Where All Paths Meet, page 4
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“Yes! Yes! In your fucking face, H!”
“In my face?” he asked.
Behind us, the headlights swerved onto our street, but I took another sharp right. The corn maze spread out to our left, with a service drive for the food trucks and equipment trailers that came and went all fall. I cranked the wheel left. The Dodge rattled as we went over the rutted dirt tracks, and then the corn rose around us, a wall of brittle, drooping yellow that had been bleached by the sun until it was almost white. Husks hissed against the sides of the truck. A few dried-up ears of last year’s corn thumped against the hood and rolled to fall off the side. And then I stopped and killed the engine.
In the silence that followed, the only sound was the corn moving—a vast, rushing noise like the ocean—and the tick of the engine cooling.
“They may have seen us turn,” Holmes said, his voice strangely soft.
“The lights were off. And there’s a million places around here we might have disappeared. And I’m doing the best I can. Do you have a better idea?”
He touched his side, winced, and shook his head.
“Then say thank you.”
For a long moment, he was still. Then he turned toward me, and his eyes were the color of morning light on snowmelt. “Thank you, Jack.”
I couldn’t look at him for too long. Blinking, I shifted in my seat. I grunted. I flipped the visor down and flipped it back up again.
His breathing was quiet and slow. The maze had stilled around us. The weak ambient light made a picket line of the drooping heads of corn.
“Jack—”
I pivoted toward him, and five months’ worth of fury erupted, and I heard myself talking before I could stop myself. “Hi, H. Hello. Great to see you again. Nice to know you’re not dead—I’ve spent a lot of time the last five months thinking you might be dead. Nice to know that you were thirty fucking minutes away from me this whole time, and you could have at least told me you were alive.”
“Jack—”
“You know what? I don’t want you to explain why you couldn’t say goodbye in person. And I sure as fuck don’t want to hear you tell me that you were doing this for me, that this was your way of keeping me safe. I’m sick to death of hearing that from you. I don’t want anything, H, except for you to answer one fucking question. Can you do that? Can you answer one fucking question for me?”
His eyes looked glassy. His breathing was shallow.
“How fucking dare you? That’s my question. That’s the only one I want you to answer. How fucking dare you, H?”
“Jack,” he said, his voice thick, and the next words were slurred. “I think I am about to lose consciousness.”
Chapter 5
Every Teenage Rebel Who Had Ever Lived
His eyes drifted shut, and he started to slump. I steadied him and called his name, and then I saw it: the dart syringe lay in the footwell, where Holmes must have discarded it after we got in the truck. After he’d pulled it out of his side. I remembered the sound from the stairwell, the one I’d associated with paintball and airsoft—the sound of an air gun. In this case, a dart gun. Holmes had been shot with, what? A tranquilizer dart? And because he was basically the teenage version of the Terminator, he’d powered through and kept running.
Until now.
All of that rushed through my mind in a matter of heartbeats. Holmes’s jaw was slack, his face soft in the absence of his usual ferocious control. He looked younger. And what if it hadn’t been a tranquilizer dart? What if it had been some kind of poison? What if he was slipping into a coma, or he was about to have a heart attack, or some sort of irreparable damage was being done to his brain? I dragged out my phone, googled hospitals, and found an emergency medical center less than three minutes away. I slid the key into the ignition—
And I forced myself to take a deep breath. No. No, that didn’t make sense. They’d stopped firing their guns. And they’d switched to darts. Because they’d recognized Holmes. Or because their orders had changed. But they wouldn’t have switched weapons if they’d wanted to kill us—they’d have kept shooting their guns until we were dead.
I did a quick vitals check. Holmes’s breathing was even, although he wasn’t taking very deep breaths. His pulse was steady. His color was good. If he could talk, I knew what he’d tell me to do: wait, let him recover on his own. Going to a hospital meant doctors, questions, police.
“As long as you’re breathing,” I told him, and I caught his overalls and dragged him closer. “As long as I think you’re ok. If you scare me again, though, we’re going straight to the hospital.”
He made a sound deep in his throat and half-fell against me.
It took some maneuvering, but I got him lying in my half-assed version of the recovery position, his head on my lap. His hair was so soft, and it was still sticking up all over the place, so I combed it with my fingers. I tried to be gentle, but as the adrenaline drained out of me, I started to shake. I let my head drop back against the seat. I closed my eyes. I didn’t trust my hand anymore, so I settled it on his nape, where the skin was warm and smooth, and the bristles of short blond hair tickled my palm.
He started to snore. Just a little.
When Holmes had left—when he had disappeared from my life, after I had learned that he had lied to me, after I had learned he had known, for months, that my mom was a Watson, and that I was a Watson—he had given me a notebook. It had been his explanation. And although I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read it, not at first, eventually, I’d had to know. I’d wanted some reason I could accept. I’d wanted something better than to keep you safe or it’s better this way.
What I had found had sounded like Holmes: the detailed explanations, the anatomization and atomization of his feelings, the reasons and logic and evidence. Hell, he’d even included some diagrams.
But as I’d read, and reread, and reread yet again those pages of dense handwriting, I’d started to see the slippage. The circular reasoning. The leaps of logic. The vague, half-formed reasons that trailed off into unwritten ellipses. And then I’d known why he’d left. Not for any reason I could argue against. Not for any belief or opinion I could debate. He had left because he didn’t want to be with me, and because he was, at heart, tremendously kind, he hadn’t been able to say it.
And now, here he was again, his head warm in my lap, and the tears came even though I tried to stop them. I mopped my face with one sleeve of that damn velvet blazer.
Holmes’s breathing changed, so I gave my face one last wipe and looked down at him. His eyes were open. The word from eighth-grade Language Arts, the word Mr. Scholz made us learn, was lambent. His face still had that unfamiliar vulnerability, the lines of cheek and jaw and chin smoothed out. His mouth worked once, soundlessly, and then, in a cracked whisper, he asked, “Is this a dream?”
I shook my head and carded his hair once.
Some of the armor fell into place, and he struggled to sit up, his breathing becoming labored. I gave a little tug on his hair and said, “Hey, dummy, you don’t have to do anything right now. Relax.”
For another moment, struggle played itself out in his face. Then he lowered his head again, and his breathing quieted. The wind moved through the corn, and that rushing sound came back, and it was vast. And his breathing rose and fell like the wind. And I felt, again, what it was like to be with him, to touch the edge of something bigger than myself.
After a while, he moved against my hand, like a cat pressing against touch, and I stroked his hair, and his eyes opened slowly. He reassembled his armor piece by piece and sat up. He wiped his mouth. I was a gentleman, so I hadn’t planned on mentioning the drooling.
“How long was I out?” he asked, and his voice was flat and detached, and the distance fell into place between us again.
“Fifteen or twenty minutes.”
He nodded. “Ketamine.” He twisted to look out the back of the cab, and then he did a full scan. “Any sign of our pursuers?”
“Nope.”
“I suggest we leave. If you can take me to a TRAX station, I can—”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I hadn’t meant to shout, but he was so stupid sometimes. When he didn’t answer, I said—er, shouted—“I asked you a question.”
His chin came up.
“I just caught you trying to break into Maggie’s safe. And then some lunatics tried to gun us down before they switched to dart guns and tranqed you. And then they chased us through Lehi, and I had to sit here and wonder if you’d been poisoned and were going to die, only I knew you wouldn’t want to go to a hospital, so I fucking sat here and waited and hoped your brain wasn’t shutting down because for some reason I still care what you think. I got that creepy invitation, and I got that weird text, and I’ve had a few seriously fucked-up days. I haven’t seen you in five months. And instead of explaining any of that, you want me to take you to a fucking TRAX station. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
The corner of his mouth trembled. An unfamiliar tightness marked the corners of his eyes.
“Get out,” I said. “You want to do this on your own so bad? Get the fuck out of my truck.” He reached for the door handle, and I grabbed him and shouted, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” he said—ok, he was shouting a little too. “You told me to get out!”
“Because I’m mad, you jackass! Not because I want you to go!”
I released him. He stared at me, and then he looked away and straightened the sleeve of his shirt. One hand came up to rub the side of his head.
“Are you ok?” I asked gruffly.
“Fine.” He bit the word off. After ten or fifteen seconds, though, he said, “The ketamine is making it difficult to think.”
“Maybe you should take an addy,” I said. “I guess that makes me a hypocrite, but if you need something to help you, I guess now’s the time.”
His hand slowed. “I do not…have any.”
I snorted.
He shot me a look and then, just as quickly, pulled his gaze away. As he resumed rubbing his head, he said, “I no longer use it.” He labored over the silence that came after and then, with a note in his voice that I couldn’t make sense of, he said, “You did not approve.”
What I wanted to say was, Since when does it matter what I want? But what I said out loud, because I’m so smart, was, “Oh.”
A flicker of something—amusement, possibly—crossed his mouth.
So, I shoved him. “Don’t laugh at me, dumbass. I mean, that’s good, right?”
He risked a longer look, amusement mixing with wariness in his face. “I suppose. There was some dependency. It was not pleasant.”
“That’s good, then. That’s good that you’re not using it anymore. I mean, that’s good.”
He didn’t do anything. He didn’t smirk, and his eyes didn’t get big, and he didn’t laugh. But I heard myself, and my face got hot.
“Yes,” he finally said. “I suppose.”
And then there didn’t seem to be anything to say, so I said, “Are you sleeping any better?”
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
He shrugged, but some of the stiffness in his shoulders eased. “Better, Jack. Not well.”
Then there wasn’t anything to say. I gave up my chemical dependency for you after I abandoned you wasn’t exactly a prime conversation starter, and I could still hear myself saying, That’s good, that’s good, that’s really good, so silence seemed like the safest option.
Holmes, of course, couldn’t read any of the fucking social cues that made this so fucking agonizing. He took a longer look at me, and his gaze seemed to touch every part of me: chest, shoulders, arms, lingering on my face. “You look well.”
“I’m not.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m terrible.”
He moved the seatbelt away from his throat. He was clutching the polyester strap.
“You abandoned me,” I said. “And you lied to me. And you didn’t even have the guts to tell me to my face. I hate you. And I will never, ever forgive you.”
“Nor should you,” he said, a hint of the posh-boy English slipping into his voice.
“No. Don’t even try.”
His hand slid along the belt, tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing. “I am sorry, Jack. I’m so very sorry I hurt you. I know that doesn’t mean anything, but if it’s any consolation, I will never forgive myself either.”
I wanted to look relaxed. I wanted to look casual. Like nothing could touch me. Like zero fucks given. I slouched against the seat, and I wrapped a hand around the steering wheel, and the old, cracked vinyl was sticky against my palm. “Whatever.”
Every teenage rebel who had ever lived was staring down at me from heaven and rolling their eyes.
I needed fresh air—I needed to do something with my hands besides hold on to that goddamn steering wheel—so I rolled down the window. Cold air washed in, stinging against my fevered cheeks, weirdly comforting with the mixture of moldering husks and damp earth. The maze looked pretty sad by this point, but it hadn’t been harvested, and they hadn’t tilled it under yet—they wouldn’t do that until July when they put in the silage. A truck rumbled past us on the other side of the corn.
“I don’t know what to do right now,” Holmes said in a small voice.
“You could apologize a million more times.”
“I am sorry—”
“Save it; I don’t want to hear it.”
“But you said—”
I turned in the seat, and Holmes pulled back a little. “I want to know what’s going on. Who sent me that message? Why? What the hell were you doing breaking into Maggie’s safe?”
Holmes grimaced. “Jack—”
“Think carefully about how you’re going to finish that sentence. If it contains any version of ‘it would be safer’ or ‘I can’t tell you’ or ‘this is for your own good,’ then you might want to consider how attached you are to your balls, because I will twist them the fuck right off if you try that shit with me.”
He broke down and chewed his lip for a moment. It was hard to watch; Blackfriar had tried to break him of the habit, and even now, when he gave in to it, I could see him struggling with himself, trying to force himself to stop.
“Tell me about the invitation,” he said. “And the message.”
So, I told him.
“But that doesn’t make any sense. Why bring you into it tonight? Why involve you at all?”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No, Jack. It’s not that you’re irrelevant—”
“What every guy wants to hear.”
“—but you are a complication.”
“The second thing every guy wants to hear.” I sat up straighter. “I want answers, H. No more stalling.”
He picked at one buckle of the overalls. He had long, slender fingers, and right then, in the moonlight filtering in through the windshield, his skin looked like marble.
“I don’t know about the invitation. And I don’t know about the message you received tonight. As I said, those actions do not make sense to me, and I can’t explain who orchestrated these events. But—” He stopped to draw a breath. “But I will tell you the rest of it. I’m afraid you are going to be angry with me.”
“Huh. Really.”
He threw me a look that, on anyone else, I would have called nervous. “I…did what you said. I lied to you. By omission. Watson—Sarah—had prepared a contingency. In the event of her death. Last November, I received a package in the mail that included, among other things, the Watson family tree. The one you took from Paxton. It’s not clear what she intended or why she sent it to me. It’s possible that she had planned, eventually, to send you that package if she had lived longer.”
“But she didn’t,” I said. “Because your dad killed her.”
Holmes froze. Color drained from his face until he looked gray, but his expression stayed locked in that unyielding neutrality. Finally, he said, “Explain.”
“Your dad arranged for Burrows to kill her. He set the whole thing up.” And I told him about that night in September, about returning to the cottage and finding Blackfriar searching my bedroom, about Sarah Watson’s laptop, which Blackfriar had found where Holmes had hidden it. “He as much as admitted he killed her.”
But Holmes was already shaking his head, and I thought it might have been my imagination, but his color looked better.
“H, I’m telling you—”
“I’m not saying you’re lying, Jack. Or even that you’re wrong. But what you’ve described—my father didn’t admit to killing Sarah, did he?”
“He didn’t have to. It was the way he—” I stopped; there wasn’t a way to put into words the aura of menace Blackfriar carried, the half-verbalized threat, the way he had looked at me, and I had known—known—that he had killed Sarah Watson. “H, I was there. I’m telling you. What about her laptop?”
“Yes, that makes sense. The laptop’s hard drive had been reformatted using a program that makes it virtually impossible to recover the data. Sarah was dealing information about the Holmes family, and she had information about Zodiac as well. It only makes sense that my father would want that information destroyed.”
“He killed her, H. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I’m telling you now. I know he did it.”
Holmes shrugged. “And I believe you’re mistaken. For the moment, it doesn’t matter.”
“How can it not matter—”
“Sarah sent me more than the Watson family tree. She sent me a portable safe.”
“And? What was in it?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t send the combination to open it. And, because of the possibility of a failsafe device that might damage or destroy the contents, I did not attempt to open it.” Holmes stopped. “The instructions in the package were to have you open it.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No.”
