice when I added, “As if we couldn’t hear.”
As if she wasn’t ours, too.
Alice’s hand fell across mine, and I twitched away from her touch again. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Did he do that, too?” I didn’t have to look up at her to see her gesturing vaguely at my face.
I nodded and then shrugged. But Alice reached across to lay her hand over mine once more, her voice soft but urgent. “She didn’t want this for you. She would never have left you with him like this if she had a choice. You need to know that.”
I shrugged again. Because it wouldn’t be for long. I would get the boys and me out somehow. But figuring out how required focusing on my mother right now, on these people my father had murdered, on what I needed to know and scraping away the rest of it. “What is in the letters?”
“Locations. To the stockpiles.”
Like a park planter that might have had more hidden than Mom’s getaway identity, or a dug-up square just six paces from a clover carving in the tree, which could definitely have once held a box of money. Had they all died next to their locations? Yes. I was almost sure they had.
“Why Regent’s Park?” I asked. “They all died in different places in the park.”
&nbs
p; Alice stared at the table, her eyes glazed in memory as she spoke. “We all kept ten thousand there.”
“Pounds?”
She seemed to snap free of her trance. “After our last job we all met there to split the money. It’s where we all said good-bye. A sentimental place, I guess. It was also the only place we all knew about, not that it was much money, really.”
“Ten thousand pounds?”
She grinned, though it felt like she was studying me again. “Sorte Juntos was your mother’s idea. She always was the mastermind, and this was Ems at her most brilliant.” Alice smiled in memory. “Damn. The way her mind worked. It was so simple, so perfect. Her greatest con.”
“Con? My mother was a con artist married to a copper?”
Alice’s smile widened. “Right? Exhibit A of the ‘you can’t choose who you love’ cliché. But Emily Ferris wasn’t just a con artist. She was a master thief. The best I’d ever met. And Sorte Juntos made it so all of us could have retired forever.”
I winced away from Mum’s name, too quickly realizing the last time I’d heard it spoken aloud was at her memorial. I saw it next to my bed every morning, but hearing it said aloud was different. I wondered what that meant, to have your name go unsaid for so long. “Not everyone retired, though.”
Alice shook her head. “Every artist has her own muse. Money, even filthy amounts of money, is almost never the cure—not for a true con artist. It’s that moment you know you have them, that’s what keeps most of us going.”
I held back a laugh. “We’ve never had filthy amounts of money.”
“No?” Alice asked, meeting my gaze with a confidence she hadn’t shown me all afternoon. “But you’ve always had enough—all those years living downtown in London, on a cop’s salary?”
I’d never thought about the house, or how we’d come to live there. Never thought about bills and how they got paid—how all of us had gone to private schools.
Lock & Mori Page 15
