That thought actually made me sit up. I was vaguely aware of Lock stirring in his sleep, of our copy of the police file starting to splay toward the edge of the bed. Because I didn’t know why my dad was doing all this. I didn’t know what made him hate these people so much, turn so completely against everything he’d ever been.
Maybe they were criminals. Maybe he was stopping them the only way he could. Perhaps that was why the DI left his file so conveniently for Dad, to aid him in his quest to take out dangerous killers. Or maybe Mallory had left it for me to find, to stop him.
I sighed aloud. Perhaps wishful thinking was the first sign of madness, and I was on a Wonderland trajectory.
I really had only one plausible choice. I had to investigate on my own. I had to find the woman from the photo, find out what she knew, and make her tell me. But all I had was a photo, and no idea how to use that picture to find her. Untrue again. I had a photo, a living witness out there somewhere, and I had two words. “Sorte Juntos.”
Lock stirred again and reminded me of an additional complication. Sherlock Holmes. He wasn’t about to give up on our little game, nor would he fail to notice if I were to suddenly be off on my own. I stared down at him for a few minutes, smoothed his hair with my fingers. He smiled in his sleep and turned toward me, tossed his arm across my lap. I caught the file just before it waterfalled to the floor and set it on the nightstand. He smiled again and I felt that tug inside me, the desire to tell him and bring him with me to find my answers.
But I couldn’t. Not yet. I couldn’t see the end of this path, couldn’t let Lock get caught between me and a killer, and until I could protect us better, I had to walk it alone.
I slid down into Lock’s arms and stared at the slanted shadows of the pins in his door. “Alone for now,” I whispered into the dark.
x x x
Sherlock slept on my bedroom floor for two days after the incident. I knew why he was there, of course, and that it had little to do with me. I knew because I understood more than most that life is fragile. Because loving someone means pretending that you can keep them safe when they’re with you, that they will be okay when they aren’t. You have to believe this to the point of denial, because to not believe leaves you with nothing but panic. A person can’t live with that kind of panic. Not for long.
When you lose someone close, when you can’t stop the pain or make it better, when you can’t even talk to her for fear you’ll crack into a million pieces on the floor, when you can’t do anything but sit and watch her deteriorate—that’s when you realize you can’t pretend anymore. All that precious denial disintegrates in a moment, and you’re left with the truth.
That life is fragile.
That letting yourself love people is a most sadistic form of self-torture.
That the fully alone are the lucky bastards who never have to learn to live with worry.
Lock couldn’t stop what was happening to his mother—no more than I could stop what had happened to mine. But me? He could still pretend to keep me safe. And I couldn’t take the last dying tendrils of his denial away from him. So I didn’t fight his constant presence, despite the way it infringed on my new commitment to investigation. I couldn’t let him stop me from my own pursuits, however, not even that first day. It meant missing school, which had somehow become the very least of my worries.
As soon as Sherlock kissed me good-bye and headed into the swarm of students going to class, I backed out the front door planning to hop the first bus to Regent’s Park. I was determined to get a look at the symbol that had been carved into the tree at the Patel site. It might be nothing, as I’d originally thought, but I needed to have all the facts of these crimes if I was going to figure out why my father had become a killer and how to stop him from killing the Blue-Haired Girl. I needed to know everything.
That included getting a better look at the fountain planter where Todd White had died. I pocketed my mom’s coin that morning so I could compare the symbols from the coin to the plaques affixed there and look for any inconsistencies. I barely made it out the door, however, when I heard a familiar lilting voice.
“My, my, my,” Sadie said, walking up from behind me. “Just six short months and here you are kissing boys and ditching class. Who knew all this time it was my influence keeping you from walking the delinquent path?”
I could probably have invented at least twenty solid ways to disentangle myself from Sadie, but I knew all of them were useless. It would have been a better use of my brainpower to figure out how to answer her next inevitable questions.
“Who is he? And how did you two . . . ?” She lifted her brow and turned back to look at the door, as if she could still see Lock walking the halls. “Not that I don’t approve, mind you. He’s got a geeky-hot thing going on.”
“That is Sherlock Holmes,” I said. My gaze had followed Sadie’s, only instead of Sherlock, I saw my chemistry professor making her way toward the doors. “And the rest can wait.” I grabbed her arm and pulled her down the steps and toward the bus stop.
“Where to, my corrupting friend? I can miss exactly one class.”