The Final Step

by Ridley Pearson

  No one did take a look, not even as Ralph accessed a basement loading dock where he’d parked the fish truck. He opened the garage-like door to the outdoors. He and I rode the freight elevator.

  Using James’s memory of the day he and I had searched the Gadwall Specialist Center, along with Sherlock’s uncanny ability to work with numbers, Ralph and I were on the second floor looking for three particular room numbers: 219, 224, and 231.

  The first, 219, revealed an older man, balding, with buck teeth and cloudy eyes. Ralph apologized and shut the door. On the way to the next, I stole a look outside at the late-afternoon sunshine and the shoreline that attracted tourists and locals alike. There had been a time I would have been on such a beach, probably at the Cape house. I might have had a floaty, or swim fins and a snorkel, or I might have been bronzing on a towel while the sound of dogs barking in the distance lulled me to sleep. I had a sickening feeling those times were gone for good. I didn’t know how that was possible, but the idea of spending my life in jail came to mind.

  “You with me?” Ralph, a few steps down the hall. Me, still at the window.

  “I’m with you,” I said.

  A nurse smiled at us as she passed.

  Ralph knocked and opened the door to room 224.

  I knew her immediately. The photographs. The home movies. She was painting a watercolor that sat on a wooden easel angled toward the window. She was thin. Too thin. She wore a smart blue shirt beneath a paint-stained apron, jeans too big for her, and stained tennis shoes. The room was okay if you liked institutions. Her well-kept hair held gray streaks that reminded me of icicles. Her eyes, gray-blue and telling, didn’t change at all as she saw me. But a very small smile took to her lips, and I knew then that she recognized me.

  “Scooter,” she said. “Come here to your mother.”

  I hadn’t heard the nickname in so long, I nearly didn’t respond. In fact, it wasn’t the name at all, but her faint smile that drew me slowly to her. I placed one foot in front of the other, as if weighed down by an impossibly heavy backpack.

  “Ralph,” my mother said. “Bless your hearts, both of you.”

  CHAPTER 69

  JAMES PAID SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS TO SOME middle schooler he found through a website for a tutorial on how to open a back door into the database software used by 92 percent of private healthcare facilities. Six hundred wasted dollars if the Gadwall Specialist Center used another brand.

  Having arrived by sailboat, captained and owned by Lexie, James and Sherlock entered the center through the dock doorway Ralph had left open. They wore clear-glass eye safety glasses, black baseball caps pulled down low, blue jeans, and navy blue T-shirts that read on the back:

  NETWORK NERDS

  CONNECT WITH US

  They separated in search of a utility room or wall box containing the center’s local area networking, internet, and Ethernet connections.

  Sherlock found a promising candidate: a door marked “Authorized Use Only.” The building’s computer and telephone wires ran through the basement hallway atop an overhead wire channel. Nearly all the blue networking wires headed through a hole into that room.

  It took Sherlock seven minutes to pick the door’s lock.

  “If you take any longer, I’m going to have a nap,” James complained.

  “You want to try?” Sherlock showed James the three needle-like tools he was manipulating to pick the lock.

  “Shut up.”

  “Wake up your laptop,” Sherlock advised, “and be ready. It’s my fault this has taken so long, but it’s going to be yours if we’re caught.”

  Hugging a mother I thought I’d lost long ago was one of the greatest moments ever. I sensed her reluctance. It felt like she considered me too fragile to hug. Like she might break me. Maybe she’d been away from kids for too long. That made my throat catch.

  I was a softy.

  “We’re going now, Mrs. M,” Ralph said. “Moria has some coveralls and a hat for you. Why don’t you carry some of your art supplies? Moria and I will get that chair in the corner.” He turned around so she could get dressed. I helped her. That was the second-best moment ever. We’d guessed at a pair of Hippo Movers coveralls a size too big, but it actually helped make her look different. All we had to do was get to the freight elevator unquestioned.

  The fifty or sixty feet suddenly seemed like miles.

  We packed up her easel and some of her paint supplies along with a small pile of her favorite watercolors. Ralph and I figured out a way to carry the stuffed chair so he didn’t have to use his bad arm and I didn’t get squished like a bug—we turned it on its side and slid it on the floor on one of its arms.

  The three of us made it out of the room and into the hall without being noticed. But it didn’t last.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice from behind us.

  Ralph turned. I grabbed Mother before she showed her face.

  “Hippo Moving,” Ralph said to the woman. A nurse, I realized, catching her uniform in a convex corridor mirror mounted high in the corner of the hallway.

  “What have we here? Someone leaving us?”

  Mother tried to turn again. Again, I stopped her.

  Panic time. Ralph couldn’t mention Mother’s room. He had to name a patient’s room that belonged to someone who might be leaving the facility. But Ralph was smarter than most.

  “Not moving out, miss. Replacing a chair with a new one.” He made his voice amusing. “We’ll take any work we can get. Ours is a family business.” In one quick explanation, Ralph had informed our adversary of what we were up to, and why it would take three people including a pint-sized girl like me to move a single chair.

  “Always like to see things freshened up,” the nurse said. She continued forward to walk past us. I had the sickening feeling she wanted a look at me and Mother but without making a big deal about it.

  I hated myself for pulling a stunt on Mother, but the stakes were too high. I did that trick of kneeing her in the back of her own knee. Her leg unlocked and she folded forward and I caught her just as the nurse passed. There was no way the nurse could have seen Mother’s face.

  Ralph looked at me with something approaching admiration as Mother recovered and the nurse left us behind. We reached and entered the elevator.

  Now came the hard part.

  CHAPTER 70

  “WHAT IS THIS?” SHERLOCK ASKED JAMES, who sat on the floor with his laptop plugged into a blue Ethernet wire.

  “I thought you knew everything.”

  “I find what you’re doing intriguing,” Sherlock said.

  “Another few strokes, and the system will say that Mother was officially released today.”

  “Then it gets tricky,” Sherlock said.

  “Yeah, well, there is that. You’re the one who thought it up. And, how to pull it off.”

  “Putting a new patient into the system has to be authorized by—”

  “A specific doctor. Yeah, I get that. You’ve said it ten times.”

  “Four.”

  “Shut up.”

  “A doctor on duty.”

  “That makes five.”

  “Very funny,” Sherlock said.

  “She’s never going to talk to you again, you know?”

  The computer room was kept unreasonably cold to protect the machines from overheating. Sherlock found the low hum annoying. He kept quiet.

  “Bum sauce, Sherlost, but it’s the truth.”

  “Truth does not have a present and a past, a beginning or end. Your sister and I have both.”

  “I’m talking about the end. Moria’s done with you.”

  Sherlock found the cold penetrating as well. “Get this done, man!”

  “No problem. A few more clicks and Lois is going to find herself in Mother’s situation. Fair is fair.” James clicked the computer’s trackpad and began to giggle. It was an evil giggle Sherlock had never heard from him before.

  Ralph and I put Mother into the sailboat’s cabin. Lexie he
lped us get her down the steep steps. Mother’s eyes flared. This was all too much for her.

  “Someday, Mother, I’ll introduce you to a boy named Sherlock. I hate him. He’s an oaf. But he has his good points. This whole thing’s his plan. It’s brilliant, of course, because that’s just the kind of boy he is. He calls it ‘ironic,’ which is fine, I suppose, so long as one understands irony. Personally, I find it a little tricky.”

  “I don’t understand.” Mother sounded as if she might cry.

  “We’re going to help you with that, Mrs. M.,” Ralph said. “For now, we need you to trust us.”

  Mother nodded grimly.

  A few minutes later, Ralph and I reached the van. We helped the semiconscious Lois to her feet, careful not to bang her head.

  CHAPTER 71

  AT 4:17 THAT SAME AFTERNOON, A PHARMACY tech named Marvin Hoshcenfelt was making the rounds on the second floor of the Gadwall Specialist Center. He knocked and opened the door to room 224.

  Glancing at his electronic tablet, Marvin matched the patient’s face with her record on file. The patient was too groggy to say hello, which only made sense given the strength of the sleeping pill that had been prescribed by the admitting doctor, Dr. Kamat. The patient was scheduled to receive the medication for the following three days. What amounted to something close to a “chemically induced coma,” sometimes used on those patients who needed extra rest at the start of their stays.

  Marvin checked the patient for her wristband and found it missing.

  “What have you done with it?” he asked the woman, knowing she was too far gone to answer.

  He checked under the bed. In the sheets. In the crack at the head of the bed. Nowhere to be found.

  Wasn’t the first time a patient had managed to cut one off a wrist, though it wasn’t the easiest thing to do.

  “We’ll get you set up with a new one,” he told the silent woman. “Never you mind about it.”

  He helped her sit up and swallow the two pills she was scheduled to take.

  He lay her back down, making sure her head looked comfortable on the pillow.

  Marvin moved over to and opened the door.

  “Goodnight, Lois. See you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 72

  FRIENDS ARE HARD TO MAKE AND EASY TO LOSE. It’s even more true, more painful when the friend is treasured.

  Brothers were never meant to be friends. I was lucky I’d managed it for a while. But I wasn’t sure that friendship would ever return after everything that had happened.

  Summer school ended without ceremony. The last three weeks were painfully boring. I woke up every morning wishing I were somewhere else. The idea that James was connected to people like Hildebrandt showed me how insane my brother had become. Baskerville Academy had been—was!—the worst thing for him ever. He was nothing short of a criminal, and a good one at that. He’d be fifteen in a few weeks—I wasn’t sure I’d ever know him better than I did right now, and that made me infinitely sad.

  Mother and Ralph picked me up when the blessed day at the end of the term arrived. James was staying a few extra days. I didn’t want to know what that was about.

  “You look better already,” I said, sharing the backseat of the town car with her.

  “Thank you, Moria.” Mother’s voice wasn’t used to speaking, even now.

  “How are you? Do you like . . . you know . . . being home?”

  Only then did I realize she was wearing all black. That pretty much told me all I had to know about how she’d taken losing Father.

  Ralph caught me in the car’s mirror. His eyes said, Don’t go there.

  Please remember, I was twelve.

  “From what I know, Mother, Father did everything he could to protect you. From people who might have tried to hurt you in order to get at him.”

  Mother looked out the side window. “There must be a million colors of green out there.”

  “I suppose,” I said. Had she heard me? I wondered.

  “Your father enjoyed autumn most of all.”

  She sounded about five years old. Her recovery was going to take time. She’d been in that little room too long. I felt like crying. But I was done crying. I was done wishing for things.

  But not dreaming. I would never give up dreaming.

  “Maybe we could go to the Cape for Labor Day,” I proposed. Sherlock would be working. “James, Ralph, you, me. There’s this girl, Lexie, but I don’t know if she’ll come if James is there. I kind of think she might, though.”

  “The colors,” she said. “The cool air. They appealed to him so very much.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. I tried to win Ralph’s eyes in the mirror, but he was driving now.

  CHAPTER 73

  I SMELLED MUFFINS. BLUEBERRY. THERE WAS something about the Cape house that made every scent special. Coffee. Bacon. Blueberry muffins.

  The morning sun shone so brightly through my windows that I went over to turn the little spindle that narrowed the slats of the blinds.

  There was a sailboat out there. A sloop. Gorgeous thing. Maybe a half mile off shore, its sails luffing.

  Something was unfastened from the bow and put over the side. It looked like a Sunfish sailboat or maybe a Sailfish. Turned out to be a paddleboard. A figure stood atop it, working the long paddle, alternating sides.

  I dug around looking for my binoculars, usually used to search for whales or identify large birds.

  James. He wore colorful Hawaiian jams, an orange Burton T-shirt, and a dark tan he hadn’t had the last time I’d seen him.

  The sails snapped with the wind. The sailboat headed southeast in the direction of Woods Hole or maybe the Vineyard.

  James paddled for shore, some white seagulls finding him and playing just overhead.

  I didn’t know the boy—my brother!—as well as I once had. But I wanted to. I hoped he’d let me in. Like with Mother’s recovery, I was prepared to give it time.

  Mother walked out onto the grass, shielding her eyes. I joined her.

  James paddled closer.

  I found a smile.

  CHAPTER 74

  FORMER FBI DIRECTOR CONNECTED TO DECADES-OLD ROBBERY

  Tanner Walters with Rob Barry

  The Suffolk County Attorney General has confirmed a joint investigation with the Justice Department into former FBI Director Mathias Hildebrandt’s alleged participation in an armored car robbery after a witness came forward offering to testify to events surrounding the more than fifty-year-old crime.

  The 1.4-million-dollar robbery of an armored car took place on Route 6 near West Dennis. The money was never recovered. A security guard, Harold Colletti, died of gunshot wounds at the scene. The murder weapon had remained missing until its unexplained appearance at the Cobb Street precinct on August 19 of this year. Sources close to the investigation confirm Hildebrandt is being sought for questioning. No charges have been made.

  Hildebrandt, who served as a distinguished FBI Director for twenty-two years, could not be reached for comment.

  James folded the newspaper and smiled smugly. He reached for a glass of orange juice, noting the two empty places at the breakfast table set for me and Mother. We needed our beauty rest.

  “Everything OK, James?” Ralph delivered a plate of steaming eggs one-handed.

  “Better than ever. We’ve got him now, Ralph. Off the Directory for good, but still working to achieve his plan.”

  “It won’t be without repercussions,” Ralph said. “Your going against your father’s wishes takes the Scowerers down a dangerous path.”

  “So you’ve already told me. I’m in charge now, Ralph. Father didn’t understand the global economy,” James said.

  “I mean no offense, but you’re fourteen.”

  “At thirteen, a kid named Jordan Romero climbed Everest. Nadia Comăneci won a gold medal in gymnastics. Mozart was having an opera performed.”

  “And you?” Ralph said.

  “Conniving crook? Creative criminal? World’s g
reatest criminal mastermind? You tell me.”

  “World’s most arrogant kid?” I said, from the doorway.

  “That, too,” James said, motioning to an empty place setting.

  “You broke Lexie’s heart, you know?” I said, sitting down. I poured myself orange juice.

  “I know,” he said, his voice softening.

  “Yours too?” I asked.

  Ralph took the opportunity to retreat into the kitchen.

  “I don’t have a heart, remember?” James said.

  “I can help you find it again,” I said. “If you’ll let me.”

  “Hide-and-seek?” James said, trying for a joke. And failing.

  “Something like that.”

  “What if I’m a lost cause?”

  I considered that long and hard. His endless confrontations with Sherlock. His dismissal of me. Of Lexie. His clinging to his thugs and his Scowerers.

  “Then heaven help us,” I said.

  James smirked, scrambled eggs bulging his cheeks.

  “Heaven help us all.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR PHOTO BY SARAH CROWDER

  RIDLEY PEARSON is the bestselling author of over fifty novels, including Lock and Key: The Initiation, Lock and Key: The Downward Spiral, Peter and the Starcatchers (cowritten with Dave Barry), and the Kingdom Keepers series. He has also written two dozen crime novels, including Probable Cause, Beyond Recognition, Killer Weekend, The Risk Agent, and The Red Room. To learn more about Ridley, visit www.ridleypearson.com. Ridley is available for limited video-streaming classroom visits, speaking engagements, and writer workshops. For more information please contact: speaker@sent.com.

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