The way he refused to address me directly put me on edge. “It’s none of your business,” I said with a flat grin.
True to Holmes form, this answer only seemed to intrigue Mycroft. “Do you know my brother from school? You’ll forgive my curiosity, but Sherlock’s never brought a girl home before. It’s an encouraging sign, to say the least.”
“He’s never brought a girl home either,” Sherlock said, biting into a sandwich. He seemed quite pleased with the instant antagonism developing between me and his brother. He would.
“I’ve never had much use for girls, if I’m being honest. No offense to your gender.”
“I’m sure womankind is devastated beyond belief.” I gestured to the plate. “Biscuit?”
Lock did a rubbish job of stifling a laugh in a slurp of his tea. But Mycroft wasn’t discouraged. He stepped in and snatched a biscuit from the plate, ruffled Sherlock’s hair, and said, “I like her.”
“As long as Mycroft approves,” Sherlock said, stretching out his arm to clink our tea mugs together.
“So relieved,” I said, drinking deeply.
Mycroft winked at me in his clueless way, and strode from the kitchen to take the stairs two at a time up to the second floor.
“Did you bring it?” Sherlock was grinning at me when I looked back.
I nodded. “It’s in my bag.”
We finished our tea in giant gulps, and Sherlock grabbed the open package of biscuits from the table before he led me up the stairs to his room.
I’m not sure what I expected to see behind the door, but what surprised me most was how normal Lock’s bedroom was. Freddie could have lived in the room, or even Seanie in a few years. The bed was mussed; there were clothes everywhere and even a few posters on the walls. Everything I’d known of Sherlock Holmes was extraordinary. Here was a strange and vivid reminder that, in the end, he was just a boy from London after all. My feeling of letdown meant it was a reality I needed to face.
I dug in my bag for the file I’d pilfered. “I brought the—”
He interrupted me with a kiss, and I smiled, even as I pushed the file between us and pulled free of him.
“Police file,” I said, to remind myself why we were there. I didn’t want to meet his eyes, so I looked past his head to the brown walls.
And once again Lock found a way to entrance me. The entire back of his door and the door-shaped wall space next to it was covered in papers, in pushpins, and in bright blue yarn. He’d created a map of our crime, and it was amazing. A neat row of our victims’ photos was pinned across the middle, each one with a blue string that led to the site of his death on a map of the park, then to the newspaper clipping of his death, then up to a more random jumble of words and the victims’ vocations and schools. I stepped past Lock in a trance, my eyes tracing every path, some from the articles he’d shown me before, some new. Some led nowhere, but most ended at a blank page with the word “police” scrawled across it, followed by a hastily added question mark in a different color, which could only be for my benefit.
“What’s all this?” My tone held the hush of the sacred, which might have embarrassed me if I wasn’t still so amazed.
I could hear the satisfaction in Lock’s reply. “You didn’t seem to believe my theory, so I thought I’d show you how I came to it in a different way.”
The work and persistence it took to create such a map didn’t go unnoticed, but what astonished me most was how close it was to the way I saw things in my mind. It was like a translation from my thought patterns to the real world. It was perfectly and completely me.
I realized I was making a spectacle of myself and forced my gaze away, which was when I saw Lock’s room in a new light. There were piles of clothes, as I’d noted before, and strange smells that might have been old plates of food but weren’t. Because under the piles were the flasks and tubes of his lab, some permanently burned out on their rounded bottoms, some still full of an unidentifiable sticky residue. He had corked bottles of ash and soil stuffed between falling-over books on his bookcase. A box with various locks on four sides sat on his desk, lock picks piled like jackstraws beside it. Little hints of the extraordinary peeked out from every corner.
When my eyes focused again on Lock, who stood a little awkwardly in the same spot where he’d kissed me, I realized they’d been there all along. He’d been there all along, and I couldn’t see him through the mess.
I wanted to tell him everything just then. I wanted him to know about my mom, about her coin, her friends, the photo. I wanted him to know about “Memories of You” and to meet Sean, Fred, and Michael. But more than any of that, I wanted to kiss him and to keep kissing him until one of us ran out of air. So I did.