Where All Paths Meet, page 32
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
With another of those muzzy noises, Tom rolled onto his side. I forced him face down and pinned him to the deck, never taking my gaze away from the Holmeses.
“He is my friend,” Holmes murmured.
“He is nothing,” Blackfriar said. “And you—you are a fool. You are a failure. You are weak. And you are a disgrace to our house. To think that I called you my son.”
Tom squawked a half-conscious laugh.
And everything tumbled into place. The photo in the study. The hair samples in the safe. The genealogical book that Tom had pored over, and the death dates that he’d penciled in. The secret he’d held over Blackfriar Holmes’s head. What I’d been asking myself since I met Blackfriar. The way Blackfriar had said, No son of mine.
For a moment, the enormity of it staggered me. All I could do was watch as Blackfriar stepped forward, as he closed the distance with Holmes, as he said, “Ask me for my forgiveness.” Holmes bit his lip, and Blackfriar made a disgusted sound. Seizing Holmes by the jaw, fingers biting into Holmes’s flesh so hard that they left white marks in the already pale skin, Blackfriar said, “I thought we had broken you of that. Perhaps a reminder is in order.”
It might kill him, a small voice in my head told me. If you tell him, it might destroy him.
But no one had told him the truth, not once, in his whole life. It had always been games and tricks and webs of deceit.
“He’s not your dad.”
The wind picked up. The pelicans moved like charcoal over the clean canvas of the sky. Holmes went still in Blackfriar’s grip, and Blackfriar’s body coiled like a spring.
When the wind died, I said, “Blackfriar. He’s not your father. Not your biological one.”
“He’s lying—” Blackfriar began.
“You don’t look alike,” I said. “Your hair, your face. Maybe your eyes, but even those aren’t quite the same. And you don’t act the same. You move the same, but that’s because he’s trained you. And he’s never once been kind to you, H. I kept wondering—everyone kept wondering—how he could treat you like that, how he could do those things to his own son. But that’s the point: he didn’t.”
Holmes looked at me, and I saw the light go out of his eyes. Because he knew. Or he believed me, and it was the same thing. He looked smaller, like something vital had been bled from him and left less.
“That’s what Sarah figured out,” I said. “The hair samples in the safe. They weren’t so she could frame the Holmeses and blackmail them. She did a paternity test. Tom figured it out too; he had that genealogy book, and something in there must have tipped him off. That’s what he was using to get close to your family. That’s the secret he was holding over Blackfriar’s head. When I found the gloves at the hotel, I thought maybe that’s how he was blackmailing him, but that didn’t make sense, because Tom had already gotten a hold over Blackfriar before he killed Baca.”
“This is ridiculous,” Blackfriar said.
In one smooth movement, Holmes broke Blackfriar’s hold. Livid impressions rose on his jawline where Blackfriar’s fingers had bit in. Holmes flung Blackfriar’s hand away and, his voice thick and posh, said, “You are never to touch me again.”
For a moment, rage ran through Blackfriar’s face: mindless, sweeping, untrammeled. It was like a forest fire in thick woods that were old and overgrown, where the blaze burns out of control. Reason and control ashed away, and what remained was a kind of insane fury.
His voice was frayed, slipping out of his control as he said, “Perhaps it is better this way. You were always a tremendous disappointment.”
The knife appeared in his hand like magic, and he drove the blade toward Holmes’s side. Holmes pivoted, but the attack had been a feint, and Blackfriar had already changed direction. He buried the knife in Holmes’s chest.
Shock wiped Holmes’s features clean. He wobbled from the force of the blow. His eyes roved, as though he were searching, and he found me.
“H,” I said. And then, “H!”
A grin pulled savagely at the corner of Blackfriar’s mouth as he released the blade. He turned, already dismissing Holmes from his reality, and looked at me. “Now, Jack. Let’s play a game.”
“No more games,” Holmes choked. And then Holmes grabbed him by the collar.
Blackfriar startled, and as the collar pulled tight around his throat, he choked. Holmes set himself against the rail. The knife still stuck out of his chest. Why isn’t he bleeding, a part of me thought. And then another part of me saw the way he had tensed himself, the last strength of his body summoned by that indomitable will, and I thought, No, please no. I screamed it. “No!”
Holmes pushed off with his feet, and he made the move look graceful as he rolled over the railing and fell. His grip was like iron, and he pulled Blackfriar with him. For a moment, they were a blur of movement, tumbling out of sight, and then they were gone.
I sprinted toward the rail, unable to stop myself.
And then I saw it, the hand I knew, the hand I had held, Holmes’s impossibly strong hand, wrapped around the base of one of the balusters. His knuckles were blanched from the force of his grip.
I grabbed his wrist, muscle and tendons tight and warm under my hand, and I felt, rather than heard, the relief that rolled through him.
Then, voice still shaded with posh, he said, “I have miscalculated, Jack. Blackfriar is holding on to my leg. I shall need you to help me back up.”
Chapter 34
I Want to See H
The police came. The ambulances. More police. Rivera and Yazzie, of course.
But not right away. Between the two of us, Holmes and I managed to get both him and Blackfriar back onto the deck. I borrowed Tom’s gun, since he didn’t need it anymore, and that went a long way toward keeping Blackfriar under control until Holmes could cuff him to a baluster. Baritsu was all well and good, and yes, frankly, it was fucking terrifying, but a lot of terrifying things are less terrifying from behind a .38.
Holmes warded off my attempts to, you know, get the knife out of his chest and perform lifesaving first aid.
“A covert stab vest, Jack,” he finally said, and he indicated the outline, barely visible under his clothes. Then he winced. His bloody arm still hung to one side, but with the good one, he probed at the laceration on his back. “Although this model did not cover me sufficiently.”
After that, he didn’t want to talk, which was good, because I didn’t have any idea what to say.
The responding officers didn’t have any better ideas than putting us all in cuffs, which didn’t seem particularly fair, but at least they ignored Blackfriar’s commands that they free him immediately. As higher-ups responded, and responsibility ran up the paygrade, the situation stabilized, and eventually, they took all of us to the hospital.
Since there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with me, once I’d had the burns and cut tended to, I got to sit in an ER cubicle while a bored uniformed officer from the Draper police scrolled on his phone. I thought that was a great idea, but they’d taken away my burner, along with everything else, so all I could do was lie there. They had some medical pamphlets on the countertop against the wall, but I decided to pass on Leaking? Burning? What to Know about Your Discharge.
Some super-spy must have flooded the hospital with sleeping gas or something because the next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake. I decided it was probably the superspy, and I figured whoever they were, they were doing all right without me, and I could probably sleep for a couple of years. Then somebody like Rivera said, “Stop faking.”
“Oh,” I said and opened my eyes. “Hey.”
He was back in the same cheap gray suit, or a clone of it, and he was rubbing his cauliflower ear. “What did I ever do to you?”
“Hi, Rivera.”
“I’ve always been fair. I’ve stuck my neck out for you.”
“I missed you.”
His jaw sagged.
“Did you miss me?” I asked.
“Perfect,” Yazzie said from the doorway. She was cleaning her glasses. “We’re in a hospital, so they can treat the stroke right away.”
After Rivera recovered, he and Yazzie interviewed me. It was an interesting technique. It mostly consisted of Yazzie asking questions and Rivera shouting, “You could have been killed, dumbass.” Sometimes he changed it up. Sometimes he asked me if I was stupid, or how stupid I was, or if I knew how stupid that particular decision had been. It was a surprisingly effective technique; I told them everything.
At some point during the interview, Dad came into the cubicle, and I stopped talking so I could half-fall off the exam table and crash into him. He staggered back, and we got tangled in the privacy curtain. The curtain rings shimmied and chimed along the rod, and Dad grunted and laughed and squeezed me back, and Yazzie had to help both of us before we fell and took the curtain with us.
“Where were you?” I asked, questions spilling out faster than Dad could answer them. “What happened? Did he hurt you?”
And at the same time, Dad was asking, “Are you ok? What happened? Why didn’t you stay in the cottage?”
The short version seemed to be that Dad was fine, albeit embarrassed about having to explain how he’d shown up at the Grange, immediately been disarmed and taken hostage, and then rescued hours later by police. I did my own quick recap, and I tried to ignore the fear and worry in Dad’s eyes.
Dad sat while we finished the interview, but it didn’t take much longer.
“Was Holloway telling the truth?” I asked. “Did he really turn over all that evidence to the police?”
Yazzie nodded.
“That’s good, right? That means you’ve got everything you need to charge him with murder.”
Rivera rubbed his eyes. Yazzie looked away.
“What?” I asked.
“Jack,” Rivera said.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I said. Ok, maybe a little louder than normal, because a nurse pulled back the curtain and raised his eyebrows.
Dad waved the nurse off, drew the curtain shut, and said, “Jack.”
“Ok, fine,” I said in a lower voice, “but you’ve got to be shitting me. He’s going to walk?”
“Nobody said he’s going to walk,” Rivera said. He dropped his hands. His eyes were bloodshot. “Jack, the gloves, the hair, the powder—that’s solid stuff. They’ve got amazing stuff now, and they did the preliminary tests, I’m talking ninety minutes to get an answer, and they rushed them through. It’s Blackfriar’s DNA on the inside of the gloves. And the hair belonged to Lynnissa Baca. So, we’ll nail him on that.”
“Especially since that boy is about to flip,” Yazzie said, and I figured she meant Tom.
“What about Maggie?”
“That’s a problem,” Rivera said. “We need to coordinate with Park City, or whoever’s handling it. There’s no record of emergency services responding to a call to the location you described. No record of Margaret Moriarty being found—dead or alive. As far as anyone official is concerned, she’s still in the air.”
I tried to think about what to say to that, but I kept seeing, in my head, the driver of the ambulance we had passed. He had looked familiar; that’s what I’d thought at the time. But from where?
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Rivera continued. “If Tom flips—and I think Yazzie’s right; he’s on the edge already—he might be able to give us Blackfriar for that one too.”
“Ok, so what’s the problem?” I said. And then it hit me, and I said, “Are you serious? He killed my mom.”
“Jack,” Dad said softly.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Hey,” Dad said, a little louder this time. “Knock it off.”
“He killed her. You’ve got it on video, and what? You’re not going to do anything.”
“Of course we’re going to do something,” Rivera snapped.
“It’s complicated,” Yazzie said. “The video doesn’t show the accident itself. We don’t know who that man is, the one accompanying Blackfriar.”
“He’s the same guy who tried to kill me in December. He’s the same fucking guy!”
“Yeah?” Rivera asked. “Do you have a name? An address? How about a Social Security number?”
“Fuck you! What the fuck do you think your job is?”
“Jack!” Dad barked.
“You’ve got his fingerprints on her necklace. You can see him in the video. You can see he took something; you can see he’s carrying it.”
“Nothing is final yet,” Yazzie said, “but we already know the prosecutor won’t bring anything against the Holmes family that isn’t airtight. The accident happened almost two years ago, Jack. And there’s just not enough.”
My face felt tingly and numb and puffy all at the same time. I lay back on the exam table and closed my eyes.
“Yet,” Rivera said. “There’s not enough yet.”
I knew he was trying, so I nodded.
They talked quietly to Dad for a couple of minutes. Then they left.
A chair squeaked as it was pulled across the linoleum, and then Dad breathed out as he lowered himself to sit. After a few seconds, he rubbed my leg.
I shook my head and screwed my eyes shut tighter.
“It’s ok, buddy. You did good. You did so good. Your mom would be so proud of you.”
I shook my head again and put my hands over my face.
“Hey,” Dad said. “Hey, come on. We know, and that’s something. And Detective Rivera and Detective Yazzie know, and they’re going to work on it. And he’s going to prison, Jack. He’ll spend the rest of his life there. It doesn’t matter why.”
But I didn’t say anything to that because we both knew it wasn’t true.
Finally, I sat up. “I want to see H.”
Dad looked at some spot in the middle distance. His hand paused on my leg, and then, after a moment, resumed rubbing my shin again.
“What?” I asked.
“Buddy.”
“Is he ok?”
“He’s fine.”
“Are you sure? Did you talk to his doctor? Because sometimes H acts like everything’s ok, and then you find out he’s been shot with a dart full of ketamine or he tore his stitches open or—” I slid across the exam table, the paper rustling underneath me. “If he’s asleep, I won’t wake him—”
“Buddy, he doesn’t want to see you.” Dad seemed to hear that, how it sounded, and he said quickly, “I mean, he asked them not to let you into his room. He—he wants some privacy right now.”
But I hurt him. Those were the first words that came to my head, mile high and neon. But I told him the worst thing in the world. I ripped the foundation of his universe out from under him. And I had to do it, and I want him to know that I only did it because I had to, but that doesn’t change how much it hurt him, or that I was the one to do it. And I need to know he’s ok.
What came out was, “But I need to see him.”
“I know, buddy. He’s ok. We’ll see him tomorrow, when he’s feeling better.”
I couldn’t help myself. The tears came faster than I could blink them away.
Dad shushed me. He rubbed the small of my back.
It was everything: physical and emotional and mental exhaustion, and the backwash that came after all the adrenaline had poured out of me, and the disappointment of learning that Blackfriar would skate on Mom’s murder—and the murder of God only knew how many other Watsons. But most of all it was this. The knowledge that I had hurt Holmes so badly that he didn’t want to see me.
With a grunt, Dad got up from the chair. He got up on the exam table next to me, and he pulled me against his shoulder, and he let me cry.
Chapter 35
What an Interesting Question
I didn’t see Holmes the next day. Dad and I drove up to the U of U hospital again, and we spent hours struggling with a web of bureaucracy, first being shuffled from one person to another, and then waiting, and then being shuffled around some more, until finally a gray-faced old man told us, apologetically, that he couldn’t even confirm that Holloway was still in the hospital.
“Patients have a right to privacy,” he said. “You understand.”
Dad had to drag me out of the hospital. And I mean drag, literally.
The next day, I found where Dad had hidden my keys, and I tried the hospital again. By myself.
Dad had to bail me out of the security office. It probably would have been worse—I’d punched one of the guards—but I had the feeling someone had called someone who had called Rivera, and that was the only reason I wasn’t cooling off in a cell.
When we got home, Dad sat me on the couch and stood over me. “That boy has a right to be left alone,” he said, his voice quiet and even. “I know you care about him—”
“I need to see him.”
Dad sat on the coffee table, which was hard for him because his mobility was still impaired. He waited until I finally looked him in the eye, and he waited some more until I broke and looked away.
“He cares about you too, Jack. But he needs some time.”
“What if he doesn’t?” I asked, and I pulled up my shirt to wipe my nose. “What if he’s gone again? What if it’s like last time?”
“It’s not like last time,” Dad said.
“I just need to see him for, like, five minutes.”
“Buddy,” Dad said, and then paused. “Jack.”
I ran my sleeve over my eyes. I looked at him.
“You’re being selfish,” Dad said, and he stood, and he hugged me against him, and he said, “It’s going to be ok.”
Then he made me give him the keys to the truck, and he sent me to my room.
I was vaguely aware that finals were happening, that school was ending, that kids were going home. I’d been excused from my finals, I guess. Or maybe I’d failed all my classes. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.
It took me longer, the next day, to find where Dad had hidden the keys. But the nice part about being worried out of your skull, like, so worried you might be legally insane, is that you’re motivated and you have a lot of free time on your hands. So, I found them, and I drove to the Grange.
