She watches the fire for a while, hands in her coat pockets. She feels the heat of it on her face, the cold at her back. For a moment, she wishes she had a cigarette, but the craving passes, more of a mood than a physical urge.
Sherlock reaches into her coat and pulls a wad of letters from the interior breast pocket—Moriarty's letters, her name and address in his neat handwriting on the envelopes. She collected them in a locked box all these months, unbeknownst to Watson. Moriarty addressed them to flat 221C, instead of 221B, to give Sherlock the option of keeping the letters a secret. How he knew 221C is empty and that Sherlock would want to hide his letters from Watson, she can only guess.
She looks at the stack of letters in her hand, the firelight casting its orange glow on the envelope at the top of the stack. She's read all of them several times, torn between curiosity and contempt, the urge to destroy them and the urge to decode them as if they were pages and pages of cyphers or riddles concealing some important truth about Sherlock, Moriarty, and the world. After the second letter arrived and she decided to read it and whatever followed, she told herself it would be irresponsible to throw the letters away unopened; Moriarty could confide in her about his crimes, past, present, or future. Eventually, she admitted to herself she read them and re-read them for the sole reason that she's still drawn to him. She hates him—not just who he is and what he's done but what he represents—and on some level, she fears him. But since their first meeting, she's been drawn to him the way she used to be drawn to cocaine, knowing he could kill her and loving the adrenaline rush of cheating death.
Someone like you can't be the hero without someone like me.
She read that line of his at least a dozen times. She wants him to be wrong about her, wants to prove she isn't who he says she is. Maybe that's why she studied these letters—to know exactly what to look for in herself, in her life. She doesn't deny her own darkness. She just wants Moriarty's analysis of it to be wrong. She is not like him. She can't be. She wouldn't love and be loved by Watson and Lestrade if she was made of the same stuff as Moriarty.
Sherlock drops the letters into the fire and pauses only for a minute, before turning away and leaving for home.
FIN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marie S. Crosswell is a novelist, short story writer, and poet. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where she concentrated on creative writing and friendship studies. Her short crime fiction has previously appeared in Thuglit, Plots with Guns, Flash Fiction Offensive, Beat to a Pulp, Betty Fedora, Dark Corners, and Locked and Loaded: Both Barrels Vol. 3. Her novella TEXAS, HOLD YOUR QUEENS is available from One Eye Press.
She lives in Arizona with her black cat.
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