The Initiation

by Ridley Pearson

  They each offered their condolences. They gave me hugs and shook James’s hand. One of them, Mr. Lowry, a man with white hair but an athletic build, led James off into Father’s study. I tried to follow but was diverted by Lois, who led me into the kitchen.

  All I could think about was the ashes in the fireplace and what they hid.

  I didn’t know what went on in that meeting; James rebuffed my attempts to find out. I assumed it was money stuff, something to do with Father’s will or insurance. I think James felt more important because of it, and neither of us needed that. After a while, the men collected their belongings and left, once again taking time with both James and me.

  Being back in the house reminded me so much of Father that I could hardly keep my balance, much less worry about such things. I’d never felt such emptiness. It stole my breath, my voice. It cluttered and complicated my thoughts. I cried and I shook. I didn’t forget about Father’s office, but grief overcame even curiosity.

  I’d always found being the only girl in our family to be tricky. Father and I had something special between us that only I shared with him. It had died in this house along with him, and I felt that absence with every painting of my old relatives I passed, every piece of furniture and photograph. I didn’t want to be here. I resented being here. I wanted to get into Father’s office and then have Ralph take me back to Baskerville. It felt odd, so very odd, that I should consider the school home when I was standing in the place I’d grown up—but Father’s death had turned everything upside down. Absolutely everything. Especially me.

  Baskerville would now be home for years to come. No more Beacon Hill; too many memories here. The thought made me almost sick to my stomach. My situation was tricky in another way as well. I hadn’t told James what Father had told me about the key in the ashes, nor about my assignment from Sherlock to photograph everything I could.

  My effort to accomplish both these tasks meant more secrecy. On this night I would be taking another step away from being the perfect sister. And while it added to my already considerably broken heart, it also filled me with a kind of thrill and excitement that I found intoxicating. I suddenly enjoyed the thought of breaking the rules. Maybe I was more like James than I knew.

  I set my phone’s alarm to wake me at 1 a.m. and placed the phone beneath my pillow so as not to wake others. I must have fallen to sleep quickly, for I jolted awake from a blank nothingness, maybe the deepest sleep I’d ever had.

  My mobile phone in hand, I tiptoed down the stairs barefoot in my athletic shorts and camisole top.

  First, I headed to Father’s office, by far my most important mission. I passed the oil paintings of former Moriarty men and women looking out at me. The existence of a Moriarty family Bible, the files in Crudgeon’s office suggesting James was tied to the school—I had a newfound confusion about these old people in their funny clothes. Their hardened faces, as dry and cracked as the paint that formed them, projected a severity and solemnity that made me actually consider their roles in my life. Father had been an only child; his father, a military man. The Moriarty women were not talked about; I hoped to change that in James’s and my generation.

  I turned away from the sitting room into and through the library and reached the door to Father’s study.

  Locked.

  Father’s study was never locked. I tried it again. The first pulse of energy rising through me was frustration and anger; the second, curiosity. I wondered why, and on whose authority our father’s office door had been locked. No doubt one of the men who’d been clustered around our family’s dining room table the night before. Mr. Lowry, Father’s attorney, came to mind. But why? And what right did he have? This was followed by my asking myself who might have the key to Father’s study, the answer immediate: Lois, who had served Father as a home office secretary since her nannying skills had proved less necessary.

  Lois was sleeping over to serve as guardian, as she had done on and off for years when Father traveled without us. I considered trying to snatch her purse and search that cluster of keys I’d seen her handle all these years. But being caught might prevent me from accomplishing Sherlock’s assignment, so I hurried through that first.

  I was diligent and thorough in making a photographic record of every aspect of the house, and Father’s “crime scene,” as Sherlock had called it. It was an expression I abhorred. But I had to live with it, as I had let slip what James had not: there was no way my father had been up a ladder winding our wall-mounted clock.

  Father was afraid of heights.

  James awakened in a foul mood on a foul Boston day of wind, rain, and an Indian summer heat wave. It was as if the heavens had opened up crying over the loss of Father.

  He showered and prepared for the memorial just as I did in my room down the hall from him. While I felt guilty over going against my brother’s wishes and emailing all the photos I’d taken the night before to Sherlock, James was the one deeply troubled. He shouted for Lois and bossed her around. He demanded breakfast be delayed. He was acting like a brat.

  I was still angling for a way to get into Father’s office, having chickened out of trying to steal Lois’s purse from her room in the middle of the night. Things weren’t going well for anyone. It felt as if Father had cast a curse over us all.

  It wasn’t until much later in the morning, as I was standing by the partially open door to James’s room, ready to confess my sins to him, that I saw him pull his suit jacket from the dry cleaning cellophane and start to put it on. I jumped back so he wouldn’t see me as he turned to fish an arm into a sleeve. I faced facts: I was too scared to admit to James I was in cahoots with Sherlock, too sensitive to tell him about the assignment I’d been given by Father concerning the key in the ashes. I didn’t know how James might react. I wasn’t sure I knew my brother any longer. It made me sick to my stomach. In only a matter of a few weeks he had changed considerably. That realization triggered an added sadness to a day already draped in it.

  I was about to abandon his doorway when I saw him pat his coat pocket. He tucked his fingers inside and withdrew a thick white card the size of a thank-you note. He flipped it over. I saw some kind of pencil or tower, an arrow or rocket. There was something printed at the bottom—numbers, maybe. James patted and searched the rest of his pockets. As he did, I slowly and quietly stepped back from his door.

  I turned my head sharply. Lois stood at the end of the hall, staring at me spying on my brother. As my eyes landed on her, she lowered her head and made for the stairs, wishing to be invisible. We both knew it was too late for that.

  Running through my head was, no doubt, what was also running through my brother’s: How did a card end up in the pocket of a suit freshly back from the dry cleaners?

  The answer was as clear as the question: someone had put it there the night before for my brother to find.

  CHAPTER 30

  ESCAPING SPIRITS, RETURNING FEARS

  I CAUGHT UP TO SHERLOCK ON THE WAY BACK from the mandatory chapel service honoring my father. If it hadn’t been Father’s memorial service I might have thought it an impressive, even gorgeous event. All students wore school uniforms with black armbands on their left arms. Everyone was showered and groomed, even Tilly Simpson and Grant Pendergraz, two of the more slovenly kids on campus.

  Sherlock had been avoiding me for the three days since James’s and my return from Boston and I didn’t take it kindly.

  “So much for friends supporting friends,” I said, coming up behind him at a jog.

  “Moria.”

  “You’re speeding up? You’re seriously going to walk away from me?” Humiliated, I stopped on the sidewalk in front of Bricks 2. To my surprise—and inward delight if I’m being honest—Sherlock stepped off the sidewalk to allow others to pass. He looked back at me. I felt amazing. His eyes cared, his shoulders sagged in resignation. He was fighting something internally. I felt like his mind was telling him one thing, his heart another, and that filled me with the first ink
ling of joy since Father’s passing. I knew at that moment that this boy could get me through my grief—this strange, weird, brilliant, dazzling boy.

  “You holding up?” he said softly, having crossed the distance to me. He passed the test—I wasn’t about to go to him; he had to come to me if we were to be friends.

  I nodded. “I emailed them to you. The photos.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you to do that.” He was about to say something more—I could feel it—but he stopped himself. “I was wrong to ask.”

  “What is it?” I said. “What’s happened?”

  “What’s happened? Your father has had a horrible accident. You need time to deal with that, Moria. I can’t believe you and James came back so soon.”

  “We can’t sit at home moping. Besides, everything in that place reminds us of him. It’s horrible, really. Here, there are much more pleasant memories. And friends.” I thought maybe I’d laid it on a little too thick, but Sherlock, for all his brains, could miss the most obvious things.

  “I shouldn’t have asked you. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “No! I won’t leave it at that! You’ve been avoiding me. Repeatedly! What’s with that?”

  “Have not.”

  “Have too!”

  “I’m giving you space.”

  “I don’t want space.”

  “You need time to process what’s happened.”

  “I have a lifetime to process what’s happened. I loved my father.” I started crying, darn it all. “He was the best . . . most amazing . . . and I’ll miss him every day of my life, with every heartbeat.” I wiped my nose on my arm. “But he was a fighter. As quiet and reserved, even distant, as he could be, he never quit. He taught James and me to never quit, never give in. ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ That kind of attitude. I owe him that, Sherlock. I have to keep swimming. Treading water isn’t an option.”

  He reached out and pulled me into his arms, his chin pressed into my hair. I held him as tightly as a pillow when I’m miserable. I shook in his grasp. He said nothing. For a few long seconds the events of the past few days floated out of me, like spirits trying to escape. I recalled him kissing my hand, as I had a thousand times now. I begged the universe to just let me stay here like this, to let the world pass me by so I could disappear into this hug like hiding under a blanket. But it wasn’t to be. Sherlock spotted James approaching. He released me.

  “Don’t quit on me,” I whispered, allowing him to separate us. “There’s a note in James’s suit coat pocket. It’s another clue, I think. Help me, please!”

  “You’re on your own if you want to continue this . . . nonsense. It’s brought nothing but trouble for all of us. I promised James: I’m out.” Sherlock didn’t wait for James. He left me there, my head spinning, my heart breaking.

  “Please!” I called, aware of the futility. Sherlock was not one to waffle. He didn’t look back. That hurt most of all.

  CHAPTER 31

  FAMILY PHOTOS

  WE DON’T SHARE OUR SECRETS; THEY WOULDN’T be secrets if we did. I had my own. Plenty, if truth be told. Recently, I’d been places I shouldn’t have been, had followed my brother and Sherlock and others. I’d made it a game with Natalie and Jamala. We’d formed a little gang of spies. I knew things I wasn’t supposed to know; I’d seen things I wasn’t supposed to see. It changed the way I looked at people because I would know when they were lying to me. Knowledge, as it turned out, can damage relationships. I never would have guessed that.

  The school mailmaid—yes, that’s what we called her—was nicknamed Madame Mim for her bent chin and sizable wart by her left eye (it looked more like a mushroom). One eye was fogged gray while the other roamed around as if disconnected in the socket. You would catch occasional glimpses of her through the open door to your tiny mailbox and it would scare the shoes off your feet. She was back there stuffing boxes, trying to read names off letters and packages. She wasn’t very good at it. McDonald would get mail for McConnell. Doris for Horace. Students spent a good deal of time redistributing mail around the dorms or in the common room.

  So it was no great surprise to me that I should receive Priority Mail addressed to my older brother, he of the same family name. It would have been more surprising, I suppose, to receive mail actually intended for me.

  The proper thing to do, of course, was to pass it along to James, unopened. I would have done just that had I not caught a glimpse of the sender’s name above the return address. Mr. Conrad Lowry, Esq.

  The rationale was easy: anything from my father’s business lawyer addressed to James was also meant for me. It wouldn’t matter if I read it first and then passed it to James, or vice versa. I didn’t go as far as to tell myself James wouldn’t care. I knew he would. I knew he’d chew me out if I opened it. But I had my excuse at the ready; a strong defense. It would be difficult for him to argue otherwise.

  I opened the letter.

  The contents, several letter-sized pages folded separately from a cover letter, were printed on heavy, brightly white watermarked paper. Fancy law firm stuff. The cover letter was brief, but telling. Conrad Lowry, writing to James—not James and me, I noted—explained the early autopsy findings were “summarized herein.” He had withheld the “more unsavory details” but had included a few photographs he believed our father’s child—again, no reference to me—deserved to see.

  The letter couldn’t have been more than eight sentences, but by the time I finished reading I was foaming mad. Clearly the meeting in Father’s office between Lowry and James had made them chums; equally clearly, I was to be no part of any of it.

  Secrets.

  The thought of being excluded by my brother and a lawyer we barely knew more than to say hello to, the thought that their conspiracy involved my father and excluded me, sent me into an internal tantrum. It galvanized my conviction to get to the bottom of what was going on and to do so using any underhanded means I chose to employ. Not only was I smarter than my brother, I told myself, but more conniving. A woman develops her skills of manipulation from the first moment she gazes longingly into her father’s eyes. By the time she’s sixteen, that same man is handing her the keys to a new car, buying her a new dress for the prom, and assuring his wife, her mother, that their little girl is all grown up now and knows what she’s doing.

  Unfolding the photocopied pages contained in Lowry’s letter, I saw a picture of what I assumed to be Father’s belongings found on his person: wallet, cell phone, key ring, cash. Seeing his beloved fountain pen twisted my stomach and I nearly threw up. Alongside was a plastic evidence bag.

  There were photos of the ladder and his body alongside. I turned away from them quickly, just couldn’t look.

  Next was even worse: color photocopies of the underside of a man’s arm, the skin a sickly pale. I wouldn’t have recognized the arm or the tiny tattoo if, along with the date and time, my father’s name had not been printed in computer type at the bottom of the sheet along with the acronym BPDME (Boston Police Department Medical Examiner) running vertically along the side.

  To say any one thing shocked me more than another would be lying. The arm, the skin, the harsh lighting in the photograph, the fact this was my dead father’s arm . . . But the tattoo was of a key with a tree growing out of it.

  I took a mental photo of the tattoo—I would never forget it—my stomach threatening to empty. My brother had described such a tattoo on the arm of his attacker. I returned the paperwork to the envelope as I knocked on the door to the post office. Madame Mim answered the door, her chain-knit lavender sweater spotted with food stains, her wandering eye drifting. I explained the letter had been delivered incorrectly and asked her to please place it in my brother’s mailbox. She was testy, clearly used to hearing such complaints. She grabbed the letter angrily and slammed the door in my face. Knowing Madame Mim, it would take her a day or two to figure out which mailbox to put it in; I thought that might give me a useful advantage.


  The secret I knew that not even my brother did was the secret that Sherlock had been hiding from the others in the chapel on the night my brother and his pack had caught him there.

  For what none of the boys had known that night—not even Sherlock—was that a certain girl had been hiding in the chapel balcony. A certain girl had witnessed it all, including what Sherlock had covered up with his shoe.

  CHAPTER 32

  A REBEL AND A THORN

  I’M NOT SAYING I WAS SPYING ON HIM, BUT JAMES left the Bricks early the morning of September 18th and, instead of heading to breakfast in the dining hall along with other early risers, he hoofed it over to the school sundial. Poised in front of the Main House and near the chapel, the alabaster sculpture rose twenty feet in the air, with a winged Mercury riding the top. Tiered steps encircled it, flaring like a wedding cake to the lawn’s freshly cut grass.

  As my brother stood there studying the spire, he withdrew a card from his blazer’s side pocket that I thought I recognized as the note from his dry cleaning. He was obviously comparing the two images as he walked around the sundial in a slow, deliberate manner. I had no idea what he was looking for or at, and the tree I was hiding behind was as close as I was going to get to him.

  I spotted something that caused my heart to jump. Having no idea if it meant anything or not, I had to make a note of it, or in this case, a drawing. I turned and pressed my back to the bark. Fully hidden from my brother at the sundial, I pulled out a pen. Lacking any paper, I drew onto my forearm. The image was of the sundial and the tall tree behind it. Drawn onto my arm there was no mistaking the similarity to the tattoo of the key found on Father’s arm.

  I stared in astonishment; the resemblance was uncanny. Coincidence? Did it mean something? I didn’t have long to consider.