Where All Paths Meet, page 23
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“And let me guess: she’ll have some serious defense system, maybe even guards.”
“We should assume top-of-the-line security measures.”
“Sorry to break it to you, H, but that’s a lair.”
Holmes refused to talk to me until we got to the other side of Heber.
We followed the state highway north. Morning spilled into the valley, turning the fields and hills gold, painting its way up the back of Timp in broad strokes. A deer was picking its way through a fallow field, stopping now and then to eat, and its shadow tamped down the wet grass.
When Holmes told me to turn, I said, “You realize Park City is, like, basically one-hundred percent villains and lairs and that kind of shit.”
“No more talking,” Holmes said and got out his phone.
His instructions took me up one of the canyons, and we turned down an unmarked road and crossed a bridge that didn’t have guard rails. It was maybe a five-foot drop to the creek below, but I still didn’t like it. Then we wound our way through lodgepole pines on a dirt road, the Dodge thumping and rocking and humping its way over a foothill.
On the other side, in a small, timbered bowl, was Moriarty’s lair.
It was a glass cube, and in the deep morning shadows, untouched by light, it looked like the shell of some sort of insect. I realized, in that way, it reminded me of the Scorpio building. We followed the dirt road down into the bowl until we were halfway to the house, and then Holmes made me stop in a pullout, and I killed the engine.
The trees seemed thicker as we proceeded on foot, and I lost sight of the house almost immediately. Aside from our steps, the only sound was the occasional rustle of leaves and branches as wildlife fled from us. It was a shock when we came over a rise and the house sprang into view again: dark glass, a box of shadows. We watched it for a moment, but nothing moved inside. Nothing we could see, anyway. I was about to take a step when Holmes caught my arm. Then I heard it: something buzzing at the edge of my hearing.
“Is it a trap?” I asked. “Is it lasers?”
“Is it lasers,” Holmes said with undisguised disgust and let go of my arm.
He started walking to the house.
“Hey! That was a legitimate question!”
He didn’t stop, so I had to hurry to catch up to him.
Up close, it was obvious that the house was more than glass. Dark wood accented the structure, and the roof was metal—not steel, but I couldn’t say what. Off to the right, the sound of a pump came, and running water, and I glimpsed what I thought was a swimming pool.
When we reached the front door, it stood ajar. The noise Holmes had drawn my attention to came again, and now I recognized it as words, but I couldn’t make them out.
“We should have guns,” I said. “We definitely need to buy some guns.”
Holmes snorted softly.
“Excuse me?”
“Stay behind me.”
I didn’t argue the point because it was so stupid it didn’t deserve an argument. I followed Holmes into the house. He moved slowly, his gaze roving, and I tried to see what he was seeing. Inside, the house looked just as modern as you’d expect from the glass cube design. Wood and stone competed for space, with the occasional touch of enameled metal to break things up. Parquet floors, shiplap walls, plank ceilings, all the wood ultraprocessed until nothing wild or natural remained. I imagined this was what it would feel like if one of those Scandinavian furniture catalogues ate you alive.
A voice came out of nowhere, the words loud enough to make me jump: “Maggie? Hello, Maggie, are you there?”
“A virtual assistant,” Holmes said, pointing to a speaker in the ceiling.
“Jesus Christ.”
He offered me a look, his mouth crooked with amusement.
I gave him the finger.
“Hello, Maggie?” the virtual assistant repeated. “Are you there?”
Holmes cocked his head.
It might have been ten seconds later when the voice said again, “Maggie? Maggie? Maggie?”
“That’s creepy as fuck,” I said.
“It’s software,” Holmes said.
“H, the door was open, and we’ve got some sort of femme-bot version of HAL on a loop—”
“Not a bot,” Holmes said. “A virtual assistant.”
“—and something is definitely wrong. And seriously? You had to interrupt me for that?”
A hint of color came into his cheeks, and he started moving again.
Our progress through the house was slow. Holmes considered every step, and although it seemed crazy, I figured out pretty quickly that he was checking for traps. The layout of the house also slowed us—it was made up, we discovered, of nesting layers of rooms, and while the outermost layer was composed of long, open spaces to take advantage of the floor-to-ceiling windows and the beautiful views, each progressive section of rooms seemed more convoluted, with unnecessary doors and doglegged hallways that dead-ended in linen closets or a single, ancient portrait of some grim-faced Moriarty ancestor, or simply nothing at all.
And part of what slowed us was the simple fact that the house was a batshit clusterfuck. Every room had something that suggested, at best, a sick sense of humor, and at worst, wear-your-face-as-a-mask insanity. A sprawling octopus of a sofa, for example, its legs curling across the room to make any direct route impossible, its upholstery printed with illustrations of men and women being disemboweled, or having limbs amputated, or being castrated. In another room, a grand piano was shaped—in part, anyway—like an elephant, so that the keys looked like its tusks. In another, Moriarty had hung photos everywhere. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing, and when I did, my gorge rose. Wounds. Lacerations, tears, cuts, incisions. Infected ones. Ones crawling with maggots. Ones that were strangely pallid, and I couldn’t help but think the people in question had been dead. She had hung mirrors between the photos, cleverly painted, so that you’d turn, and for a moment, you’d think someone had flayed the skin from your face. My shirt was damp with sweat, and I caught myself breathing through my mouth.
As we worked our way from room to room, the voice of the virtual assistant followed us, with its queries of “Hello?” and “Maggie?” and “Are you there?”
When we found her office, Maggie Moriarty was sitting in front of a chessboard, and she was dead.
I knew it the way I’d known when I’d seen Lynnissa Baca: the too-still body, her pallor, the way she slumped in her seat. The animal part of my brain knew before the rest of me caught up. Moriarty was dressed in her usual getup: a studded leather jacket, black leather pants, black combat boots that laced up to her knees. Her eyes were closed.
“Stay back,” Holmes said.
I scanned the office—a teak desk, a leather chaise, built-in bookcases that had been staged with trinkets, a pair of cabinets on the wall with one of the doors ajar. A glass door led out onto a tiny, enclosed patio, I guess in case she needed a moment of fresh air without having to navigate that maze. No samurai swords or antique pistols, not even a nice modern battle axe, but she had a good-sized stapler on her desk, so I grabbed that and nodded to Holmes.
He approached her slowly. The lines of his shoulders hardened; his back was tight. He waited, and after what felt like an eternity, he checked her carotid for a pulse. After another eternity, he peeled back one eyelid. I glimpsed a dark, fixed pupil and pulled my gaze away. On the chessboard, a game was in progress. Moriarty had been playing black, and although I didn’t know much about chess, I thought it looked like she’d been winning. Except she’d lost her queen, I saw after another moment. The black queen still lay on the board, tipped over after she’d been taken by a white bishop. I could hear myself breathing too fast.
When Holmes joined me, he was scrubbing his hands on the joggers. “She’s dead.”
“Fuck that,” I said. “How the fuck can she be dead?”
“Maggie,” the virtual assistant said overhead, “you’ve failed to respond for over an hour now, so I’m contacting emergency services. I hope everything’s ok.”
Holmes pointed to a wine glass, and I thought of Lynnissa Baca again. “She was poisoned.” He moved behind the desk. “Jack, if you prefer to keep watch—”
I managed to shake my head. “No. No, I can help.”
“We don’t have much time. It might be better if you brought the truck to the front door.”
That was enough to draw me out of my shock. I shook my head again, cleared my throat, and said, “I can do this.”
I checked the bookcases, but while the trinkets looked valuable, they didn’t look particularly interesting or important, and so I moved on. I tried the door to the patio, and it opened, and air smelling like wet stone and metal and a hint of pine met me, cool and refreshing. Nothing out there either. I worked my way around the room, looking for what I thought Holmes would look for—although God only knew what that was; maybe footprints? I stopped at the cabinets on the wall and opened them.
They held a whiteboard. I’d seen this at school, whiteboards and bulletin boards with doors that could be closed and, if necessary, locked. On the whiteboard, someone had taped pictures. Hundreds of pictures. I stared at them, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Many of the pictures were old—black and white, for the most part, and depicting people with dated clothes and old-fashioned hair. Beneath them were written names.
Timothy Watson.
Daniel Watson.
Carey Watson Roper.
Myron Watson.
Romeo Shakespeare Watson.
Aurelia Watson Jefferson.
My mother: Camilla Catherine Sixsmith.
On and on like that. And as I scanned the names, I recognized many of them. Watsons who had died young. Watsons who had, I was sure, been killed.
“Jack,” Holmes said, and his voice was a whip. “Get away from there.”
I stepped back. And then I saw it.
They weren’t just photos. They weren’t just a random assemblage of black-and-white. I’d seen this before, when hundreds of little photos made a bigger picture, one that you could see if you looked at them all together. There was a word for it we’d learned in art. Ms. Prinze had taught it to us. A photo mosaic.
And now I saw it.
I heard Holmes moving. Felt him take my arm. But I couldn’t look away.
Me. It was me. A photo mosaic of my face, a candid, when I was smiling and looking away from the camera. And someone had made it out of dead Watsons.
Chapter 23
Impossible Things
I couldn’t walk right. My legs were stiff, and although I didn’t fall, I kept feeling like I was about to—like my legs would lock on the next step, and I’d tip over. Holmes kept a hand on my arm, steering me through the labyrinth of nightmares, until fresh air met my face again. Outside, my brain registered pine duff, sage, a hint of wood smoke. Hands pressed me down, and my ass found cold concrete.
“Put your head between your knees.” Holmes’s voice came from a long way off. “Breathe. Do you remember you taught me a special way to breathe? Show me again, Jack.”
I breathed. Holmes’s hand shifted on my neck, his fingers playing lightly with my hair. I counted my breaths and breathed some more. Holmes stayed with me, his hand on my nape an anchor to reality. After a while, I said, “Ok.”
His fingers traced a question on my skin.
“I’m ok,” I said with a little more conviction, and when I tried to sit up, Holmes let me. He studied me, and I pushed on his face, turning him away from me. “Don’t be a goober.”
The bowl of the canyon was quiet. I blinked a few times, rolled my head on my neck. A wave of nausea crashed over me, but it faded as soon as it came, almost a memory. Above me, a red-tailed hawk floated in the sky. It looked motionless, like someone had pinned it there, but that was impossible.
“If I had known” Holmes began.
“Stop.” When I looked again, the hawk was gone. That was the deal with impossible things, I guess. The only thing I could think to say was “So, now we know who’s been killing Watsons.”
Holmes shifted, and it was a long time before he said, “Perhaps.”
I rolled my head on my neck again. “If I’m wrong, tell me why I’m wrong.”
“I don’t know, Jack.” He turned back to me, and if anything, the worry in his face was even more intense. “Are you all right?”
“Sure. Yeah. I mean, why the fuck not?”
He pulled his knees to his chest. He must have found something super interesting about my sneakers.
With a sigh, I peeled one of his hands free and squeezed it. “I’m freaked out.”
When Holmes looked up, his eyes were liquid, and he said, “As am I.”
I nodded. He squeezed back.
Something moved off in the brush, the sound of fast, frantic movement, and it broke the moment. “We should go, right?” I asked as I got to my feet. I gave Holmes a tug, and he let me help him up. “Get out of here before the police arrive?”
Holmes nodded. “If you’d like to get the truck, I will make a quick pass—”
“No,” I said.
“Jack, it’s only reasonable—”
“No.”
“In any similar operation, having a driver on standby—”
When I touched his jaw, he flinched. He almost covered it, but I hadn’t missed it. I kept my hold loose, playful, as I shook his head back and forth. “N. O. I know you’re trying to protect me, and I appreciate it, but I will go out of my skull if you leave me alone right now.” I wagged his head in a nod, and in my best English accent said, “Quite right, Jack. Jolly good.”
“That is not how I sound.”
“You sound much sexier.”
He twisted free, scowling. “This is a tactical mistake.”
“So, I’m shit at tactics. Add it to the list. And say, ‘Jolly good,’ just once, so I can get it right next time.”
“You are an idiot,” he said and stalked away.
I went after him. We followed the house. It was built onto a section of land that had been leveled out of the bowl, which meant that on three sides, it was easy to follow the perimeter of the building. The walls of windows allowed anyone to look inside.
“Do you think someone was spying on her?” I asked.
Holmes shushed me.
“Do you think the killer, like, ambushed her?”
“I don’t know, Jack. Please be quiet.”
“Do you think there’s a clue or something?”
He rounded on me. “I think there’s a possibility the killer is still in the area, and so I would like you to be quiet.” He shook himself and chuffed and folded his arms across his chest. “Please.”
I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself. I grinned. Then I mimed zipping my lips.
“Imbecile,” Holmes muttered as he turned and started forward again.
I don’t know why it helped to be a jackass. I guess it was either that or—or fall into that black place again. Seeing Moriarty hadn’t hit me as hard as seeing Baca, but it had still been, well, a lot. Especially combined with the photo mosaic, all those dead Watsons, and the ass-busting creepiness of seeing my own face staring back at me. Moriarty—or whoever it had been—hadn’t been so crass as to paint a target on me, but I thought the message was pretty clear. So, I could either think about that, about how somebody was trying to kill me the way they’d tried to kill everybody else in my family tree, or I could jackass around and drive Holmes to the brink of justified homicide. The latter seemed like the better option.
I was so caught up in trying not to think about the photo mosaic that when Holmes stopped, I noticed too late and crashed into him. A swear slipped out of his mouth, and he clutched me, and for a moment, we both wavered. I glimpsed the drop-off in front of Holmes, and I wrapped an arm around him and grabbed the rail of Moriarty’s deck, which was directly above us. Holmes’s muscles were taut, and he smelled like Dial soap and the particular smell of his hair and like the store-brand detergent Dad and I used. Like home, I guess, if I had to put a label on it. For a dozen heartbeats, I held him against me, and the adrenaline rush of almost falling faded by degrees. Holmes wrapped a hand around my wrist, and after another few heartbeats, I let him go.
“As I thought,” Holmes said. “An approach from this side would be difficult, perhaps impossible, and it would offer no advantage, considering—” He stopped. Without even seeming to think about it, he grabbed my arm and leaned out over the drop.
I clutched his forearm, and I tightened my grip on the rail. Holmes was using me more for stability than anything else, but one thing you learn when you spend time in the mountains is that any drop-off can give way at any moment—nothing is ever as solid as it looks, and sometimes, the ground just gives way.
For close to a minute, Holmes did nothing but stare.
“What?” I finally asked. “What is it?”
He pulled back from the ledge and said, “See for yourself.”
We had to improvise, since we couldn’t trust his bad arm to hold our weight, so while Holmes held onto the deck railing, I gripped the waistband of his joggers. If I fell, a naked Holmes would have to explain how I died, which was probably a fate worse than death for him, so I figured it would pretty much square us.
For a moment, I couldn’t see what Holmes had noticed down among the scree and scrubby trees and brush. And then I spotted it: something definitely not natural—black and oblong and half-hidden by a scraggly maple.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Let’s find out.”
We had to backtrack to the front of the house so that we could come down the slope without breaking our necks. In the back of my head, a timer was running—I wasn’t sure how much time I’d wasted freaking out, but emergency services, if they were coming, couldn’t be far. Moriarty’s hideout was remote, but it wasn’t that remote. Hell, I was surprised nobody had flown in with a helicopter yet.
Making our way down the bowl was harder than it had looked. The ground was crumbly and gave easily underfoot, which meant we both slipped and skidded a lot (although, of course, I slipped and skidded more than Holmes, who even managed to make almost falling on his ass look like he was doing ballet). Twisted junipers dotted the side of the hill, making the air wintery with their smell, and the bark on one ripped up my palm when I started an uncontrolled slide and had to grab it to stop myself. There were clumps of blue spruce and yellow-brown shrubs that were coming back to life. We were halfway down when a fat hare burst out from where it had been hiding under a log and sprinted off into the tree line.
“We should assume top-of-the-line security measures.”
“Sorry to break it to you, H, but that’s a lair.”
Holmes refused to talk to me until we got to the other side of Heber.
We followed the state highway north. Morning spilled into the valley, turning the fields and hills gold, painting its way up the back of Timp in broad strokes. A deer was picking its way through a fallow field, stopping now and then to eat, and its shadow tamped down the wet grass.
When Holmes told me to turn, I said, “You realize Park City is, like, basically one-hundred percent villains and lairs and that kind of shit.”
“No more talking,” Holmes said and got out his phone.
His instructions took me up one of the canyons, and we turned down an unmarked road and crossed a bridge that didn’t have guard rails. It was maybe a five-foot drop to the creek below, but I still didn’t like it. Then we wound our way through lodgepole pines on a dirt road, the Dodge thumping and rocking and humping its way over a foothill.
On the other side, in a small, timbered bowl, was Moriarty’s lair.
It was a glass cube, and in the deep morning shadows, untouched by light, it looked like the shell of some sort of insect. I realized, in that way, it reminded me of the Scorpio building. We followed the dirt road down into the bowl until we were halfway to the house, and then Holmes made me stop in a pullout, and I killed the engine.
The trees seemed thicker as we proceeded on foot, and I lost sight of the house almost immediately. Aside from our steps, the only sound was the occasional rustle of leaves and branches as wildlife fled from us. It was a shock when we came over a rise and the house sprang into view again: dark glass, a box of shadows. We watched it for a moment, but nothing moved inside. Nothing we could see, anyway. I was about to take a step when Holmes caught my arm. Then I heard it: something buzzing at the edge of my hearing.
“Is it a trap?” I asked. “Is it lasers?”
“Is it lasers,” Holmes said with undisguised disgust and let go of my arm.
He started walking to the house.
“Hey! That was a legitimate question!”
He didn’t stop, so I had to hurry to catch up to him.
Up close, it was obvious that the house was more than glass. Dark wood accented the structure, and the roof was metal—not steel, but I couldn’t say what. Off to the right, the sound of a pump came, and running water, and I glimpsed what I thought was a swimming pool.
When we reached the front door, it stood ajar. The noise Holmes had drawn my attention to came again, and now I recognized it as words, but I couldn’t make them out.
“We should have guns,” I said. “We definitely need to buy some guns.”
Holmes snorted softly.
“Excuse me?”
“Stay behind me.”
I didn’t argue the point because it was so stupid it didn’t deserve an argument. I followed Holmes into the house. He moved slowly, his gaze roving, and I tried to see what he was seeing. Inside, the house looked just as modern as you’d expect from the glass cube design. Wood and stone competed for space, with the occasional touch of enameled metal to break things up. Parquet floors, shiplap walls, plank ceilings, all the wood ultraprocessed until nothing wild or natural remained. I imagined this was what it would feel like if one of those Scandinavian furniture catalogues ate you alive.
A voice came out of nowhere, the words loud enough to make me jump: “Maggie? Hello, Maggie, are you there?”
“A virtual assistant,” Holmes said, pointing to a speaker in the ceiling.
“Jesus Christ.”
He offered me a look, his mouth crooked with amusement.
I gave him the finger.
“Hello, Maggie?” the virtual assistant repeated. “Are you there?”
Holmes cocked his head.
It might have been ten seconds later when the voice said again, “Maggie? Maggie? Maggie?”
“That’s creepy as fuck,” I said.
“It’s software,” Holmes said.
“H, the door was open, and we’ve got some sort of femme-bot version of HAL on a loop—”
“Not a bot,” Holmes said. “A virtual assistant.”
“—and something is definitely wrong. And seriously? You had to interrupt me for that?”
A hint of color came into his cheeks, and he started moving again.
Our progress through the house was slow. Holmes considered every step, and although it seemed crazy, I figured out pretty quickly that he was checking for traps. The layout of the house also slowed us—it was made up, we discovered, of nesting layers of rooms, and while the outermost layer was composed of long, open spaces to take advantage of the floor-to-ceiling windows and the beautiful views, each progressive section of rooms seemed more convoluted, with unnecessary doors and doglegged hallways that dead-ended in linen closets or a single, ancient portrait of some grim-faced Moriarty ancestor, or simply nothing at all.
And part of what slowed us was the simple fact that the house was a batshit clusterfuck. Every room had something that suggested, at best, a sick sense of humor, and at worst, wear-your-face-as-a-mask insanity. A sprawling octopus of a sofa, for example, its legs curling across the room to make any direct route impossible, its upholstery printed with illustrations of men and women being disemboweled, or having limbs amputated, or being castrated. In another room, a grand piano was shaped—in part, anyway—like an elephant, so that the keys looked like its tusks. In another, Moriarty had hung photos everywhere. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing, and when I did, my gorge rose. Wounds. Lacerations, tears, cuts, incisions. Infected ones. Ones crawling with maggots. Ones that were strangely pallid, and I couldn’t help but think the people in question had been dead. She had hung mirrors between the photos, cleverly painted, so that you’d turn, and for a moment, you’d think someone had flayed the skin from your face. My shirt was damp with sweat, and I caught myself breathing through my mouth.
As we worked our way from room to room, the voice of the virtual assistant followed us, with its queries of “Hello?” and “Maggie?” and “Are you there?”
When we found her office, Maggie Moriarty was sitting in front of a chessboard, and she was dead.
I knew it the way I’d known when I’d seen Lynnissa Baca: the too-still body, her pallor, the way she slumped in her seat. The animal part of my brain knew before the rest of me caught up. Moriarty was dressed in her usual getup: a studded leather jacket, black leather pants, black combat boots that laced up to her knees. Her eyes were closed.
“Stay back,” Holmes said.
I scanned the office—a teak desk, a leather chaise, built-in bookcases that had been staged with trinkets, a pair of cabinets on the wall with one of the doors ajar. A glass door led out onto a tiny, enclosed patio, I guess in case she needed a moment of fresh air without having to navigate that maze. No samurai swords or antique pistols, not even a nice modern battle axe, but she had a good-sized stapler on her desk, so I grabbed that and nodded to Holmes.
He approached her slowly. The lines of his shoulders hardened; his back was tight. He waited, and after what felt like an eternity, he checked her carotid for a pulse. After another eternity, he peeled back one eyelid. I glimpsed a dark, fixed pupil and pulled my gaze away. On the chessboard, a game was in progress. Moriarty had been playing black, and although I didn’t know much about chess, I thought it looked like she’d been winning. Except she’d lost her queen, I saw after another moment. The black queen still lay on the board, tipped over after she’d been taken by a white bishop. I could hear myself breathing too fast.
When Holmes joined me, he was scrubbing his hands on the joggers. “She’s dead.”
“Fuck that,” I said. “How the fuck can she be dead?”
“Maggie,” the virtual assistant said overhead, “you’ve failed to respond for over an hour now, so I’m contacting emergency services. I hope everything’s ok.”
Holmes pointed to a wine glass, and I thought of Lynnissa Baca again. “She was poisoned.” He moved behind the desk. “Jack, if you prefer to keep watch—”
I managed to shake my head. “No. No, I can help.”
“We don’t have much time. It might be better if you brought the truck to the front door.”
That was enough to draw me out of my shock. I shook my head again, cleared my throat, and said, “I can do this.”
I checked the bookcases, but while the trinkets looked valuable, they didn’t look particularly interesting or important, and so I moved on. I tried the door to the patio, and it opened, and air smelling like wet stone and metal and a hint of pine met me, cool and refreshing. Nothing out there either. I worked my way around the room, looking for what I thought Holmes would look for—although God only knew what that was; maybe footprints? I stopped at the cabinets on the wall and opened them.
They held a whiteboard. I’d seen this at school, whiteboards and bulletin boards with doors that could be closed and, if necessary, locked. On the whiteboard, someone had taped pictures. Hundreds of pictures. I stared at them, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Many of the pictures were old—black and white, for the most part, and depicting people with dated clothes and old-fashioned hair. Beneath them were written names.
Timothy Watson.
Daniel Watson.
Carey Watson Roper.
Myron Watson.
Romeo Shakespeare Watson.
Aurelia Watson Jefferson.
My mother: Camilla Catherine Sixsmith.
On and on like that. And as I scanned the names, I recognized many of them. Watsons who had died young. Watsons who had, I was sure, been killed.
“Jack,” Holmes said, and his voice was a whip. “Get away from there.”
I stepped back. And then I saw it.
They weren’t just photos. They weren’t just a random assemblage of black-and-white. I’d seen this before, when hundreds of little photos made a bigger picture, one that you could see if you looked at them all together. There was a word for it we’d learned in art. Ms. Prinze had taught it to us. A photo mosaic.
And now I saw it.
I heard Holmes moving. Felt him take my arm. But I couldn’t look away.
Me. It was me. A photo mosaic of my face, a candid, when I was smiling and looking away from the camera. And someone had made it out of dead Watsons.
Chapter 23
Impossible Things
I couldn’t walk right. My legs were stiff, and although I didn’t fall, I kept feeling like I was about to—like my legs would lock on the next step, and I’d tip over. Holmes kept a hand on my arm, steering me through the labyrinth of nightmares, until fresh air met my face again. Outside, my brain registered pine duff, sage, a hint of wood smoke. Hands pressed me down, and my ass found cold concrete.
“Put your head between your knees.” Holmes’s voice came from a long way off. “Breathe. Do you remember you taught me a special way to breathe? Show me again, Jack.”
I breathed. Holmes’s hand shifted on my neck, his fingers playing lightly with my hair. I counted my breaths and breathed some more. Holmes stayed with me, his hand on my nape an anchor to reality. After a while, I said, “Ok.”
His fingers traced a question on my skin.
“I’m ok,” I said with a little more conviction, and when I tried to sit up, Holmes let me. He studied me, and I pushed on his face, turning him away from me. “Don’t be a goober.”
The bowl of the canyon was quiet. I blinked a few times, rolled my head on my neck. A wave of nausea crashed over me, but it faded as soon as it came, almost a memory. Above me, a red-tailed hawk floated in the sky. It looked motionless, like someone had pinned it there, but that was impossible.
“If I had known” Holmes began.
“Stop.” When I looked again, the hawk was gone. That was the deal with impossible things, I guess. The only thing I could think to say was “So, now we know who’s been killing Watsons.”
Holmes shifted, and it was a long time before he said, “Perhaps.”
I rolled my head on my neck again. “If I’m wrong, tell me why I’m wrong.”
“I don’t know, Jack.” He turned back to me, and if anything, the worry in his face was even more intense. “Are you all right?”
“Sure. Yeah. I mean, why the fuck not?”
He pulled his knees to his chest. He must have found something super interesting about my sneakers.
With a sigh, I peeled one of his hands free and squeezed it. “I’m freaked out.”
When Holmes looked up, his eyes were liquid, and he said, “As am I.”
I nodded. He squeezed back.
Something moved off in the brush, the sound of fast, frantic movement, and it broke the moment. “We should go, right?” I asked as I got to my feet. I gave Holmes a tug, and he let me help him up. “Get out of here before the police arrive?”
Holmes nodded. “If you’d like to get the truck, I will make a quick pass—”
“No,” I said.
“Jack, it’s only reasonable—”
“No.”
“In any similar operation, having a driver on standby—”
When I touched his jaw, he flinched. He almost covered it, but I hadn’t missed it. I kept my hold loose, playful, as I shook his head back and forth. “N. O. I know you’re trying to protect me, and I appreciate it, but I will go out of my skull if you leave me alone right now.” I wagged his head in a nod, and in my best English accent said, “Quite right, Jack. Jolly good.”
“That is not how I sound.”
“You sound much sexier.”
He twisted free, scowling. “This is a tactical mistake.”
“So, I’m shit at tactics. Add it to the list. And say, ‘Jolly good,’ just once, so I can get it right next time.”
“You are an idiot,” he said and stalked away.
I went after him. We followed the house. It was built onto a section of land that had been leveled out of the bowl, which meant that on three sides, it was easy to follow the perimeter of the building. The walls of windows allowed anyone to look inside.
“Do you think someone was spying on her?” I asked.
Holmes shushed me.
“Do you think the killer, like, ambushed her?”
“I don’t know, Jack. Please be quiet.”
“Do you think there’s a clue or something?”
He rounded on me. “I think there’s a possibility the killer is still in the area, and so I would like you to be quiet.” He shook himself and chuffed and folded his arms across his chest. “Please.”
I tried not to, but I couldn’t help myself. I grinned. Then I mimed zipping my lips.
“Imbecile,” Holmes muttered as he turned and started forward again.
I don’t know why it helped to be a jackass. I guess it was either that or—or fall into that black place again. Seeing Moriarty hadn’t hit me as hard as seeing Baca, but it had still been, well, a lot. Especially combined with the photo mosaic, all those dead Watsons, and the ass-busting creepiness of seeing my own face staring back at me. Moriarty—or whoever it had been—hadn’t been so crass as to paint a target on me, but I thought the message was pretty clear. So, I could either think about that, about how somebody was trying to kill me the way they’d tried to kill everybody else in my family tree, or I could jackass around and drive Holmes to the brink of justified homicide. The latter seemed like the better option.
I was so caught up in trying not to think about the photo mosaic that when Holmes stopped, I noticed too late and crashed into him. A swear slipped out of his mouth, and he clutched me, and for a moment, we both wavered. I glimpsed the drop-off in front of Holmes, and I wrapped an arm around him and grabbed the rail of Moriarty’s deck, which was directly above us. Holmes’s muscles were taut, and he smelled like Dial soap and the particular smell of his hair and like the store-brand detergent Dad and I used. Like home, I guess, if I had to put a label on it. For a dozen heartbeats, I held him against me, and the adrenaline rush of almost falling faded by degrees. Holmes wrapped a hand around my wrist, and after another few heartbeats, I let him go.
“As I thought,” Holmes said. “An approach from this side would be difficult, perhaps impossible, and it would offer no advantage, considering—” He stopped. Without even seeming to think about it, he grabbed my arm and leaned out over the drop.
I clutched his forearm, and I tightened my grip on the rail. Holmes was using me more for stability than anything else, but one thing you learn when you spend time in the mountains is that any drop-off can give way at any moment—nothing is ever as solid as it looks, and sometimes, the ground just gives way.
For close to a minute, Holmes did nothing but stare.
“What?” I finally asked. “What is it?”
He pulled back from the ledge and said, “See for yourself.”
We had to improvise, since we couldn’t trust his bad arm to hold our weight, so while Holmes held onto the deck railing, I gripped the waistband of his joggers. If I fell, a naked Holmes would have to explain how I died, which was probably a fate worse than death for him, so I figured it would pretty much square us.
For a moment, I couldn’t see what Holmes had noticed down among the scree and scrubby trees and brush. And then I spotted it: something definitely not natural—black and oblong and half-hidden by a scraggly maple.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Let’s find out.”
We had to backtrack to the front of the house so that we could come down the slope without breaking our necks. In the back of my head, a timer was running—I wasn’t sure how much time I’d wasted freaking out, but emergency services, if they were coming, couldn’t be far. Moriarty’s hideout was remote, but it wasn’t that remote. Hell, I was surprised nobody had flown in with a helicopter yet.
Making our way down the bowl was harder than it had looked. The ground was crumbly and gave easily underfoot, which meant we both slipped and skidded a lot (although, of course, I slipped and skidded more than Holmes, who even managed to make almost falling on his ass look like he was doing ballet). Twisted junipers dotted the side of the hill, making the air wintery with their smell, and the bark on one ripped up my palm when I started an uncontrolled slide and had to grab it to stop myself. There were clumps of blue spruce and yellow-brown shrubs that were coming back to life. We were halfway down when a fat hare burst out from where it had been hiding under a log and sprinted off into the tree line.
