The Downward Spiral

by Ridley Pearson

  “I’m sure we do,” Crudgeon said to James. “I’d be happy to provide it,” he told Colander.

  “I’ve come a long way to talk to you, James,” Colander said. “I’ve already spoken to your sister and your roommate.”

  “So I heard.”

  “Perhaps after the meal—”

  “I have homework,” James said. “Tons of homework. You can blame the headmaster for that.” He faked a smile, his stomach upside down.

  “The video will allow for a probable cause warrant,” Colander informed James. “The warrant will necessitate my return and a more formal discussion.”

  James felt light-headed though he tried not to show it. Gathering his strength, he said, “I’m sure Mr. Lowry will understand what that means, since I don’t.”

  “It means you’re in trouble, son. If you don’t speak with me now, you’re in serious trouble.”

  James wanted badly to agree to sit down with the man. But he’d been schooled by both Crudgeon and Lowry to never speak to police without Lowry in the room. Not ever. He had said, “We have friends in high places, James, who can work miracles.”

  “I don’t know why I would be,” James said as innocently as possible. “But if you say so.” He looked over to Crudgeon. “May I be excused, Headmaster?”

  “Go on,” Crudgeon said.

  As famished as he was, James had somehow managed to lose his appetite.

  Following the non-meal, James headed for Bricks 2 to try to mend things with Lexie.

  Just passing the Main House he saw through the lamp-lit darkness a girl who looked like Lexie being helped toward a waiting car.

  The woman helping her took shape as Mrs. Carlisle. But the way Mrs. Carlisle hunched and held Lexie so tightly suggested something was terribly wrong.

  “Lex?” James hollered.

  Lexie turned her head and seemed to catch sight of James, but hurried away from him.

  “Lexie! I’m sorry!” But a chauffeur closed the car door before James got out the apology.

  Wanting to find out what was going on, James headed directly to Bricks Middle 2. He swung through the doors, immediately encountering a group of girls, all of whom moved away from him. “LeTona? Annie?” he said.

  “How do you feel now?” Annie asked.

  James looked at her curiously. “What was Lexie doing with her mom?”

  “What do you care after the way you treated her?”

  Only then did he begin to understand that Lexie’s mother couldn’t have possibly made the drive from Boston in the thirty minutes since dinner. “Wait a second,” he said. “What exactly’s going on here?”

  One of the girls called him words she shouldn’t have. Ruby Berliner chastised him venomously. “That’s how you treat someone when they’re coming to you for comfort?”

  “Comfort? I . . . was protecting her! What are you talking about?”

  “Her father was hit by a truck. A hit-and-run in Boston.”

  In his mind’s eye, James saw Superintendent Colander. He saw Mr. Carlisle’s appointment book open to the wrong week on the man’s desk. He saw Tuesday, 4:00 p.m.—one of many appointments that he’d photographed, printed out, and hand-delivered to Lowry. Lowry, who had adamantly refused to allow James to email him any such material.

  “Comfort?” he said again. Lexie had come into the common room needing a friend. In his determination to keep her from getting caught by Colander, he’d not only rebuffed her, but made a fool of her.

  Of himself, as it turned out.

  James stuttered. “D-dead?”

  “You didn’t know,” Ruby said.

  “Oh, come on!” Annie complained. “I don’t believe that for a second!”

  James looked up at the girls, pale and not moving.

  “He didn’t know,” Ruby said.

  The foul-mouthed girl chided, “You selfish, rude, horrible tool.”

  James’s mind reeled. He’d done this. He’d caused this. The truck had to have been driven by Scowerers, agents who’d acted on information provided by him.

  “Dead?” James repeated the word in between bouts of dizziness. He might have stayed there a few minutes longer. He couldn’t remember. He ended up staggering around campus in the cold until finding himself in the Lower 3 hallway, dazed and slightly frostbitten.

  He relived how he’d treated Lexie, how without an explanation she must have felt so abandoned.

  Could she possibly connect him to her father’s death?

  They should have told him.

  Something else was happening to him. Something he didn’t like, but couldn’t resist. While regretting the way he’d treated Lexie, he also felt emboldened by the wicked thrill of it all. Remorseful, but excited. Something as simple, as easy, as photographing some pages out of an appointment book had . . .

  “Dead?” he muttered aloud.

  A boy heading toward the washroom apparently heard him and moved away from James. Something about the boy’s repulsion added to the effect Carlisle’s death was having. James sensed both purpose and power, importance and effectiveness. He was a very real part of something big and dark and powerful.

  The Scowerers had removed either an obstacle or an untrustworthy ally.

  Cause and effect, James thought. He hungered for more, while at the same time wondering if such an order had been placed and resulted in Father’s death.

  Part of the problem, or part of the solution? he wondered, having little idea of which side he was on.

  But, at the same time, he wanted more.

  CHAPTER 48

  AT MY SUGGESTION, SHERLOCK AND I MET IN one of the soundproofed music practice rooms Thursday night after study hall. Sherlock looked uncomfortable as he pulled the door shut. It took me a moment to remember he’d been beaten up in one of these rooms. I apologized. He told me not to be silly. I told him I wasn’t being silly.

  Open space on the walls and the inside of the door was covered in egg-carton-shaped foam meant to absorb sound. A small window with a fabric blind looked out into the dark.

  I reminded Sherlock that as underclassmen, and a boy and girl alone in a room like this, we’d receive demerits if caught. The rehearsal studios were notorious make-out rooms and were patrolled vigorously.

  “I’m aware of that, Moria.” He pulled open a cupboard, withdrew a violin case, and then the instrument. He tuned it poorly and began to play a piece of either improvised or poorly memorized music. Beethoven, I feared. He wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t good either. Few of his notes were in tune. But when he closed his eyes, I felt sorry for him—he believed himself at one with the instrument. Sadly, his math was off. He wasn’t close to “at one.”

  “What have you got?” he asked, chin to the instrument, notes flying around the space in no exact order.

  “Questions.”

  He continued playing, much worse than before.

  “James isn’t eating,” I said.

  “I noticed.”

  “He isn’t talking to me.”

  “Nor to me.”

  “He isn’t hanging around with Clueless and Brainless.”

  “Ever since the Colander visit.”

  “Yes. I saw that,” I said. “Do you think there’s a connection?”

  “Do you think there isn’t?” Sherlock asked. He seemed to be trying to make the violin accompany our conversation—the low strings for his voice, the higher notes for me. It didn’t work at all.

  “Same night Lexie left.”

  “Indeed.” As if he’d made this connection long before anyone else. He could be so obnoxious.

  “I also wanted to talk about something else—someone else,” I said.

  “Is that so?”

  “Ruby Berliner.”

  “Oh,” he said. His finger slipped off a high string and twanged against the instrument.

  “Can you just stop playing for a minute?”

  He stopped. “You don’t like it?” He sounded so hurt.

  “Lock, I love it. You’re
very talented.”

  “If you say so. I studied at the conservatory when but a lad of—”

  “You and Ruby,” I said.

  “If there’s anyone you should be worried about—and there is not!—it should be Natalie.”

  “NATO?” I said, using her nickname. “Why? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand.” He sounded so condescending.

  “No.”

  “Natalie?” he said. “Your roommate?”

  “I know who Natalie is.”

  “Apparently, you don’t. Not really.”

  “Natalie and you?”

  “No! I mean, if you ask her, yes. I think very much yes. From me? No. Not interested. Never was.”

  I could see how I might have misinterpreted a good deal of Natalie’s encouragement for me to pursue Sherlock. She could have been speaking from her own crush on him. I filed it away. “Don’t change the subject!” I warned. “Ruby is the subject.”

  “Ruby is an ally, an employee of Sherlock Investigations, if you will.”

  “No, I won’t,” I said. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “She is a means to an end. We need her.” He started up the violin again, like tugging the cord of a lawn mower until it growled.

  “Stop being so abstract, so obtuse, and put that thing down, would you, please?” I couldn’t think. He held the violin by the tuning pegs. It looked toylike in his long fingers.

  “I stayed behind,” he said. “The fashion museum. I stayed behind.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Just what I said: I hid up in the ceiling. I stayed after all the commotion.”

  “You did not!”

  “I used one of the stands. Was nearly found out by some police, but thankfully, no. They were too dense. When all were gone from the place I . . . well, I kind of fell back out of there. But I was about to saw open the display case holding the cross when I discovered the most unexpected, the most fascinating, the most important fact. One that may, perhaps, solve a good number of problems we face.”

  “Such as?”

  “Procuring the painting of Wilford. Executing the necessary—”

  “I mean ‘such as’ what discovery?” I snapped at him.

  “It’s not a jewel.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Hanging from the cross. Transforming the light in the painting. Not a jewel.”

  “I’m listening.” Why he couldn’t seem to complete a single thought, I had no idea. My suspicion was that he wanted me to beg, wanted me to celebrate his genius, compliment him at every pause. He had me so wrong.

  “Sir Frederick William Herschel . . .”

  “Oh, please no!” I wondered if I’d said this aloud. Another Sherlock history lesson. I didn’t have the patience.

  “. . . in the year 1800,” Sherlock said. I exhaled, grateful I’d apparently not complained aloud. “Directed sunlight through a prism and measured the temperature of the spectrum of light. A man named Johann Ritter followed up, measuring the red spectrum. You’re bored!”

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re somewhere else.”

  “Nonsense! I’m in Ritter’s lab measuring the red spectrum.”

  “Good!” he said, believing me. I felt cruel. I tried to pay better attention. “It’s called a dispersive optical prism. Basically, a triangle of glass. You can look it up.”

  “No thanks.” That I did speak, regrettably.

  “Two hundred years ago, your ancestors left a clever visual clue inside the family Bible and a piece of jewelry for their descendants to use in decoding the Bible. One needed the other. You, James, and I pursued the obvious—the jewel. But upon seeing it was nothing but a prism, a specific prism at that, I made an unexpected discovery.”

  “I’m lost,” I admitted.

  Sherlock reached into his coat pocket. As his hand came out dragging a string of pearls, it turned out it was a good thing the room was soundproofed, because I let out a scream. In his hand, he held the gold cross necklace.

  “Stay calm! This is a fake. This is Ruby’s work, but it’s darn good work, if you ask me.”

  “Fake?”

  “Just so. Art imitating life, to reverse a cliché. It’s what everyone seems to be after, and since neither the Scowerers nor the Meirleach stole it from the museum, I thought a good copy might come in handy.”

  “But we need the real one,” I said, “in order to try it out on the Bible.”

  “In fact, we don’t! But that doesn’t mean we aren’t curious about who stole it.”

  “You can be so annoying,” I said.

  “The necklace is old-school, Moria. Put the prism in sunlight, divide that light into its various colors. Isolate the deepest reds onto the pages of the Bible, and there you have it.”

  The two of us startled at once. A clap from the window. Sherlock nearly dropped the violin. I jumped up out of my seat. The fabric shade held a batten in its bottom hem as a weight. The wood of the batten had smacked the window casing, driven by a breeze from where the window was open a quarter inch. Reckless of us not to have noticed the window being open like that. Sherlock shut it, ducked under the blind, and locked the window.

  “There you have what?” I asked, returning to our conversation.

  “Silver nitrate, I imagine!” said Sherlock. “Can’t know for certain until we try.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the window; something about it bothered him.

  “Stop being so Sherlock!”

  “Moria, we have ultraviolet lamps—black light—that we can use in place of the archaic methods of using the optical prisms and sunlight. All we need to test my theory is the Bible and a black light from the science lab. Whatever is there, whatever your father wanted you to find, would have been written using the chemical silver nitrate, a long, long time ago. And maybe more recently.”

  “Note to Sherlock,” I said. “We don’t have my family’s Bible. It happens to be in the headmaster’s office!” I screamed.

  I looked at his face, still bruised, and tried to imagine what went on in his head.

  He raised his solo eyebrow again. “Yes. And I have a plan to . . . borrow it.”

  “Of course you do.” I was blatantly condescending.

  “My plan”—the door opened as Sherlock was speaking—“is to bring our two halves together. It will be fun, I promise.”

  “Mr. Holmes! What did you just say to her?” Mr. Geissinger, the music teacher, one of tonight’s proctors, burned red in the face.

  “I . . . ah . . .”

  “He’s explaining a musical piece to me,” I said to Mr. Geissinger. “An improvisational piece.”

  “Is he?” Geissinger perked up.

  Sherlock hadn’t played the violin for several minutes. “The first movement with the second,” he said to the music teacher.

  “I see.”

  I covered my grin. Sherlock could turn things around on other people, could twist them into knots, could tangle their own words faster than anyone I knew.

  “Oh! Yes!” said Geissinger. “Are you a violin man?”

  Sherlock ran off a flourish to prove himself. It was better than the earlier music.

  “We need a second violin in the pit for the next play. Who’s your advisor, Mr. Holmes?”

  “I’d rather not, sir. Time constraints.”

  “I don’t give a hangnail if you’d rather not,” he said, somewhat confounded by his own words. He looked slightly lost and distraught. “That is, you’ll play if I say you’ll play.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’ll play.”

  Sherlock didn’t acknowledge.

  “I’ll have the sheet music to you tomorrow. I’ll expect a run-through of the first three scenes day after tomorrow.” He looked at me. “What the devil are you two up to anyway?”

  “Improvisation, sir,” Sherlock said. Where his quick answers came from beguiled me. “I’m calling it ‘Family Portrait.’ It’s about the Moriartys, sir. James
is my roommate. This is his sister. I’m putting her to music, if that doesn’t sound too abstract.”

  “Abstract? I love abstract! Philip Glass. Steve Reich! Let’s hear it, boy.”

  Geissinger stepped in, allowing the door to shut. He apparently didn’t care about delaying his rounds as curfew proctor.

  Sherlock played as if I wasn’t in the room. His high notes stood my hair on end, and not in a good way but the nails-on-blackboard way. His morose melodies, haunting and aimless, left me thinking of snakes and insects and wiggly, creeping things I wanted no part of. Geissinger called it “inspired.”

  Ten (agonizing) minutes later, Geissinger provided us both with passes so we could return to our rooms without demerits.

  I walked back to my room alone along the western side of the Bricks where an access road separates the Bricks from the JV playing field and a wide expanse of lawn leading to the gym. Bikes were chained up outside shuttered windows, the blinds pulled for privacy. Light from the windows threw pale patterns onto the black asphalt, and I found myself playing step-on-a-crack-and-you’ll-break-your-mother’s-back. An animal, or car brakes, or something unthinkable cried from the woods beyond the gym, well down the hill from me, and I was reminded of Sherlock’s insistence there were strangers in the shadows keeping watch on my brother. Grown men, not kids like us. Perhaps they were out there now, I thought, looking at me.

  I walked faster, and the faster I walked, the more frightened I became, the more concerned I was not alone. I found it strange the way fear could take over so quickly. The trickle became a flood, stealing my mood and forcing terror into me only because of the dark, unexplained sounds and things people had told me! I was allowing my imagination to pick and choose among the tidbits Sherlock had shared, and my mind began to paint a picture of my being attacked and dragged off.

  I entered my room sweating and out of breath despite the fact I’d never moved faster than a brisk walk.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Natalie said.

  Maybe that was it, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t what was there, but wasn’t there that had frightened me nearly to peeing myself.

  “Or was it Mr. Great, as in Britain?” That was the closest Natalie had come to truthfully expressing a romantic interest in Sherlock.