The Initiation (18 page)

I
CAUGHT UP TO
S
HERLOCK ON THE WAY BACK
from the mandatory chapel service honoring my father. If it hadn't been Father's memorial service I might have thought it an impressive, even gorgeous event. All students wore school uniforms with black armbands on their left arms. Everyone was showered and groomed, even Tilly Simpson and Grant Pendergraz, two of the more slovenly kids on campus.

Sherlock had been avoiding me for the three days since James's and my return from Boston and I didn't take it kindly.

“So much for friends supporting friends,” I said, coming up behind him at a jog.

“Moria.”

“You're speeding up? You're seriously going to walk away from me?” Humiliated, I stopped on the sidewalk in front of Bricks 2. To my surprise—and inward delight if I'm being honest—Sherlock stepped off the sidewalk to allow others to pass. He looked back at me. I felt amazing. His eyes cared, his shoulders sagged in resignation. He was fighting something internally. I felt like his mind was telling him one thing, his heart another, and that filled me with the first inkling of joy since Father's passing. I knew at that moment that this boy could get me through my grief—this strange, weird, brilliant, dazzling boy.

“You holding up?” he said softly, having crossed the distance to me. He passed the test—I wasn't about to go to him; he had to come to me if we were to be friends.

I nodded. “I emailed them to you. The photos.”

“I shouldn't have asked you to do that.” He was about to say something more—I could feel it—but he stopped himself. “I was wrong to ask.”

“What is it?” I said. “What's happened?”

“What's happened? Your father has had a horrible accident. You need time to deal with that, Moria.
I can't believe you and James came back so soon.”

“We can't sit at home moping. Besides, everything in that place reminds us of him. It's horrible, really. Here, there are much more pleasant memories. And friends.” I thought maybe I'd laid it on a little too thick, but Sherlock, for all his brains, could miss the most obvious things.

“I shouldn't have asked you. Let's leave it at that.”

“No! I won't leave it at that! You've been avoiding me. Repeatedly! What's with that?”

“Have not.”

“Have too!”

“I'm giving you space.”

“I don't want space.”

“You need time to process what's happened.”

“I have a lifetime to process what's happened. I loved my father.” I started crying, darn it all. “He was the best . . . most amazing . . . and I'll miss him every day of my life, with every heartbeat.” I wiped my nose on my arm. “But he was a fighter. As quiet and reserved, even distant, as he could be, he never quit. He taught James and me to never quit, never give in. ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.' That kind of attitude. I owe him that, Sherlock. I have to keep swimming. Treading water isn't an option.”

He reached out and pulled me into his arms, his chin pressed into my hair. I held him as tightly as a pillow when I'm miserable. I shook in his grasp. He said nothing. For a few long seconds the events of the past few days floated out of me, like spirits trying to escape. I recalled him kissing my hand, as I had a thousand times now. I begged the universe to just let me stay here like this, to let the world pass me by so I could disappear into this hug like hiding under a blanket. But it wasn't to be. Sherlock spotted James approaching. He released me.

“Don't quit on me,” I whispered, allowing him to separate us. “There's a note in James's suit coat pocket. It's another clue, I think. Help me, please!”

“You're on your own if you want to continue this . . . nonsense. It's brought nothing but trouble for all of us. I promised James: I'm out.” Sherlock didn't wait for James. He left me there, my head spinning, my heart breaking.

“Please!” I called, aware of the futility. Sherlock was not one to waffle. He didn't look back. That hurt most of all.

W
E DON'T SHARE OUR SECRETS; THEY WOULDN'T
be secrets if we did. I had my own. Plenty, if truth be told. Recently, I'd been places I shouldn't have been, had followed my brother and Sherlock and others. I'd made it a game with Natalie and Jamala. We'd formed a little gang of spies. I knew things I wasn't supposed to know; I'd seen things I wasn't supposed to see. It changed the way I looked at people because I would know when they were lying to me. Knowledge, as it turned out, can damage relationships. I never would have guessed that.

The school mailmaid—yes, that's what we
called her—was nicknamed Madame Mim for her bent chin and sizable wart by her left eye (it looked more like a mushroom). One eye was fogged gray while the other roamed around as if disconnected in the socket. You would catch occasional glimpses of her through the open door to your tiny mailbox and it would scare the shoes off your feet. She was back there stuffing boxes, trying to read names off letters and packages. She wasn't very good at it. McDonald would get mail for McConnell. Doris for Horace. Students spent a good deal of time redistributing mail around the dorms or in the common room.

So it was no great surprise to me that I should receive Priority Mail addressed to my older brother, he of the same family name. It would have been more surprising, I suppose, to receive mail actually intended for me.

The proper thing to do, of course, was to pass it along to James, unopened. I would have done just that had I not caught a glimpse of the sender's name above the return address. Mr. Conrad Lowry, Esq.

The rationale was easy: anything from my father's business lawyer addressed to James was also meant for me. It wouldn't matter if I read it first and then passed it to James, or vice versa. I didn't go as far as to tell myself James wouldn't
care. I knew he would. I knew he'd chew me out if I opened it. But I had my excuse at the ready; a strong defense. It would be difficult for him to argue otherwise.

I opened the letter.

The contents, several letter-sized pages folded separately from a cover letter, were printed on heavy, brightly white watermarked paper. Fancy law firm stuff. The cover letter was brief, but telling. Conrad Lowry, writing to James—not James and me, I noted—explained the early autopsy findings were “summarized herein.” He had withheld the “more unsavory details” but had included a few photographs he believed our father's child—again, no reference to me—deserved to see.

The letter couldn't have been more than eight sentences, but by the time I finished reading I was foaming mad. Clearly the meeting in Father's office between Lowry and James had made them chums; equally clearly, I was to be no part of any of it.

Secrets.

The thought of being excluded by my brother and a lawyer we barely knew more than to say hello to, the thought that their conspiracy involved my father and excluded me, sent me into an internal tantrum. It galvanized my conviction to get to the bottom of what was going on and to do so using
any underhanded means I chose to employ. Not only was I smarter than my brother, I told myself, but more conniving. A woman develops her skills of manipulation from the first moment she gazes longingly into her father's eyes. By the time she's sixteen, that same man is handing her the keys to a new car, buying her a new dress for the prom, and assuring his wife, her mother, that their little girl is all grown up now and knows what she's doing.

Unfolding the photocopied pages contained in Lowry's letter, I saw a picture of what I assumed to be Father's belongings found on his person: wallet, cell phone, key ring, cash. Seeing his beloved fountain pen twisted my stomach and I nearly threw up. Alongside was a plastic evidence bag.

There were photos of the ladder and his body alongside. I turned away from them quickly, just couldn't look.

Next was even worse: color photocopies of the underside of a man's arm, the skin a sickly pale. I wouldn't have recognized the arm or the tiny tattoo if, along with the date and time, my father's name had not been printed in computer type at the bottom of the sheet along with the acronym BPDME (Boston Police Department Medical Examiner) running vertically along the side.

To say any one thing shocked me more than
another would be lying. The arm, the skin, the harsh lighting in the photograph, the fact this was my dead father's arm . . . But the tattoo was of a key with a tree growing out of it.

I took a mental photo of the tattoo—I would never forget it—my stomach threatening to empty. My brother had described such a tattoo on the arm of his attacker. I returned the paperwork to the envelope as I knocked on the door to the post office. Madame Mim answered the door, her chain-knit lavender sweater spotted with food stains, her wandering eye drifting. I explained the letter had been delivered incorrectly and asked her to please place it in my brother's mailbox. She was testy, clearly used to hearing such complaints. She grabbed the letter angrily and slammed the door in my face. Knowing Madame Mim, it would take her a day or two to figure out which mailbox to put it in; I thought that might give me a useful advantage.

The secret I knew that not even my brother did was the secret that Sherlock had been hiding from
the others in the chapel on the night my brother and his pack had caught him there.

For what none of the boys had known that night—not even Sherlock—was that a certain girl had been hiding in the chapel balcony. A certain girl had witnessed it all, including what Sherlock had covered up with his shoe.

I
'M NOT SAYING
I
WAS SPYING ON HIM, BUT
J
AMES
left the Bricks early the morning of September 18th and, instead of heading to breakfast in the dining hall along with other early risers, he hoofed it over to the school sundial. Poised in front of the Main House and near the chapel, the alabaster sculpture rose twenty feet in the air, with a winged Mercury riding the top. Tiered steps encircled it, flaring like a wedding cake to the lawn's freshly cut grass.

As my brother stood there studying the spire, he withdrew a card from his blazer's side pocket that I thought I recognized as the note from his
dry cleaning. He was obviously comparing the two images as he walked around the sundial in a slow, deliberate manner. I had no idea what he was looking for or at, and the tree I was hiding behind was as close as I was going to get to him.

I spotted something that caused my heart to jump. Having no idea if it meant anything or not, I had to make a note of it, or in this case, a drawing. I turned and pressed my back to the bark. Fully hidden from my brother at the sundial, I pulled out a pen. Lacking any paper, I drew onto my forearm. The image was of the sundial and the tall tree behind it. Drawn onto my arm there was no mistaking the similarity to the tattoo of the key found on Father's arm.

I stared in astonishment; the resemblance was uncanny. Coincidence? Did it mean something? I didn't have long to consider.

Unseen by my brother, the school chaplain approached him. An unusually short, balding man, as thin as paper, Chaplain Roger Browning had the reputation as a troglodyte (cave-dweller) who read in the evenings by candlelight and whose sermons were eerily knowledgeable of events in the Bricks of which even the masters and mistresses remained unaware.

Straining my ears, I made out most of their conversation.

“James.”

“Chaplain Browning.”

“I wanted once again to express my deepest condolences.”

“Thank you for what you said at Father's memorial service. I didn't know you were here at Baskerville back when my father was.”

“Oh, yes. I was something of a troublemaker back then. Your father was a rebel, for certain, but nowhere near the thorn that I was.”

“Hard to believe.”

“I simply wanted to say . . .”

A lumbering trailer truck passed by on the road
beyond the stone wall, obscuring my ability to hear.

“ . . . What one sees and what one observes are often different.”

“What am I seeing that I'm not observing?” James asked.

“Therein lies the difference between something staying the same, or progressing. If looking to progress, and I believe you are, never take the fast road, as it rarely produces satisfactory results. Fast roads will get us there quickly, but we often miss the most satisfying scenery.”

“What are you saying, exactly?” James was cross. “The fast road to what, exactly? You think losing my father is easy? Seriously?”

“Heavens no. I'm saying hello, son, and passing along my condolences.”

“What is the scenery thing, anyway? This scenery I'm missing?”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Chaplain Browning said. “In this case, the details as well.”

“Well, that certainly clarifies things.” My brother's dangerous temper was surfacing. The chaplain took a step back from James. “What can you tell me about this sundial?”

“What is it you want to know?” Browning continued to keep his distance.

“When was it built?”

“My goodness, I'm not certain anyone can answer that. Like the chapel, your great-grandfather had it brought over from Europe. It was installed here
to his specifications.
Exactly as he wanted it.”

“It's marble.”

“Italian marble. Yes.”

“And the thing on top?” James asked.

He was referring to an X and P mounted at the peak of the sundial.

“It's the Chi-Rho symbol. The first two letters of the Greek
Khristos
,
or ‘Christ.' To many in ancient times, it represented the constellations Orion and Pleiades. To the Vatican as well. Did you know that seen from satellite, the layout of the Seven Hills of Rome and the Vatican's Piazza are a perfect representation of Orion and Pleiades?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it was carefully planned and constructed to mirror the sky. The Key of Solomon unlocks the mystery behind the constellations of the gods.”

“A key?” James repeated almost breathlessly.

“Yes.”

“Let me guess: Orion and Pleiades.”

“Correct. It's all wrapped up in magic and secrecy. The Vatican in those times was filled with ritual and closely guarded secrets.”

“Like
The Da Vinci Code
!” James said.

“Yes. That symbol is original to the sundial. Likely a kind of street sign, a marker that the traveler was either protected by a secret society or had arrived to his meeting place.”

“And the marker was near the chapel, originally?”

“Oh, yes! Your grandfather had it placed
exactly
where it had been in relation to the chapel. In relation to the compass as well.”

“What kind of secret society?”

Chaplain Browning smiled and folded his hands in front of himself. He wasn't going to answer.

James took a step closer.

I tried to remember the contents of the pages I'd seen while in Crudgeon's office. I'd skipped over what had looked like architectural drawings. I now wondered if I'd been too hasty.

My brother looked ready to punch the man in the face.

“James!” I called out, waving and walking toward the men.

“Oh, great. Just perfect,” James said upon seeing me.

Chaplain Browning spun an about-face and headed for the chapel.

I had to think of something to explain my sudden appearance. “You going to breakfast?” I asked.

“I am,” my brother answered.

“That's the chaplain, right?”

“Duh.”

“What'd he want?”

“To tell me how sorry he is about Father. He says they were school chums, which I don't believe for a minute. The guy is the complete opposite of Father.”

“You mean, he's alive?” I said, not knowing why I said it. Right now everything was about Father's death. Families ended. Lives ended. Everything ended. Most of them, like Mother and Father, long before they should. “Was that all? You looked kind of angry.”

“I thanked him for the memorial service. I wasn't angry.”

“I see.”

There we were, brother and sister, best friends for life, lying to each other, and at a time we needed each other more than ever. I nearly told him about the key hidden in Father's office, how I'd missed
my chance at it, how I felt it more important than any hunt for stupid clues or even the search for our family Bible. How I wouldn't rest until I found a way back to Boston, and into that room.

As it turned out, I shouldn't have been so ambitious.