The Downward Spiral

by Ridley Pearson

  — I Timothy 6:10

  The loud bang startled us.

  “Quick,” Sherlock whispered. I hurried out of the secret room and carefully unlocked the office door from the inside. It had been a stupid idea to lock it in the first place. Slipping back through the open bookshelf I helped pull the shelving shut. Sherlock wouldn’t allow it to be closed all the way. “We don’t know how to open it,” he whispered, fighting against James, who continued to pull.

  “How hard can it be?” James quipped.

  “How loud can it be?” Sherlock asked.

  James relaxed his pull, leaving the deep door open with only a fraction of an inch to go before being fully closed.

  “We need to hold it,” James whispered incredibly softly. “In case someone pulls.”

  The boys took hold.

  CHAPTER 28

  I DROPPED TO THE FLOOR AND CHECKED IF ONE could see below the bookcase. In fact, there was a space of a quarter inch or so. I saw the office door swing open, saw what I knew to be Lois’s slippers as the office light came on.

  Lois crossed toward Father’s desk and I lost sight of her. I heard the drapes rustle, Father’s office chair move.

  From my prone position, I looked up my brother’s exaggeratedly long leg. He was looking down at me. I hand-signaled something opening, while I silently mouthed, “The desk!”

  We’d left the desk mat open! I could feel Lois staring at it: a gun and envelope. What must she be thinking?

  Click. She’d shut it.

  On the way back across the office her slippers stopped exactly in front of us. I wondered if she felt a pocket of this hidden room’s colder air. Had it made her skin crawl?

  Did she sense us?

  Seeing only her slippers and pale ankles, I could picture her looking around the office more carefully. Maybe she felt something she couldn’t explain to herself.

  A moment later, she hurried from the room, catching the light switch. Hurried like the house was on fire.

  CHAPTER 29

  “SHE’S GONE,” I SAID.

  “We are so busted,” James said.

  “Upstairs,” Sherlock said, grabbing Father’s journal from the lectern and stuffing it into the small of his back.

  “We’ll tell her we were in the basement,” I said.

  “What if she’s already checked?” James asked.

  “Hurry!” I said.

  We left the hidden room dark. Eased the section of bookshelf back into place. It made very little sound closing.

  Sherlock had kept hold of the key. He returned it to the left side of the fireplace ash.

  “We are soooo busted,” James repeated.

  We slipped out and took off running, crossing the foyer and flying upstairs for our rooms.

  We had no idea what to expect.

  CHAPTER 30

  “NICE TRY,” LOIS SAID, FROM THE DOORWAY into my room. “I said, nice try, Moria. Playing asleep like that. I was in here not five minutes ago.” She switched on the lights. “Where were you?” Arms crossed, eyes squinting.

  “Downstairs, watching a movie.”

  “You’re lying. The television is cold. Hasn’t been on for hours.”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Your father’s desk. Tell me about that.”

  “What about his desk?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Moria.”

  “You mean the gun? You weren’t supposed to see that.”

  “You are in a world of trouble, young lady. You and your brother and your friend.”

  “They don’t know anything about it,” I said, somewhat honestly. “Father showed it only to me.”

  Lois wouldn’t think to look under the covers for my phone. James and I had agreed on this while on our way up the stairs as he dialed me and opened up the connection. Whoever heard Lois speaking to the other would mute his or her phone, preventing Lois from hearing anything through the device. It would allow the other to monitor exactly what was being said, so Lois couldn’t try to trip up the other.

  “I couldn’t sleep. I went back down there just to look at it. I still haven’t touched it.” That much was the truth.

  “And brought the boys with you,” Lois said.

  “No, I did not.”

  “Moria!”

  “I can’t speak for them, Lois. Maybe they heard me? Maybe they checked on me and I wasn’t here in my room? How should I know? Maybe they were creeping around the house trying to find me or spook me or whatever. If they were, you know James, you never would have seen him. He’s like a chameleon the way he can hide.” The truth again. I watched her process my explanation.

  The trick now was to move her thought. “He showed me how to open it. Showed me the gun and how to use it. He showed me a couple of other things as well, all of them secrets I was supposed to keep. Secrets I plan to keep. You should have checked the wardrobe first. That’s where I was hiding when you came in. I got out before you ever reached the desk.” I had watched the slow and careful movement of her slippers.

  “You expect me to believe your father showed you where he hid a gun?”

  “Did you know about it?” I asked.

  “I most certainly did not!”

  “Ralph?”

  “How would I know? No! I’m sure of it. No, no, no.”

  “He was worried, Lois. You know how he’d been over the summer. He told me if I didn’t hear from him at least once every three weeks I was to check that hideaway for a message from him. If no message, I was to take the gun and keep it with me.”

  “You’re lying. He would never have said such a thing.”

  “I think you underestimate my father’s love for his children. If he went missing, then he feared for us. But he didn’t go missing, did he, Lois?”

  “And you disobeyed him,” she said, pointing out a fault in my argument. “You didn’t keep the gun with you.”

  “I hate guns. Was I supposed to take it to school with me? I left it. But I check every now and then like I did tonight, just to make sure it’s still there.” I wondered if she knew about the other secret hiding place. I got nothing. She was unreadable. I conjured up my best frail voice. “For what it’s worth, I don’t like being called a liar. It’s hurtful.” The truth once more.

  James wasn’t the only one changing. At twelve, I had two grown-up employees. They worked for my legal guardian but I suspected if James and I complained enough, Lowry would fire either of them. It would never happen. They were both like family to us. But the possibility existed and charged me with a sense of responsibility. Seeing all that gold—gold and jewels that belonged to me and James—didn’t exactly hurt things. I felt rich and in control.

  I also had a sinking feeling I was mistaken on all counts.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY’S CENTRAL Library opened at nine on Saturday mornings, giving us time to do our research before James was to go sailing. The older of the two buildings, built of Milford granite, stood like a Grecian temple.

  “Trying to translate that was painful,” Sherlock said. He wore the same clothes as the day before. None of us had slept more than a couple hours. Sherlock looked it. I hoped I didn’t.

  “Translate what?” James asked. “The journal?”

  “That one’s impossible. I’m hoping someone here can help us with that. No, the page of what Moria called gibberish from the gun drawer.”

  “But,” I said. “I hear the ‘but’ coming.”

  “I could make a joke about that,” James said, “but I won’t.”

  “Thank goodness,” I said.

  “But,” Sherlock said, “I managed to figure it out. It was numbers, random numbers at first glance.”

  “Let’s not play Twenty Questions,” James said as we climbed the steps toward the towering doors.

  “I suppose I can spare you my agony. It’s dates. I’ve got six dates for us to research. There are probably many more on there. For today we have six.”

  “You’
re thinking news stories,” James said. “You brought us here to research news stories.”

  “Perceptive of you, James. Correct. One wonders why someone would encrypt a list of dates. Looking back at those dates seemed a logical place to start. And your father left them to be found.”

  “What if they’re just business stuff or something?” I asked.

  “There may be a story even so,” James said, teaming up with Lock. The pair of these boys working together was a little hard to take.

  “Agreed. And while you and Moria are digging up articles, I’ll try to see if someone knows of a scholar of Ancient Greek who might transcribe your father’s journal and maybe even this sheet of scrambled dates.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “Father was an intensely private man.”

  “And he’s dead,” James said coldly. “And his killer could easily be mentioned in that journal, Mo. Sherlock’s right. We need someone to help us.”

  The grandeur of the library stole my breath. I hadn’t been here in several years, and I appreciated it more from the moment I entered. We stood in an ornately decorated chamber with a vaulted ceiling and an echoing, cathedral-like resonance that demanded reverence—in this case, to the written word.

  James and I hunkered down in the second-floor reference area. Only then did I realize our mistake.

  “James, why is it the least socially capable of the three of us is attempting to interact with the librarians?”

  “That is strange,” James admitted, typing on a computer terminal. He was cross-referencing the six dates with The Boston Globe. I had been assigned the Boston Herald. “Do you realize,” he said, “they’ve digitized all the Globe newspapers from 1872 to the present? How awesome is that?”

  “The earliest date we have is 1972,” I reminded him. “Four in the 1990s and one in 2008.”

  James muttered, annoyed with me. When he said something was awesome, I was supposed to agree.

  “Awesome,” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said, “I’m trying to concentrate.”

  In a different area code than us, near the front entrance, Sherlock waited at an information desk. When his turn came, he stepped up, fully prepared to make his inquiry.

  The librarian beat him to it, an older, gray-skinned woman, with kind eyes.

  “Those were the Moriarty children you came in with, weren’t they?”

  Sherlock said nothing.

  “He—Mr. Moriarty, their father—the family in general, have been such wonderful benefactors of this library. Such a tragic loss. Such a fine man. And the children. Moria, isn’t it? Jimmy?”

  “James.”

  “My, how they’ve grown.”

  “I wonder if you might be able to help me, to help James and Moria. It seems their father fancied himself something of a Greek scholar. He left some writings behind explicitly for them but they’re written in Ancient Greek. I’ve considered calling the universities for them, but thought it more prudent to begin here, where ancient text is part of your business.”

  “Such an interesting and unusual request.”

  “I try,” said Sherlock, going for humor. She regarded him curiously. “Never mind,” he said.

  A morbid-looking fellow behind the counter, possibly a few years out of college, had twitched at the librarian’s mention of the Moriarty name. Taken by itself, that wouldn’t have won much consideration from Sherlock, but it was the boy reaching for his mobile phone a little too quickly that seemed more than coincidental. Especially given that a library desk phone sat within reach. The boy’s pallor and unkempt appearance influenced Sherlock as well, though he knew it should not. He, Sherlock, was not much better at presentation.

  More to the point, the boy didn’t send a text; he made a call. As Sherlock juggled conversation with the matron he kept watch on her assistant. How much weight could be put on an odd-looking college-aged boy making a phone call? Sherlock wondered. The call began, ended, and the boy went back to work on his computer terminal.

  But Sherlock was put off by it. He considered paranoia an affectation for others. He wouldn’t allow himself emotional response. He reacted to visual and audible stimuli and believed himself clinical and analytical in his assessments. The boy was a problem.

  Partially tuned in to the matron, Sherlock heard a name and wrote it down. A lawyer by the name of Thomas Lehman who visited the rare book room with regularity to read Ancient Greek.

  “Self-taught,” she said, “as I understand it. A delightful man. A true gentleman. I’m sure if he can’t help you, he will be able to point you in the right direction.”

  Sherlock thanked her and moved on. Joining us, he told James and me how correct he’d been in assuming the library was the place to check. Neither of us fed him the gratification he was fishing for. Overtired and somewhat irritable, I found his pretentiousness taxing.

  “Anything?” Sherlock asked us, sounding disappointed. “Do the dates mean anything?”

  “There’s so much that happens on any given day,” I said. “It’s overwhelming. Strikes. Governments in turmoil. Sports. Natural disasters. Crimes of every kind.”

  “Nothing much in The Globe,” James said.

  I heard what only a sister, or maybe a parent, could hear: James was lying.

  “Check out November first, 1967,” I said, more interested in James’s response than what he might find.

  I saw once again the unseen: my brother didn’t want to revisit that date, but under pressure, he typed anyway.

  “It’s not a headline, but a mention,” I said, “at least in the Herald. The real story is the evening edition of November sixth.”

  Sherlock may have felt the tension between brother and sister. But whatever the case, a boy who loved to meddle stayed out of it, his head pivoting between the two of us.

  “It’ll be front-page news on the sixth, I promise,” I said. I gave James no choice. He brought up the front page to November 6, 1967. I couldn’t help but question his resistance.

  I addressed Sherlock, the neutral party. “Get this . . . one of the dates you gave us is August fourteenth, 1962. The only news, the biggest news on the fifteenth, was a robbery from a mail truck on Cape Cod the day before. One and a half million dollars stolen! Six guys. All with guns. Revolvers, it says.”

  James snorted. He wanted me to shut up.

  “On the first day of the trial, November sixth, 1967, the key witness is said to have gone missing five days earlier. The guys arrested are let off because there’s no witness. Five days earlier is November first, another of the six dates you gave us.”

  “A crime,” Sherlock said. “You should start again, looking only at crimes on the dates in question.”

  “It’s a waste,” James said emphatically. “Do you know how many crime stories there are every day? It’s practically all they wrote about back then.”

  “Big crimes,” Sherlock said. “Notable. Unusual.”

  “Father was not a criminal,” I said, though I suspected otherwise, given all I’d learned in the past few months. My stomach sank.

  “Of course not!” James barked. “I don’t believe there’s a connection. Not for a second!”

  “What about all the stuff in the room?” I asked, my voice quavering. I knew the truth. Why wouldn’t James admit it? But I had my answer: the initiation.

  “Look, we would need to connect the stuff in that room to one of these stories,” James said. “I didn’t find that. You didn’t find that. That stuff in the room, it’s all investments.”

  “But why hide it?” I asked.

  James blanched. “Shut up.”

  “It’s just too much stuff, James. Too valuable. You know that. I know that.” I felt so absurdly cold. “Sherlock knows that.”

  “It’s vast wealth,” Sherlock said. “But I suppose, given the heritage, the longevity of your family, it’s possible such goods had been accumulated over a very long time.”

  “There! You see?” James said. “The accumulation of weal
th. Exactly!”

  “It looked more like a pirate’s cave to me,” I said.

  “This isn’t Narnia!” James complained. “It’s not Pirates of the Caribbean. Get real.”

  Sherlock twitched noticeably. “Listen, you two,” he said so softly I nearly missed it. “Do not look! But to James’s right is a pale creature I saw earlier at one of the librarian desks. He’s with two others. Unsavory, if you ask me. If I’m right—and when aren’t I?—they are looking for you two. So I think it best we split you up. Moria, you will please keep your face in the direction it’s aimed. Stand up slowly and head into those stacks. James, behind us is an elevator. It will be arriving in . . . five seconds. You will take it to the garage while Moria and I will take the stairs to the ground floor. We will keep them guessing. We shall rendezvous at the Dartmouth Street entrance. Nod if you understand.”

  James and I nodded gently, barely a tuck of the chin.

  James said, “See you there. Good luck.” He touched my arm fondly, more the gesture of the James of a year ago. I treasured the contact.

  “Off we go,” Sherlock said. “Nice and easy.”

  The elevator toned behind us exactly when Sherlock had said it would. It was one of those things I wouldn’t forget about Sherlock, a moment like that. He possessed the ability to know more, understand more, see more than five people put together.

  As I reached the end of the short aisle between bookshelves Sherlock appeared, in stride. “Follow me,” he said. “Look straight ahead, not so much as a glance to your left, not even if someone calls out to you.”

  “You’re scaring me, Lock.”

  “Good, then maybe you’ll walk faster.”

  CHAPTER 32

  JAMES RODE THE LIBRARY’S ELEVATOR ALONG with a white-haired couple who stood in silence. The couple left at the ground floor. Others joined him. He arrived to the garage and calmly walked in the direction of the exit signs.