Lock & Mori

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To my mother,

who will never read this

but lives on every page

London, Present Day

Chapter 1

I wore a hat with a feather plume the first time I met Sherlock Holmes. It was the fourth of March. I only remember the date because all three of my brothers glommed onto the Marching Forth pun for the entirety of breakfast. Freddie even had a stupid, hollering ringtone for his mobile that shouted, “March FOOOORTH!” over and over until I threatened to flush the thing down the toilet. For once, leaving for school felt more like bliss than drudgery. But the bliss didn't linger.

First was double maths, where yet again I was forced to explain that just because our professor was ignorant of the latest in math theory, it didn't mean he could mark my homework wrong when clearly it was the book that was in error. Next came economics and a lecture from books I'd read for fun last summer's break. Lunch was followed by a long, boring lab as Marcus Gregson turned our chemistry experiment into a black, smoldering thing that stank up the entire room. How he managed to do so, despite the two contingencies I'd put in place to make it impossible for him to ruin it, the greatest detective in history would never be able to deduce. I warned Marcus his calculations were off, but Professor made me promise to let him run at least one lab on his own before term was over. Not my fault her room would smell like chemical warfare for months.

I thought I'd escaped the madness when I settled into my final class of the day, but even that turned into a colossal cock-up. Still, I hadn't quite expected that a fire drill would send me into the inner sanctum of the most eccentric, highly notorious boy in my class. And by the time that happened, it had already been a very, very long day, to say the least—the kind of day that could only ever end with me wearing a feathered hat.

The very minute the fire alarm started to simultaneously scream and flash lights at us, Miss Francis, the drama teacher, instructed the class to calmly make their way out of the theater, except for me. She said, “Mori, do be an angel and nip downstairs to storage to fetch our Mr. Holmes.”

Miss Francis was always calling us angels and champs. “Can he not hear the alarm on his own?” I asked.

She might have nodded or shook her head, but she was already pushing me out the theater's side door, so I couldn't see. “Sherlock doesn't seem to pay attention to things like alarms when he's working. Be quick about it, will you?”

I, of course, had heard of Sherlock Holmes and his secret lab in the basement of the theater. It was just cartoonish enough of an image to spread widely around the school. He found the chemistry lab inadequate to his needs, which was the only part of the story that had intrigued me, and his mother had somehow talked the headmaster into letting him have a space of his own. I suspected she used Headmaster's favorite kind of persuasion—the monetary kind.

I spent my trip down the steps to the shadowy basement hall picturing what a lab that so outshined our chem lab would be like and wincing against the flashing fire-drill lights, which were all the brighter in the dim. It wasn't until I swept open the double doors of the storage room he used as a workshop that I remembered I was still in full costume, from hat to lacy trim, which barely brushed the dusty linoleum floors of the hall. I wasn't too embarrassed, however, because Sherlock's hair stood up on one side, almost as tall as my plume. With his back to me, he ran fingers through his mop, readily displaying how it had gotten that way.

The lab itself was fairly unimpressive—two long tables with all the basics: glassware, tubes, flames, and even a centrifuge and an autoclave. But instead of brown glass bottles full of chemicals for experiments, Sherlock's shelves were stacked with specimen containers, Baggies filled with various samples, and books—stacks and stacks of books on every subject imaginable, from
Who's Who
to physics, mountaineering to crimi­nology. I probably would have continued to explore were it not for the constant screeching reminder of why I was there.

“What is it?” Sherlock shouted over the alarm, without turning to acknowledge me. Instead, he hunched farther over the table in front of him, one hand typing furiously at a tablet, while his other carefully turned a small plastic knob to adjust the flow of red fluid from what looked like an ancient glass
IV bottle. The red substance dripped down a tube and into a cup with a rather alarming rhythm.

“I'm to fetch you,” I shouted back. My voice barely carried over the blaring fire alarm.

“I cannot hear you, so you might as well go away.” His arms flew into the air as he spoke, then dived down again, adjusting vials, tubes, and the flames of several Bunsen burners. He moved around the table with an odd sort of violent grace, like a mad symphony conductor directing the bubbles and billows, until finally he was facing me, though he did not look up. His school uniform was as disheveled as his lab: white shirt wrinkled and untucked, with sleeves rolled up to his elbows; navy-and-silver-striped tie loosened and askew; and blue sweater flung over the side of a chair so that one sleeve pooled on the dusty floor.

“I'm to fetch you,” I shouted again, adding, “because of the alarm,” which immediately silenced.

He did look up then, his dark blue eyes fiery with what appeared to be a form of righteous indignation, though his expression dulled to pure intrigue as he took in my appearance.

“You must come out to the courtyard when the alarm—”

“Edwardian?” He focused in on the buttons of my bodice, and it was all I could do to keep my hands from adjusting the neckline rather higher.

“Late Victorian,” I corrected. “But you—”

“Just a moment.” Sherlock scowled as he reached to flip his tablet back around to face him. He squinted at the screen and mumbled, “Period costuming,” as he typed one-handed.

“What about it?”

He followed my gaze down to his screen. “Topics I have not yet mastered.”

“You wish to master period costuming?” My hand slid up to rest on my hip as my lips formed the smile that most infuriated my father. It appeared to have no such effect on Sherlock.

“Asks the girl dressed to meet Her Highness Victoria.”

“Point,” I conceded.

“Ah, we're keeping score. Good to know.”

I rolled my eyes, and then a silence fell between us that normally would have been my cue to dash, but the way he was staring made me feel squirmy. “I came from the theater, just now.” I waved my copy of the play in the space between us by way of explanation, though I wasn't sure why I felt the need to explain myself to him. “It's a graded performance of—”

“An Oscar Wilde. I'm not sure our school's theater performs anyone else.”

I started to affirm that it was indeed an Oscar Wilde, but apparently the boy wasn't finished with his guessing.

“You're the understudy, though you'd rather not be. You took this class for some reason other than your love of the art form.” I opened my mouth to speak, but he stepped closer, his finger in the air. “Possible that it's a family craft, and you do it to please a parent. Father? No, mother.”

I held back a sigh and stared at him until I was very sure he was done. He had already interrupted me three times in
our short conversation, and I wasn't sure I could repress my violent tendencies were he to cut me off once more.

“Close, but no.” Truth? He was almost exactly right. But I wasn't about to feed the enormous monster of an ego that he displayed with every condescending quirk of his thin, girlish eyebrows. He would score no more points off me.

“Nonsense. That dress is at least two sizes too small, and not at all fitted for your figure, which is”—a soft pink skirted his cheek as he stared at my corset again—“endowed.” Only his deepening blush saved him from my outrage. “And despite my admitted lack of mastery on the subject, I do not for a moment believe that orange trainers were popular in late Victorian times. Then there's the matter of your worn and tattered copy of the play, which, by the dated doodles I can now see on the cover, definitely belonged to your mother.”

“Are you quite done?” I asked, much more gently than I felt. I might also have slid my hands over the doodles in question. My mother had gone through some kind of Duran Duran obsession, apparently.

“Are you ready to admit that my observations are correct?”

“There are more pressing concerns.” I glanced behind him, but he didn't take the cue.

“Nothing is more pressing than the truth.”

I gave him one last chance to follow my gaze back to his table, and when he did not, I sighed. “Fine. I am always the understudy, as I learn lines rather more quickly than is typical. I also have no interest in any of the graded tracks in class, and being on call for the actors gets me out of having to paint sets,
run lights, or direct. In all, it is easy and makes me look well rounded to university gatekeepers. That, and that alone, is why I take drama.” I nodded to sell the lie but betrayed myself by clutching the script more tightly in my hands. He stared into my eyes, but I didn't for a moment think he'd missed my gaffe. “The trainers are what I brought to wear home from school today. As you noted, the ailing actress whose place I'm taking in the rehearsal is smaller than me, and while I can stuff myself into her costume, I could not make my feet shrink three sizes to wear her slippers. Now, as to the more pressing matter—”

“Eidetic?” Sherlock asked, adding, “Your memory. It is what allows you to learn the lines.”

If I hadn't thought it would entertain him utterly, I might have growled aloud before I answered with a curt, “Yes.”

I shouldn't have said. He stepped toward me, some of the fire returning to his gaze—as though I were a flask of liquid that had suddenly turned an intriguing shade of scarlet. But then he narrowed his eyes, studying my face as he spoke again. “I'm not wrong about your mother. That copy of the play was hers.”

I narrowed my eyes in mocking return, but the way he spoke of my mother so freely set me on edge.

“My mother is—is dead.” I hadn't meant to say that, exactly. But I was determined not to show him my internal surprise. Nor was I ready to hear his theories on why I kept taking drama in homage to her memory. So I leaned enticingly close to Sherlock Holmes, so close that I noticed how the blue of his eyes was the exact same shade as my own. And then I
whispered, “I believe that you should go back to your tubes and burners now.”

He took in a deep breath, and I felt a trace of his exhale against my cheek as he asked, “And why is that?”

I leaned back enough to stand up straight and offered him my best smile. “Your blood is overflowing.” I spun round to leave just after I'd spoken, though I took enormous pleasure in the fading sounds of his scrambling and cursing as I walked away.

Chapter 2

Albert Einstein once said, “The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

Gandhi said, “Monotony is the law of nature,” like the rising of the sun day after day.

I tend to side with the ladies on this subject, like Edith Wharton, who called it “the mother of all the deadly sins,” or Anaïs Nin, who, in her simple way, said, “Monotony, boredom, death.”

It's why I carried dice in my pocket, one black and two whites. Running probabilities was an easy way to calm my thoughts, and the fall of the dice was unpredictable but straightforward, while still providing an uncomplicated backdrop for my thinking. I'm not some übergenius who feels compelled to chant equations while tromping the halls, but maths come rather easier to me than to most. I follow the path of an equation like a string through a maze. And I enjoy the puzzle of it.

Some days, like that March 4, when the idea of taking the same bus home to the same stop to the same sidewalk
made me want to shriek loudly and in public, I used my dice to break the monotony. The dice gave me an excuse to try something new. And after my ridiculously irritating day, a little newness appealed.

After a late rehearsal I changed out of the gown and into jeans and a sweater, instead of my uniform. I hated wearing my uniform home; it drew the worst kind of attention. It made me approachable. Once my costume was put away, I pulled out the dice and rolled them across the dressing room counter, with a result of Black = 1, White = 1, White = 1. One chance in 216 to get a roll like that. The strangeness of it might have been an omen, if I believed that the hidden powers of the universe applied omens to dice games. Or if I believed in omens at all.

In my game, the black die told me what transport I'd take, bus for odd and tube for even, and the whites told me which bus and stop to take. Any cockeyed dice meant I'd be walking the whole way. I had to completely plan the trip in my mind before taking my first step. It was my way of memorizing my part of London. My roll meant I'd take the first bus and get off at the first stop.

Unfortunately, the first bus that came was the 27, which was the bus I would've taken without the game, because the first stop was less than a block and a half from home. It was literally the shortest possible commute to come from the longest of odds. So, I decided to go with the spirit of the dice rather than be ruled by them, and walked down to Gloucester Place, then didn't cross over to Baker until Crawford. It was technically
going the wrong way first, but it turned a two-minute walk into a ten-minute walk, the longest way round the block.

Near the corner of Baker Street and Crawford, the odds really took over. Sadie Mae Jackson walked out of Boots pharmacy just as I was walking past. If one of us had been looking down or even out at traffic, we might have pretended not to see each other, passed without acknowledgment, and carried on with our lives, as we did whenever school forced our proximity. But that day our eyes met directly when we were mere feet apart.

I was taken once again by their disarming shade of amber—the very thing that had made me stare at her that first day we'd met. Maths, of course. As was typical, I was done with our class work when we still had a half hour of class left, and with nothing to do, I glanced around, tried to see if I could guess when the rest of the students in class would be done as well. I'd only noticed her eye color when she'd given the equations scrawled out on the side chalkboard a strangled look. I grinned at her expression, and she caught me staring.

“Or you could just keep sitting there like a possum playin' dead,” she'd said, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, not the beginning.

I was pretty sure I hadn't missed her saying anything else. Her eyes weren't that disarming. “Or what?”

“I thought you were fixin' to help me with this impossible graphing nonsense, but if you'd rather stick with the possum eyes . . .”

That's when she'd bugged out her amber eyes, evidently
like a possum, and I'd narrowed mine. I helped her, though, even when it meant meeting after class to explain all the math theory behind the problem dating back to the beginning of the school year. She'd offered to help me with literature, and I let her, despite the fact that I'd done all the reading months prior. She was keen on paying back a favor—not that I ever felt that Sadie owed me anything.

She definitely didn't owe me anything outside of Boots on this day. And she almost immediately looked past me, which for a moment made me think we were going back to pretending, but then her body moved toward me, like I was pulling a lifeline secured around her middle. When she moved close enough for me to recognize the smattering of darker brown freckles that didn't quite blend into the brown of her skin, I noticed she was still wearing the locket her grandmother had given her before she left America. Her hair was longer now, the soft spirals falling around her ears rather than spiking out from her scalp in what had been her signature look all last year.

We stood awkwardly for a few fidgety seconds that felt like eternities before she spoke. “Somebody ought to say something, I s'pose. Might as well be me.”

Say something,
I echoed bitterly in my mind. As if saying something now would erase the six months of nothing we'd had. Sadie had been the closest to a best friend I'd ever known. She'd come to England for what was supposed to be just a single school year. She'd stayed on, though, to try for A-levels and a spot at university. At least, that had been her plan before. I had no idea what she was planning now.

I tried very hard to shrug and walk away, but her too-­familiar American drawl tugged something loose in my mind until all my favorite memories of her filled all the empty gaps between my thoughts like sand pouring through stones in a jar, shifting away the time we'd spent apart like it was nothing. I grinned, despite the ache of that.

My smile was seemingly all the encouragement she needed. She said, “I shouldn't have stopped calling, and I know that, I do.” She twisted her shopping bag until the canvas handles creaked, then watched as it spun loose. “I told myself I was giving you time and space, but then the not calling came easier than the calling. Truth is, I didn't know what to say.”

There was nothing to say—that's what I wanted to tell her right then, but the aching got worse with the thought of the nights I'd spent wishing the phone would ring to help me escape. And by the time the words tumbled out, I said, “You don't have to say this.”

“Now, Mori, I'm trying very hard to apologize, as my nana would have me do. You don't want me to get in trouble with my nana, do you?”

I attempted a flat grin. “I assume she's still in America.”

“Yes, indeed. And while you've never been subject to her Talking-To, I will tell you it has a longer reach than the Atlantic Ocean.” Sadie smiled. “I've missed you something awful.”

I nodded, because I'd missed her too, but I couldn't seem to say it aloud. Perhaps it was harder to make up with someone when you haven't fought, really. Just drifted. Even though it appeared we were going to take one step back toward each
other in front of Boots, one step doesn't cross a six-month chasm all at once. Especially not the six months I'd had.

I was silent too long, and Sadie Mae started up again, like she always did. She couldn't stand quiet between us. There was something comforting about her prattling on, though. Perhaps we'd taken more than one step after all.

“I won't keep you, 'cause I know you have your studies. But I'll look for you at school tomorrow, if that's okay. I do hope that's okay?”

I nodded. “I'd like that.”

She rested her hand on my arm and leaned close. “We'll work our way up to the calling.”

Sadie left with a wink and a more genuine smile than I'd seen on her in months of accidental sightings. I wasn't ready to go home, though, so I retraced my steps around the block and gave myself ten more minutes of thinking time.

Ten minutes wasted as it turned out. By the time I marked the corner to Baker Street, my thoughts were lost in reliving my encounters with both Sadie Mae and the great enigma, Sherlock Holmes. I'd heard so many rumors about the boy, I half thought he might be hunchbacked with the crazed white hair and chemical-stained fingers of a mad scientist. He could have at least worn a lab coat over his school uniform—live up to the stereotype.

I was, in fact, so caught up in the memory of our meeting, I didn't notice the music coming out of my house until it was too late. I couldn't have done anything about it were I paying attention. Run. I perhaps could've run off, waited it out
somewhere else. Not for the first time, I thought how pathetic it was to be afraid of your own house. Especially since my home used to feel like the safest place in the city.

We had our very own police detail, or so my mom would joke whenever Dad paced the halls of our tiny house, making sure every door was bolted, every window locked.

“Promise I won't try to escape, constable,” she'd say, holding her hands in the air and quirking the selfsame smile I must have inherited from her. Constable Moriarty, Detective Constable Moriarty, Detective Sergeant Moriarty—my dad was on his way to becoming Detective Inspector of the Metropolitan Police Service, Westminster Borough. And then Mum got sick. I couldn't remember the last time Dad secured our house. Maybe he no longer cared if anyone entered. Or escaped.

I counted three open windows as I walked up the steps to our door, each allowing the warbling piano to tumble down toward me just before the trumpet took its turn to bleat out the simple melody of “Memories of You” by Louis Armstrong. It was an ancient song, but my parents met volunteering at a city tea dance. Dad said he first laid eyes on Mum as she was fox-trotting around the floor of an old community center in the arms of some pensioner who had better dance skills than my dad. He watched her for five dances before he got up the nerve to ask her for a waltz, and that's when the song came on the stereo. That's when they fell in love.

I thought that kind of love lasted forever. Turns out, it's more fragile than glass.

Louis was singing about a “rosary of tears” by the time I got the courage to open the front door. The calm domestic scene in our kitchen was a bit of an anticlimax, though I saw clues of the coming chaos—a half-empty bottle of bourbon, three glasses filled to different heights with the amber liquid and scattered around the counters and table, which meant that he was already drunk enough to lose track of his tumbler. Dinner was ready, untouched and cooling on the stove, meaning Dad hadn't eaten anything before pouring the stuff down his throat. Wouldn't be long before something set him off.

He emptied the glass in front of him and went back to scrolling for crime news on his laptop, while my nine-year-old brother, Sean, toiled away at his spelling work on the other side of the table. My other brothers, Freddie and Michael, knew better than to come out of hiding on “Memories of You” nights—the advantage of being twelve and ten years old rather than Seanie's age. I hoped it wouldn't take another year for Sean to learn.

I squeezed past Seanie's chair to the stove in the silent space between the end of the song and the warbling piano that started it up again. It sounded all the more eerie in its travel from my dad's bedroom and across the hall to where we were.

“Body in the park,” Dad grunted. When neither Sean nor I responded, he slammed his fist down on the table and then stared out the window longingly. “Found him 'bout an hour ago. Killed last night.”

“Figures, and on your day off, right, Dad?” Sean was some
how convinced that crimes only ever happened when our father wasn't on duty.

“Stay out of the park till the police have it all sorted, yeah?”

Sean smiled, and my heart sank. “They'll never sort it without you, Dad. The police are worthless!”

Everything fell silent as the space between the song's repeats came up again, and I cursed under my breath.

“What did you say, boy?” Dad stood so quickly, he sent his chair flying back to clatter against the counter.

Sean shrank down as Dad advanced on him, his panicked eyes shifting from Dad to me and back. I knew what he'd been trying to do. On any other night, Dad would've cheeked back about the “sodding police” and how pathetic they were without him there. But not when “Memories of You” played. Never then.

“He didn't mean it,” I said, but I couldn't distract him from Sean. I couldn't stop him either. Not yet. If I played my cards too soon, it would get so much worse. But it was painful to stand at the counter and do nothing.

“You calling what I do worthless? You couldn't wipe your arse without help.”

I watched him tower over Sean, as solid as a statue, watched his hand rise in the air. I flinched before I heard the smacking thud of Dad's fist against Sean's jaw but didn't look away, not even when a stream of apologies bubbled from Sean's lips in that simpering tone that only ever fed Dad's anger.

Before his fist could fall again, I was there, standing tall between them, infuriating smile sliding easily onto my lips.
I tried to find Dad's eyes in the sunken shadows of his face. I tried to show him I wasn't even a little afraid, but inside I was cringing. Waiting. Preparing. He wouldn't hit me—or, at least, he hadn't yet. But not all strikes are done with a fist.

“Out of my way, cow.”

“You never called Mum that,” I quipped back, earning the full glare of his wrath. “Cow” was probably the kindest thing he'd call me when he was drunk. He always got worse and louder, stood closer so that I had to smell him and feel his spit on my cheek. If there were any other way to make him leave us alone, I would've done it.

“You think you're like her? You think you can take her place? Think you can wear her nobility like one of your whore outfits?”