“You took the letter apart? Does this mean you’re on the case?”
Sherlock still sounded distracted when he said, “We are on the case.”
“And I suppose that means we’re going to the clinic.”
“Of course. And if you’re lucky, I’ll tell you all about my new case at school.” Lock didn’t wait for my response. He was already out in the hall when he said, “It’s a missing mobile phone, which seems dull, of course. But the only suspect claims to be in love with the victim. . . .”
Lock said something about the suspect’s father working for a mobile company, and then he was too far down the stairs for me to hear. I was left to stare at my own reflection in the mirror. I brought my fingers up to my lips as my forced grin faded and tried not to think about how much I still wanted him to kiss me.
? ? ?
“So, as you see, there’s too much data to figure out what really happened,” Sherlock said. We were sitting on the bus, heading to the clinic, but his mind was definitely wrapped up in this phone riddle.
“Or not enough,” I offered.
Lock ignored me and started poking at his tablet with a little more force than was called for. A boy two years younger than us was being accused of stealing a mobile from a girl in his class—a girl he’d been in love with since grade school, according to the boy. He could barely utter full sentences when she was in his immediate vicinity. Stealing from her wasn’t likely. More to the point, his father did indeed work for a mobile company, which made his stealing an outdated phone, of all things, completely unbelievable. He should have been at the very bottom of any suspect list.
Still, when the classroom was searched, the phone was found in the boy’s book bag. Lock had been wrestling with the puzzle when he’d been distracted by the pearls. “But I wanted to know what you thought. The boy’s pretty desperate.”
“Why? He just returned her phone, right?”
“They’re threatening to expel him.”
“That seems a bit extreme.”
“I thought so too, but he’s more worried that the girl will hate him and that he won’t be able to see her anymore if his parents make him transfer schools.”
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds, and then Lock muttered, “Too many possibilities.”
It was the exact opposite of my case, the one we were supposed to be focusing on that day. But he wouldn’t be able to, not as long as this problem was in front of him, so I decided to help.
“Who benefits?”
Lock looked insulted at the question. “Do you not think I’ve already tried to ferret out a motive?”
“And there’s none?”
“The girl is well liked but not popular enough to have enemies.”
“Every girl has an enemy, and it’s almost always another girl.”
“I thought men were the enemy,” he said as a tease.
I narrowed my eyes. “Well, who exactly do you think teaches little girls to see other little girls as the enemy, when in fact it’s all just a lie to make sure we never consolidate our talents and rise to power?”
I watched Lock’s expression brighten and I changed the subject before he said something annoying, like how lovely I looked when I ranted about the patriarchy. “In the absence of a motive, have you considered it was an accident?”
“Someone accidentally stole the pho— Oh, you mean that our boy was accidentally framed. That it was put in the wrong bag. Yes. Yes, of course.”
“And?”
“Three others have his same bag on that level of the school building, none of whom I can say with any certainty were in the classroom that day.”
“What if someone picked it up thinking it was his own and was too embarrassed to return it?”
“And slipped it into our boy’s bag, knowing he’d return it to the girl he liked? The SIM card was removed and the content on the phone was wiped clean, which is an odd step if it was all a mistake.”
“Someone wanted to destroy something on the phone, then. For sure.”
“Agreed, but here we are at too many possibilities. The girl claims there were hundreds of pictures and videos on the thing. She’d upgraded the memory as much as was possible and kept having to delete stuff to make it work right.”
“Too many possibilities,” I said, falling back into my thoughts.
Lock did as well, for a time, then he asked, “Do you ever wonder what you’ll do in future?”
I paused to stare out the window. “Before or after the feminine revolution?”
“After university.”
“Doctorate in maths and most likely an academic career. Why?”