Lock & Mori

by Heather W. Petty

  We had both been lost in the silence for so long, it surprised me when the attendant came to collect our trash as the train pulled into the station in London. It was just five, which meant we’d get to my house a few minutes after my regu­lar time. It also meant the boys were out of school.

  Lock insisted on taking a taxi to Baker Street and kept his arm around me the whole ride home. I stared past his shoulder out the back window, focusing on the raindrops dripping down the glass as my thoughts swirled apart, then spun together into a fine point once again when he leaned in and kissed me. I smiled. “What was that for?”

  “You smile in this certain way when I kiss you. I needed to see that smile.”

  “Just now?”

  “Every now. I’m just usually able to control myself better.”

  I smiled again, and he kissed my forehead and held me close. It all felt so normal, I started to think maybe we’d make it through this. Maybe we’d really keep my father away from us somehow. Maybe we would really all be okay.

  I thought that all the way back to Baker Street, until Lock opened the taxi door and I heard the first bars of an eerie, warbling piano play, followed by a bleating trumpet.

  Chapter 19

  I stared at my front door, frozen, while Sherlock paid the cab. He might have asked me a question, but I couldn’t seem to put any thoughts together with that song playing. It was perhaps only a fraction of a second before I started to run for my door, but it felt like twelve eternities of stunned stillness as my mind, enfeebled by my assumptions, tried to make sense of that song being played on that day. Alice was all that was left of his morbid list, and she was safe in Sussex.

  I may have used that as a mantra with my every step that brought me closer and closer to the house. I fumbled with my keys, and then the doorknob, as if I hadn’t entered this house through this door every day of my life. I threw open the door to stillness, but I knew someone was there. I could feel it.

  Dad wasn’t in his room, or the kitchen, which didn’t make sense. He should have been home. The song was playing. I ran to the French doors that led to the patio, but he wasn’t there, either. That left only the boys.

  “Freddie!” I called, and immediately Sean appeared out of the shadows, his lip swollen and bloody. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, his eyes hard and his cheeks streaked with tears that had long since dried.

  “Mori?” Michael appeared next, red welts slashing his face. He ran over to me and buried his face in my shoulder, so I couldn’t inspect his injuries, and immediately started to shake with silent tears.

  By the time Freddie limped from the shadows, I was ready to fall to pieces. His right eye was swollen shut, and his forehead had a gash that was still slowly trickling blood into his eyebrow and down his cheek. He was holding his ribs with an arm that looked battered, and his jeans were ripped and stained. “I tried to stop it, like you always do,” he said.

  That was my job on “Memories of You” nights. And I hadn’t been here. I hadn’t stopped our father, despite all my plans.

  I shook my head and pulled Freddie closer, reached for Seanie as well. “Never mind that. I need you three to go pack a bag. Pack like you won’t be coming back for a while. All your favorite things. Seanie, you’ll help Freddie?”

  “Where are we going?” Michael asked, his words muffled by my shirt.

  “To my house,” Lock said from the doorway. I watched his eyes take in every detail of the boys and then I turned away, ashamed. I didn’t want him to see them this way. To know how I’d failed.

  “To a hotel,” I said, trying to force myself to smile when I said it, like it would be the most fun they ever had. “We’ll stay at a hotel and I’ll take care of things.”

  “Which one?” Sean asked, as if he wouldn’t come along should my choice be inadequate.

  I smiled and shooed at him with my hand. “Off you go, Seanie. And no packing your whole life. One bag, I mean it!”

  Sean and Fred trudged up the stairs, but Michael wouldn’t be moved. I nudged him back from me just enough to see his face. He was crying still and it looked like he would have a black eye.

  “Tell me,” I said, quietly.

  “The s-song,” he said, a tear dripping down his cheek. “It was playing when we came home from school.”

  I’d thought I’d had it all figured out, Dad’s ritual, his targets, his methods. My ignorance caused the welts on Michael’s face.

  “Freddie really did try.”

  I wanted to sink into the floor, but I managed a nod, managed to keep my own tears from showing. “I know it. I should’ve been here.”

  “He stopped when Sadie came.”

  A flare of panic shot off inside, but I tried to keep it out of my voice. “What happened? When Sadie got here?”

  “She brought us a peach pie! Can we take it with us to the hotel?”

  “Yes, of course, but I really do need to know what happened.”

  “She pushed her way into the house and Freddie hid Sean while Dad was distracted. Then she started talking really low to Dad.”

  “Did you hear what she said?”

  “Something about constables she met at the park. Dad did that thing where he hunches over when he’s mad and said they should just go and find those constables right now. Sadie looked at me and Fred and then said they should.”

  “She went to the park with him?” My voice betrayed me, and Michael’s eyes went wide. “I have to know everything, Michael. This is so, so important.”

  “D-dad got mad again when he couldn’t find his sweater in his room. He yelled, ‘Where is it?’ and then it sounded like he slammed his closet door. Sadie smiled at us and said that you’d be home right quick, which doesn’t really make sense. Does she always talk like that?”

  “And then?” I prodded.

  “Then they left to go find the constables at the park.”

  I could barely take in my next breath, but I forced a grin and smoothed Michael’s hair. “Go pack, Michael. Quick as you can.”

  The very minute he turned toward the stairs, I turned to Sherlock. “Keep them safe. Get them out of here and—”

  “Where are you going?”

  “He took her to the park.” I grabbed Lock’s arms and stared up into his eyes. “His closet is where he kept the sword,” I whispered. “He couldn’t find it, but he took her—”

  “Go,” he said before I finished, but he didn’t let go of me right away. “Be careful. I’ll be right behind you.”

  His phone was out and to his ear the second he let go of me, and I heard him say his brother’s name as I left, running down our steps, running down the street, weaving through pedestrians like I was a crazy person. I was crazy. There was no way one person running randomly through the acres and acres of Regent’s Park would find two other people if they didn’t want to be found. And it wasn’t as though he would kill her out in the open where anyone running up could see.

  Had I the time to indulge it, that thought alone might have tripped me up, halted my breathing. Had I the time to indulge it, I might have fallen to pieces on the bridge, or when I ran into the trees near the college and there was no one there save me and the birds. I went to the most recent crime scene, and there was no one. The tape had been removed and the grass mowed. I went to the place Mr. Patel had died, by the zoo, to the fountain planter, to every place I knew he’d killed before, and when I couldn’t run any more and my lungs screamed for air, I collapsed against the bandstand. Of course my addled mind had taken me there last.

  The park was shadowed, stepping into the sheer cloak of dusk, that time of the evening when everything seems so clear, but the details are cloudy. I almost gave in, then, to the screaming frustration inside me, to the panic, to the knowledge that he could have killed her fourteen times over already. Instead, I stood and forced my rubbery legs to take me to the shor
e. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find there—some sign that his sword really was still in the depths of the lake. My own footprints to prove that I’d actually thrown it in, that the morning hadn’t been a dream.

  Instead, I found a shoe. A uniform shoe. A girl’s uniform shoe with a ragged scuff down the outer side and mud all around the toe. I stared at it for what felt like an unreasonable amount of time but was possibly only a second. And in that second I ran the probabilities. Population of London sec­ondary schools was roughly 625,000 students, 141,000 in private schools requiring uniforms, statistically 51 percent female, leaving only a one in 71,910 chance that the shoe belonged to Sadie Mae Jackson.

  But it did. Of course it did. As did the foot inside and the stocking-covered leg that protruded at an unnatural angle.

  The next seconds were silence. A buzzing silence that stripped out the typical chorus of birds and insects that followed us all through the park, stripped out the sound of the rain, even the sound of my own breathing. I only knew I took breaths by watching the rise and fall of my chest. I finally forced myself to look up at Sadie, who didn’t move at all.

  She was my friend, and I’d lured her right into the arms of a killer—a monster who’d left her slumped against a willow tree by the lake, hidden in the branches just feet from where I’d disposed of his weapon of choice. I thought I was hobbling him, removing one piece of his ritual. I thought he had a list and that only those on it were in danger. I’d thought so many wrong things. Turns out he hadn’t needed a sword to kill Sadie Mae, only his hand wrapped round her neck. His fingers left pink-striped impressions there. He hadn’t even bothered to close her eyes. And I found I couldn’t get close enough to reach them.

  Someone tried to break through the silence, even taking my hand in his and pulling me into his arms, so that I couldn’t see her anymore, forcing me to hear the pounding beat of his own heart. I wrenched myself free of him, but he’d broken the spell and every sound in the entire city came rushing back, including the wasplike buzz of his voice that seemed to come at me from everywhere.

  “Stop, Mori. Stop and think. We call this in now.”

  I held my hand up in front of Lock’s face but didn’t touch him.

  “Mori.” He tried to hold me again, but I stumbled away before he could. “We can’t just leave her here.”

  I stared at Sadie Mae again, but she still wouldn’t move. “Stay with her?”

  “And you?” Lock’s look was blank again, but his voice betrayed that expression. He was afraid.

  I shook my head. I knew I should stay. Do something to cover for that man. Take away the fingerprints that were probably waiting to be discovered on her skin. Run home to practice lies with the boys until they were ready to swear Sadie Mae had only dropped off the pie, that she hadn’t even come inside the house. Covering meant we wouldn’t be on the news. We wouldn’t be separated. We would be free from the consequences of having a killer for a dad.

  Only he would be free as well. And he would still be breathing. I couldn’t have that.

  I didn’t know when exactly I’d decided that my father had to die. But it had been well before that evening in the park. Perhaps I knew it from that first night when Mallory and Day left us in the house with the monster who’d once been my father. Perhaps just two nights before, when I met his eyes across the shadowed hallway. I was taller than him, standing up on the stairs, looking down. And I already knew. It was just this truth that had spun through my unwitting consciousness for hours or days or weeks, until I accepted it fully as the only way.

  Maybe that’s how one becomes a killer. Not with decision, but with acceptance.

  Truly, it was the only way any of this could end. With one of us dead. Once I knew that, it was easy to decide it should be him. It wasn’t even a choice, really. More that it fell to me to accept the reality and to act.

  But I hadn’t accepted that reality in full, not until I stood with rain-sopped clothes that stuck to my body in odd ways, with my hair in perfect curls that only ever appeared when it was wet, with my best friend lying among the roots of a giant willow tree, still refusing to move. I stared down Sherlock with eyes most likely streaked with mascara and tried not to flinch when the first tendrils of rage started their heated path up my spine.

  “Stay with her.” My voice was a still pool that somehow managed to survive the escalating violent tremors inside me. I didn’t wait for his response, didn’t stop when he called after me. The silence had returned, as though the heat had seared away all sound. I was surprised I didn’t leave a wake of ash behind me as I wove through throngs of people on the streets, clutching umbrellas while typing or talking into their mobiles. I didn’t even remember how I got to our front door, but I remembered the noise it made when I threw it open.

  This time the house really was empty. And something about that broke my silence again, just in time for the ­muffled clicks and clacks of the restarting turntable. Maybe it wasn’t the song that set me off. Perhaps the heat had to dissipate somehow. But my first victim was that bloody record. I thrilled at the scratch of the needle across its delicate surface, then again when it shattered against the wall. I gripped the largest shard with a torn up T-shirt that was wadded up on the floor and used it to rip a large tear in the sensible brown duvet Dad had chosen to replace the tulips of Mom’s bedding. I ripped open his pillow, until the ugly mess of brown and white feathers spilled across the floor. But that wasn’t enough. I smashed everything I could find that was his, emptied his dresser drawers, and scattered and ripped his papers.

  I’d managed to rip and shred half his clothes from the closet when I saw the box that held my mother’s things. I tried to press on and flung a stack of his sweaters onto the floor behind me, but the whirlwind inside had slowed to almost nothing. I wiped a tiny feather from my sweaty, flushed cheek and stared at the box long enough for even my breathing to slow.

  I took the box. I took it upstairs with me and began to pack some of my things, including those things of my mother’s that I’d kept hidden, and the pictures of me and Sadie that I’d left stuck to my mirror, even when things had gone wrong. When I left, I turned off the light and wandered out the front door like I was never going to return. And maybe that’s why I felt so light as I crossed the street and walked over to Sherlock’s house.

  I stopped on Lock’s front steps and peered through the quasi dark to stare back at my house for a while. I wanted to see him come home to the mess, to the nothing that would be the rest of his short life. I wanted to see his panic or anger or indifference. It didn’t matter which. But soon the exhaustion of the day caught up to me, and the strain of holding my bags and managing the heft of the box sent me inside. Still, I watched my porch until the very last moment before Lock’s door opened. I wasn’t quite done with that place, I realized. But I wouldn’t return until I had a fully formed plan to end things for good.

  He would pay for all of it.

  Chapter 20

  I’d always been bad at the next part—the waiting. Still, sitting in Sherlock’s window and looking down the street toward mine, I felt the power that comes with patience. My rage roiled within me, strengthening, sharpening, controlled. I could control my breathing, my expression, and even the curve of my shoulders, but I couldn’t seem to control how and when the image of a slumped-over Sadie Mae hijacked my thoughts. And I couldn’t afford to walk the path that kind of thinking would lead me down.

  So, instead, I thought of How.

  How he would die.

  Poison would be something—to surprise him after he’d ingested it and watch him slowly fade, so that my face hating him was the last that he’d see of this world. But it seemed too easy to me. Too gentle a death. A courtesy he’d never offered any of those he’d killed. It also left too many open questions.

  And this had to be perfect—no holes, no clues, no questions.

  “Can you see your
house from here?” Somehow Mycroft had silently appeared. Again.

  I couldn’t be bothered to look at him, or answer.

  He took a noisy, sloshy bite of an apple, and I pressed my head against the window to get away from him. “Why, yes, your brothers are safe and well cared for. You’re very welcome.”

  “Thanks,” I murmured. I should’ve been with them, after all that had happened—but I never could stay for long. I couldn’t stand it, the aftermath, with Michael’s crying and Freddie’s recounting the fight, play by play. Worse, though, was the way Sean would pretend he didn’t need to cry or relive what had happened. A nine-year-old shouldn’t have a look that hard. He looked most like Dad on nights like these.

  I felt a soft brush against my cheek and looked up into Mycroft’s droopy eyes. They were crystal blue—much lighter than his brother’s—and were focused on the small drop of water on his forefinger. He rubbed his thumb over it, and I held my hands in my lap to keep from wiping at the cool trail the tear had made down my cheek.

  “I take it you have no plans to take them back to that house.”

  Our eyes met for the first time, and Mycroft’s widened a bit. “I see.”

  I doubted he did. No one would believe the level of violence tripping through my thoughts just then. The crease in his brow relaxed as I focused on softening my expression.

  “He will never again lay a finger on those boys,” I promised, and just saying the words dropped a pebble in the still pool of heat that lay dormant at my core. I squeezed a fist, digging nails into my palm to keep my composure.

  Mycroft paused to study my face and then looked back down at his hand. “I think perhaps I should be afraid of what you just said, but I believe you.” He backed up a few steps. “And that’s enough for me. For now.”

  He paused again at the doorway. “One more thing.”