“What’s that?”
“A letter from my dad to Fred. I found it on his bed last night after the police left. If he didn’t orchestrate the search to get at me, he definitely could have done it to have the letter delivered.”
“So an officer did your dad a favor?” He grabbed it off the table and flipped it over in his hand. “Can I open it?”
“Do what you want with it. Just make sure Freddie doesn’t see.”
He tore open the envelope. After a few seconds he shook his head and slid the note over to me. “I don’t think this is why either. Take a look.”
“I’d rather not.”
Lock pulled it back. “It’s just your father’s delusional fantasies, really. He goes on about how he was wrongly accused and will be out soon to come rescue them from you. Not enough here to warrant using a huge card like a search of your house to deliver it. Maybe if it had instructions for a meeting or something equally practical. But even then, there are so many less intrusive ways he could have gotten this to Freddie.”
“My father isn’t known for his subtlety.”
Sherlock shook his head again and reread the letter.
“Why does it matter?” I asked. “Either my father orchestrated it or Mallory was looking for an excuse. . . .”
But that wasn’t it, and I knew it too. Even before Sherlock said, “There’s a third possibility. A more concerning possibility.”
“The tip had to have been called in by someone else.”
Lock brought the tips of his fingers together. “Because of the hand.”
“Because of the hand,” I echoed. Had I really forgotten that gory little detail overnight? Someone had planted a severed hand in my bin. Someone who wished me to be accused of something. I wanted to blame my father for this as well. He definitely could have had someone set the entire thing up on his behalf, and I could think of a million reasons why. Perhaps he wanted people to think I was just as criminal as he was. Maybe he just wanted to scare me. Or it could’ve been some foolish attempt to make our house look targeted and not a good place for the boys to live. Only he couldn’t have known that Alice was coming, and until last night the boys had been living with Mrs. Hudson.
Sherlock took my bowl and walked to the sink with it but turned before he put it in the water. “Your father is most likely not the culprit here.”
“Maybe not.”
“And that is more concerning. If we don’t know who it is, we don’t know why he did it.”
“And?”
He lifted my spoon into the air and said, “And we don’t know what he’ll do next.”
It was a dramatic gesture that was lost on me, because I was still stuck on all the myriad reasons why it could and could not be my father. So much so that I got up from the table and started to leave the kitchen without a word. Lock met me at the doorway, which he half blocked with one shoulder.
When I looked at him, he reached up to push a lock of hair back behind my ear and asked, “It was really nothing?”
The quiet tone of his voice made me want to reassure him, but I didn’t have the words. Instead, I nodded, then smiled a little as an afterthought. “I’ll have the boys bring down their school bags.”
? ? ?
I peered out the window to find a handful of reporters wandering about the pavement in front of our house. The days after my father tried to kill me, our sidewalk was a circus of movement that quickly became an impenetrable wall of people holding objects whenever my brothers and I showed our faces. Notebooks, cameras, microphones, and digital recorders were all thrust at us anytime we left the house or returned home. An explosion of flashes and whirs took in our every expression, sigh, and mutter.
That’s when Mrs. Hudson first offered for us to stay with her. We hid ourselves away at her house and had everything delivered, including our school makeup work, which was smuggled in by a ridiculously costumed Lock. We lived like that for three days until the next giant parliament corruption scandal stole the media’s attention away. That’s also when I’d decided to move back to our house. As much as I wanted to stay with my brothers, being in a stranger’s house felt like I was letting my father and the chaos of the press and protesters drive me away from my home. And that day, despite their diminished numbers, it felt like they were doing it again.
“Not this time,” I whispered as I let the curtain drop back into place. We’d only just gotten our house back as a family, and I was determined to make that last. This time I wasn’t going to let them make us hide.
All five of us stood at the door, Sherlock and me flanking my brothers, our arms around their backs like we could create a shield from what was about to happen.
“Okay, remember the rules.”
“No speaking, just walking,” Freddie said.
“Holding hands until we’re past the crowd,” Michael said.
Sean was last but loudest. “No one left behind!”