The loading dock being quite elevated, Sherlock offered me a leg up. He lunged me over rubber bumpers made of cut-up truck tires, and I rolled, and rolled, and rolled until passing under and through the barrier of insulating strips. The far side was chilly, five times more smelly, and extremely noisy. I ducked behind some kind of rolling cart. Sherlock arrived a few seconds later.
The processing plant conveyors carried dead fish in various stages of decapitation and disembowelment. Slimy fish guts filled gigantic rolling tubs while men and women in blood-covered rubber aprons, gloves, and paper hairnets wielded razor-sharp knives.
I threw up, spontaneously. Not much in quantity, but enough to make me retch a second time. Sherlock once again patted me on the back—not the reaction I’d expected from him. He took off to our left.
I hurried to the right, scurrying post to post for cover. I admit, I copied Sherlock’s moves nearly to the step. I took care to get a decent view of the work area, doing my best to make sure no one was looking my way before I moved on; thankfully, cutting a fish with a knife sharp enough to take off your fingers required concentration.
Across the warehouse, up a metal staircase, I saw a string of small office spaces atop a platform that jutted over the plant floor. One of the four had newspaper taped over the window. It was as if I wore a charmed necklace that warmed when in the presence of great good or great evil—James was in that room. James was behind that newspaper. James was within my reach.
Maybe sisters just knew these things; maybe James and I weren’t like normal brothers and sisters; maybe I was wrong, my heart taking the place of my brain.
I’d lost contact with Sherlock, now a good distance away. I searched for Ralph among the aproned workers in their hairnets. The noise in the room competed with the horrendous odor. I literally bumped into opportunity. Several of the thick rubber aprons hung on a hook fixed to a steel strut column behind which I was hiding. On a scummy shelf sat a box of latex gloves and another of the paper hairnets. The apron hung below my knees, the hairnet made me blush, but I moved across the plant floor without anyone taking a second look.
Coming around the third set of conveyor belts, I spotted Ralph at the foot of the metal stairs. I walked past him slowly.
“Newspaper on windows upstairs,” I said, moving on.
“Got it,” he said immediately, looking like a foreman surveying his workers. Sherlock wasn’t to be seen. I’m not sure why, but I glanced up.
There, in the crisscrossed tangle of steel rafters, a thin shadow of a boy held to a riser. Nearly invisible. Wraithlike. Sherlock. The steel beam upon which he stood connected to another and another in uniform fashion, like a mapped grid of city streets. Two blocks up, and one block to the right would take him along an avenue that connected to the balcony outside the office cubicles.
“You! Back on the line!” called a man’s voice from up above. It took me a moment to look, a moment longer to realize he meant me. I acknowledged with a lift of the hand and headed for the nearest conveyor. A group of men and women stood side by side. Knives were held in a slot between two pieces of wood attached to the conveyor equipment. I withdrew a knife, then pulled a dead fish off the conveyor and onto a well-worn plastic cutting board that ran the length of the line. The woman next to me caught the fish just behind the forward fin, sliced toward the head, then down with a crunch. Her left hand swept the cut parts into a bin while her right nudged the fish onto the belt. She grabbed another.
I did the same, feeling light-headed and ready to toss my cookies onto the moving belt. I severed the head. It wasn’t so hard. Swept it into the bin, pushed the fish back onto the conveyor, and grabbed another. The woman next to me shot me a glance, no doubt wondering at how slowly I’d accomplished the task. She had done four fish to my one.
“You new?” she asked in a heavy accent.
“Very.”
“Faster, or they put you on guts and grime. You don’t want that job.”
“Got it! Thanks!” I remained pathetically slow compared to the others. When I thought I’d reached blinding speed, I counted her five to my two. She handled a knife well. I’d have wanted her on my side in a street fight. Desperate to turn around or look behind me, I resisted. Not only would I give myself away, I might reveal Sherlock or Ralph as well. Instead, I looked across the busy plant floor, taking note of possible routes and exits to get James out of here.
“Do you think he’s watching us?” I asked the kind woman next to me.
“No. None of ’em stay out here so long. Bobby, he’s Sundays. He bosses some and goes back to his online poker. He won’t be coming out until he needs more coffee or the toilet. Keep going, you’re doing fine.”
“I’m pathetic.”
She laughed, her hands moving automatically. I had the feeling she could do this job blindfolded.
“Irish?” I asked. “Is Bobby Irish?”
“Irish? All them is Irish! Can’t hardly understand some of them,” said a woman with an impossibly thick Eastern European accent. “Friends. Family. Who knows. I just do my work.”
Meirleach? I wondered. Scowerers? I couldn’t tell one side from the other. My brother caught in the middle. Why did Father have to leave us? We needed him now more than ever.
Sherlock hugged a vertical beam only a few yards from the balcony. His head hung as he stared down at Ralph, who was apparently blissfully unaware of his location. Look at me! Sherlock willed.
Nothing.
An idea! Sherlock spotted some welding slag, scabs of metal that had rested atop the beam for generations, just awaiting a boy’s curious fingers. Carefully balancing, he squatted and picked up one of the many lumps. Aiming at Ralph, he swung his arm and dropped the chunk. It landed and broke into pieces at Ralph’s feet.
Ralph was apparently not new to such spying, for instead of immediately looking up, he did not react in the slightest. Five seconds passed. Ten. Sherlock was about to throw a second chunk of weld when Ralph moved a few feet and glanced up.
Sherlock twisted his wrist, fingers clasped as if holding keys.
Ralph nodded. Message received.
Sherlock looked on as Ralph crossed to Moria on the conveyor line. He reached past her, withdrawing a knife he then cupped so that it hid behind his forearm as he returned to the stairs. He climbed.
Sherlock moved, tightroping his way across the narrow beam until reaching the balcony. He climbed over the railing just as Ralph arrived at the top of the stairs. As if they’d carefully rehearsed, the two met at the door to the room blocked with newspaper. Ralph broke the tip off the knife on his first attempt to pry open the door. The second attempt worked as he drove the knife handle into the latch with a throw of his hip. The door came open, but from the opposite side. Unpinned from the hinges, the door fell inward, slamming to the floor.
“Oops,” Ralph said.
James jumped over the fallen door, was caught by Ralph, and swung onto the balcony.
“Ralph!” Sherlock said, ducking behind James, seizing hold of the fallen knife, somersaulting, and planting the broken blade into the toe of a large shoe.
A man screamed. We all turned to look.
A gun fired into the ceiling. Sherlock had just saved Ralph from being shot. The knife driven into the man’s foot had caused him to raise his arms just as he was going to fire.
Half the workers dove onto the floor.
Sherlock and Ralph, with James between them, rushed down the stairs, where I signaled them to use the back of the building—the way Sherlock and I had entered—and then followed in lockstep. Call it woman’s intuition, sixth sense, luck, I somehow knew trouble was coming through the door to the parking lot.
It came, not in the form of police responding to a gunshot, or a well-wishing civilian playing Sunday Hero, but a man who may or may not have been in the building already. Whoever it was, the man, a knife thrower, possessed keen eyesight, a steady arm, and remarkable accuracy.
Having pushed the workers out of his way,
he had dozens of blades at his disposal, all dirty with fish guts and blood, the first of which came so close to my nose that I smelled it. A second knife caught Ralph in the forearm, opening a nasty wound. A third might have killed one of us had Sherlock not appeared from the shadows holding a trash can lid out as a warrior’s shield. Three knives in a row collided with the shield and fell to the concrete. The next hit a steel post as we passed behind it. Another, and another, Sherlock somehow adroitly intercepting them, his reactions as fast a swordsman’s.
“I took fencing, you know?” he said, utterly calmly, as if reading my thoughts—again! “The foil, for me. Fifteens as often as not.”
Clank, clank! More knives fell to Sherlock’s shield. He pushed us back through the insulating curtain of rubber. Outside now, we jumped down from the dock—Sherlock helping me, which I greatly resented—and we ran, which was no contest. I beat them both by a good deal.
Ralph’s forearm was bleeding badly as he climbed behind the wheel. I pulled off my paper hairnet and tried to tie it around the wound.
“Compress it instead!” Sherlock instructed.
Ralph drove one-handed.
“You . . . How? . . .” James’s throat caught. “Thank you! Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome, dear boy. Know you’d do the same!”
For once, James didn’t complain about the use of the nickname.
CHAPTER 45
JAMES, SHERLOCK, AND I ALL NAPPED UNTIL lunch. I looked out my window to see men trying to look casual on the sidewalk by our townhouse’s front door. Scowerers. Of that I had little doubt.
We were under guard.
Lois prepared a lunch of tomato soup, a choice of grilled peanut butter and jelly or grilled cheese sandwiches with ham, and a heaping bowl of potato chips. Heaven.
We were scheduled to leave with Ralph for Baskerville Academy around four o’clock. It would be safer there, we all felt sure. We were told to head upstairs and do our homework and rest. Ralph had a nasty line of stitches on the underside of his left forearm that James demanded to study close up, inspecting like a surgeon.
“Does it hurt?” James asked.
“Never mind that.”
Sherlock, whose shoulder was bothering him again, and who wore a lump on his right temple that looked like a golf ball sawed in half, knocked lightly on my door a few minutes past one.
I admitted him and offered him my vanity stool while I sat on my bed, legs tucked under, Cucumber and Ellie sprawled on my pillow.
“Remember the library gave me the name of that man?”
“The Greek scholar,” I said.
“Exactly! Very good, Moria!”
“I’m not a moron, you know! That was only yesterday.”
“Feels like a fortnight,” Sherlock said. “He rang me back. A voicemail. Offered for me—us—to pay him a visit.”
“What? Today?”
“I think, maybe. Before I ring him back, I wanted to check with you. Are you up for it?”
“Translating Father’s journal? Of course! What do you think?”
“I think we’ve had quite a weekend, and perhaps this should wait.”
“You do?” I gasped.
“No. But I wanted to give you an out, if you wanted.”
“I don’t want,” I said. “To wait!”
We both grinned, coconspirators once again!
“Who do you trust more, Lois or Ralph?”
“That’s a horrible thing to ask, after the way you made up all that stuff about my bathtub night.”
“I made up nothing!”
“You have no evidence! You, who insists on only following the evidence.”
“It’s what the circumstances of the evening suggest, Moria. Ergo: circumstantial evidence.”
“It’s conjunctive,” I said harshly.
“I think you mean conjecture, as in ‘a conclusion from incomplete evidence.’”
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” I spit out, humiliated.
“You have to pick one of them, Mo. I can’t do it for you.”
“I hate you!”
“No doubt.”
“Ralph. Why, I don’t know, but—”
“Fine. We can work with that.” Sherlock sounded so cold and unsympathetic to what he’d just asked me to do.
“Work how?”
“Someone has to help us get out of this house. We’re prisoners, Moria, or hadn’t you noticed?”
CHAPTER 46
RIDING IN THE DARK OF THE TRUNK OF THE family car, an ungainly tall boy beside me—his feet to my head, and vice versa—proved an unsettling and uncomfortable solution to escape my own home.
“If the Scowerers are protecting us,” I said into the pitch black and the smell of rubber, “why do we have to hide from them?”
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking of them as private bodyguards. They are protecting James first, and you second,” Sherlock said, speaking softly. “They are protecting what’s of value to them. Why, we don’t know. Who they are, exactly, we don’t know. Only that they are secretive, organized in a somewhat military way, and they have enemies.”
“The Meirleach.”
“The same.”
“Ralph is taking a risk,” I said.
“He is. If my theory is correct—and when am I wrong?—he was himself a target: the hot chocolate. I’m confident he has figured that out as well. There would appear to be a fine line between allies and enemies, and it does us no good to speculate on how everything fits together and where we stand. And by ‘we’ I mean you and James.”
“You, too.”
“Sadly, no. There is every evidence I don’t matter a hoot to either side. Perhaps that may help us at some point, Moria. Perhaps we gain a little something from that.”
“My hip hurts,” I said. “That pointy bone. I need to roll over.”
“Don’t even think about it. That is not going to happen.”
I knew he was right. “OK, but on the way home I vote we hide under a blanket in the backseat.”
“Is there a blanket?” Sherlock asked.
“Don’t go getting technical on me,” I said, amusing him. I enjoyed making him laugh. It was like finding the right place for a jigsaw piece that had confounded everyone else at the table.
Thomas Lehman, a short man in his late seventies, with thick glasses, gray hair, and heavy eyebrows, admitted Sherlock and me into his penthouse apartment atop a brick condominium tower that overlooked the bay. It was filled with marble busts and statuettes, many chipped or missing noses, as well as parchment scrolls and 1960s-era contemporary art, and I felt as if we’d visited our second museum of the weekend. There was a cluttered, professorial feel to the sitting room. The man walked sturdily, had a clear voice and hearty chuckle. A man easily self-amused. Sherlock and I sat where he told us to, facing him with a view out the windows.
We waited for him to speak. He was that kind of man.
“You’re Moria Elise.”
“Moriarty. Yes.”
“And you are James?”
“No. A friend of hers. A school chum. I’m the one who called you.” Sherlock scribbled down his cell phone number and email address and passed them to the man. “In case . . . well, I don’t know.” Sherlock untucked his shirt and withdrew Father’s journal from the small of his back. I wondered how long he’d been hiding it there.
The lawyer turned amateur scholar flipped pages, reading. “How did you come by this?”
“It was my father’s. He . . . passed.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that. I knew him. Socially. Did I tell you?” He addressed Sherlock.
“I should have thought to have asked,” Sherlock said.
“This can be a small town at times. Functions. Some art auctions.”
“Buying or selling?” Sherlock asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You and Mr. Moriarty. The art auctions. Were you buying or selling?”
Sherlock was thinking about the st
acks of paintings, the busts, rare stamps, and other collectibles in Father’s secret room.
“That’s confidential information, I’m afraid. I don’t feel comfortable discussing that.”
“Apologies.”
The man’s good humor was gone, the lawyer present. “Do you mind?” He didn’t wait for our answer. He sat back and read the dead language, turning pages regularly. Five minutes passed. Ten. Sherlock’s eyes told me he didn’t want me interrupting the man.
“His handwriting isn’t easy,” Lehman said without looking up. The single sheet recovered from the gun drawer dropped out of the journal and into the man’s lap. “What’s this?”
“Numbers,” Sherlock said.
“I can see that.”
“I tried . . . that is . . .” Sherlock said, “I was able to get the first three lines. We’d like the rest, if possible.”
The man set it aside.
“I have poor eyesight, and I tire easily,” Lehman said, not that we’d asked. “Aging is horrible, unless you consider the alternative.” A glint to his eye. I liked Thomas Lehman, Esq. “From what I just read, it’s an . . . accounting. Part business diary, part personal journal. I’m sorry to say that on first glance I don’t believe its content is proper for persons your age. This is grown-up stuff.”
“We are investigating Mr. Moriarty’s death,” Sherlock said.
The lawyer managed not to break a smile, though his eyes filled with mirth. “Are you now? Is that so?”
“It’s thirty-seven pages. How long for you to read it and give us a general idea of what we’ve got?”
Lehman regarded Sherlock. He seemed to be considering handing the journal back.
Please no! I spoke mentally.
“Thirty minutes.”
“Can we wait?” I asked.
“May we?” Sherlock said, correcting my grammar. He could be such a snob.
“How are you getting home?” he asked.
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