Where All Paths Meet, page 16
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
One of my new life goals, which I’d formed in the last fifteen seconds, was not to be stabbed by one of Blackfriar’s groupies, so I started thinking about how I could make my dream a reality.
Two doors later, I was certain that Tom was closing the distance. Eight feet between us. Barely. He looked almost sick, his face bloodless, eyes ringed by greenish-black circles. If he wasn’t planning on murdering me, he was definitely thinking about ralphing all over the carpet. I wasn’t trying to keep my glances a secret anymore; if he noticed them, they didn’t bother him, and I didn’t care if they did. He was close enough now to rush me, and that meant keeping an eye on him.
The next door was another of those magazine-spread bedrooms: the perfectly fluffed duvet, the perfectly plumped pillow, the single Calla lily that had to be silk resting on the perfectly rustic dresser, all of it looking like you weren’t supposed to get within six feet of it. I bumped the door open and, with a final look for Tom, said, “Stay here.”
He didn’t, of course. As I crossed the room toward the closet, he lurched through the doorway behind me, cracking the jamb with his hip, the bag jingling and rattling as he righted himself. By that point, we couldn’t have been more than a couple of yards apart. He opened the bag, and he slid a hand inside. I kept him in my peripheral vision as I opened the closet door an inch.
Acting, Mrs. Babcock had told us in eighth-grade drama (between doing crossword puzzles and researching, on the smart board, “how to sell your screenplay”), was reacting. So, I reacted.
“Holy shit.” I slammed the door and put my back to it. “Get Noneley. No, scratch that. Get Blackfriar.”
Tom blinked. He drew his hand, still empty, from the bag and wiped the back of it across his mouth. “What is it?”
“What the hell didn’t you understand? Go get him!”
Instead, of course, he slunk toward me, bag held tight.
“Are you listening to me? Hey, dumbass, did you hear—”
I let him elbow me aside. Shoulders tight, he opened the closet door—obviously, the thought of finding some unspeakable horror in a random Holmesian bedroom was not out of the realm of possibility for him—and then said, “What—”
I kicked him in the back of the knee, and he stumbled into the closet. I shut the door, planted one foot at the base, and reached for the bed. It had a nice, wide headboard, and I got a good grip and hauled it toward me. It wasn’t even all that heavy—the bed, frame and all, slid across the carpet.
“Hey!” Tom hammered on the inside of the door. “Let me out! Hey!”
“Hay is for horses, shit for brains.”
I got the bed in front of the closet door, and then I stepped back. Tom immediately shoved the door open, but it struck the headboard. He probably had a quarter inch of space to work with. He shut the door and tried again. The bed shifted slightly. He could get out. Probably. Eventually. But by that point, I’d be long gone.
“You can’t do this!” He slammed the door into the headboard again. “You aren’t allowed to do this!”
“Easy there, buddy,” I said as I headed for the hall. “Blackfriar is particular about his property.”
Something scraped his voice raw as he screamed after me, “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!” And then, in a hysterical spill: “They’re going to laugh at me!”
I shut the door behind me as I stepped out into the hall. His screams continued—they sounded unhinged, and the momentary pleasure of getting rid of the dickweed was quickly changing into feeling doubly shitty about myself. He’s fine, I told myself as I hurried down the hall. He’s perfectly safe and fine in that closet. He’s just mad, that’s all. Maybe it would have sounded more convincing from somebody else.
Blackfriar’s office was located at the far end of the mansion, of course. I ought to have known. It was another of the spacious, high-ceilinged rooms, and it had the clutter and chaotic, ordered disorder that, from what I knew of the Holmeses historically, seemed more in keeping with them than my personal Holmes’s preferences for all things neat and tidy. It held all kinds of shit: a massive, rosewood desk; glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls; a tsunami of paper, some of it looking ancient and brittle; a stuffed raven posed for takeoff; a slipper that looked Middle Eastern, mounted on a plaque on the wall; a burgundy smoking jacket draped over a chair. The smoking jacket, along with the lingering smell of cigar smoke, suggested that thing against the wall was a humidor and not, as I would have chosen, a mini fridge for my personal stash of Coke. A spiral staircase led up to a mezzanine level with leather club chairs, a chaise, more bookcases, more paper. One wall was completely glass, with a pair of French doors that led out onto the deck. The afternoon sun played across the rumpled, glass-sequin valley.
I felt like I had stepped back in time. There were modern touches, of course—a top-of-the-line laptop, for example, and the array of charging cables that snaked through the papers on his desk. But it felt like a room from a different era. I had a hard time imagining Holmes in this room. For a moment, I tried to imagine what he’d be like in ten years, twenty. Blackfriar would die eventually—at least, that was my theory; I was afraid, though, he might be following the Darth Vader trajectory instead—and Holmes might, one day, be the one who sat behind that desk, smoked cigars, read bizarre, antiquated texts, looked out on the world he’d conquered. Maybe. But if he did, I wouldn’t know that man, and the thought of it made me inexpressibly sad.
A sound at the door made me turn. Cecilia Holmes stood there, dressed in slacks and a crisp white button-up. She wore pearls, and a part of me wanted to laugh: pearls around her throat, pearls at her ears. Her hazel eyes tracked me, but I’d seen a lot of people on bennies; she was handling them better than most.
“Hello, Jack,” she said as she pulled the door shut behind her. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like your mother?”
Chapter 17
Baritsu
“Mrs. Holmes. Um. Hi.”
Jack Moreno, everyone. A national treasure.
Cecilia stared at me.
And then my brain caught up with what she’d said. “Wait, you knew my mom?”
She walked across the room. She trailed a finger along the raven’s wings. She cupped the toe of the slipper that had been mounted on a plaque. She stopped at the desk, stirred the papers, and the soft rustle of the pages whispered between us.
“Sit down,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
I dropped into one of the chairs in front of the desk. She took the chair behind it—Blackfriar’s chair. She looked at home there. The afternoon light poured over her like liquid gold. It lit the silver in her hair, drew a strong shadow along one side of her face. She looked like Holmes, or he looked like her. His features were more masculine, of course, but it was impossible to see her right now, to be this close to her, and not know where Holmes’s beauty had come from. She clasped her hands on the desk, and she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
I wanted to ask again, like maybe she hadn’t heard me, but I could taste my own over-eagerness in that urge. I forced myself to sit. To wait. She studied me. And then, without looking, she plucked one of the pages from the desk and rooted around in a drawer until she came up with a pencil. “Your cheekbones,” she said. “Your nose.” The pencil flew over the blank paper. The soft scratch of the lead filled the spaces between her words. “Your father’s features are a good complement. You’re much prettier than she was; your mother verged on horsey.”
Literally nothing in my life had prepared me for this conversation—let alone for someone telling me my mom had been horsey—so I clutched the arms of the chair, bracing myself against the unreality of the moment, and tried to remember to breathe.
A few moments later, Cecilia held out the sketch. It was beyond good—it was masterful, and she’d done it in a matter of moments, from memory. Mom looked younger than I remembered, but she was wearing one of her favorite necklaces, one that Dad had bought her on a family vacation. I remembered the drawing Holmes had given me before he’d left, the one he’d done of the two of us, in bed, the moment of that first kiss. Good looks weren’t the only thing he’d inherited from his mother.
“How have I done?”
I nodded and took out my taped-up Superman wallet. I took out the picture of Mom and Dad from their ten-year anniversary; I’d found it in a box when we’d moved, and I’d taken it without asking Dad.
Cecilia examined it. “She was older then, of course. This is how I knew her.”
She plucked a frame from the desk and held it out to me as I returned the photo to my wallet. Then I took the frame and studied its picture: two men with a woman between them. The woman was Mom, barely more than a girl, and she looked even more like Cecilia’s drawing than I had expected. The man on her right, with his arm around her waist, had brown hair and a crooked smile, and I was pretty sure he was wearing a Baja hoodie. He looked like whatever you called hipsters back then—maybe just plain old hippies. The man on Mom’s left could have been Holloway: hair the color of aspen leaves in the fall, the same nose and jaw, the same slender build, like a blade.
“Leopold,” Cecilia said, indicating the hippy. “Moriarty.” Then she pointed to the blond man. “And Fairfax.” Amusement gave her voice an edge. “Holmes, obviously.”
I spared him a second glance before my attention floated back to Mom. She looked so young; that was all I could think, over and over again. I forced myself to pass the picture back, and Cecilia returned it to its place.
“They’re all gone now,” she said softly. “He keeps it as a reminder.”
Down in the valley, light shifted, sparked, spun—the sun on cars, glass, chrome.
“You may ask me.”
I had to clear my throat. “How did you know her?”
Her smile was surprisingly sad. “She was a Watson.” Then she slid the sketch toward me. “Keep it. Please.”
Those words were a doorway onto a million more questions—about my mother, about what being a Watson had meant to her, about what her life had been like growing up, and if she’d been part of the web of the great families, and which Holmeses she’d known, and what she’d been like before my father, before me. And, of course, the bigger questions, the ones you couldn’t ask because no one had the answers. Who was she? Why didn’t she tell me?
“What do you want from my son?” Cecilia asked, her voice even, her tone measured.
It took me a moment to regroup. “What? Nothing.”
“This is not the time for lies.”
“I’m not lying. I don’t want anything from H. He’s my friend. Was my friend. It’s—I don’t know.”
Behind the chemical fog in her hazel eyes, something kindled.
“I don’t want his money, if that’s what you mean. I’m not trying to use him or anything like that.” She still hadn’t moved; as far as I could tell, she hadn’t even blinked. That conversational void pulled more words out of me. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to say that you will leave, that you will end all contact with my son, and that you will never return.”
I stared at her for a moment.
“I am, of course, willing to compensate you.”
The violin shrieked in the distance, but this time, I didn’t startle. I burst out laughing.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said. “You’re as bad as he is.”
Nothing crossed her face, but she set the pencil down and sat back, hands flat on the desk.
“What’s the problem?” I asked. “What’s such a big fucking deal that nobody can wait to get me out of the picture? I’m a bad influence? I’m corrupting Holmes by treating him like a human being? I’m a distraction? He can’t focus on his mission while I’m hanging around? I’m an embarrassment to all Watsons, is that it? You, and Blackfriar, and Tom, and everybody else—what’s the matter?”
“You are a vulnerability. And my son cannot afford to be vulnerable.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. That kind of crazy bullshit. I’m not a vulnerability for H. We make each other better. He told me that, you know. Not about me. Before he knew—he told me about the Holmeses and the Watsons, how they were at their best when they were together. And that’s true; I’ve seen it. I’m living proof of it.”
“My son is a child, and he indulges in childish fantasies.” For the first time since I’d met Cecilia, color rose in her cheeks, and something seemed to burn off the chemical haze in her eyes. “The Holmeses are not better when they are with a Watson. They are more human.”
“News flash: that’s better. He’s not a robot, and he’s not a soldier, and he’s not a famous detective from a hundred years ago. He’s a sixteen-year-old boy who’s been brainwashed, and yeah, he’s a genius, and yeah, he’s special, but he needs someone who cares about him. Someone who reminds him he’s human.”
Cecilia leaned forward, her mouth opening. Then she seemed to change her mind and shut it again. She reached for the laptop on the desk, pulled it closer, tapped the touchpad. It woke immediately, without a password, and she navigated through a series of pages until the screen changed again, and a video began to play. When she turned it toward me, I saw Holmes.
He was standing on something that reminded me of a wrestling mat, and he favored one side, as though he couldn’t quite straighten up. The camera angle didn’t show the walls of the room, so it was hard to tell how big the space was—or, for that matter, where he was. His hair was disheveled, and although it was hard to tell through the footage, one cheek looked red, as though he’d been struck. It took me a moment to realize he was wearing the pink oxford that Paxton had picked out for him.
“What is this?” I asked, head coming up, but Cecilia’s face was carved ivory. “Is this right now?”
“It is called baritsu.”
“What does that mean? What’s he doing to H?”
She didn’t answer, and movement on the screen made me turn my attention back to Holmes. He was circling, moving in that loose, liquid fighting stance that I recognized from all the hours we’d spent sparring. The pose was different, though; with every step, it was obvious that not only was he favoring his right side, but he looked exhausted. He was slower, choppier, the familiar grace of his body marred and fractured. It was like someone had taken my Holmes and made a video of him and played it back at a quarter of the normal speed.
I didn’t realize there was audio until Blackfriar spoke: “Again.”
Holmes moved forward, and Blackfriar moved into view. He was still dressed in the sharkskin suit, and his movements were the same as ever: oil and well-machined gears and clockwork ballet. As I watched, Holmes closed with his father, and for a moment, he moved like my Holmes again: the boy who was a whirlwind, a rushing river, a shooting star.
Blackfriar was faster. He slid away from Holmes’s blows, and he made it look like he wasn’t even trying. Then, somehow, he had moved behind Holmes, and I saw that Blackfriar carried a cane in one hand. He lashed out with it now, the thin length of black wood a blur on the video feed, and the air cracked as it connected with Holmes.
“No son of mine is so slow,” Blackfriar said.
Stumbling, Holmes cried out. It sounded more like a sob. He righted himself, regrouped, faced his father. But it was clear from the way he held himself that the blow had done something to him. His arm—the arm where he’d been cut—hung at his side, and blood soaked the sleeve of his shirt.
I scrambled out of my chair. “Where are they?”
“Sit down.”
“He needs me!” My shout rang out in the study.
Cecilia’s face remained untouched. It didn’t matter; I didn’t need her. I’d find Holmes on my own. I started to turn. Then I saw the gun in her hand. Small. Tiny. A nickel-plated revolver. And pointed right at me.
“Sit down,” she said.
“You’re his mother, for fuck’s sake.” On the screen, Holmes was staggering, trying to keep himself upright. It looked like so much blood. My face prickled. My eyes were hot and wet. “He needs you. How can you let this happen?”
“Sit and watch. And then tell me, Jack, that human is better.”
“Say the word, my son,” Blackfriar was saying on the screen. “Tell me you’re done, and you can rest, and I will…speak with Jack.”
Holmes wavered on his feet. It was hard to tell, but he must have shook his head because Blackfriar let out a small, disgusted noise and started to turn.
The assault was lumbering, almost comically bad, as if Holmes were doing a poor impersonation of himself. He charged Blackfriar, and Blackfriar moved like a snake. The cane connected once with Holmes’s knee, and then again across his back, and Holmes fell. He caught himself on one knee. His whole body shook as he struggled for breath. I watched him try to push himself up. Watched, and did nothing, as Holmes brought that tremendous will to bear, one more time, for me.
Then he sagged back down, his body trembling, hands spasming against the mat.
“Why,” Blackfriar asked in a tone of mild disappointment, “must you always choose the harder path?”
It was like somebody had wiped my mind clean. A white haze haloed the edges of my vision. Bells were ringing inside my head. I moved, and Cecilia said something, the revolver jabbing toward me.
I couldn’t parse the words, but I heard myself saying from a long way off, “Then shoot me, you fucking bitch.”
I ran.
The bells were louder, filling my head. My haloed vision collapsed into a tunnel. I knew the hallway they’d taken; I’d start there, and I’d kick down every goddamn door in this place until I found him. I shouldn’t have left him. The thought kept time with my feet hitting the floor. I shouldn’t have let him go.
When I passed through the vaulted entry hall, though, Noneley had the front door open, and Rivera and Yazzie were standing there. Not bells in my head, a voice said, because I’d been stupid again. Literal bells. The doorbell. Rivera went to say something and then clocked me again, his face changing into something like fury.
