Where All Paths Meet, page 28
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
I shook my head.
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know. I ate a million mini-Reese’s at a gas station.”
For some reason that made Dad laugh, and he pressed me down onto the sofa. “Let’s get some real food into you.”
“I hate Reese’s. I’m never eating Reese’s again.”
He riffled my hair again, ignoring my glower as I tried to fix it, and shuffled toward the kitchen.
“I’ll get it,” I said. “You should be resting.”
“I’m going nice and slow. Lay back and close your eyes.”
I thought about watching TV, but my eyes were itchy from all that crying, and closing them sounded good. From the kitchen came the clink and clank and clatter of Dad doctoring up the canned chili, his uncertain steps, the rattle of the compressor. As the chili warmed, the smell reached me: tomatoes and cumin and beef and other deliciousness. The rustle of plastic suggested this might be my lucky day, and we were having haystacks.
That was my last clear thought before an undertow pulled me down. In my dreams, Holmes was there. Holmes practicing that ridiculous smile. Holmes helping me up after I’d fallen while we’d been training. Holmes pressing my hands to his cheek, his face radiant, when he’d come to me the night before. When I’d thought I’d understood. When I’d believed what I’d wanted to believe, what he’d let me believe: that I mattered to him the way he mattered to me.
I woke to Dad thumbing tears from my cheek, his fingers scritching pleasantly through the hair above my ear. He made shushing noises and urged me to sit up. Sleep dragged at me. I wanted to sleep. Forever sounded like a reasonable amount of time, if it meant I could dream about Holmes in those moments when the lie had been perfect, when I’d known, in a way that seemed subatomic, coded into the physics of my existence, that we belonged to each other.
“You’re going to feel better,” Dad said as he wiped my cheek again. “He hurt you before, and you survived, and you’re going to survive this.”
I nodded.
He wrapped my hands around the bowl with my haystack: Fritos, then chili, then cheese. Heat seeped through the ceramic and warmed my fingers.
“I’m not hungry, Dad.”
“I want you to take ten bites.”
“Five,” I said automatically.
His grin flashed out. “Nine.”
“Six.”
“Eight.”
“Seven.”
“Eight.” I opened my mouth, and he said, “Eight, Jack.”
I’d smashed half the bowl before I realized what he’d done. By that point, I was shocked to discover I felt partially human again; I wasn’t sure when I’d last eaten a full meal, and although Dad had doctored the chili to mouth-blisteringly hot, that only made it better.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said as I picked out a Frito and ate it, and then I hit a couple of more spoonfuls of chili. The haystack was disappearing at an alarming rate. “I’m a Watson. I’m supposed to, I don’t know, solve crimes. Or help solve them. But Dad, I don’t have any freaking clue what to do next.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Jack.” He sat on the arm of the recliner; it was one of the things he did when he was tired, the way he always was after seizing, but didn’t want to let himself sleep yet. If he was going to force himself to get up and do something, when all he was supposed to do was sleep. “This isn’t a story; this is real life, and you’re a teenager, and you’ve done more than anyone could reasonably expect of you. We’ll get the police involved, and we’ll do everything we can to make sure he pays for what he did.”
“How can you be so calm?” I mumbled. Exhaustion gathered itself again, pounced, bore me down. “He killed Mom. How can you sit there?”
“I’m not calm. I’m furious. But your mother is dead, and you’re alive. My job is to keep you safe, Jack. That’s what matters right now.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but a yawn came out. The bowl slipped from my fingers and clattered to the floor. I was barely conscious enough to be grateful that somebody had finished the haystack.
A part of me was aware that something was wrong, and I tried to ask what was happening, but instead of a question, all I could manage was a soft noise.
Dad heaved himself up from the arm of the recliner. He combed his fingers through my hair, and past him, on the counter, I saw one of his prescription vials sitting out on the counter, next to the spices, where he’d been fixing the chili. That seemed important, like I needed to run a thread from point A to point B, but I couldn’t do it, not with all that weight dragging me down.
Dad’s voice was strange and hard and unfamiliar, at odds with the gentleness of his touch as he helped me stretch out on the couch. “I don’t know anything about Holmeses and Moriartys, Jack. I don’t know anything about Watsons. I wish your mom were here to tell you about that; if it meant something to her, she never told me. But I know this: you’re not only a Watson. You’re my son. You’re Jack Moreno. And the Morenos don’t run away from their problems.”
Then sleep rushed in like the blackness between the stars, and I was gone.
Chapter 30
Watch Out, World
The sleep was deep and dreamless. Or, if there were dreams, they were the kind that crumbled into sand by morning, and it was a mercy not to remember them.
On the same trip to that old mining town where Dad had bought Mom’s necklace, one of the “fun” “activities” (notice my generous use of quotes) I’d been required to participate in was taffy-pulling. In case you’ve never done it, it’s exactly what it sounds like. You pull taffy. Forever. Or, at least, it feels like forever. And it’s hot at first, and your hands are covered in oil, and you pull. And pull. And pull. The taffy resists, and then it loosens up, and every other pull it tries to slip out of your hands. But after a while, it’s got a sheen to it, and they say it looks satiny. Which, I guess, it kind of does.
Which is a long way to say that waking up was a bitch.
I knew I needed to wake up. And I kept trying. But it was like pulling taffy: consciousness kept slipping away, and the harder I pulled, the looser and slipperier it became, and I’d fall back into nothing.
And then, one time, it worked, and I lay there, and everything had a soft sheen in the morning light.
My first thought was that I’d passed out on the couch. I’d fallen asleep on the couch enough times to recognize the signs: my head on a pillow, a blanket tucked around me, all Dad’s work. He said I was too big for him to carry to bed now.
My second thought was that Dad would kill me if he saw me hungover like this.
It wasn’t a regular hangover, with the headache and the need to vomit and the unrelenting determination that dying was the only solution. And it wasn’t exactly the way I felt when I smoked too much, and I still hadn’t come down properly, although it was closer to that. My body ached, and my head felt weirdly tight, like skin stretched across the mouth of a drum. My mouth was dry, which was weird, because some passerby had drooled a fuck-ton on the pillow while I was innocently sleeping.
I stumbled to the bathroom, peed, drank water from cupped hands, and pawed through the medicine cabinet until I found the Tylenol. Then I started the shower and sat under the water until I felt human enough to stand and clean myself up.
As my brain kicked into second gear, a few thoughts worked their way to the top. Bits and pieces of the day before began to come together. Snatches of the fight with Dad. His fall. The—
The chili.
“Motherfucker,” I said and got a mouthful of shower spray.
Wiping my eyes, I rinsed off and dried myself.
He’d drugged me. My own father. I scowled in the mirror as I ran the towel over my chest. Bad enough to be treated like a kid in general, but to have him put me to sleep, literally, the way he and Mom joked about using cough syrup when I’d been little. He was as bad as—
Oh, I thought as one tired little synapse fired. Shit.
I forgot the towel and ran, buck-ass, toward the front of the cottage. Dad’s keys were gone from the hook near the door. So were my keys; I vaguely remembered surrendering them after Dad had brought me home from jail. Dad’s shoes were gone. There was a scrap of paper on the kitchen counter, but that could wait. I sprinted down the hall, the cottage’s old boards thundering under my bare feet, and threw open Dad’s door. His room was always neat. I dropped onto my knees, pulled out the gun safe, and knew. It was open. And the gun was gone.
“God damn it,” I said and ran back to the kitchen.
The note had Dad’s handwriting, and it was a single sentence: Under no circumstances are you allowed to leave the cottage. Love, Dad.
I stared at the note. Then I laid it on the counter again and put my head in my hands. He’d gone to take care of it himself. Of course he had. He’d as much as told me the night before. He was furious about Mom. He was determined to keep me safe. His last words, before the chemical haze had scrubbed away memory, came back to me: The Morenos don’t run away from their problems.
And he’d bought a fucking gun.
The first thing to do was call Rivera, and I spent five minutes going through my room, throwing everything I owned in a hundred different directions, until I remembered I’d given up my phone last night too.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I told the face in the mirror.
I took a few panicked breaths. Then I forced myself to take deeper ones. Ok, I thought. Ok. He’s gone. He’s gone to do something. And whatever it is, it’s bad, because he doesn’t know what he’s going up against, not really, and because he’s sick, and if he seizes or if he gets a migraine or if he stumbles because his balance still isn’t a hundred percent, Blackfriar will destroy him.
For a moment, the panic actually seemed to stop my heart. I’d heard about panic attacks, about how they felt like a heart attack, how they felt like dying. I wasn’t sure if this was one—maybe it was a baby one, or maybe it was only the Jack Moreno Special Edition Freak-out™. But whatever it was, I felt like my heart had locked up in my chest, and my lungs weren’t working, and all I could do was sag against the desk and struggle to hold on.
When it was over and my body was mine again, my face got hot, and my eyes stung, and I dropped into the chair. But I didn’t let myself cry. If I started crying, I might have another panic attack, and if I had another one, I might legit die. Even if I didn’t, I wasn’t any use to Dad like this. He needed me.
And that thought was a lifeline. He needed me, and I could help him. I had to help him.
I glanced down at my dangly bits. I had to help him. And I couldn’t do it while I was free balling.
Jazz hoodie. Joggers. The Cortez because Mom had given them to me and I was going to kick some ass in her name today. The next step was to steal a car. I was pretty sure it was Monday. Or maybe it was Tuesday. It would have been nice to know, but I didn’t have my phone. Either way, classes were in session, which meant a lot of staff would be in classroom buildings, and the staff housing would be mostly empty. I could take a custodial cart for cover, and I could get into any of the staff houses with a screwdriver—if anybody even bothered with the locks.
My plan worked, and ten minutes later, I was headed down the canyon in Ms. Albrecht’s 2009 gray Hyundai Elantra, which had the incredible distinction of being so bland that it was practically invisible. I figured she’d understand it was an emergency. Or, if she didn’t, I’d tell her it had to do with colonialism. She’d eat that up.
Dad might have taken my wallet, but the last year and change had taught me a few important lessons. The first was that you can never have enough cash, because you don’t know what kind of emergency you’re going to have, and bill collectors can’t take your money if they can’t find it. So, by the time I hit I-15, I’d made a stop, and I now had a burner phone with plenty of minutes.
I drove north and called Dad. When he didn’t pick up, I left a message, asking him to call me back. I tried again, just in case, but he didn’t pick up that call either. I left another message.
I tried Holmes next, with the same results. Big surprise. I left a message anyway.
My first thought was to drive straight to Reichenbach Grange. I had a good plan that went something like this: charge in there, and if anything gets in your way, plow through it. There was even something in there, a vague, half-formed vision, about kicking down a door.
But as the Elantra purred up I-15, reality started picking apart the Boy Genius’s plan. If Dad had gone to the Grange, how was I going to reach him? I couldn’t kick down a door—hell, I don’t even know if I could have shot out a lock, and for that matter, I didn’t have a gun. And what if Dad hadn’t gone to the Grange? If I showed up at the Holmeses’ mansion and charged in and Dad wasn’t there, I’d have given myself away, and my only advantage—if it could be considered an advantage—was the element of surprise. Once that was gone, I had nothing.
On the other hand, the Grange was the only place where I did have a chance to rescue Dad. If Dad had gone to confront Blackfriar at Zodiac, I didn’t have a shot. There were twelve buildings on the Zodiac campus, each of them big enough for hundreds of people, each with plenty of spots to hide Dad. And that’s not to mention the Zodiac security team. Or what if Dad had gone somewhere else? What if he’d called Blackfriar, and they’d arranged a meeting?
The possibilities multiplied and branched, and frustration made my eyes tear up again. I tried, again, to bring myself back from the edge. Think, I told myself. Think. You’re not a Holmes, and you’re not a Moriarty, but you’re not stupid either. You’ve done hard things before. The hard thing right now is to keep your shit together and help Dad, so think!
Maybe yelling at myself was genuinely a good motivational strategy. Maybe I needed to start using it for chemistry. Or maybe I was lucky, or bouncing along in the Elantra jarred something loose, or the universe decided to be merciful for once. Whatever the reason, an idea came to me.
Tom.
We’d found Tom’s bag at Moriarty’s house. He’d been there the night she died. Or someone had wanted us to think he’d been there the night she died. Either possibility raised some interesting prospects. And now that I knew Blackfriar had killed my mom, now that I had reason to believe that Blackfriar had been killing Watsons for decades, a question crystallized in my head—something that had been bothering me since the night I met Tom Watson: why did Blackfriar put up with him?
Because now I knew that Blackfriar wasn’t above murder. And I knew that Blackfriar wanted the Watsons dead. As Cecilia had shown me—painfully, irrefutably—the Watsons did make the Holmeses better. Not better detectives. Not better warriors. Better people. More human. More complex and intricate and fully realized and wonderful, the way all people become when their lives intertwine. Blackfriar didn’t want that—not for himself, and most certainly not for his son. So, why had he allowed Tom to follow him around? Why, for that matter, had he allowed Tom to stay alive?
Because he had to. That was one answer. Or because he needed to. That was the other.
Either Blackfriar needed Tom for something, and his usefulness made Blackfriar willing to put up with a puppy dog Watson trailing him everywhere. Or, for some reason, Blackfriar couldn’t get rid of Tom. And that made me think of another Watson who had tried to get leverage over the Holmes family. Holmes—my Holmes—had told me from the beginning that the Watsons were notorious for getting close to the Holmes, for learning their secrets, for profiting from the details of their lives.
What did Tom know that Blackfriar wanted to keep secret?
I didn’t have any proof that Tom knew something. I didn’t have anything but an inconsistency, the nagging certainty that Blackfriar’s behavior was wrong, out of character, and that, therefore, some other force held him in check. There was a possibility, yes, that Tom was an instrument, and that Blackfriar was keeping him alive for some purpose. But I didn’t think that was the case. Blackfriar was always trying to slip away from Tom, avoid him, escape. That was what had bothered me: the subtle imbalance of power between them.
And the next thought was logical, cool, controlled: if I knew that secret, I could make Blackfriar leave us alone. If he had Dad, he’d have to let him go. He wouldn’t ever bother us again.
And a smaller, darker part of me thought, If I knew that secret, Holmes would have to come back to me.
I crushed that thought out and tried to focus. The next step was to find Tom. That night at Sundance, Noneley had said something to him about getting back to his hotel. So, which hotel? There were hundreds of them in Salt Lake. Even more if you extended the range to include Utah Valley or Park City or, say, Sundance. Needle, meet haystack.
But that wasn’t quite true, was it? Because people picked the kind of places they wanted to stay based on a lot of factors, and some of those factors, you could predict. Before Mom died, when we’d traveled, Dad and Mom had gotten into—well, they weren’t arguments, but they were definitely disagreements about where to stay when we went to Disney, when we went to watch the Dodgers play, when we went to that old mining town. Mom liked upscale. Mom liked boutique. Mom liked expensive. Dad liked anywhere you could accumulate (and then pay with) points.
What did I know about Tom Watson? Not much. But he’d glued himself to the Holmeses, and that said something about his character. And he’d done so by blackmailing Blackfriar (at least, that was my theory), and that said something about his stupidity. When I’d trapped him in the closet, he’d sounded hysterical, something about being laughed at. So, somebody who wants connection, somebody who wants attention, but, at the same time, is afraid of it. Somebody not too bright. Tom would want somewhere fancy, I figured. Especially if Blackfriar was footing the bill. Somewhere with a reputation—not a boutique. Tom would want the recognition, the name power. And he’d want somewhere big, somewhere with lots of room, because the other thing about Tom Watson was that sometimes he wanted to disappear.
