The Old Wheel, page 32
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“Who met him there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who was walking through the tunnels with you?”
“A lot of people!”
Holmes stood and dusted his knees. “He’s worthless.”
“I was blitzed, man.” Aston rubbed red eyes. “It’s all a blur.”
“You’re blitzed now,” I said.
He hugged himself and wouldn’t look at me. “It’s my fault,” he finally said. “He’s dead. Daw’s dead, and Kazen’s dead, and it’s my fault. I asked him to come here.”
“What about the night of the party? I heard you say you were going to your room; you knew Kazen was coming, but when we went upstairs, you weren’t there.”
“You heard me say that?”
“Focus. Where were you?”
“Downstairs. Some of my dad’s friends wanted to talk to me. They all wanted to talk to me because of the videos, not that they’d say it to my face.”
“Did you see anybody go upstairs?”
Helplessness bled across his face, and he shrugged.
I threw Holmes a look, but Holmes only said, “Watch him,” and started for the stairs.
“H, the master bedroom is down here.”
“I know,” floated back to me from the stairs.
Aston shivered and stared at the floor. The dishwasher swished and rattled.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing his arm.
“What—”
“He said to watch you, so come on.”
I propelled Aston up the stairs in front of me. When we got to the hall, the light in Camdyn’s room was on, the sound of hangers sliding on a rod reached me. I steered Aston through the doorway. Holmes had dumped out Camdyn’s hamper, and clothes were scattered across the floor. As I watched, he gave a disgusted shake of his head and shut the closet’s double doors. He turned to the dresser and opened a jewelry box.
“Uh, H?” I said.
Aston tried to take a step forward. “Stay out of my sister’s stuff, you pervert.”
I hauled him back, and he gave me a wounded look. “H?”
“I’m quite busy, Jack.”
“Want to explain what you’re doing? You know, while you’re being busy.”
“I made a mistake.”
“Let me go out on a limb: I made a mistake too.”
He raised his head long enough to offer me the glint of dry amusement in his eyes. Going back to his search, he said, “We made a mistake. We knew, as soon as Dawson was killed, that two parties were involved. I was angry at myself for letting Paxton distract me; I was overeager to believe that by unraveling the events behind Dawson’s death, I might find out who had arranged things.”
“Ok, maybe I didn’t make a mistake. That wasn’t my theory.”
“No, that’s not the mistake I was referring to. The mistake that we both made was in believing that similar motivations drove both of our perpetrators. You asked the question, who could hate Aston enough to do this to him? But it should have been obvious we had it wrong. Paxton and Dawson didn’t hate him; they wanted money. Yet when Dawson was killed and the blackmail leaked, we continued to ask the same question.” He opened a drawer and began dumping out Camdyn’s underwear. “Who hated Aston enough to do such a thing—to frame him for the murder of his best friend and lover, and then, to add insult to injury, to expose the motive by releasing videos of their sexual encounters?” Holmes inspected the drawer’s underside and set it aside with a noise of disgust. “We had it wrong the whole time.”
The wind shrieked around the house. I had this momentary mental image of something huge, something vast, a beast of snow and ice with the house gripped in its jaws. The wolf of winter.
“Ok, well,” I said, “I’m using my amazing powers of deduction to guess that the person behind all this is Camdyn, since we’re searching her room. But she wouldn’t release those videos, H. And she definitely wouldn’t frame him for murder. She did everything she could to protect him—including going up against his psycho parents. No offense.”
“No, man,” Aston said, “they’re legit psycho.”
“In the first place,” Holmes began, “deduction does not yield guesses—”
“Forget I said deduction,” I cut in quickly.
“—and in the second place—”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes for Aston’s benefit.
“—deduction relies on premises that, if true, always yield a true conclusion.”
“It’s my fault,” I said. “Never say deduction. Never ever say deduction.”
This time, Aston rolled his eyes, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t for my benefit, but he said, “He’s right, H. I mean, um, Holloway. Cam wouldn’t do this. She’s the only one who’s nice to me. I mean, she’s a total bitch sometimes about stuff like, well, everything, but she’s actually a decent human being, and she cares about me.”
Holmes let out that dry little huff that passed for his laugh most of the time. “That’s what puzzled me and Jack, of course. Who would do such a thing? Who could hate you enough to do it? And, of course, that was our mistake.”
A voice behind me, cool and feminine and slightly shaking, said, “But not your only one.”
I started to turn. Steel snubbed up against my neck. The muzzle of a gun.
“Cam?” Aston said, facing the door. “I thought you had an event.”
“Don’t move,” Camdyn said. “Mr. Holmes, show me your hands. I’d hate for something bad to happen to your friend.”
Holmes stared at her. Then, slowly, he lifted his hands and displayed them.
Most of the power to my brain was off, big sections of it going dark. Sweat broke out everywhere—cold flop sweat on my forehead and chest and back and underarms.
“Would you like me to tell him?” Holmes asked. “It might be easier, hearing it from someone else.”
Camdyn trembled. The gun dug into my nape hard enough to hurt. When she spoke, her voice was almost unrecognizable. “No more talking.”
“Cam, what’s going on?”
She took a few deep breaths. Her free hand closed around my collar, and her nails felt cold and smooth between my shoulder blades. “I’m taking care of things.”
“What do you mean? They’re—they’re helping me.”
“Get in the closet.”
Aston’s silence lasted a beat too long. “Is that a gay joke?”
“Aston, get in the goddamn closet!” she screamed.
Aston flinched and took a couple of nervous steps toward the louvered doors.
“Now! Right now! What don’t you understand?”
“Cam—”
Her next scream was wordless and full of helpless fury. Aston blanched and yanked open one of the closet doors. He fumbled it, trying to pull it shut, and then, finally, it clicked.
“Tie the handles,” Cam said. Her voice was still thick, the words heavy and distorted. “We don’t want him to get out and call the police, do we?”
Holmes nodded. He found a scarf in the mixture of clothes on the floor, and he looped it around the handles of the closet doors. Every movement was steady, assured. A Holmes must always be in control. A Jack, on the other hand, was allowed to piss himself, I figured, if he had a lunatic jamming a gun against his neck.
When Holmes had finished, he displayed empty hands again. “Camdyn, the police are already investigating your family. Your time has run out. The best thing you can do now—for everyone, including Aston—is put the gun down and let us contact the authorities.”
In the seconds that followed, her breaths came rapid and shallow, like she was on the verge of crying. Then her hand tightened on my collar, and she yanked me back a step. “I said no more talking. Come on.”
I moved backward with her, all my focus on keeping my footing so that I didn’t fall. I had the sense that if I was no longer useful as a hostage, she might blow my head off, and lately, I’d been pretty attached to my head. It’s what I used to kiss H with. A wild giggle started in my chest at that thought, and I had to fight to clamp it down. It took everything I had to concentrate on walking, on breathing, on not tipping over into a total batshit meltdown.
The stairs were the worst part. She moved the gun to the base of my spine and her other hand to my waistband, and she said, “It might not kill you down here, but it’ll be enough.”
So, I stumbled down the steps backward, blindly, my heart pounding behind my eyes. If she slipped. If she came down wrong, and her finger tightened automatically. If the dishwasher sang its happy song when she wasn’t expecting it.
Holmes came with us, keeping a ten-foot gap. His face was unreadable, but his eyes were intent and fixed on me. I focused on him. Holloway Holmes. The water-silk of his movements. The hollow fires of his rage. The tremendous power of mind and spirit that worked through him. In another time, they would have called him god-touched, and he had let me hold his hand.
We made it down the stairs, and she walked us through the kitchen, the silverware still clinking, and out into the garage. The cold met my fevered cheeks like the edge of a knife. A black Infiniti sedan was parked in the middle of the garage, and Camdyn moved us around it until we stood at the back of the car. She released my collar long enough to do something, and the car beeped, and the trunk popped open.
“Get in,” she said.
I took a step, but she caught my collar and pulled me back. “You.”
Something flickered in Holmes’s expression.
Seeing it, whatever it was, woke something in me. I’d let her haul me around like a sack of potatoes, and yeah, that had been shock and whatever else. Now, though, the first wave of terror had broken, and I found my voice. “You don’t have to do this. Please, Camdyn, we’re trying to help Aston.”
“Get in the trunk,” she said again.
Holmes hesitated. Then he lifted one unscuffed chukka. It had salt and water stains from the snow; he’d have to get rid of the pair because he couldn’t wear them like that. It was probably driving him crazy. It was the kind of thing we’d have to work on, something maybe I could help him with. I realized my brain was slipping again, trying to find a mouse hole to slip through so it wouldn’t have to deal with the gun at my neck.
“Camdyn, you don’t hate Aston. You love him. Why are you doing this? You’re his sister.”
She let out a bizarre little laugh, and the muzzle dug into my flesh.
“No, Jack,” Holmes said, but his gaze had moved past me to Camdyn. “She’s not his sister. She’s his mother. Aren’t you?”
Camdyn’s fingers flexed, nails scratching my back. Then she said, “The trunk. Now.”
Holmes nodded. He climbed into the trunk, folding himself up to fit. If anyone could look neat and packed away and perfectly comfortable in the trunk of a mid-sized sedan, it was Holloway Holmes. Apparently. When Camdyn told me to, I shut it. The last thing I saw was Holmes, his gaze meeting mine, the look calm and confident. His eyes were the silver of the moon.
“Get in front,” Camdyn said, and she shoved me toward the driver’s door. “You’re driving.”
Chapter 29
Darkness and Snow
We drove across Heber—at least, that’s what I think we did. I was behind the wheel, but I was on autopilot: turning when Camdyn told me to turn, stopping when she told me to stop. She sat behind me, and for the first few miles, she kept the gun pressed against my neck. Then she sagged back, and the gun dropped away. I got my first glimpse of her in the rearview mirror: makeup ruined, face sallow, hair flat and wet from snowmelt. I hadn’t realized she’d been crying.
And then we were through Heber, hurtling down the darkness of a canyon: the bones of the mountain, the black brushes of cottonwood and willow, slashes of silver—water, but not the Provo. The storm had intensified. When the winds were strongest, snow billowed against the windshield in a total whiteout, and all I could do was grip the wheel and maintain course until the wipers let me see again.
“Are you his mom?” I asked. I wet my lips and tried to work moisture into my throat. “Really?”
“No talking,” she said dully. Then she gave that weird laugh again. “What am I doing? What in the world am I doing?”
“It’s not too late. We can stop. Pull over. We can wait here for the police.”
She said nothing. We drove, and the wipers scraped the windshield. She needed to replace them—they squeaked every time, both directions. The kind of thing that, another day, would have driven me crazy. One thing about guns? They’re great for perspective.
“You hear on TV—” Her voice was small, almost lost in the sound of the tires churning slush. “—all those stories about moms who lift a car off their child, or who throw themselves into a river, or who fight off a dog. It sounds made up. People are people. Some of them are good. Some of them are not so good. Having another person come out of you, it doesn’t change any of that.”
We drove another mile. I blinked; one of the vents was pointed at my face, and my eyes were dry. “Maybe it’s not having a person come out of you. Maybe it’s loving someone.”
She was quiet for so long, I thought she wouldn’t answer. But then she said, “How did you know?”
“I didn’t. Holmes did. But now that he said it, I can see it too. The age gap, sure. I think about it now, and yeah, I should have wondered. A sister that much older, I think she wouldn’t have been in his life much. She wouldn’t have shown up on campus, swooping in like a surrogate mother. The way you treated him when you came to his dorm room. My mom sounded the same way when she got after me about my room. And we heard that argument you had with your parents. You were so worried about him.”
She let out a long breath. “You’re sweet. I can see why Aston likes you. Not that he’d ever admit it; he’s so scared about fitting in, about being liked. We did that to him, of course. But when he was a child, he was so—so open. So loving. Sometimes, I’d hold him, and I thought it was too much. That my body couldn’t hold all of what I was feeling. I’d give him to my mom, and I’d go to my room, or I’d go to the store. Anything so I didn’t have to feel so much.” In the rearview mirror, I saw her slump against the door, her cheek fogging the window. “I was fifteen, and I thought I was in love, and he was persuasive. He was desperate, which was its own kind of persuasiveness. That anyone could want me so much. When my parents found out, they were furious. My dad was a stake president at the time. His father was on the shortlist to become an apostle. After they calmed down, when they explained everything, I understood. It seemed so simple. Necessary, even. I spent a year studying abroad.” She gave the two words a bitter edge. “I came home to meet my baby brother. Everyone was so happy. So excited. It was a miracle, wasn’t it?”
“Aston doesn’t know? Seriously?”
“How could he? I’m his older sister. He was my parents’ mid-life surprise. It’s an easy explanation. We look alike, but then, of course we do. We thought it would be better this way.”
Asphalt and snow and black ice sped past us. The wind buffeted the car, and I had to fight the Infiniti to keep it on the road—and, I hoped, in the right lane.
“Is that why you killed Dawson?” I asked. “Because he was threatening Aston?”
When I looked in the mirror, she was checking her hair, and for a moment, our eyes met. Her gaze slid away. “I didn’t mean to. I told you the truth: someone contacted the family. They wanted money. We were willing to pay. I met him in the tunnels, and—and I couldn’t believe it. I knew Dawson. He’d come home with Aston. He’d been polite to my parents. He wasn’t the kind of guy I wanted Aston to be with, not forever, but I could tell he was fun, and he was into Aston, and it was…good, I thought. Good for Aston to be with someone who wanted him. Good for Aston to have a chance to be himself, his real self. And then there he was, with that smug smile, like—like it hadn’t meant anything. I tried to talk to him; all he cared about was the money. I gave it to him.” Her voice changed, opening into something between disbelief and amazement. “And he wouldn’t give me the videos. He said he’d keep them safe. He said nobody would ever see them. But I knew. Right then, I knew he was going to keep doing it.” She swallowed, the sound audible even over the Infiniti’s engine. “I don’t remember it. I was so mad.”
I tried to keep my eyes on the road, but they slid to the rearview mirror. She was waiting for me, watching me, death in her face. I yanked my attention back to the road. My brain started talking, trying to cover up that moment, and I heard myself saying, “And then Aston showed up.”
“He was supposed to meet Dawson, he told me, but he was confused.” She laughed. “He was stoned. I need to stop doing that. I need to stop…editing. I think he was early. I don’t know; that’s the only thing I can think. Or he’d followed Dawson. It might have been that. Aston is insecure about a lot of things. He can get jealous.”
“You tried to help him. We thought you were trying to get him away from there, maybe kidnap him. But you were trying to take care of him.”
“He needs it,” Camdyn said with dry amusement. “He can’t take care of himself. I tried telling him that if he’d wait, if he’d play their game, they wouldn’t be able to touch him once he turned eighteen. But he wouldn’t listen. He wants so much, and he wants it so badly—to be seen, to be known, to be loved. I tried to give it to him, but it wasn’t enough. There was the boy at Scout camp. And then, when he didn’t learn his lesson, there was Dawson. And then that awful security guard was extorting money from him, and I thought maybe that would be the thing that made him stop, think, be smart.” A click came from the back seat. The sound of metal—something on the gun. My chest tightened until I wasn’t sure I could draw another breath. “He’s a child still,” she said as though speaking to herself now. “It’s not his fault.”
“It’s not anybody’s fault,” I said. I had to force myself to suck in air, and I felt dizzy. “Nothing is anybody’s fault. We can pull over.”
“They were going to send him away to one of those camps. They were going to cover it up. Again. Just like last time. Make it all go away.” She let out a weird laugh. “I was going to do it too. I took the pictures from his room, the blackmail note, all of it. And then I realized the truth had to come out. They won’t be able to cover this up. The videos are out there; everyone knows. And me…” She trailed off, the words dissolving in the dark.
