Lock & Mori Read online

  “Watkins?” I said as a question to the arm I’d grabbed. I was hoping the arm’s owner would point me in the right direction and maybe even confirm that was the boyfriend’s name. Turns out I had unfortunate luck.

  He scowled. “I’m Watson. But I prefer John, if it’s all the same. Let go of my arm.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure this Watson was the one, so I said, “The bloke Lily dates. You remember his name?”

  John’s eyes narrowed and he pulled his arm from my grasp. “What do you want with her?”

  “I don’t want anything with her. At present, I want to know the name of her boy.”

  John sighed and shook his head. “I’ll give you a hint: His name isn’t Watkins.”

  “It’s you, then?”

  He seemed to grow more suspicious with my smile, so I dropped it. “What do you want with her?”

  “Nothing, I said. It’s just that . . . well, I’ve just heard about her dad.”

  “That’s none of your business.” He started to walk away, which sent my mind spinning for a way to stop him.

  “Wait.” I didn’t mean to grab his arm, but he was forced to pull free again, this time stepping out of my reach and deepening his frown. I was evidently rubbish at getting information out of people. “No, I know. I just felt I should give my condolences or something. I mean, we’ve been in school a few years together.”

  John’s expression melted into either mild distrust or acute wariness, whichever kept his eyebrows from sinking permanently into the cavernous wrinkle at the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, well, I’ll tell her.”

  “I’d like to tell her myself,” I said quickly. “Will she be back to school soon?”

  He shook his head. “Not for a while yet.”

  “Will there be a memorial?”

  He stared at me through his bangs with pursed lips. I stared back. “Saturday. Two p.m.”

  Chapter 6

  The rest of drama practically dragged on forever. I couldn’t seem to sit still out in the audience, like I normally would’ve, watching as each of those students wanting to be graded as a director ran a scene, none of which included Lily’s character. My attempts at standing side stage quickly turned into a kind of rocking, twisting dance that irritated even myself. At last, I gave up and took to pacing behind the backdrop curtain, until I spotted a rodent-type animal that looked at me in a rather threatening way as I neared it. I tried glaring back, but it stood its ground until I was obviously forced to spin around and flee with my life.

  Rodents. Horrible, pointless things.

  Finally, the bell rang, and it was all I could do not to rip the costume from my body the minute I got into the dressing room. No idea why it was suddenly so urgent for me to be at the Regent’s Park boat dock with the speed of the demons. Thankfully, I caught myself before I got too near and was able to slow my pace to a disinterested stroll. Just because I had some sort of news didn’t at all mean that I would be joining Sherlock’s game.

  Or tell him about it.

  “You’re here,” he announced as I walked up.

  “I promised.”

  “Yes, well, promises, in my experience, mean very little. Still, well done.”

  Honestly, he was the most infuriating, condescending, ridiculous—

  “Shall we?” He waved toward the little boathouse, ignorant of my internal ranting.

  He seemed twitchy as we walked. He kept taking turns staring at the path ahead and down at my hand. This left me feeling more than a little self-conscious about my bloody hand of all things. I kept wondering what he was seeing, what scar or smudge or chip in my polish would give him insight into my heritage, personality, or personal grooming habits.

  About the time I expected him to declare that I had eaten salmon last Wednesday and would become an ardent Catholic in my seventies, I decided that this “observe and judge” quirk was his most irritating quality. I sighed and was just about to ask him what on earth was so damned fascinating about my hand when he reached across the gap between us and took it in his. He instantly calmed, and, despite my surprise, I felt my own inner tension soothe as well. I even smiled a bit. There was something wretchedly endearing about Sherlock’s manner. Even when he was irritating.

  He, of course, had no idea what to do with my hand once he held it, and quickly returned to his twitchy ways. Luckily, I had only a few steps left to tolerate his grasping and swinging until we reached the window outside the café, where boats could be rented. All the while, I was determined not to acknowledge the familiarity I felt when we were together. I sometimes wasn’t sure if I was compensating for his awkwardness, or if this strange boy actually made me feel . . . whatever it was that makes one feel at home with a stranger. Like I’d known him forever.

  As payback for this inner treachery, I made him struggle for almost a full minute with trying to remove his ID and money from his wallet one-handed before letting go of his hand, a thought that clearly hadn’t occurred to him.

  Our boat was a blue fiberglass thing with a light wood floor, two blue benches, and orange oars. Number 28.

  “Any thoughts on our case?” he asked, once we were out on the water.

  I, in fact, had many, but I covered with, “You first.”

  “How shall we start our little game?”

  “I’m not sure I want to play yet.”

  His eyes practically lit up with the news. “Oh, well. I can’t blame you for being intimidated, having so much less experience with these things.”

  “Oh? Solved a lot of crimes, have you?”

  That was evidently the exact right thing to say. I hated how much he was enjoying this. “I meant with deductive reasoning. The crime is incidental to the puzzle.”

  “Our schoolmate’s father is dead, but, yes—incidental.”

  He shrugged off my sarcasm. “Still, I’ll understand if—”

  I knew what he was doing. He couldn’t have been more obvious, and still I interrupted his smug ridiculousness with, “You worry about you. I’ll worry about me.”

  I watched as his lip twitched, but he managed to suppress whatever expression might have escaped. “I thought you weren’t going to play.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I thought you should know there’s to be a memorial. Tomorrow at two. I’m invited.”

  He couldn’t have known it was a lie, no matter how high his brows raised after I’d said it.

  “You may tag along if you’d like.”

  I was pretty sure that his next expression was mocking, but he only said, “How kind of you.”

  “So . . .” I looked out over the lake and watched the swans for a bit.

  “We should probably get started.”

  “And how would we do that?” I tried to act bored, and then added, “Were I to decide to play along. Which I haven’t yet.”

  “As you said.”

  My expression dared him to comment further. He did not. He was perhaps wiser than first impressions would indicate.

  “We should probably recognize up front that this will likely be some sort of mundane puzzle.”

  “Why?”

  “Because most puzzles are horribly mundane.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “Because until we have the data to prove otherwise, there is still the possibility that it will fascinate.”

  “And what’s so fascinating about a stabbing in the park? I’m sure they happen all the time.”

  I knew the answer, of course. I knew it before he smirked and leaned in closer than I would have preferred. I could have mouthed the words as he spoke them.

  “His hands were in his pockets.”

  The one clue that shouldn’t have meant anything, yet meant everything, because it didn’t make any sense at all. “It’s impossible.” I’d
spoken aloud unintentionally, and couldn’t seem to stop once I’d started. “There must be some alternative explanation. Perhaps the killer put his hands back in his pockets after the fact. It has to be something like that.”

  “Why in the world would he do it? There’s no reason.”

  “But it has to be,” I countered. “There isn’t a single scenario where a person being attacked would leave his hands in his pockets.”

  “If the killer was very close before he pulled out the knife, maybe Patel didn’t see it.”

  “After he was stabbed, then. It takes less than a second to rip your hands from your pockets. He would have tried to cover the wound. It’s in our nature to do it, even when we’re too late to stop the knife and it’s useless to stop the bleeding. We try. Until our last breath, we try.”

  Sherlock studied my face. Again. But I wasn’t willing to leave my train of thought, not even to indulge my irritation.

  “It’s impossible. I mean, the man would have to have been dead almost the second the knife entered his body, and . . . oh.” I let the scene play out once more in my mind, the same that had played as I looked at the tarp-covered body that night in the park. At the blood on the tree, which had been at the man’s back. At the umbrella, which hadn’t been his at all. “If it pierced through to mark the tree, it wasn’t a knife.”

  “A sword, then? But if you don’t buy him hiding a knife until the last minute, how exactly would he hide the length of a sword?”

  “Perhaps along the handle of—”

  Sherlock’s brow cleared before I could finish my thought, and he stood up, swaying the boat rather dangerously. “The umbrella!” he cried out. Half the lake was staring at us by the time I pulled him back down to his bench. “We’re brilliant at this.”

  I refused to smile as I put my ideas together aloud. “If he was pierced through to the wood of the tree.”

  “If it pierced through his heart and his spine.”

  “If that could even be done with any length of sword without the man lifting his hands from his pockets.”

  “It was dark,” Sherlock offered. “And perhaps it was a short sword.”

  “Tantó,” I said, at the same time Sherlock said, “Gladius!”

  “Roman,” Sherlock offered.

  I countered with, “Japanese. Ten inches long, super sharp, and used in martial arts for demonstrations.”

  “Ancient, two feet long, and most likely less widely available. You win.” Sherlock scowled. “It’s no good, though. Those things are all illegal. How would our killer get his hands on a sword, short or not? There probably isn’t a single one in London that isn’t under lock and key in some museum or historical society.”

  He was right, of course, but wrong at the same time, because I knew of at least one such sword in London. It was up in our attic, without a lock or key to speak of. That is, if Dad hadn’t found it and tossed it by now. I even remembered the day my mother showed me where she kept it, in the shadows of one of the beams, where no one would think to look, she said. My mother had endless secrets. She loved to tell them to me, and still it felt like I’d never come close to knowing anything really important about her. That was what she was like. She made you feel like you knew what no one else did, but really it was something useless, like where the sword was hidden.

  “Besides, they’ll never look in a copper’s house for illegal booty,” she had said. She was running her aikido forms, one hand holding the sword over her head, parallel to the roof. She held the position for one perfectly still moment, then sliced the sword through the air, impaling an invisible opponent in the neck behind her, before spinning to stab him again through the heart. For just that next moment, she was ferocious, deadly. I could believe she was a warrior—capable of anything.

  But then she glanced from her ghostly opponent to me and winked. She was my mum again, and when she smiled, every trace of the warrior was gone.

  “There are loads of weapons in the city,” I told Sherlock, deciding he didn’t need to know about Mum’s sword. “You know someone’s got one that was handed down to him from a family member or something.”

  He seemed to consider what I said, then dismissed it with a shake of his head.

  I shrugged. “It could have been any kind of long dagger. But do you think it’s possible to pierce a man through like that?” I followed my mother’s forms in my mind again and superimposed that over the crime scene, until they became one in my mind. Because if the killer had his back to Patel . . . “One to paralyze and one to kill him before he can even lift his hands to defend himself. Could the body have had two wounds?”

  He frowned. “Possible. But why two?”

  “One through the throat, which, if it cut into the spine, would stop movement to the hands.”

  “And kill him just the same.”

  “But what if it didn’t? What if the first missed the brain stem, the part that would kill a man instantly, but severed the spine in such a way that it created a C4 injury, so that he was left gasping and paralyzed. How high was the gash in the tree?”

  Sherlock nodded. “Yes. It was high up—perhaps too high for a thrust to Patel’s chest. Though I couldn’t see a second gash from where we were. But the blood could have obscured a second wound, yes?”

  “What if the killer really knew aikido? What if he was following a form he’d learned with a sword in class?” Without thinking, I lifted my arm over my head, holding an invisible sword just as my mom had. “Do you think we could have a trained assassin . . . ?”

  I let the ridiculous suggestion hang in the air before scowling at my own words. Sherlock seemed overly pleased by it, however.

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “If I knew, I would not have asked the question.” It would seem that every time I momentarily forgot how infuriating Sherlock was, he found a new way to remind me.

  Sherlock’s lips twitched before he spoke. “You obviously have some kind of martial arts experience.”

  “Took aikido classes with my mom when I was a kid, which I’m sure doesn’t count as—”

  “I take boxing. And fencing. We’re quite the army, you and I.”

  I started to correct him, but I was pretty sure Sherlock didn’t hear over the high-pitched wailing sound of his mobile ringing. He pulled it out and rolled his eyes at whatever he’d seen on the screen before answering, “I’m busy.”

  I looked out across the lake, but the tightness in the way Sherlock said, “I see,” got my attention. He turned his face away from me before I could find his expression.

  “Of course. I’ll be home within the hour.”

  He didn’t speak to me the entire way back to the dock, not even an answer when I offered to help him row, and when he finally faced me, he wasn’t sad or angry or cold. He just looked like he was about to ask me some deep, dark question. Only he never asked. He did offer a hand to help me out of the boat. He even mumbled something about seeing me back to my house. And when I offered to stand in line to return the oars to the rental window so he could go, he merely nodded and wandered away from the café. Which is why I was so surprised to see him just around the bend waiting for me when I was done.

  “You didn’t need to stay. I know you have somewhere to be.”

  I might as well have spoken to the bench across the way. Sherlock didn’t even move.

  “You should go. I can find my way home.”

  Still nothing.

  I toyed with the idea of waving a hand in front of his face, but decided to just let him be, and wandered back out of the park on my own. I did look back once, however, and watched him look around briefly for me, before he shoved his hands into his pockets, shrugged, and started down my same path.

  I wondered if I’d ever get a glimpse inside that mind of his. Then I quickly shuddered at the very desire.

  Chapter 7

  I
woke up Saturday morning facing the wrong direction. I’d had the dream again, the one where the past six months have been the nightmare and my mom’s really alive—that I could see her again, if I could just get downstairs for breakfast. Only, in the dream, everything goes wrong. The shower won’t work, my closet’s empty of clothes, and I can’t find the door to the stairs. Dream Me starts to panic, desperate to see my mother and never able to reach her. Before I can, I wake up and the dream fades away completely.

  But the feeling of her being in the house stays, so that for one waking moment, I think she’s still alive.

  After three mornings of that, I had placed the program from her memorial service on my nightstand, so it would be the first thing I saw when I woke up. Dreams are so cruel. I never wanted to believe in them when awake. Not even for a moment.

  But that morning, the morning of Lily’s dad’s memorial, I woke up looking the wrong way, and by the time I saw the program, I was wrecked. I waded through the day in a fog of the dream. Not even the electric tension of the boys cooped up in the house could distract me from that feeling of being on the edge of a cliff, on the verge of losing my grip. Like a feather’s weight might be enough to send me hurtling down.

  At lunch, I caught myself expecting Mum to walk through the door, and barely escaped out to our front steps in time to keep the boys from seeing my breakdown. I stared at the sky, my chest heaving and my eyes flooding beyond my control. I focused on my breathing, on the scared look Michael gave me the first time he caught me crying over Mum, on how embarrassed I’d be if Sherlock walked up while I was so emotional. When neither worked, I thought of all her things, those few I’d managed to pilfer from Dad’s collection, hidden under my bed—the pictures, the letters, the coin.

  The coin was just an oversize gold-painted novelty with a four-leaf clover on one side and a tree on the other—the kind with Celtic knots sprouting from the branches and falling down to entwine with the roots below. She used to flip the coin across the tops of her fingers and back, a nervous habit she only ever indulged on those rare occasions when Dad wasn’t around. Not that he was always home. He had this way of feeling present even when he was gone. And we could never count on him to stay that way. He’d show up at odd times and hours, like we could never really know his schedule. He lingered.