The Downward Spiral

by Ridley Pearson

  “Don’t do that!” Lois said.

  I didn’t want to be with Lois—one of the three people we suspected of having tried to hurt me. I wanted to be with James and Sherlock and my friends at Baskerville. But James had driven off with Ralph a few hours earlier, and Sherlock had been required to take a bus rented by the school that departed Boston in another hour or two.

  I was stuck, though determined not to be.

  “Well, I mean, there are two men back there. And they happen to have been somewhere in sight for the past three stores, but I doubt they’re stalkers. Oh, and I saw them in the parking lot, too.”

  Lois did not look back, which surprised me. Who doesn’t turn around when someone warns them they’re being watched?

  “Washroom,” she said. It wasn’t a request. We turned down a short hallway. At the door to Women’s, Lois and I shot a backward glance. One of the two men had followed, heading to Men’s. The other stood by the shoe store at the end of the hall.

  This was the same Lois in consideration as one of three people who might have tried to drug me unconscious so I would drown in my bath. A Lois I had known basically my whole life. A Lois I loved like a mother.

  “Caprese,” I said, which was as close as I got to cursing. “Hamlet!” was another (never hurts to quote Shakespeare). And “Oh, ship to shore!” came in handy as well.

  Lois was accustomed to my shorthand potty mouth. “Inside.”

  Standing by the sinks, surrounded by pale green tiles and a smell that defied description, Lois questioned me about when I’d first seen the two men, how I’d noticed them.

  “I’m an observant, sometimes brilliant, young woman. You have to ask?”

  For a moment, she thought I was serious. Then she smiled crookedly (Lois avoided showing her teeth when she smiled). She did something unexpected then: she put her phone into her purse. The move caught me off guard. Lois didn’t like anything that operated with an on/off button, especially the phone that first Father and now Ralph required her to carry. What troubled me was why she’d had it in hand in the first place. Had it been dialed to 911, awaiting her thumb to put the call through? Had the men scared her that much?

  Or had she allowed someone to listen in on my discussion with her?

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  “Just taking precautions.”

  “Did Father have enemies?”

  “What a strange thing to ask.” Lois looked at me askance.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “This is not the place. It smells like yesterday’s breakfast in here.”

  Whatever that meant.

  She inspected herself in the mirror, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She brushed her front, smoothing out the fabric of her navy blue dress. Then she addressed me as an afterthought, regarding me in the mirror. “Any person, man or woman, who is as successful and intelligent as your father is bound to separate himself from certain groups and find himself aligned with others, Moria. The term is ‘competition,’ not ‘enemy.’”

  “Why would the competition be interested in me?”

  “Or me,” Lois said. She and Ralph were experts at making themselves invisible. They could be in the same room with me and I wouldn’t notice them unless they wanted me to. I’d made the mistake of not thinking about Lois as the target.

  “Because you know more than any of us about Father’s businesses,” I exclaimed. “Oh, Lois, I’m so sorry! I hadn’t considered that!”

  “Don’t trouble yourself with such nonsense. And it’s just that: nonsense! I’m sure we’re wrong about these two. Only one way to find out.” She led me out the door, down the hall, and back into the mall. We passed the man who stood waiting. Tall-ish, dark-ish, nondescript-ish. Moroccan or Egyptian. Swarthy, in a handsome, intriguing way. He didn’t give us a second look, much to my disappointment. We passed several more stores. Lois impressed me with the clever methods she used to steal a look behind us: a mirror on a kiosk cart; pointing up to store signs and pivoting as if lost; dropping a Hello Kitty notepad intentionally and glancing back as she retrieved it. The methods not only struck me as shrewd, but practiced.

  “We’re clear,” she told me. Not “good,” or “OK,” or “alone,” but “clear.” They said that kind of thing in cop movies, not real life.

  I mentally replaced the word “practiced” with “trained.” Lois was comfortable, I realized, not uptight the way I was. She was calm and collected, the experience not entirely unfamiliar. She’d been trained.

  Either the air-conditioning had switched on, or thinking of Lois had given me a chill, but gooseflesh ran up my arms and tingled at the base of my neck and I squirmed.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” she asked. “We’re all right. We’re fine.”

  But all I heard was, “We’re clear.”

  A mall security woman passed us on a Segway. Three girls in extremely short shorts and bare midriffs paraded past, leading a group of six guys by about ten feet. In January, no less. I couldn’t tell if the two groups knew each other, but I thought they probably did. The same groups had existed in the hallways of my middle school, before I’d started at Baskerville Academy.

  “I’m actually looking forward to getting back to school,” I said to Lois. “I can’t believe I’m saying that, but there you have it.”

  “If you’re trying to convince me otherwise, know this: we all think it a good idea to keep you home an extra day or two.”

  “It’s not being with you, Lois!” I lied. In fact I was terrified to be in the house alone with her and Ralph. “It’s just the last thing I want is more special treatment. James and I already take a lot of grief for our ancestors starting Baskerville. That’s bad enough. What am I supposed to tell them? I almost drowned taking a bath, but my brother’s roommate saved me and my governess decided I should take a couple days off.”

  “That would be a pretty dress for you,” Lois said, apparently forgetting we wore uniforms at Baskerville.

  I jumped back suddenly, wishing I hadn’t. My reaction wasn’t because of the outrageously ugly dress. It was because I was a quick learner, me being me.

  I caught a figure in the reflection off the glass.

  Not either of the stalkers. This time it was Sherlock staring back at me.

  CHAPTER 11

  GIVEN MY NEWFOUND RESPECT FOR LOIS’S POWERS of observation, my options were limited. Because of the men we’d seen following us—though they were currently nowhere in sight—she wasn’t about to leave me alone.

  We stopped in the food court. She, for a cinnamon bun. I, for a peach gelato. While I was conspiring on how to break free in order to meet secretly with Sherlock, a guy in a green apron, pushing a rolling trash pail, cleared a few things off our table.

  He knocked some litter into my lap. I was about to complain when I saw it wasn’t litter at all.

  Moria

  Written in pen across the folded piece of paper.

  By the time I looked up, I saw only Sherlock’s back and a green apron string.

  “Everything all right, sweetie?” Lois asked. My reaction to the trash in my lap had been excessive.

  “Fine, thanks.” I thought it strange and somehow predictable that neither Lois nor I had looked to see who was cleaning our table. I condemned myself for not even thinking of this act as being performed by a fellow human being. Worse: Sherlock had known we wouldn’t look up at him, and that disturbed me most of all.

  I unfolded the note in my lap, where I also held my phone. Lois knew I could spend hours looking down at my phone, oblivious to everything around me.

  On the sheet of paper he’d drawn a bunch of boxes in ballpoint pen. Not boxes, I realized, a diagram. Not a diagram, a floor plan with a half-dozen question marks on some of the lines.

  Not just a floor plan. It was the ground floor of our house.

  Sherlock was asking me for measurements.

  CHAPTER 12

  LATE SUNDAY, STUDENTS BEGAN RETURNING TO Baskerville
from break. Sherlock didn’t pay much attention. Asocial by choice, he kept to the library, skipping dinner.

  The DuPont Library, a concrete abomination that had no business on a campus of Colonial brick buildings, occupied ground to the west of the dining hall with an apron of brick terrace out front. The bricks held names of alumni and donors. Sherlock, who’d become absorbed in a good mystery, was the last student to leave. Mrs. Hornknocker, a grandmother to all with silver cotton-candy hair and a loose and flabby neck, wished Sherlock good night and locked the doors behind him.

  As usual Sherlock was in two places at once. His feet were moving, but his mind was on the plot of the book clasped in the vise of his arms against his ribs.

  As Mrs. Hornknocker switched off the building’s interior lights, an unintended darkness overtook the terrace.

  Sherlock spoke loudly into the empty courtyard. “You’d be fools to try it! She’s not blind, you know.”

  Two figures hunched in shadow on the side of the building looked at each other in the gloom, wondering if Sherlock could possibly have seen them.

  “Whatever hazing you may have in mind, I’d rather take a rain check.” He sighed heavily as he heard them rush toward him from behind. He and James had been warned in the fall session to expect some hijinks from upperclassmen. They had never come, which had been fine with both boys. “This stuff is so childish!” Sherlock hollered.

  He was scooped up off his feet, his two attackers seizing him beneath his arms. Things became a little more aggressive and confusing when a foul athletic sock was stuffed into his mouth and a section of tape slapped across his lips.

  “Buferfuff . . . nunshish,” he muttered, not liking this at all.

  The mystery book fell to the terrace.

  He was struck on the head. His legs sagged.

  Sherlock woke up in one of the six music rehearsal studios beneath Hard Auditorium, an exceptionally small, closet-sized space.

  “Nufflegger . . . hmff.” The sock was still down his throat.

  The boys let loose on him, delivering a pounding. If this was hazing, it was not what he’d expected.

  His punishers wore balaclava ski masks, though that hardly deterred Sherlock, so honed were his skills of observation. Even with one working eye (the other swollen shut), a broken nose (bleeding), and a sprained wrist, Sherlock took note of the two pairs of worn running shoes and one pair of socks marked NFL.

  When the thicker of the two boys said, “You don’t wanna go busting into people’s houses without asking.”

  “Hummercunch . . . affterally.”

  “You put your beak where it doesn’t belong and we’ll spread you around the forest to where your hand won’t know where your foot’s at.”

  “Meffer-flef,” groaned Sherlock.

  The taller boy had to be a varsity soccer player the way he delivered the final kick to Sherlock’s chest. Something cracked loudly.

  It surprised the two punishers and quickly put an end to the event.

  As they left, the boys shut off the room light and switched on the sign that was mounted outside each of the rehearsal rooms.

  QUIET PLEASE

  REHEARSAL IN PROGRESS

  Sherlock knew that sign well. Through all his pain and soreness he managed to find amusement. It hurt too much to laugh, but he was thinking that if that was the rehearsal, he didn’t want to be part of the performance.

  CHAPTER 13

  I ARRIVED AT BASKERVILLE ACADEMY MID-MONDAY morning, having talked Lois into cutting my two-day imprisonment down to one. I was later than all but a few students whose flights had been delayed by winter storms.

  My brother skillfully avoided me throughout that afternoon and evening. His avoidance told me something had to be wrong. Very wrong. He’d left for school an ally and companion, my nurse and protector. Suddenly, I didn’t exist.

  Something was up, and I knew it.

  I was not to be deterred. I finally cornered him by using the element of surprise, taking advantage of the one place where only a sister would dare. It required impeccable timing and thorough scouting, but James and I had grown up playing endless hide-and-seek. Cops and robbers. Spy versus spy. An expert at covert surveillance, contortion, subterfuge, and diversion, I was well positioned to literally catch him with his pants down.

  I slipped into the only washroom on Bricks Lower 3. The boys’ washroom. I pressed my back to the door to prevent anyone entering, while trapping the only boy, my only brother, inside.

  “You’ve been avoiding me!”

  James was scrubbing his soapy hands together under the faucet. He tried and succeeded to keep from looking surprised.

  Impressive, I thought.

  He spoke in a calm but deliberate tone. “If Can’t-Tell catches you, you’ll be expelled.”

  “Mr. Cantell’s the assistant wrestling coach. He won’t be around for hours. Why are you avoiding me, Jamie?”

  “I’m not. Who said I was?”

  “Bull roar!”

  “There was a mix-up. It may have started with me. Probably did, but I’m handling it.”

  “Where is Lock? Why haven’t I seen him?”

  “That’s the mess-up,” James said. I could tell he felt ashamed.

  “Jamie?”

  “I’m going to handle it.”

  “Handle what?” I felt butterflies, and not the good variety.

  “I would check the infirmary.”

  “Jamie?”

  “Stop saying my name like that. You’re not Father.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I might have mentioned to a couple guys what went down at the house, that your boyfriend was involved.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “I think one of them checked with Natalie,” James said. “And I guess you’d been texting with Natalie, and maybe she’d been texting with Ruby Berliner. Anyway, Ruby told this guy that Sherlock broke into our house.”

  “What?” Natalie Sekulow, one of my two roommates, had an unspoken crush on Sherlock. It was my own fault for talking about him so much. By the time the fall session had ended, I’d sold Natalie on all of Lock’s good qualities. That she might gossip about him was no great surprise. Ruby, on the other hand, I’d have expected better of. An artist and thinker who hated tests but loved old TV shows, Ruby didn’t strike me as a girl to get catty.

  “That he hid in your room while you were undressing.”

  “What?!!” I felt livid. And embarrassed. “He saved me!”

  “I know that! That’s not the point! It got all messed up. And anyway, I’m going to handle it! How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “The infirmary? Oh my gosh! Sherlock’s in the infirmary?”

  “Give it a rest, Mo! It’s done. We can’t undo it. I can’t undo it! I’m new to this stuff.”

  James caught himself. I wasn’t supposed to have heard that. I pretended I hadn’t, but it hung between us, causing a cavernous pause.

  A boy pushed on the door. I stuck my head out into the hallway and told him to go away. I was not polite. Speechless, perhaps even frightened, the boy hurried off. I felt surprisingly powerful at that moment. Abnormally good.

  “Lock’s on our side,” I reminded James.

  “I know that.”

  “What side are you on?”

  He stuck his hands into the wind machine hand dryer. It roared. He looked over at me cruelly.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “That’s just plain wrong.”

  “That’s another conversation.”

  “The infirmary??”

  “Wait,” my brother said. “Wait until you calm down before you see him. And when you do see him, make sure he forgets who did that to him.”

  “I will not!”

  “You will, too!”

  I loved my brother dearly even when he gave way to his short temper and grew heated like this. I knew the brilliance with which he approached practical jokes and “operations,” as we’d called th
em in our childhood years when pretending to be spies or criminals. Jamie had always delighted in playing the criminal—always the thief, never the detective—and I in the opposite role.

  Hearing such a forceful tone from him now made me wonder if our games had shaped us, if we were bound to the things of the past the way trees along the coast lean forever away from the sea.

  If, by our own decisions, we become unchangeable.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE SCHOOL INFIRMARY HAD THE LOOK OF A movie where you’re supposed to be in heaven. It was in a converted part of the top floor of the humanities building, which had once been the original library, with tall, arched-top windows admitting an abundance of natural light, white walls, and metal-framed beds with white linens. The school nurse, a matron of Germanic proportions and pleasant demeanor, wore a white apron over office clothes. She had big teeth and a broad smile.

  There were already two cases of flu, both girls in a closed room designated for the contagious, and then Sherlock in the third bed of six that shared a kind of dormitory.

  “Hey, you,” I said, trying not to cringe. I pulled out a chair, but he tapped the bed, and I willingly sat down at his side. “Oh, man,” I let slip out.

  “Ran into a door,” he muttered through cracked lips. His nose was covered in white tape and a bent piece of metal.

  I felt myself choke up. James had had nothing to worry about. Sherlock Holmes was no tattletale. I could have kissed him. I actually thought about it, which was something so new to me I probably blushed. I grabbed some tissue and blew my nose.

  “That bad?” he said, fighting to not smile.

  “Yep,” I said. “Maybe worse.”

  He winced as he lost the battle.

  “Some door,” I said.

  “The mother of all doors.”

  Some tears spurted out. I hated myself. I caught them with the tissue.

  “Not that bad,” he said.

  I had to use the tissue yet again.