Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  The tight ranks of the books and my ingrained hesitation to borrow from those ordered shelves stayed my hand from reaching out and plucking one or another from its brothers. Instead, I wandered away to look over the rest of the room. The bath-room was bare and bright, its tiles clean and the usual detritus of such places—soap, bathtowels, and shaving equipment—tidied away, no doubt by Mrs Gordimer. Now that my attention was finally brought to the subject, it occurred to me how difficult it must have been for the woman to know just how to go about her cleaning duties. Regular dusting and the occasional scrub, yes, but what to do with the stubs of soap left by two dead people? Sliding open the top drawer of the chest beneath the wash-basin, I found Father’s razor and soap-brush, and below it Mother’s hair-brush and pins, but little of a more ephemeral nature.

  On a sudden thought, I left the bright tiled room and walked over to the narrow door into the clothes closet. It smelt of cedar, but faintly, and although the clothes were still hanging there, they had all been pushed to the far ends of their rails, as if that was as far as Mrs Gordimer had been prepared to go without further orders.

  I sat for a while at my mother’s dressing-table before I could take up the tarnished silver powder-box that had waited ten years for the return of its owner. I pulled up the top and waited until the faint upsurge of powder reached my nose: a pang, nothing more, not even when I lowered my face to the powder and drew in a full breath of it. The still, small voice of my mother was not in the powder, nor had it been in the bedroom itself, nor in the house. A whisper of the voice, faint as a ghost, came from the shelves of her most beloved books, and so I went there and waited, unaware of the quiver of tears in my eyes until they spilt down my face.

  Damn you, I told my mother’s shade, why did you have to agree to come down here that last time? Why hadn’t you pushed a little harder, insisted that the thousand and ten jobs in San Francisco made a trip down here impossible, that we could as easily have a final family week-end in the city? Why?

  I caught myself before the maudlin tears could overwhelm me. She hadn’t meant to die, hadn’t meant to take Father and Levi with her; it wasn’t her fault that I had been left alone in the world. No one’s fault at all, except my own.

  Cleaning my glasses on the shirt of my pyjamas, I issued myself orders: Get a book to read, go down and make yourself another cup of tea, since that one on the table is sure to be cold as ice. Pull yourself together.

  I took a volume at random from the shelves before me, spoiling their pristine order, walked around the bed to turn off the bed-side light, then went out of the door, shutting it quietly but firmly, and descending the stairs to the kitchen.

  I settled at the table with my fresh tea and the book, but I did not open it. Instead, I stared over the top of my cup at the shelves that were also a door and at the tea canister that was a lever, not really seeing either.

  The more I thought about it, the more I felt that Mr Long’s suggestion had been in the right direction: The concealed apartment was in no earthly mansion, but rather lay within the walls of Matteo Ricci’s memory palace, and the reason I could let myself into it with such ease (at least, I could in my dream) was because I had placed it there myself: built it, closed the door on it, turned the key in its lock. The hidden apartment was my past, the childhood I had locked away and forgotten almost completely under physical pain coupled with the shock of abandonment and the wretchedness of guilt. I alone, the least worthy of the four Russells, had survived: better by far to walk unburdened and amnesiac from the desert of my past than to carry around the lush memories of what I had lost.

  Yesterday my intellect had begun to accept the meaning; nonetheless, that morning’s version of the dream had all but shouted at me, “It’s not that simple.”

  Not that the interpretation was wrong, just that an intellectual recognition did not take it far enough.

  A badly burnt creature will forever shy away from fire; until two weeks ago I had shied away from my past, denying the very possibility that I had gone through the events of 1906, allowing it to remain concealed behind the later trauma of the accident.

  And yet, the victim of fire often remains perversely fascinated with flame, incapable of leaving it alone. And so my scarred mind had found reason to bring me, first to San Francisco itself, and then to this lakeside retreat by way of a piece of road that I’d had no intention of revisiting: Unwanted journeys all, yet each step of the way, each painful brush of memory, had brought to me a degree of mastery and self-respect. The prod of one object after another in the Pacific Heights house had made me wince, but I had also felt the dormant pieces of my past begin to unfurl and come alive within.

  Then, when I had begun the journey down the Peninsula, the process of memory had changed. To use the image my dream had provided, this place had been an entire self-contained apartment, fully furnished with the people and events of the past, waiting for me to step inside and finally claim it.

  And so it had proved: Coming here, I had known what the village would look like before we drove into it; I had anticipated Mrs Gordimer and her work, known what the Lodge would look and feel like before I turned the key, and been able to lay my hands on specific items without having to pat around blindly for what logic told me had to be here. I remembered this house, in a way I did not my more permanent home in Pacific Heights, where each event, it seemed, had to be laboriously prised open, each person and memory all but chiselled from the walls.

  The Lodge, I thought, was how memory was supposed to work: fully and openly, not grudgingly and piecemeal.

  So then why was the third dream so damnably insistent? Not a physical hidden room, not the general opening up of my past—what? What was it I hadn’t yet explored, what did I still shy away from confronting?

  (Their deaths) my mind whispered to me, but before the phrase was complete I was already on my feet and moving to the kettle, reaching for the tin of coffee, wondering even if Flo had left one of her cigarettes downstairs because although I didn’t normally smoke I found myself craving one, the nicotine and the calming ritual of lighting and puffing.

  While the coffee was brewing I went to my bedroom and put on some warmer clothes, then took a cup outside where I could sit on the terrace and watch the stars fade, but as soon as I had sat on the low stone wall and drawn my feet up the whisper came again.

  (Their deaths.)

  I jumped down from the wall, took a swallow of the scalding brew, and set the cup down again, where it clattered so badly it nearly leapt from its saucer. The air of the terrace was suddenly cold, and I hugged my coat around me and walked to the end of the stones and back again, pausing again to take another drink from the cup that persisted in shaking between my hands. I paced to the end of the terrace and back again until I began to feel like some lion in its cage, then abandoned the coffee and the terrace and set out blindly across the wet grass.

  (They died) and Yes, damn it, they died, and the immediate cause of their deaths was my irritable adolescent self tormenting my brother and forcing my father to take his eyes off the road. Only he shouldn’t have done so, because he was an experienced driver and almost never did that, he’d driven across the country and never got into trouble, not once, and it was a terrible road but he knew it was a terrible road and he was well used to it.

  But other people who knew the road went off it as well, as evidenced by the thin insurance man clambering around on the rocks in precisely that spot.

  Odd, I thought idly, to happen across the investigation of a motor accident when it was a motor accident that had brought me to that place. And then I heard the voice begin to speak in my ear again and I made a violent turn to shake it off, dimly aware that the ground beneath my feet was sloping down.

  (They—)

  All right—Yes, they died! Mother, Father, Levi, they all died, but then again people did, all the time. Dr Ginzberg had died, and Mah and Micah, all the time people died. Although actually, no, come to think of it, it wasn’t all t
he time, it was all at the same time that they’d died.

  An odd coincidence, I conceded; and with that word, I was suddenly aware that I was beginning to have a bad feeling about this.

  My feet were at the edge of the dock, and I stepped onto the worn boards, listening to the stretch and creak of the wood giving under my weight. At the end, I sat down with my boots dangling off the end. The water was still and watchful beneath the marginally lighter sky.

  Three dreams. One to drag me by the scruff of my neck up to the events of April 1906, when books flew, objects smashed, the sky burned. The second to bring me face-to-face with an ambivalent figure who had come into the tent in the days following the fire: a man with no features, who simultaneously terrified and reassured me, come looking for my father. And a third to repeat, over and over, the message that I needed only to open the door to find the hidden rooms, that I knew they were there, and had only to stretch out my hand for the latch.

  And yes, they died, my family, servants, friend. But my family died eight years after the city burned and half a day’s journey south of the place where the faceless man had come into the tent. They died in a snatched moment of leisure before the end of an era, days before my father would go into uniform and my mother would travel east. It might well have been our very last time on that road.

  More irony than coincidence, that one.

  I shivered in the cold; the air was so still, the lake seemed to be holding its breath; the brief hair on my scalp prickled and rose.

  I’d never been as phobic about coincidences as Holmes was—for a man who professed to disbelieve in divine intervention, he was ever willing to follow the tracks laid out for him by Fate. But as I sat on the dock, balancing on the point formed by three intersecting images welling out of my unconscious mind, something else came up and stared me full in the face.

  I’d been shot at.

  In England, I had enemies; Holmes had enemies; I’d have put an assault down to one of them. But here? Two days after we’d arrived?

  Finally, with the sensation of a key’s wards sliding into place and an almost audible click, the hard barrier fell away, and I took a step into the hidden rooms of my past.

  Where all around me, the walls, the furnishings, the very air shouted at me—

  Was it an accident? Or was my family in fact murdered?

  Chapter Twenty

  Accident, or murder?

  With that simple question, the world shifted dizzily on its axis. My father’s peculiar will, the deaths of the Longs and Dr Ginzberg, the attempt to assassinate me on the street—all those came together with a clap in my mind. Not that I could see anything resembling a cause, but I had worked with Holmes long enough to see the pattern of a knot forming in the disparate strings around me. Too many deaths, too many coincidences.

  Something had happened, Long had said, during the fire of 1906; something that took Micah Long away from his own family during the frantic hours when Chinatown burned, something that changed the relationship between our fathers, an event that may have driven my mother back to England for six years.

  An event that, two years after our return, sent their motorcar off a cliff.

  And that within four months had extinguished the lives of three individuals in whom various Russells might have confided.

  And which, ten years afterwards, caused someone to lower a gun on the only surviving Russell.

  The Russell who was currently sitting in a completely exposed position as the sun climbed towards the surrounding hills, with her only weapon buried at the bottom of her valise.

  The stupid Russell who hadn’t thought to look behind her since giving a token glance to the street outside the St Francis on Sunday morning.

  I scrambled to my feet and scurried towards the house as if I’d heard a twig break in the woods. Inside, I locked the terrace door, then went rigid, waiting for a careless motion or uncontrolled breath to betray an intruder. The house was silent, and the only dampness on the stones of the floor was from my own feet. I slipped up the stairs of the bedroom wing and cautiously nudged open my own door, but the room was empty.

  I felt slightly more secure with the pistol resting in my trouser-band. I stuffed my possessions into their bags any which way, then went upstairs to bang on the door of Flo’s room.

  No response: I had my fingers around the knob when I heard a befuddled whimper from within. “Flo, we need to go as soon as we can. I’ll get the coffee ready, but you need to wake up now.”

  Donny’s head had already emerged from the door behind me.

  “Something up?” he asked.

  “I think I should be back in the city right away. I’m making coffee.”

  I had just taken the percolator from the heat when Donny appeared, dressed, combed, and shaved.

  “Can you take a cup to Flo?” I asked. “I don’t know if she’ll come out of her coma without it.”

  He looked at me oddly, but did not say anything, just carried the two cups away. Eventually Flo joined us, picking at the toast I laid before her and drowning her sleepiness in caffeine.

  When her eyes were somewhat clearer, she fixed them on me. “What’s the rush?” she demanded. “I thought we were going to have a nice swim before we go?”

  “I just need to be back in the city,” I said, the flatness of my tone brooking no argument.

  Flo blinked, and Donny cleared his throat. “Well, then, if you girls want to pack up your things, I’ll put the umbrella and chairs back into the boat-house.”

  “Never mind them, the Gordimers will take care of everything.”

  I stood up. Flo and Donny, after exchanging a glance, did the same. Without waiting to see if they did as I asked, I picked up the key-ring from its hook and walked out of the front door.

  The dirt drive to the road had only the Lodge and, up at the road itself, the Gordimers’ house. I went to the back door and knocked, knowing at this time of day they would be in the kitchen. Mr Gordimer opened it, dropping his sweat-stained hat over his head as he did so; the odour of home-cured bacon and fried eggs washed over me, making me smile involuntarily as I held out the keys.

  “We’re off this morning. Thank you for watching over everything so carefully.”

  He took the keys from me and passed them over his shoulder to the figure behind him. I greeted his wife, whose stern face softened as she said, “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to chat, Mary. I hope everything was satisfactory?”

  “Absolutely perfect.”

  Gordimer gave a sort of rumbling sound preparatory to speech, then came out with, “You’ll be selling up?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. I’ll most likely sell the place in the city, it’s ridiculous to keep it standing empty, but if you two are willing to go on with the upkeep here I’ll hang on to it for a while longer.”

  “Of course we’re happy to keep it tidy and safe for you,” Mrs Gordimer said, “for as long as you like. And if you want to have your lawyer drop us a line again to say you’re coming, we’ll put the milk in the ice-box, like always.”

  “I appreciate it, Mrs Gordimer. And any of the bigger maintenance jobs that come along, I trust Mr Norbert’s good at approving them.”

  “Oh, yes, there’s never been a problem. Last year when the roof started leaking—no, I’m a liar, it was two years ago now—all I had to do was drop a line and suggest it was a job too big for Willy here on his own and Mr Norbert wrote right back to say we should hire whoever we liked and send him the bills. Willy wanted to do it, of course, but we hired the son-in-law of Mr Jacko—remember him, at the post office? His daughter Melinda married a nice hard-working boy from San Mateo and though of course they live over there, the boy was happy to bring his crew here for a few days and do the job. With Willy to supervise, of course.”

  Willy—Wilson, his name was, and the diminutive did not suit him—looked slightly abashed that he had not mounted the assault on the roof by himself, but I was glad his wife had put her veto on his active p
articipation. I nodded my appreciation and made to ease myself back from the door, lest I be caught in the snare of Mrs Gordimer’s words for the entire morning.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s lovely to see you two looking so well, and I’m sorry I can’t stay longer. My friends decided that they have to get back, so we’ll be off.”

  “That is a pity, but I do understand, young people today are so busy. You just leave everything there, I’ll pop in later and tidy it all away.”

  “That’s very good of you, Mrs Gordimer. Perhaps I’ll manage to get down again before I leave.” I threw this last down as a sop to distract her, although it was a blatant lie. I had no intention of coming again, not for years. Maybe not ever.

  Mrs Gordimer’s continued barrage plucked at me, but slowly I moved back, further and further from her range.

  However, it was Gordimer himself who stopped me. With another rumble, he summoned the following words: “Had some people here, asking questions.”

  My feet, halfway down the steps, stopped feeling their way backward. “People?”

  “Man and a woman. Few weeks ago.”

  Mrs Gordimer’s head inserted itself between us, staring at her husband in outrage. “There were people here and I didn’t see them?”

  “Day you left for your sister’s. I was working on the boat-shed door, after dinner one night. Nearly dark. They came around the house, bold as brass. I sent them off.”

  “Can you tell me about them? Did you get their names?”