The Initiation

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The Initiation Page 16

by Ridley Pearson


  “A recent discovery. Yes.”

  “It’s like we own this school or something. I don’t exactly get how it all works, but you being the male heir is obviously important.”

  I could see him calculating. I’d known for years the power of my brother’s mind. As long as it had been focused on the Red Sox or the Bruins, on schoolwork, it had kept itself contained. In the past two years, since James’s voice began to change, his attention had widened. He read the morning paper cover to cover and had detailed discussions with Father about the stock market and politics, stuff I didn’t understand or care about. I thought these changes were mostly responsible for Father’s sending James to Baskerville. My partial reading of the old legal document had changed that. For James as well. He’d been sent here as part of a generations-old agreement.

  “So let’s say there’s some kind of trigger for our family’s financial support that has to do with the male heir—me—attending or graduating. Maybe that agreement or that trigger also has something to do with our family Bible.” His voice grew excited. “Maybe I have to swear something using the Bible. Like in court. In order for the school to be paid. ‘Do you solemnly swear to abide by the rules of Baskerville Academy, blah-blah-blah.’ See? The Bible goes missing, and the school freaks out. Father freaks out. Maybe, even, whoever is sending these clues freaks out. I end up some chess piece in a game that you and I haven’t figured out yet, meaning we’re at risk. Meaning the headmaster is worried about me, worried about you.”

  I was nodding so hard I was making my neck sore. “Definitely, almost makes sense.”

  “Almost?”

  “An oath? Really? How could that get them their money?”

  “Yeah . . . you’re right,” he said. “But I feel we’re close.”

  “We” was about all I heard. . . .

  “It makes sense they need the Bible for something. They don’t want it back just to display it.”

  “Maybe our great-grandfather was a head case. Maybe there’s some rule that the Bible has to be on display.”

  “That’s not impossible. Crudgeon wouldn’t tell us that because he’d have to explain that our family funds the school and that would give you and me too much power over him. Interesting.”

  “It is!”

  I’d seen his face get red like that before. Only a couple of times, and they never ended well. He’d nearly killed London one time, strangling the dog and holding him off the ground—London, his favorite. I’d saved London; he was only scared, not hurt. But I couldn’t save James. It was like he’d passed some internal threshold where nothing could reach him. It wasn’t a bad temper but more like another person had come out from within him. I feared that was about to happen again—and it wouldn’t be London he’d strangle.

  “It’s all right,” I said encouragingly.

  James took me hard by the shoulders. Truth be told, I nearly fainted. I thought he was probably going to rip me in half without knowing what he was doing. He could dispose of my body in the showers, or in pieces down the toilet. My legs wilted.

  “Crudgeon assumes it was you who broke into his office.”

  “W . . . h . . . a . . . t?”

  “If we don’t figure this out, he’s going to use you—I don’t know how—to get to me,” he said, his eyes wide with terror.

  “The Bible is separate from the clues. The guy with the key tattoo under his arm made that clear enough. Father warned me to protect you.”

  “You’ve spoken to Father?” I cried out jealously. “When? Did he call?”

  James’s face was paralyzed. “Never mind that. We have to guard against anything happening to you, Mo. I’d do anything to keep you safe—”

  “Never mind? Seriously, Jamie? No, I won’t ‘never mind.’ I do mind. I mind very much. What about Father?”

  He told me about the bizarre underground visit, about the discussion of legacy and how Father was trying to stop someone from doing something but that it was taking more time than he’d hoped. How Baskerville, the family Bible, and Jamie and I were all part of it, but that Jamie didn’t know what “it” was.

  I knew the sisterly thing to do at that moment was to share the instructions Father had given me while in his study. I didn’t share because Father had asked me not to, but I wasn’t certain those rules still applied.

  “Would you really do anything to save me?” I wished he’d say it a few times more. I felt good all over.

  “Power is about leverage,” he said, sounding like a grown-up version of James. I think that’s when I realized the changes in James would be forever. He wasn’t a different James, he was the older variety. “My boys and I will protect you.”

  “Your ‘boys’? You sound like a bad guy in a movie.”

  “I have a couple guys who help me out, Mo. You know that. Soon, there will be more.”

  “You’re building a posse?”

  “Something like that. Don’t worry about it. What I need you to do is to cooperate. Co-operate. Operate together. You get that? If I’m fighting you at the same time I’m trying to protect you, that’s not going to work.”

  “You make it sound so dangerous.”

  “You’d understand if you’d seen Father. I think it is dangerous. For both of us. Me, because I’m the male heir and something is expected of me. Like I told you, Father knew about the clues, so they must be a tradition. The scary dude told me to give up the Bible search and focus on the clues. So there’s that, too. You, because if I mess this up, they’ll use you to get at me. Father was blunt about that. We don’t know who ‘they’ are. I don’t know how I might mess this up, which makes it all the more likely I will.”

  “You know what’s weird?” I said. “As weird as this sounds, I actually know what you’re saying. I get it.”

  “So you’ll cooperate?”

  “One thing: don’t ask me to give up Sherlock as my friend. Do not go there.”

  “Mo? That kid’s trouble. It’s you and me. Three’s a crowd. I’m not going to tell you who you can have as a friend, but I’m asking, I’m begging . . . give it a rest until we figure this stuff out. Please!”

  “M . . . O . . . R . . . I . . . A!!? Moria Moriarty?” It was Mistress Grace. “Are you in the dorm?”

  I pushed James into the nearest shower and pulled the curtain shut. I wheeled the bucket and mop into a stall and pulled the stall door closed. I headed out into the hall, tugging on my skirt and rubbing my hand—a girl fresh out of the washroom.

  “Down here, Mistress Grace!” She was nearly to the far end of the corridor, well past my dorm room.

  I didn’t know until then that a person’s movement tells its own story. Mistress Grace was a motherly, round woman with soft hands and pinprick beady eyes. A happy woman, she moved around easily and lightly enough to be half her undetermined age. Presently, her face was grim, her walk slow, her eyes downcast.

  As she arrived close to me I could see more the details of her worn expression: glassy eyes and streaked mascara.

  I’d heard Father use the expression “The devil’s in the details.” I’d assumed it meant that small details were often the biggest obstacles. But the devil was quite honestly in the details of her face. She was bewitched, overcome. And it had something to do with me.

  Of that, I had absolutely no doubt.

  CHAPTER 27

  NO EASY WAY

  “MORIA, I’M AFRAID THERE’S BEEN AN ACCIDENT.” Mistress Grace’s voice reflected the evidence of her tears. It was as sad a thing as she’d ever spoken.

  “James? Something’s happened to James?” I tried to look as if all the blood had drained out of me.

  “No, dear, not James, thank heavens.”

  “Sherlock?” His name just escaped my lips. It felt as if someone other than me had put them there. Why Sherlock? I wondered. And why would that same chill own me?

  “I’m afraid it’s your father, dear girl. There’s no easy way to say this: he’s . . . gone.”

  I awoke in the
school infirmary looking up at white acoustical tile and hearing the murmur of voices.

  “She’s awake!” said James.

  I sat up, but too quickly. The room swirled and spun.

  I opened up my eyes to James’s worried and tear-streaked face close to mine. He was holding my hand and sitting in a chair that was lower than the bed, making him seem smaller.

  “Jamie,” I groaned. “Water, please?”

  An arm connected to the school nurse delivered a plastic cup of ice water. “Lucky for you, Mistress Grace caught you, or you’d have really thumped your head.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “lucky me.” Tears practically squirted from my eyes. “Jamie . . . is it . . . true?”

  He was crying as well. He nodded and hugged me and I think we stayed that way a long, long time. Headmaster Crudgeon stood at the foot of the bed watching. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. I would find out later he’d never left my side. The cruel Mrs. Furman was there, as well as Mistress Grace. There was an ice pack on my head and my feet were raised on a pillow.

  The infirmary room contained two hospital beds and some equipment on wheels. It was all very antiseptic and spare. I hadn’t even known it existed. From the view out the window I placed it as the upper floor of the McAndrews Science Hall.

  “Could we have a minute?” Jamie asked as politely as I’d heard him say anything since arriving to Baskerville.

  The adults moved into the hallway.

  “Is it true?” I asked.

  He nodded. Tears rolled down his cheeks again. “He fell off a ladder.”

  “Father on a ladder?”

  “Shh. I know. Listen, Mo, do you remember my telling you he came here, to school, the other night?”

  “Of course! I fainted, I didn’t go psycho!”

  “Hush! Not so loud! Remember? He was all worried about you.”

  My body shook with grief. I felt twinges of anger, regret, sadness, and a profound sense of emptiness.

  “About . . . well, that if I didn’t act right it might end up on you. But him? He was freaked out, but I never thought this would happen.”

  “The ladder.”

  “Exactly. He was winding the wall clock in the hall.”

  “Father was? That’s Ralph’s job!”

  “I know. But don’t say anything. There’s something horrible going on, Mo. I’m in it. We’re in it. And we don’t even know what it is.” He wiped away snot from his nose. “First Mother, now Father.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Mother?”

  “He was scared. Father was scared.”

  My breath caught. Not our father. That’s what Jamie—James, I corrected myself—was saying.

  “The attack . . . my bedroom,” he said. “What if that wasn’t for me? What if they were just using my room to enter the house and—”

  “—get to Father,” I said. “James! What are we supposed to do?”

  “Get you out of here. Get well, Mo. We can’t talk here. You get well and we’ll figure this all out. But secretly. In private, you understand? Nothing to Crudgeon or the others.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s super important.”

  “I get it,” I said. “I’m better right now. I’m ready.”

  “You don’t have to convince me,” he said, looking up. “You have to convince them.”

  CHAPTER 28

  BROKEN TRUST

  “I HEARD ABOUT YOUR FATHER. I’M TERRIBLY sorry.” Sherlock sat at his desk, a stack of open library books before him. He closed the top three books the moment he saw James.

  “Thanks,” James said.

  “If you need the room to yourself . . . ?”

  “No, I’m okay. I don’t think I have any more tears left in me.” He tried to laugh; it sounded more like a wet cough.

  “They’re in there,” Sherlock said, “and you must trust to let them out whenever they want.”

  “An expert on grief too?” He lashed out at his roommate, eyes squinting, his voice strident.

  “Sorry to say, yes. Me mum and da, both gone. It’s just my older brother, Mycroft, and me. We are like you and Moria, except he’s seven years my senior.”

  “I need you to stay away from her for a while.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Just for a while. No more you and Moria.”

  “But she needs friends now more than ever. You as well, James.”

  “Not you, she doesn’t. Not me, either.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Bad things happen to Moriarty women,” James said, quoting Father. “Father’s death. They’re calling it an accident.”

  “And?”

  “Moria can’t be involved.”

  “You don’t believe it was an accident,” Sherlock said.

  “I didn’t say that. Forget it, please. Promise me you’ll give Moria some space.”

  “The clues? The Bible?”

  “You see? There you go again!”

  “James, I can help.” Sherlock was thinking about the image of the key in the floor that he intentionally hid in the chapel.

  “No.”

  “You’re sure this is how you want it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we talk about some of this? Not later, but now?”

  “I suppose.”

  “We know a family Bible typically contains birth and death records, James. But is there any reason to believe that’s why it was taken?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Moria and I think it may have been copied.”

  “Copied?”

  “Scanned. In the computer lab. No proof. Just a hunch.”

  “For what? How can that make any sense? A Bible’s a Bible.”

  “It doesn’t make sense. Not unless your family Bible is different somehow.”

  “A swearing in,” James said. Clearly feeling uncomfortable about his doing so, he shared the conversation he’d had with Moria. With the death of Father, he was more desperate than ever to figure things out.

  “Interesting,” Sherlock mumbled.

  “How so?”

  “Your father will have left you instructions.”

  “So say you.”

  “So say I. In the will, or the trust, or whatever arrangements he has made for you and Moria. A Moriarty tradition or ritual.”

  “The initiation,” James whispered.

  “How’s that?”

  “Something my father sa—” He caught himself.

  “You spoke to your father? Recently?”

  “Never mind that.”

  “James. If you—”

  “He knew about the clues. I think he’d done them as well back whenever. He said that word, ‘initiation,’ but it was like he regretted it. Never mind! Leave it alone!”

  “You’re absolutely right. How unkind of me. You need time to grieve and not worry about such things.” Sherlock’s mind was whirring.

  “Promise me.”

  “Promises are made to be broken, James. I don’t make them. I do, however, give you my word in this: I respect your concerns, and I want nothing whatsoever to do with any harm that may come to you or Moria. Nothing could be further from the case. And I will point out the obvious: the headmaster is not to be trusted. I believe you’ve made the connection we’ve been seeking, and clearly the headmaster is culpable in some manner or other.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “I am not your enemy, James. You may indeed have enemies, but I am not one of them and it’s time you figure that out.”

  “What connection?” James asked, too curious to allow it to pass.

  “Your presence here at Baskerville, the tradition of the clues.”

  “Mr. Know-It-All.”

  “I observe. I analyze. And yes, I render opinion as a result of both. But please—”

  “Just . . . stop!”

  “Very well.” Sherlock returned his attention to the pile of books on his desk. “But I think you might consider a visit to your
home where . . . it happened . . . before the police muck it all up.”

  “You’re impossible!” James said.

  “I try,” answered Sherlock.

  CHAPTER 29

  A SAD NIGHT

  FOUR DAYS PASSED EXPEDITIOUSLY AND JAMES and I found ourselves back in our Beacon Hill home in anticipation of a hastily arranged memorial service scheduled for the following morning. Ralph delivered us curbside, where we were greeted by Lois, our prim and proper former nanny. For a while now, Lois had been about as close as we got to a mother. We hugged and wept in the drizzle outside our sturdy brick home, the ground feeling as if it were shifting beneath our feet.

  “We will get through this together,” she said. Just the kindness in her voice helped. For one brief moment since I’d heard the news, I felt a glimmer of hope. James disconnected from our group hug and pretended he felt nothing. He’d been so quiet on the long drive from the academy. I’d tried but failed several times to engage him in conversation—and let’s face it, I can be engaging. Father’s death had crippled James. He was keeping everything inside, a recipe for disaster.

  I had an important mission: get a few guarded minutes alone inside Father’s office. Find the key in the fireplace. Unlock the drawer. Read whatever was there. The existence of the mission helped curtail my grief, made small talk frustrating and even more boring than usual.

  There were familiar faces inside, something James and I hadn’t planned on. All men, they were engaged around our dining table in what looked like a meeting—papers and pens, cell phones and coffee cups strewn about. A long meeting, by the look of it. They rose, closing journals and calendars, and greeted us lovingly.

  A few we knew as our “uncles”—close friends of Father’s since James and I had been toddlers. Each was familiar. These were the men who showed up, most often in pairs, to the house at all hours. Two of the men we’d met before—from Father’s university? His club downtown? I couldn’t remember exactly who they were. Businessmen. Investors. Attorneys. I imagined them trying to sort out our family affairs for us.

 

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