Lily was her own minefield. She didn’t seem all that bothered by my presence, despite her friends’ keening. She never spoke to me or about me, never joined the shunning sessions. Instead, she just studied me. Openly. Like I was as unfathomable as a Pollock painting. I preferred her stares to the dramatics of her friends, really, because she didn’t avert her eyes, even when I stared back.
We’d been studying each other every day of the six since I’d returned to school, sometimes through an entire class session. And the oddest thing was starting to happen, for me at least. I was beginning to feel like I knew her. Perhaps it was Lock’s influence, but with so much time on my hands and so little interest in Miss Francis’s end-of-term puttering about, I felt like I spent the span of every class taking in Lily Patel to the very last detail.
At first it was just general things, like the fact that she had the same necklace in both silver and gold, which she would match to the metal of her earrings. She always wore a bronze cross tied around her neck with a black ribbon no matter what other jewelry she wore. She mostly hid the cross under her uniform shirt, so that I only got glimpses here and there. She wore her uniform perfectly, without a button undone or hem unaligned, but she changed out her handbag every other day, and I had yet to see a repeat.
It was probably cheating, but I learned she was a vegetarian by listening in on a post-lunch conversation in the hall. Not particularly health conscious about it, though, as her bag was filled with empty bottles of Thai coffee and crinkled-up pastry wrappers that afternoon in drama.
Last Thursday I learned that Lily played cello, when she brought the instrument into class. She’d probably done it dozens of times before, but it took her hefting the giant behemoth case down the theater aisle for me to notice that those papers she studied during free time in class were actually music scores for orchestra. Her heart didn’t seem to be in it, however. Her attention was mostly distracted to the stage, even when there was nothing there but lights and dust and our empty circle of chairs. Her heart didn’t seem to be with Watson anymore either, though that guess was based more on his desperation than any behavior from her.
So I knew that much about Lily Patel. All those ridiculously useless facts, and that her father had been murdered right where I sat in Regent’s Park.
I touched my fingers to the clover leaf her father had undoubtedly carved into the tree trunk to note where he hid his money, and I let myself wonder briefly if Lily knew what had been hidden there. What would they have done with the money, had they known where it came from? Would it be life-changing money for them? Or would they rather have denied its existence to sustain their memory of Mr. Patel as it was, without Sorte Juntos, the criminal organization he and my mother had been members of?
I pulled my hand free from the carving before my thoughts circled back to my father, and instead let myself imagine what it must have been like to run something like Sorte Juntos. To be my mother. To pull the puppet strings of a team, guiding them in and out of some of the most secure places in London. To take whatever she wanted to take. To be above and beyond the rules and the law and any kind of morality. To be free.
Mum had lived that life. So had Alice. And somehow they both ended up living incredibly mundane lives as adults, one in a row house, the other on a farm. Not for the first time I wondered how someone with that kind of freedom and power could willingly decide to step into a cage-like marriage with my father. But those were the kinds of thoughts I was trying to avoid.
Footsteps brought me back to the present and to the realization that I could have been followed by a reporter and, more distressingly, that I was sitting on the spot where my father had killed a man. But before I could do more than stand, the light from a flashlight shone full in my face.
“You.” A female voice, but I couldn’t tell if the tone held surprise or accusation.
I shielded my eyes and started imagining worst-case scenarios, starting with a morning full of headlines about how a serial killer’s daughter was caught visiting his crime scenes hours after police had searched her house.
“What are you doing?”
I had no answer for that, so I turned my face away from the light and stepped toward the shrubs where Lock and I had hidden on the first night of our little game. The beam of light dropped from my head to my feet and my accuser said, “Wait.”
I kept walking until she said my name.
“Mori, wait.”
I hazarded a look and was surprised to see Lily Patel staring at me with the same expression she wore in drama, like she couldn’t decide what to think, but just the sight of me made her sad.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
She was holding flowers and an unopened can of beer, which seemed an odd combination, but I knew I had no right to ask anything. So I glanced toward the shrubbery again and took one more step. “I’ll go.”