The Final Step

by Ridley Pearson

  I couldn’t stop looking at him. Grinning. I’d never met anyone who’d come back from the dead. He seemed something of a miracle to me.

  To Lois, too, apparently. She screamed as he came in through the back door of our Beacon Hill home. James and I heard her because we entered through the front door at the exact same moment. We were on a mission to recover a key from the ashes, and a gun from a secret drawer.

  Ralph provided us cover.

  CHAPTER 65

  SHERLOCK DIDN’T SHOW UP.

  Ralph, Lexie, James, and I waited impatiently in the Baskerville woods, but no Sherlock. James, who’d moved his monitoring equipment from the auditorium into one of the three backstage dressing rooms, called Claudette. He called the room “Command Central,” which struck me as childish, but then again, I was a mature twelve-year-old girl.

  “He’s still not here. I hate to leave the girls alone,” James said.

  “We are happy to be alone,” Lexie said, interrupting the call. I seconded her remark.

  “How hard is it to keep a lookout, Sherlock or no Sherlock?” I said, struggling to believe my own words. Sherlock was a fast thinker, a clever boy unlike any I’d met. “I’ll take the back and the observatory. Lexie, the front and opposite side. You said yourself, there’s only one bodyguard at night. We’ve got this.”

  “He patrols the property.” Ralph, who carried a rucksack over one shoulder, handed us both small cans of pepper spray to hold off any of Hildebrandt’s bodyguards. “In case it comes to that,” he said.

  “Enough!” I said. I didn’t want to consider that possibility. “Any more what-ifs or maybes and I’m going to lose my nerve. Let’s get on with it.”

  “We get on with it when Claudette says to,” explained James. “Only then.”

  We waited. I didn’t know if it had been five minutes or fifteen, but suddenly all our phones vibrated at once. I glanced down and read the group text.

  Looking around one more time, as if hoping to spot Sherlock’s late arrival, James whispered, “Let’s go.”

  He and Ralph took off up the path in the direction of the observatory. Lexie and I followed after a count of thirty. Nearing the top of the hill, we moved through the woods to our right, away from the observatory. Approaching the back of the decaying ruin, I hunkered down where I had a decent view as Lexie continued around the structure and out of sight. She took up position with a view of the driveway. In the palm of my hand, I held my phone, waiting for the go-ahead text. The real pressure was on James and Ralph and we all knew it.

  “Good luck,” I whispered, far too late for them to hear me. Maybe I was talking to myself.

  Lexie texted the group:

  guard in car in front

  That was the signal James needed. He and Ralph would head through the observatory and into the tunnel. It was also time for Claudette to project the ghostly images of Father on the walls of Hildebrandt’s bedroom.

  Ralph paused at the open door to the basement room that so perfectly matched the set built onstage for Colander. He marveled at the effort and determination of the young James to avenge Father’s murder. James’s planning and the trickery impressed him. James was indeed the choice to lead the Scowerers. The boy was a natural leader born with a sneaky way about him. He’d make a fine criminal mastermind someday.

  Up the basement stairs. Down the hallway. Quietly up more stairs to the bedroom door. James paused, hearing his own recorded voice muted on the other side. Claudette was right on schedule. James motioned to the door. It was Ralph’s moment.

  GUARD OUT OF CAR. TWO GUARDS!

  James received Lexie’s text too late to stop Ralph, who’d put his own phone away.

  man in back of house

  I sent my own text as quickly as I could. He was a tall, shadowy man who gave me chills just watching him walk. I couldn’t see him clearly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  Ralph slipped through the door as Hildebrandt faced the opposite wall, where a flickering image of Father loomed larger than life.

  “You can’t outrun your mistakes,” Ralph said.

  Hildebrandt turned around so fast his pajamas barely moved.

  “You?” Hildebrandt clutched his chest in pain.

  “Was my job to protect him,” Ralph said, pointing at the wall.

  Nearly a mile away, in a smelly room backstage, Claudette played a simple recording of James’s slowed-down ghost voice, recorded a day earlier. “Thank you, Ralph.”

  The exchange between two apparent ghosts sent Hildebrandt reeling.

  “Impossible,” he moaned.

  It was impossible, but Hildebrandt was too sleepy or drunk, or medicated, to believe it.

  A moment later, Father’s image flickered and faded. Claudette had shut down the projection of Father as planned. It was up to Ralph now.

  From my post, I witnessed that the event changed everything. Ruined everything. It had apparently not occurred to James or Claudette—certainly not to me—how the projections inside Hildebrandt’s room would look from the outside. A blueish pulsing and light played on two upstairs windows.

  The guard on patrol stopped and looked up. I saw him touch his ear. I could hear him speaking, though not what he said. He headed for the back door. The Old Man was awake, I could imagine him thinking. Maybe part of the job was to check in on him.

  back guard into house

  front guard into house

  GET OUT OF THERE!

  The speed with which things happened next could only be explained by Einstein. Time either expanded or compressed, but whichever it was, more stuff happened in one minute than normally happens in fifteen.

  “One of your many mistakes,” Ralph told the reeling Hildebrandt, “was hanging on too tightly to the past.” He looked like a man both drunk and crazy. Not out of his mind, but in an alternate reality. One in which he couldn’t find his balance, physically and mentally. Claudette’s audio/video work had terrified the man, filling him with adrenaline.

  Ralph held up a police evidence bag with a yellowed label. Inside was the gun from Father’s secret drawer. James and I had sneaked it out of Father’s desk while Ralph had spoken to Lois only two hours earlier.

  “I should know. I’m the young cop your father paid to steal it from the evidence room.” Ralph let that sink in. Hildebrandt struggled to make sense of what he was hearing. “A young cop in line with the Scowerers, I might add. I left it for safekeeping with Mr. Moriarty in case something unfortunate happened to me. Funny what young, stupid kids will do. You steal a candy bar just once, and pretty soon you have it in your heads to knock off an armored truck.”

  Hildebrandt couldn’t get a word out, his eyes glued to the gun in the evidence bag.

  “This was what prevented you from forcing him or threatening him to go along with your new plan for the society.”

  Owl-eyed, Hildebrandt looked on the edge of having a heart attack.

  “The robbery on the Cape was a long time ago. Those things follow you. You college kids doing such a stupid thing. A guard shot dead. The stolen money never being found.”

  Hildebrandt went pale.

  “The thing is,” Ralph said, “when a secret comes apart, it’s like a plate being dropped on the floor. Too many pieces to repair.”

  “Chain of custody will never hold.” Hildebrandt tried to sound convinced.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But it can’t hurt to have the confession of the cop who took it. Are you willing to play those odds?”

  Knowing Claudette was recording all of this, Ralph considered his words carefully.

  “No court will hear it.”

  “A man is little more than his reputation. Court or not, a story like this getting out will ruin yours. Small satisfaction for you killing Mr. Moriarty, but it may have to do.”

  “I did not kill Moriarty.”

  “You arranged it.”

  “So say you,” Hildebrandt said. There was not a hint of intoxication in his voice. It had left when the gun had come
out.

  “Colander failed you. He took care of Mr. Moriarty, but failed to find the gun, so you cut a deal for him and his Meirleach thugs to return to the house looking for it and the Moriarty treasure. An elaborate plan, breaking in to three different homes.”

  Just then came a loud noise from the hallway.

  James squatted at the top of the stairs as one of the guards climbed steadily toward the second floor in no particular hurry.

  As the man reached the top landing, James jumped out and pushed him down the stairs.

  The second guard, the one who’d waited in the car, must have been a trained gymnast the way he leaped over his tumbling partner. He used the handrail to propel himself up and over and removed his gun as he continued higher.

  James did what any idiot fourteen-year-old boy would do: he dove at the man.

  Only nothing happened. Or, at least, nothing James expected. He found himself flying backward, not down the stairs. Ralph had yanked him out of the way. Ralph had stepped in front of him. There was a yellow flash. A gunshot.

  Hildebrandt came out of the bedroom in his pajamas, looking like a wild-eyed madman. James, who’d thumped his head on the floor, found his legs wouldn’t move. There was no gun in Hildebrandt’s hands.

  Driving to the Cape house a few years earlier, we’d passed a car crash, a minivan on its side. We’d seen a woman—a mother, I think—her face scratched, wandering away from the wreck, wandering right into the traffic. Hildebrandt moved like that. Lost. Blind.

  James finally felt his legs tingling. He scooched on his bottom in order to see down the stairs as Hildebrandt climbed over Ralph and the others. Moving like he didn’t know he was stepping on people. Hildebrandt reached the front door.

  That was when Ralph, who lay atop the two others, attempted to roll onto his side.

  He was bleeding.

  Badly.

  There was no mistaking the gunshot.

  I texted Lexie:

  stay!

  She texted:

  OMG

  My thumbs were already typing as her next text arrived.

  H in car!

  The gunshot had made my hearing insanely sensitive. I heard not only my own frantic breathing, but car wheels grinding the pebbled driveway. Headlights swept the woods and I saw Lexie hiding. She was squatting at the side of a tree. As the light went past her she didn’t move an inch.

  The engine groaned louder and yet faded as it headed up the drive toward the paved county road.

  I texted:

  H driving?

  There were probably a hundred things I could have asked, I could have written. I had no idea why I’d sent that exact message. Maybe my fingers and my mind operated from two different areas of my brain. Maybe my heart and brain were so disconnected that my emotions and body operated on different tracks. Or maybe I had a kind of paranormal intuition like one of those birds or butterflies who can fly two thousand miles back to the exact same tree.

  Because Lexie texted back immediately:

  No

  “The Boston apartment,” Hildebrandt said from the backseat.

  His driver kept driving. His men knew not to speak unless spoken to, not to strike up a conversation. Hildebrandt leaned back.

  “Things went from bad to worse,” he said.

  The driver kept quiet.

  “He was real.” As if that made any sense. “Gunfire. Somebody . . . On the stairs. I haven’t got any idea . . . wait a second! Pull over a moment!”

  The car kept moving.

  “I said: pull over!” Hildebrandt yanked on the door handle. Nothing. Dove across the backseat to the other door. Nothing. The window. Nothing. “I said—”

  “Shut up and listen to me!”

  Maybe it was the accent, maybe the driver’s confidence, but Hildebrandt strung together a bunch of words that would have gotten him sent to the headmaster’s office.

  The car slowed, though barely. The driver turned slightly into profile. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m called Sherlock Holmes.”

  CHAPTER 66

  “I’M NOT A GOOD DRIVER,” SHERLOCK SAID. “Sorry, your real driver couldn’t make it. I don’t recommend messing with me when my hands are on the wheel.” He sped up the car. The woods streamed by on either side of the road. Even a small jerk of the wheel would result in a head-on crash.

  Hildebrandt frantically reached for his seatbelt and clicked himself in. “You are going to regret this, boy. Unless you pull over this instant and turn the keys over to me, you’ll face kidnapping charges. You’ll go to prison for the rest of your life.”

  Sherlock tugged the wheel to the right. The car tires yipped. He corrected the wheel only a yard before leaving the road. “Might I recommend you don’t limit your kidnapper’s options before you have the upper hand? If you give me the choice of life in prison or a tree, I might just take the latter, you know? How would that be?”

  Another bad word. “What . . . do . . . you . . . want?”

  “It’s a long list. Do you have a pen?”

  “Do I look like I have a pen?”

  Sherlock checked him out in the rearview mirror. Adrenaline had gotten Hildebrandt this far, but he was holding his head like someone who had a horrible headache. His pajama top was torn, a mass of steel wool escaping from his chest. His blotchy face reminded Sherlock of someone about to throw up.

  “If you vomit in this car, I’m going to go a lot faster. Just FYI. That’s not good for either of us.”

  “Put the phone down. You’ll kill us both.”

  “You’ll speak when I ask questions,” Sherlock said, yanking the wheel dangerously one-handedly. “And only then. Capisce?”

  “You are in so deep!”

  Sherlock sped up considerably. “A simple yes or no will suffice. Capisce?”

  “Yes,” Hildebrandt said between clenched teeth.

  Sherlock slowed the massive SUV. He’d scared even himself with the last move. He lifted his phone and glanced at it quickly, well aware of the rule not to text and drive. He figured life-and-death circumstances could allow for interpretation of the rules. But he was wrong.

  A deer jumped out from the woods. Sherlock overreacted, pulling too hard on the wheel. The car rocked. Hildebrandt let out another example of potty mouth. The SUV caught only the deer’s tail as the back wheels of the car lost contact and entered a skid. Sherlock reacted instantly, spinning the wheel the wrong direction. Instead of straightening, the vehicle began a slow counterclockwise rotation like the hands of a giant clock. It would have continued to skid, continued to rotate—right off the road—had Sherlock’s magnificent brain not calculated his mistake. He corrected the wheel, turning into the direction of the skidding back wheels. The car shuddered, the tires barked, and the grille drifted into the right lane before rocking once more. It was headed in the correct lane, going in the opposite direction as if nothing had ever happened. The deer’s twitching white tail and hind end could be seen vanishing into the woods.

  “Piece of cake,” Sherlock said.

  He wasn’t sure Hildebrandt heard him. By the look of him, the man might have passed out.

  The two guards awoke to a weeping James awkwardly cradling Ralph’s head and shoulders. Seeing the man’s blood on the stair treads, determining their boss was nowhere to be found, they fled out the front door. A car was heard racing away from the property.

  “Look at you, babbling like a baby,” Ralph coughed out wetly. “What in the world, boy?” Ralph examined the gunshot wound to his upper chest. “Dial nine-one-one on my phone, will you, boy? And then get out of here. But find me a washcloth first, will ya? I need some compression on it.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Of course you are. It’s a bleeder, is all. Now help me call an ambulance. You’re leaving before you have to answer a bunch of questions you can’t answer.”

  “James?” Lexie’s voice from the direction of the front door. She spoke his name louder.

  “In here!”


  “Go away! Don’t touch anything!” Ralph shouted. “Either of you! Fingerprints. Get out of this house. Now!”

  James accepted Ralph’s phone and dialed. Ralph snatched it.

  “There’s been a shooting. Ambulance needed . . . Yes, I’m the victim. Address? Use my phone’s GPS. Hurry.” He ended the call. He whispered, “It’s done. Now go!”

  James continued holding the man. “I can’t leave you.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll give you a good shellacking!”

  James smiled faintly. “Good luck trying.”

  “Go.”

  “James?” Lexie was coming up the stairs with a dry washcloth.

  “You must learn to protect those around you, son. Miss Moria and Lexie will be involved if you don’t act.”

  James looked at Lexie. “For them, then,” he said.

  “You’re going to do fine in your new position, son. Don’t try to force it. It will come to you.”

  “Don’t talk like I’m not going to see you again.”

  “I may be taking an unexpected vacation but I’ll stay in touch this time. No visiting me in the hospital if it comes to that. Use your head, not your heart.”

  James’s and Lexie’s phones vibrated at the same instant.

  “Go,” Ralph said.

  “You’re on a fool’s errand, boy,” Hildebrandt said. “Sherlock Holmes to the rescue? Is that the plan? Turn me in to the police? For what? You know who I am, I trust. Who’s going to believe some high school Brit over the former director of the FBI?”

  “You and Colander. Ralph has all the evidence we need,” Sherlock said.

  “You’re just a boy. I’d rather spare you these details. But it appears I cannot. So, you’d better listen, and listen well. If you doubt me, boy, it’s on you. If anything untoward should happen to me, including my arrest, Moria Moriarty will experience an unfortunate accident. The arrangement was made because of the Moriarty boy, James, not the likes of you, but it’s in place, nonetheless. You go through with this, you will set in motion a plan that cannot be undone. Do you understand?”