The Downward Spiral

by Ridley Pearson

  “That was my presumption,” Sherlock said. “I’m sorry if that’s insensitive of me.”

  I waved my hand trying to let him know I was OK with it. I couldn’t speak. Not just yet.

  “Maybe some items from your grandmother. But yes. Your family had a connection here for decades. It was that connection . . . Then your father made a sizeable donation of personal items.”

  “Why give away the cross if it’s the only way to read the Bible?” I asked.

  “Why indeed?” Sherlock said. “As I said, it could be so others, like you and James, could get to it without a lot of legal-smegal. Or, I suppose, your father may have just needed a place to hide it for a while.”

  “Because he was afraid of the Meirleach!” I thought back to how Father had become so paranoid in the months before his “accident.”

  Sherlock picked at his prominent nose. I looked away.

  “You’re saying he hid it in Mother’s jewelry. Why not his secret room?” I asked. “Why not there?”

  “We may yet find it is in there, Moria. We didn’t have much time to look around. We can look again tonight.”

  “But you think it’s here?”

  “I find it interesting that your father made the donation. I don’t think there’s a flea’s chance in a fire that anyone would ever think to look in the Fordham Fashion Museum for it. He knew it would be safe here, even left on a hook in the hallway.” He had me laughing. It felt good. “This place isn’t open tomorrow. It was kind of now or never. Worth a try. Worth asking someone about.”

  “I agree completely. I just hope James shows up.”

  On cue, my brother walked through the door. The three of us shared an awkward hug moment. We caught him up on Detective Colander and Sherlock’s theory about the Moriarty cross.

  “OK then,” James said cheerfully. “I’ll ask.”

  He crossed to the information desk, with me and Sherlock close behind. James introduced himself by name and spoke to a woman with white hair, from whom he accepted a brochure.

  “Jewelry, second floor. Two galleries, nineteenth and twentieth century. I asked about diamond necklaces. She said they have many.”

  I preferred the stairs, from where we could see ahead and below. The stone staircase was wide and regal. I felt like a princess and imagined Sherlock my prince, an image that didn’t quite work but I went with it anyway.

  The moment the three of us entered the nineteenth-century jewelry exhibit we saw it. James approached the pedestal in the center of the room. A glass box on top held a gold cross on a heavy silver chain. A large jewel hung from the bottom of the cross. There was no question about its comparison to the painting of James Wilford.

  “Just what you said,” I told Sherlock. “Out in the open.”

  “Where no one can find it,” said he.

  I watched as he appraised the room strategically: another door to the side to a third exhibit hall, the entrance to the exhibit behind us. He disappeared for several minutes, leaving me to stare at this necklace, the sight of which cut me to my core. It had been in the family since before the Moriartys. It was in my blood. I could tell James was thinking the same things, feeling the same things. Whether he’d meant to or not, Father was teaching us our family history.

  I wasn’t sure when Sherlock had returned. I found him by my side, studying the necklace intensely.

  Without looking at me he said, “Nothing you can do about it today, it being a Saturday. The earliest we could ask someone—you two could ask someone—about your right to it,” he said, “would be Monday, and we’ll be back at school.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” Sherlock agreed.

  “You’re saying we have to wait until the next time we come to Boston?” James asked testily. “That’s unacceptable.”

  “I asked,” Sherlock said, “just now, if the director or any of the administrative staff were in today. They are not. Regular business hours.”

  “But it could be weeks,” James said.

  Sherlock studied the cross and jewel with his nose practically touching the glass box that secured the heirloom.

  “I wonder,” he said. When I asked later he refused to explain what he’d meant by that.

  CHAPTER 36

  JAMES FELT APPREHENSIVE ABOUT SAILING WITH Lexie. He didn’t want to like her—he had an assignment to take care of—but he kinda couldn’t help it. She was not at all the girl he’d assumed her to be. Everyone at school who mocked her were idiots. Judging by their assessment, it was apparently some kind of crime to be quiet, smart, and wanting nothing to do with the boarding school brats who dominated the social structure at Baskerville.

  Turned out, she was the opposite of them, in all the good ways. The opposite of some stupid nickname that had stuck simply because the words sounded so good in combination. Lexie the Loser. If she’d been Jamala the Impala or Ruby the Beauty her fate would have been entirely different. As it was, she was victim of a catchy nickname, and nothing more.

  Liking her made sailing together all the trickier. They were about to have fun together. How could he have fun with her and then spy on her father? He felt dirty.

  Mr. Carlisle picked him up at the train station and made small talk on the way back to the peninsula. James had dozed during the short train ride, already exhausted from the busy morning. As Lexie had predicted, her father had taken the sailboat out for a trial, during which he tested the rigging in the cold conditions. James heard all about it.

  The house had been built to impress. It succeeded. Its size and remote location made it look to James like something from an X-Men movie. James was led downstairs to a guest room where a microfleece wet suit, long underwear, neoprene boots, and other clothes, including a Windbreaker, awaited him. The outfit was slightly clumsy but warm.

  Mr. Carlisle, having no need to remind his daughter, an expert sailor, about the hazards they faced, did so anyway. He made her and her crew promise not only to wear the life vests but to cinch them down tightly.

  James had sailed for years from the Cape house in all weather, and in all different sailboats, large and small. He felt tempted to mention this, to do a little boasting in front of Mr. Carlisle, but he resisted. James and Lexie boarded the sailboat and pushed off. Nearly instantly, they moved at high speed.

  The 470, Lexie’s boat, performed well when close-hauled. The skipper and her crew hiked out over the windward edge to level and stabilize the craft, increasing its speed. In strong wind, the act amounted to standing with one’s feet on the side rail, your body extended a matter of a few feet over the foaming white wake that broke from the bow. With the boat ripping atop the water at breakneck speed, the maneuver of tacking charged James with both adrenaline and terror, a mixture he found intoxicating.

  Shouting over the roar of wind and sail, he called triumphantly, “I . . . LOVE . . . THIS!”

  “IT’S . . . THE . . . BEST!” Lexie answered, sea spray wetting her face.

  She handled the small boat well, her decisions sharp and crisp. James found her lack of hesitation impressive and comforting. No loser was Lexie. Here, in her element, she proved herself mentally strong and courageous.

  “Ready about . . . !” she called. In this maneuver that altered the course of the boat, the two of them needed to duck under the boom in unison and scurry to the other side in order to be in place for when the sails caught the wind. It was like a complicated and thrilling dance move. The slightest mistake, or missed timing, and the wet, slippery surface of the fiberglass boat was likely to send at least one of them into the water.

  “. . . hard to lee!” Lexie pushed the tiller. The sail roared as it luffed. The two of them ducked and worked lines—releasing one, tightening another—as they scrambled into position. The sail filled. The boat jumped up onto its rail, water coursing across the top. Lexie and James moved from a crouch into a full standing position as counterbalance to the force of the sail. They sailed like this for thirty minutes. It
felt more like five.

  “Not good!” she shouted.

  “It’s great!” James countered, wiping spray from his eyes.

  “There!” she said, jerking her head feverishly.

  “Oh . . . no . . .” In front of them, between them and the shore, a thick, guncotton gray squall appeared as if out of nowhere. It came from the north, barreling down the coast as a curtain of gray-black threat.

  “That’s snow,” she said. “And ice.”

  “Can we outrun it?” James shouted.

  “You do the math!”

  She was right: the front moved with excessive speed, eating into the dull blue sky and hiding the shoreline as if a curtain were closing. The peninsula and the Carlisle home looked toylike.

  “It’s not likely, but if the rigging ices . . .” Lexie said. She didn’t complete the thought.

  “Yeah!” James said.

  “We’ll capsize.”

  “I said I know!”

  The speed with which the boat moved heightened every word, every flex of James’s muscles. The water beneath them begged for a mistake.

  Her voice hoarse from shouting, Lexie said, “If we run for shore, my dad will have an easier time finding us. The moment he sees the snow, he’ll come for us. But it’s coming from the north, the far side of the peninsula, and by the time it hits, he’ll have had no warning.”

  “The city? Someplace south?”

  “Puts us farther out to sea than Dad will expect. We might possibly outrun it if this wind direction holds. But if we’re made to run downwind we’ll slow down, we’re less stable, and we’re much farther than where they’ll search for us.”

  “Don’t talk like that! No one is going to have to search for us.”

  “James, if that’s a wet snow . . . and when aren’t they at this temperature? . . . we’re going in.”

  “Don’t . . . say . . . that!”

  “Remember what Dad said about holding on to the boat. We hold on to the boat and we don’t let go.”

  “I am not playing Jack in Titanic for you, Lexie!”

  She bellowed laughter. “Thank you for that. I needed it!” She looked toward the peninsula and then toward shore. James could feel her calculating wind speed, distance, and the changes the storm might bring.

  “You know how satellites and spacecraft get a slingshot effect using a planet’s gravity?” she shouted.

  James did not like the sound of this.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  “Run for home?” James asked hopefully. She didn’t answer him. “For shore?” No answer.

  They sailed a minute longer, still aimed toward the peninsula. “I think there’s a third option,” she said.

  “How did I know you were going to say that?”

  Her face tightened, the wind suddenly colder, the first tiny flakes of snow blown in advance of the storm. “Let’s find out!”

  CHAPTER 37

  FOR JAMES, IT WAS LIKE ENTERING A CAVE OR A big gray mouth. The closer they sailed toward the island, the lower and wider grew the cloud generating the snow and wind. Rapidly, it bore down on them, enveloped them from all sides, spraying a cold white ice in advance like rice at a wedding. Lexie’s theory involved putting the sailboat into the throat of the blow. She tacked toward shore once inside the gray, as the ice gave way to snowflakes the size of fireplace ash.

  The snow adhered to the aluminum, glommed onto the sailcloth and fiberglass in gooey clumps. It stuck to their faces, and had they not been wearing swim goggles as part of their survival skins, it would have stuck to their eyelashes as it did their exposed hair. It would have blinded Lexie, and they’d have gone off course.

  She moved the tiller in faint degrees, while holding to it strongly, and navigated out of the ash into the ice flakes, the wind fiercer than any they’d faced. All but blind, they could see no more than a foot in front of the bow.

  They hit the mooring buoy without ever seeing it. Its line, tethered to a deep anchor and therefore stationary, tangled in the sailboat’s centerboard. It acted as a trip line: one moment the sailboat was ripping along, the next its speed cut in half, the bow giving way to the pull and turning them downwind.

  James fell.

  His feet popped off the edge and he slid on his back across the sailboat’s deck, grabbing frantically for the tangled rigging and, finally, the edge of the hull. Three fingers were all that held him. Inverted fingers because of his being on his back.

  “HOLD . . . ON!” cried Lexie, who had somehow managed not to fall.

  Then, a splash as the boat righted and the sail luffed, clapping. Lexie had fallen off, her harness tangled. The rigging whipped the aluminum with sharp cracks. James slid like a bar of soap. As he slid, he rolled and, as he rolled, he slapped into the water where Lexie had vanished. His gloved hand caught hold of webbing. The force threatened to tear his arm out of its shoulder socket.

  He had hold of Lexie’s belt.

  Coiling line around his right arm to hold on, he tugged with his left on the belt. Her head appeared out of the ice and foam. She wrapped her hands around his forearm as the boat slowed behind a windless sail.

  Together, they moved her to the edge rail, where Lexie switched her grip to a line. Then, “Look out! Jibe ho!” she hollered.

  The boat had come around just far enough for the wind to find the sail again. This time, it filled it like a boxer’s punch. It screamed to starboard side. The lines went taut. At once the boat was going ten, twelve, fifteen knots, its port side elevated, James dangling once again, Lexie folded over the edge, half on, half off.

  His face pressed to the fiberglass, James didn’t see what she did, or how she did it. Over the roar and the pitch, he heard her unclasping her safety belt, and he shouted for her to stop. It was a reckless and absurdly dangerous gesture, a cocky, outlandish thing to do in the face of such natural power. The boat continued to sail along. James lifted his head. Lexie was back in her harness, the lines untangled.

  “Put your leg through that line!” she shouted, hand on the tiller, having solved the tangle of James’s rigging and simplified it down to a single move.

  “There!” she called, as he managed the move. “You’re good.”

  A moment later, he climbed to her side and they were sailing again.

  “All good?” she cried.

  “I don’t even know what that means!”

  “You’re alive!”

  “All good,” he confirmed. “You saved my life.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. And you, mine, I think. But we’ll never know, will we? And that’s a good thing!”

  “You’re . . . out . . . of . . . your . . . mind!” James bellowed above the raging wind.

  “Yes! Absolutely. One hundred percent!”

  “We could be home in front of a fire!”

  “Pathetic, isn’t it? Who would want that?”

  “I’d raise my hand but we might capsize.”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  She had the boat hauling with the wind, charging like a bull. Ice was building on the pulleys, collecting on the boom, but he knew somehow they were through the worst of it.

  “That jibe,” she cried.

  “Oh, man! I thought it was going to break apart.”

  “The best thing that could have happened. It broke all the old ice off. I’ve got five times the control I had.”

  “We’re cooking!” he said. In fact, they were standing prone to the water, perhaps eighteen inches above its surface. Flying.

  And then, no ice, no cloud. They were a matter of only yards from large rocks stationed as a break to prevent shore erosion. Lexie called for James to trim the sail as she heaved the tiller, the rocks growing larger, coming closer.

  At what to James seemed like the last possible second, she called to come about. They switched sides as deftly as synchronized swimmers. Ballet partners. A thing of beauty.

  There, not a half mile away, stood the causeway, the two-lane road from shore to the private
island. They were in a pocket of clean air, just behind the torrent of the squall.

  “We would have hit the rocks!” James called, piecing together the evidence. “If the storm had stretched to here, this far, we would have hit the rocks! You could have killed us!”

  “It was either me or the storm,” she said, barking out another of those dark laughs. She eased up on their speed. “It’ll blow out in a few minutes. It’s turning south-southwest. Dad will be half crazed by now.”

  James felt the bumps and bruises, the strains and aches. He looked over at her as she called out for him to give more line and she tweaked the tiller. She caught him staring, looked at him until he had the nerve to look her in the eyes. They sailed like this, eye to eye, for a few hundred yards. She never looked forward, nor to the sail, nor to the stays at the top of the mast. She looked at James. Unrelentingly. And he, at her.

  CHAPTER 38

  LEXIE AND JAMES RECOUNTED THEIR ORDEAL over tea served in the living room with an amazing view of the sound.

  Mr. Carlisle focused his attention on James while his wife served freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies and poured strong black tea, offered with milk and sugar. It was part celebration, part ritual to thank Poseidon the sea had not claimed the two.

  Mr. Carlisle leaned into their every word. He thanked James for rescuing his daughter. James no longer felt like a guest, his connection to the family now warmer. Lexie was enjoying herself immensely.

  James wasn’t sure he could go through with the spying.

  Mr. Carlisle informed everyone—he did not offer—that he would be driving James to the Beacon Hill home. No train ride for the boy who saved his daughter. James smiled, having no idea how to respond.

  “Should I go now?” he said, feeling awkward and wondering if Mr. Carlisle was trying to drop a hint.

  “No, no! Not at all!” Mr. Carlisle said.

  “Have another cookie,” Lexie said.

  “More tea?” her mother offered everyone.

  “I don’t mind the train at all,” James said.