“A tree.” I looked from where we floated to the boathouse and wondered how I could convince Lock we needed to get back to shore and over to the planter without telling him why.
“Want to see it?” He’d sat up and had his hands on the oars before I could answer, and sooner than I’d imagined, we were standing in front of the six-month-old crime scene.
I ran my hand over the Celtic knots mixed with leaves that flowed from the branches and down to entwine with the roots at the base. Just like Mom’s coin. She was everywhere in this game, connected to these people, possibly even to their deaths. I had to know that connection. “They don’t really seem to fit the planter’s other decorations, do they? The symbols?”
Sherlock walked from our side to the other and then back. “You’re right. It’s like they’ve been plastered on, not carved from the original stone.” He grabbed an edge and tried to shake it, but the medallion didn’t come loose. “Long time ago, maybe.”
It had to mean something—this man who’d known my mom, dying at a planter that held the symbols of our secret coin. But I couldn’t indulge in those thoughts just then. I couldn’t let Lock see me indulging them anyway. What I could do was find out more about Mum—who she really was when she wasn’t being our mom.
I knew only one place to do that. And it was more dangerous than stealing a thousand police files.
Chapter 9
The next two days I came home from school fully intending to make a thorough search of my mother’s things, but Dad was always in my way. It was as if he had returned to his old, lingering ways, from before Mum was sick. He went from never home to always home in the space of my decision to invade his and Mum’s personal belongings, which almost made me think he’d gained psychic powers. Psychic powers that could only ever come from the bottle, the office, or home. He never went anywhere else. Not since I’d decided to pry, anyway.
Lock and I met in the hall at school and again at drama, in the very back row of the theater. We compared notes and read through the articles I’d committed to memory the very first time he’d handed them to me. We talked details and argued theories, but the longer we went with only the papers as our source, the more frustrated we both became with merely guessing. Lock’s frustration, however, seemed to outstrip my own by miles. I was starting to suspect there was more to his mood than just his desire to solve the case of a murder in Regent’s Park.
“One of the park regulars then,” he proposed, for only the third time in so many days.
“Still a theory.”
I watched his grip tighten on the papers in his hands. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s what we call it when there’s no proof. And there’s no more proof of that today than there was the last time you said it.”
“We don’t have enough data!” He tossed the papers in the seat between us with a carelessness that instantly set me on edge. Nothing I said was adequate that day, even when I was blatantly and obviously right. He was being an idiot, and I might have explained that to him at length, but I was in too foul a mood to be bothered.
Instead, I snapped back, “I said I’d get the file and I will.”
He stared at me for a few seconds and then stood and started down the aisle. “Find me when you do.”
Getting the chance to go through my mother’s things was still top priority, but in the interim, I spent the rest of my spare time trying to find a way to retrieve a bloody police file without my dad finding out about it. I looked through his bag every night after he sloshed into his room to sleep off the drink. I even tried going down to the station, twice, to see if I could talk my way onto a computer or into a file room. With almost fifteen hundred officers in the Westminster Borough, one would think I could slip in and out anonymously, but both times I was forced to hide and sneak out to avoid what few detectives I knew.
Really, I should’ve just told Lock it was impossible, but every time the subject came up, I managed to lose my head in the challenge of it, in the imperative to find out more about the deaths of my mother’s friends, and then I’d renew my promise. As I did that Wednesday out on the lake in the park.
Sherlock was in a particularly awful mood, which I at first attributed to the fact that he was nine full minutes late to the time he’d set (and proceeded to text me reminders of every ten minutes for an hour). It was the first time he hadn’t been waiting for me, which wouldn’t have mattered at all if he hadn’t blurted the word, “Apologies,” at me in a tone more suited to insult than regret.
We went out in the boat, but I was quickly aware that his mood hadn’t improved in the twenty-four hours we’d been apart—only now I was stuck out in the water with his stormy demeanor. It took exactly thirteen minutes for me to tire of his thunderous barking and heated silences.
“Take me back,” I said.