Where All Paths Meet, page 12
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
I steered him toward the table by the shoulders, sat him in a chair, and began unpacking our takeout. Holmes inspected the bag.
“Have you had their stuff before?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“It’s basically the best thing on the planet.”
“For a teenage boy,” Holmes said, “what does that mean? A hamburger stuffed with pixie sticks?”
“You’re a teenage boy, bucko. Although actually, if you caramelized the pixie sticks first, that probably would be fucking delicious.” I opened the first takeout container. “Waffles with pearl sugar. This one is their s’mores, so marshmallow, graham crackers, chocolate.”
“I remember this recipe. It’s called diabetes.”
I tried to slap him upside the head, but Holmes was too fast for me.
“This one,” I said as I opened the second, “is called Cinnamonster.”
“It has cinnamon, I presume.”
“And bananas and blueberries and—you know what? If you’re going to make that face, I’m not going to explain.”
“I’ll never know the mysteries of a waffle called Cinnamonster.”
I stopped. Fists on hips. Glaring. “This is because you’ve been gone for five months, you know. You think you’re way too big for your britches. Paxton has let you get totally out of control.”
He huffed his little breath.
“This,” I said with exaggerated patience as I took out the next one, “is the Holy Grail. It’s the reason for living. When we invented this, the human race achieved its pinnacle.”
“Is it a hot dog?”
“It’s not a—H! How fucking dare you?”
Something played at the corner of his mouth, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning.
“This is the Machine Gun,” I said as I opened the container.
“Dear God. Did they let a teenage boy name the food too?”
I chose to ignore that. “Merguez sausage. Frites. Andalouse sauce. All on the best baguette you’re ever going to eat. This is humanity’s purpose finally realized. This is what you’ve been waiting for your whole life.”
“Soggy bread stuffed with french fries?”
“They’re frites, dumbass. This is classy as fuck. And that one’s yours, by the way. I got one for myself.”
“Jack, I can’t—”
“Pick your waffle.”
“There’s no way—”
“Great, I’ll take the s’mores.”
Holmes stared at me helplessly.
“Start with the Machine Gun,” I said. “Then the waffle is like dessert.”
“Like dessert?” he muttered as he picked up the sandwich. “It’s pure sugar.”
“At this point, no more talking.”
To his credit, for a skinny white boy who lived off shakes and air, Holmes did some serious damage to the Machine Gun. I didn’t expect him to finish it, but he polished off three quarters of it, and it didn’t take him long—after the first experimental bites, he was ravenous. I ate my Machine Gun too, and we didn’t have to talk, and we didn’t have to explain, and we didn’t have to deal with the fact that Blackfriar Holmes was apparently trying to frame his son for murder.
So, I was totally unprepared when Holmes said, “He saved my life in Hong Kong.”
I chewed. I swallowed. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and ignored the horror on Holmes’s face. “What? Who?”
“Paxton.” Holmes picked up a frite that had fallen out of his sandwich and trailed it through drips of andalouse sauce. “After I…left, I began trying to track down Watson’s package. I traced the fake deputy, the one who searched your room, to a location in Seattle. I lost the trail for a while and picked it up in Hong Kong. It’s how I found my way back to Maggie, actually. How I learned she had been behind all of it. But in Hong Kong, I allowed myself to become distracted.” He said the words clearly, with merciless precision. “And I would have died—should have died. Only Paxton had come after me, and he saved my life.”
Conversational life hack? Stuff your mouth full of food so all you have to say is “Oh.”
Holmes huffed his little laugh. “I am not sexually or romantically involved with Paxton.”
Another conversational life hack? Don’t let the son of a bitch at the back of your head do the talking. “That’s kind of hard to believe considering you were in love with him for most of your life, and you’ve spent the last half a year shacked up with him.”
Straightening in his seat, Holmes set his jaw, face hardening. Then he stopped, and the corner of his mouth quirked, and he said, “Jack, are you jealous?”
“Of course I’m jealous. And I’m mad. And I still hate you. And we’re supposed to be eating, not talking about—about whatever this is.”
The quirk came again—this time, the amusement was unmistakable, even coupled with disbelief. But Holmes didn’t press the point. He toyed with the Cinnamonster, picking off the fruit in delicate, birdlike bites. When I finished the s’mores waffle, I told him he was ruining it, and I liberated the waffle and helped myself to the rest of it.
I was up to my eyebrows in Cinnamonster when I finally said, “He didn’t abandon you, you know. When you were still living at home, I mean. That story you told me; he didn’t just leave.”
Holmes blinked once. Then again. Color came into his cheeks.
“I guess you ought to know that. He—it’s complicated. And he should be the one to tell you. But he left because he had to, not because he wanted to go to school, not because he’d gotten what he wanted out of you, not because he’d been using you.”
Holmes didn’t say anything. His breathing stayed the same. His chest rose and fell evenly. The only sign was his hands, twisting a paper towel.
“So, if you still, you know, have feelings, maybe you should give him a second chance—”
“Stop.”
I did. I stuck a fork in what was left of the Cinnamonster. After a minute, I licked whipped cream from my thumb, got to my feet, and started collecting the trash in the takeout bag.
Holmes stood and left, and a moment later, the door to his room clicked shut.
Great. Fantastic. Super.
I went to the bathroom and stripped down, and it felt good to be free of the day-old clothes. The warm water on my skin felt even better. The fancy body gel and hair stuff had to be Paxton’s. After the shower, I borrowed somebody’s deodorant and decided once and for all to shave my head because my hair was a fucking lost cause.
I was dreading the next part, pulling on my dirty clothes, when Holmes said, “I’ve left you something clean to wear.”
That was all. The way hotel staff might tell you they’d changed the towels.
I opened the door. No Holmes, but the clothes lay neatly folded on the floor. They weren’t his—the black tee with ZADDY printed on it could only belong to one person, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen Holmes in jeans, and certainly not a pair ripped in so many interesting ways. They were bikini briefs, by the way, and I was sure Holmes had chosen them on purpose because of the little pouch on the front. I had an idea what the clothes meant. I had an idea of what he was saying, even if he couldn’t say it any other way. I was starting to think maybe I hadn’t been as quiet as I’d thought, walking in on him in the bath. I was thinking, with Holloway Holmes, I needed to learn how to read smoke signals.
I carried them out into the living room, where Holmes was reading on his phone. He’d put on his chinos and chukkas, and he looked ready to go.
He gawked at me, flushed, and ducked his head. “What are you doing?”
“Getting dressed.”
“You should get dressed in the bathroom.”
I pulled on the briefs, which, now, felt like they were the size of a kleenex. “Don’t want to.”
“This is inappropriate.”
I held up the shirt. Examined it.
“Jack!”
“Zaddy.”
“You have to get dressed!”
“What do you think that means?”
Maybe that was too much; his chin came up, and he fixed me with a look. “You know what it means. Put on your clothes, or I’m leaving.”
“You’re not leaving.”
“I will.”
He readied himself to stand, so I said, “Don’t get off that couch.”
“You’re making me uncomfortable—”
“Bullshit.”
He stopped. Swallowed. Looked away, and then back again, his eyes raking me up and down. I blew him a kiss. Then he took his phone in both hands and dragged his attention back to the screen. He looked like he was praying.
Trying not to laugh, I pulled on the shirt. The jeans next. The whole muscle-boy fuck-toy look wasn’t exactly my thing, and the clothes were Paxton’s, so they were a little too big for me. But I didn’t look too bad, if Holmes’s reaction was any indication. I would have felt bad—the poor guy looked like he was on the brink of a stroke—but he’d started this.
“I’m decent,” I said. “You can stop pretending.”
“I was not—” But he stopped when he looked at me again, and there’s nothing quite like that feeling, being seen like that, being devoured, wholly and completely, by someone you want. His voice was weaker when he finished, “—pretending.”
“Uh huh. Are you still mad at me about Paxton?”
“I was not mad at you. I was—am—upset.”
I waited. “Do you want to elaborate?”
“I don’t know. I have many feelings about what you told me. Some of them are conflicting.” He held himself tightly, the way someone might their first time on the high dive. “It does not change what I told you previously. My feelings for Paxton are irrelevant in that regard. I love you.”
“Just not enough to, you know, let me know you were alive.”
He swallowed, and he brushed his jaw with his knuckles, and I could see the tremor there. But he didn’t say anything.
I sighed. “Are we ever going to talk about your dad?”
“If you wish.”
“H, come on. I’m not trying to be a bad guy here, but you have to admit, it’s pretty bad.”
“Paxton’s analysis was subjective. Did my father do anything to frighten him? No. Does he have any evidence that my father planted that footwear in order to frame me? No. Paxton gave us his assumptions.”
“Like I did.”
Holmes locked his phone, turned it in his hands, ran his thumb along the side.
“Like my assumptions,” I said, “about your dad killing Watson.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Holmes began carefully.
“No, you don’t need to say it. I know you think I’m wrong. And because I’m stupid old Jack Moreno, I’m not even worth arguing with. You’ll ignore me, or placate me, and do whatever you want in the end.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Two people in your life, two people you claim are important, are telling you that your dad is scary and bad and—and that he might be trying to frame you for a murder he committed. And you’re not willing to listen.”
“My father is misunderstood by many people—”
“He beat you. He hurt you. For years.”
“—but he has always had the singular goal of protecting his family—”
“That’s rich. Protecting his family? God only knows all the ways he fucked with your head.”
Holmes’s jaw tightened. “—and while I understand that you have concerns—”
“The games. The tests. All those fucking trainings. Why can’t you bite your lip?”
“—you do not understand—”
“Tell me why you’re not allowed to bite your fucking lip. Tell me. What’s so fucking important—”
“You do not understand.”
“I understand that he treats you like you’re a lab rat, and that’s half the reason you don’t understand how amazing you are—”
“Jack, for God’s sake, shut up!” Holmes shot up from the sofa. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, and you’re embarrassing yourself!”
In the silence that came after, I thought I could hear the traffic on the street below.
“Every family has their own dynamic,” Holmes said in a softer voice, “and with our families, that is truer than most.”
“But I don’t understand because I wasn’t raised a Watson.”
Holmes let his eyes slide away.
“Real nice, H. Really fucking nice. You know who you sound like? That ass-gape Tom. Maybe I don’t know how these fucked-up families do things. But that doesn’t matter. Because nobody should do that to anybody. And the whole point, H, the whole fucking point, is that you’re letting it get in the way of what’s right in front of you. I told you about your dad. Now Paxton is telling you. Paxton ought to know, right? He grew up with the families. He knows how they do things. You told me he’s everything your dad wanted in a son. And he’s so scared of Blackfriar that he threw everything in a car and tried to drive away just because your dad came poking around. What’s that tell you?”
Holmes was perfectly still. He rubbed his jaw again, where the light picked out the faint stubble—barely anything at all, nothing more than a flitter of gold.
“Then we will talk to my father.”
I shook my head. “Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Jack. You believe he killed Lynnissa Baca, stole Watson’s portable safe, and then framed me for the crime. For the sake of our investigation, let’s say you’re correct. What is the next step?”
“Get the police.”
“With what evidence? A conversation you had with him months ago? Paxton’s groundless fears? If you believe my father is responsible for these events, let’s prove it.”
I shook my head again, but I didn’t have anything left to say.
Holmes, however, didn’t seem to have that problem. He met my eyes—rare for him—and spoke clearly and coldly. “My father is Blackfriar Holmes, son of Archangel Holmes, son of Sherlock Holmes. He did not do this.”
In that moment, I had a glimpse of it, of who Blackfriar was to Holmes: a towering genius, a master of every art and craft, distant and harsh and unforgiving, maybe even terrifying, except for when he was doling out praise and pleasure sparingly. A little bit like God, I guess. It must have been intuition, because it wasn’t something my conscious brain put together, but I understood Holmes a bit. It was part of growing up, learning your parents weren’t who you thought they were, not entirely. They skipped their medication because they were trying to save money. They peed themselves because they seized. They forgot to worry about your homework because they were worrying about how to feed you dinner, and they forgot to worry about dinner because the migraine was so bad they had to lie in a dark room and whimper. And even if it didn’t happen like that, it happened somehow. You learned they had fears, prejudices, shortcomings. They were human, in other words.
What was it like for people who had been abused?
The question was so startling, and my knee-jerk reaction so strong—Holmes wasn’t abused—that for a moment, I was disoriented. It took me a moment to realize Holmes was staring at me, waiting for a response.
All I could come up with was a nod.
“I’d like to retrieve my car,” Holmes said. “And then we can visit my father. It’s a Saturday; he’ll be home.”
It didn’t take long for us to get ready. Holmes grabbed one of his gear bags, and I laced up my Stan Smiths, and we drove south, back to Zodiac. I had one of Dad’s CDs in the player, turned low because that’s how Holmes preferred it, but I couldn’t have told you if it was Smashing Pumpkins or Pearl Jam or what. I kept coming back to my own question, to my own automatic denial.
When we got to the Scorpio parking lot, Holmes directed me to a spot near the front doors. I’d known he was driving a black Bentley—I’d seen it on the security footage, after all. But it had been one thing to see the coupe on a screen, and another to see it in person. Holmes dropped out of the truck, and I killed the engine and joined him as he inspected the car.
“It hasn’t been moved,” he finally said. “Although I’d like to check the Zodiac security footage to be sure.”
“Great,” I said. “So, someone else has two hundred thousand dollars lying around to pick up a spare Bentley to frame you.”
“Another thread to follow. If someone purchased or leased a similar vehicle, that may be one way to find the killer. Or they may have stolen it and, in the process, incriminated themselves somehow.”
“I guess. Seems like a lot of work; why frame you at all? I mean whoever did this, they did a good job getting rid of Baca without leaving behind any evidence.”
“Why not frame me?” Holmes asked, the words surprisingly bitter. “I am unstable, reactive, dangerous. I have a history of violence.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking: Yeah, but he’s your dad.
Holmes must have heard it anyway. His expression closed off, and he shrugged the gear bag higher. For a long moment, he stared at me. Then he turned and marched toward the Scorpio building.
“H! Hey, what are you—goddamn it!”
I jogged after him. His face was a frozen mask when I caught up.
“I thought we were going to see your dad.”
“Yes.”
“I thought he was at home.”
“Yes.”
“So, want to tell me what’s going on?”
“What’s going on, Jack, is that in your haste to demonize my father, you’ve overlooked the one person with the strongest reason to want Lynnissa Baca dead.”
“Hold on—”
I tried to catch his arm, but pain flashed across his face when I touched him, and I dropped my hand. He sped up, not looking back at me, and headed toward the building.
“It was Maggie who stole Watson’s safe in the first place, Jack.” The words drifted back to me. “Maggie who hired Paxton to blackmail Aston and distract us. Maggie who had her vault broken into.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’d like to know what she has to say about all this,” Holmes said, the words crystalline and sparkling with sharp edges. “Wouldn’t you?”
