After a few seconds my phone vibrated. Me too, she typed. We need more days like today.
I slept fitfully and gave up at four a.m. to sneak down the stairs. Only one more thing for me to deal with—my father’s short sword. If we had the time, I would’ve waited for him to go to work, but we had to be out of the house before any of them woke up or risk having to explain why I wasn’t in uniform, why I was leaving earlier than usual, and any assortment of questions that might come with every tick away from my normal schedule.
Dad was snoring so loudly, the stairs were vibrating with the noise. The soft sound of his door clicking open didn’t even break his rhythm. A bottle of bourbon with maybe a tablespoon of liquid left was tipped over on his nightstand, a visual clue to the mystery of his deep, deep slumber. I was able to slide the closet open a few inches at a time until I could reach for the sword, where it was still wrapped in a sweater next to my mother’s tattered box of things. I had it in my hand and was out the door of his room in seconds, his snores droning on while I rewrapped it in a towel.
The number of people in the park that early shocked me. I should’ve known it’d be popular with runners and dog walkers, but I’d never come face-to-face with the crowds until that morning. I made my way directly to the bandstand and then toward the lake, slipping inside the curtain of willow branches at the water’s edge. There weren’t any people there—no one on the water. But still I waited until even the few lingering shadows in the area seemed to have moved away. Removing the sword from the towel was the worst part.
I spent a good five minutes wiping down every surface and scratching the fibers of the towel into every crevice, and then I checked again for early morning park people. I thought I saw a shadow by a tree around the bend from me, but then it didn’t move, and I knew it had to be my imagination. Even if it wasn’t, it was too far away to see me, much less understand what I was about to do.
After one last swipe of the towel, I threw the sword as far out into the lake as I could without leaving the cover of the branches. It sank immediately, without even a trail of bubbles to show where it had gone in. And then it was done. My father was disarmed, of a sort. Not that he wasn’t a trained policeman, capable of killing in a myriad of ways, and I didn’t know whether he even knew how to find the Blue-Haired Girl or not, but the sword was part of his ritual, and perhaps its absence would be enough to at least give me a day. So with that chore done and the boys looked after with the promise of American baked goods, there was nothing to do but collect Lock and head for the station.
Even though the train to Brighton didn’t leave until 8:37, it was still before seven when I left the house again, this time dragging an eerily quiet, barely coherent Sherlock behind me. Once I got him some coffee, he perked up, but he wasn’t very talkative as we took our bus to the London Victoria line. I thought we should buy all-day passes, just in case we needed to turn around quickly or stay late. But when I asked Lock about it, he merely mumbled his assent. Finally, when we were standing on the platform, waiting for our train, I decided enough was enough.
“What?” was his only response to nearly a full minute under my direct scrutiny.
“You’re quiet today.”
“Thinking.”
“About?”
He studied my face before he answered. “How difficult it can sometimes be to keep a promise.”
“And which promise it that?”
Another unreasonably long pause. “I once promised a girl that she was the one mystery I would never solve.”
I stared across the gap and up to the tiny panes of windows near the ceiling. “That doesn’t seem all that difficult.”
“I agree. It shouldn’t be. And yet . . .”
Someone jostled me closer to Sherlock, and I turned, moving into him without lifting my eyes. “It could be . . . ,” I started, but my throat suddenly felt unbearably dry, and my words wouldn’t come.
Lock leaned his face down toward mine so he could speak softly in my ear. “I have made an observation of a different sort.”
“And that is?”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and his cheek pressed gently to mine. “When a person cares for another, he wants to know everything about her all at once.”
I grinned. “Where’s the fun in that?”