The case book of hollowa.., p.1
The Case-Book of Holloway Holmes, page 1
part #4 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
THE CASE-BOOK OF HOLLOWAY HOLMES
SHORT STORIES FROM THE ADVENTURES OF HOLLOWAY HOLMES
GREGORY ASHE
H&B
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Case-Book of Holloway Holmes
Copyright © 2023 Gregory Ashe
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law. For permission requests and all other inquiries, contact: contact@hodgkinandblount.com
Published by Hodgkin & Blount
https://www.hodgkinandblount.com/
contact@hodgkinandblount.com
Published 2023
Printed in the United States of America
Version 1.04
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63621-063-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63621-062-9
The Adventure of the First Day
This story takes place before the events of The Strangest Forms.
1
Jack
Dad was throwing up again.
I squirmed into the bedding, squeezing my eyes shut. The sound continued down the hall in the cottage’s only bathroom. Several long uh-uh-uh, and then silence. Like he was holding his breath. The morning light laid a hand across my face. After a moment, I burrowed under the pillow, into the dark.
Uh-uh-uh.
A low-grade headache prowled around the back of my skull—nothing like the whammies Dad got, but the kind that meant I’d been stupid to cover the night shift, stupid to stay up late watching the Stream Queens play Dead by Daylight on Twitch, stupid to think I’d honestly have the morning off and could sleep in.
Uh-uh-uh.
One, I thought. I threw the pillow across the room and kicked the sheet and blanket to the foot of the bed. One morning to sleep in.
Rubbing my eyes, I went out to the hall. The cottage was small: two bedrooms that were exactly the same size, i.e., about as big as my balls; an even smaller bathroom; and a combined kitchen and living room where the TV from our old house now took up a whole wall and sometimes the refrigerator smelled like it was burning.
Dad was on his knees in the bathroom, leaning against the old pedestal sink, his face the same color as the porcelain. Big drops of sweat covered his forehead, and a trickle of saliva hung from the corner of his mouth. “Hey, buddy. Go back to bed.”
“Did you take your medicine?”
He nodded. He looked wrung out. The year before—before the accident—we’d biked Canyonlands, and at the end of every day, he’d wanted to stay up and talk and look at the stars. Now, he was lucky to stay upright through the morning. “Come on.”
“Mr. Taylor called.”
I got my hand under Dad’s arm. “Come on.”
“You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“Well, I’m up.”
Dad squeezed his eyes shut as I helped him to his feet. “Jack—”
“You’re supposed to lie down with an ice pack when they’re this bad.”
He probably would have said more, but he also looked like he wanted to throw up some more, so it was one of those mutual self-destruction things. I got him into his bedroom and pulled the thin, sun-bleached curtains closed. They’d been printed with what had probably been wildflowers at some point. On the other side of them, the whole world became a flat, bright gray. I got him an icepack. I got him a glass of water.
“I just need fifteen minutes,” Dad said, but he was squeezing his eyes shut again. “For the meds to kick in.”
“What’d Mr. Taylor want?”
“Jack, I can do it.”
“Ok, well, what did he say?”
Outside, a couple of kids were laughing, and music blared and then cut off. More laughter. We were set back from the campus, but not far, and all day you could hear stuff like this. The rich kids going to their rich kid school.
“The boys’ bathroom in Hinckley.”
He had his eyes closed, so I made a face.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I said I’ll do it.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
His real smile came out then, only it was like the curtains, sun-bleached.
“The doctor said you can alternate Tylenol and ibuprofen if the prescription doesn’t help. They’re on the nightstand. Don’t knock over your water.”
“You’re a good man, Jack Moreno.”
“Puke bucket?”
Dad pressed one hand to his temple; with the other, he fumbled under the bed and brought out an old gallon plastic bucket that had once held discount vanilla ice cream.
“I’ll check on you at lunch,” I said, and before he could protest, I shut the door.
After giving my eyes another rub, I dug through the clothes on the floor of my room and came up with a relatively clean The Walker School polo and the pair of old jeans I liked to wear for the shitty—no pun intended—jobs. Add-on: my ancient Vans; I saved the Nikes for when I wouldn’t be wading through piss. Dad didn’t have any coffee ready, and I’d eaten the last Pop-Tart the day before. My stomach did that thing that’s not really grumbling, where it just seizes up like a fist, but I didn’t know how much time I had, so I ignored it. Mr. Taylor was one of those guys who got a hard-on from holding clipboards and stuff like that. If he’d told Dad there was a situation, he’d follow up on it. Soon.
I jogged over to the maintenance building and got the cart, gave it a quick once-over—trash bin, cleaning sprays, drain enzymes, scrubbers and mop and squeegee and broom, plus all the extra, miscellaneous stuff—and headed for the athletic center. At my school, we would have called it the gym. At Walker, it was the athletic center. It was also douche central. In pre-algebra, we’d had to do, you know, a + 4 = 10, and then you had to take the four away from both sides, and hey, a = 6. So you take the athletic center, and you say a + sports = a fucked-up bathroom, and then you take away sports from each side, and you get a = rich entitled assholes.
When I got there, it was the lobby bathroom, which was why Mr. Taylor was pitching a fit—God forbid somebody important walked through and decided to take a leak. Somebody had locked the door, probably the gym teacher who had reported it. I let myself in. I found the breakfast burrito in the urinal.
That was it. No shit smeared on the walls. No sewage back-up. Some ass-wipe hadn’t wanted to eat the breakfast prepared for him by the school chef and a team of line cooks. Big emergency.
I gloved up, filled a bucket with disinfectant, and retrieved the urinal strainer. The burrito—what was left of it—went into the trash. The strainer went into the bucket.
Bro-y voices came from outside.
“I shit you not,” one of them was saying. “Three-pointer.”
Laughter covered up another of them responding, and I only caught the end: “—couldn’t make that shot if your nuts were on the line.”
“Bruh, watch.”
The door clapped open, and they tumbled inside. They were all around my age, all in high-end athletic clothing and expensive basketball shoes, all of them with good skin and good haircuts, all of them like someone had peeled them off a sheet of kiddie stickers of what teenagers were supposed to look like. They stopped when they saw me. Then one of them laughed, and another elbowed the boy in front, who was holding, yep, a breakfast burrito.
He hesitated. Then indecision changed into a sneer. He made it a jump shot, a little bounce of the toes to give it that razzle-dazzle, and the burrito went into the urinal. The same one. Without a strainer. The boys burst out laughing.
I grabbed the mop. The old handle’s wood felt uneven in my grip.
“Sorry about that,” the boy said, staring at me, matching me gaze for gaze.
I looked away first. “Yeah,” I said, aware of how the word meant absolutely nothing. “No worries. I’ll get it.”
2
Holloway
267 days remaining. September 6 to May 31. I had to make it through 267 more days, and then I would be free.
No, not free. Not ever. But I wouldn’t be here.
My room in the residence hall was a decent size, as boarding school rooms go. And, more importantly, it was private. The morning air was cool coming through the open window. The light was still indirect; I wasn’t used to this, the sun coming up behind the mountains so that days seemed to have a false start before they really got running. Someone must have been vaping nearby because I could smell the artificial bubblegum flavoring.
Routine: pushups, triceps dips, planks, side planks, plank ups. Then legs: squats, lunges, side lunges, calf raises. Tomorrow would be different, but different in the safe way, like all the days before. Routines could contain variety. Walker had a gym—they called it an athletic center here—but a gym was not part of the routine. Not every day, anyway.
As I exercised, my mind did its own kind of work. Walker was new. Walker was an unknown quantity, a variable that had yet to be determined. There had been no campus visit, no tours from a friendly adolescent who was, at least in terms of his or her age, nominally my peer. There had
been no get-to-know-you games, no specially designated social visits—why don’t you let Tommy here introduce you to some other students? There had been no classes, no visits with instructors, no promises of independent study and accelerated courses.
Twenty miles from Walker to Provo Airport. Seventeen-point-four miles to Heber Valley Airport. But, of course, neither of those would get me where I needed to be. Fifty-four-point-seven miles to Salt Lake City International Airport. Four hours, twenty-four minutes on Delta. Direct. Then, from New York, seven hours, five minutes on Delta. Direct. Heathrow.
If I had a car to get to Salt Lake.
If I had a ticket for a flight.
If I had anywhere in London to stay.
If I had so much as a credit card to get things rolling. Or, for that matter, my passport.
Well, a legally obtained credit card and passport. In my own name.
Conclusions: A) stay at Walker, serve my sentence, and be returned, eventually, to a measure of independence. B) Therefore, next step: orient myself on campus. I would need to learn the layout of the campus. I would need to learn each individual building. I’d memorize choke points, exits, security vulnerabilities. C) Corollary: orient myself socially. Every social system has its own topography. Learn who has power and who doesn’t. Learn how to control the ones who have power and the ones who don’t. D) Corollary: orient myself to schoolwork. I didn’t think I had much to worry about; Walker wasn’t known for its rigorous academics. Walker was a prison, albeit a lovely one where parents paid $66,800 a year not to be bothered anymore by their children. But I’d need to perform adequately to prevent further suspicions of noncompliance.
By the time I finished, I was slick with sweat, my muscles lighting up, the little fires of all those kilocalories, all the microtears in tissue. I grabbed my soap and towel and padded down the hall. Walker was old, and the residence halls showed it: the boys’ buildings had communal bathrooms, without even the courtesy of private showers.
There was only one boy using the showers. I kept moving toward him, my body loose, moving the way I would have moved in a fight, my eyes fixed on a tile in the middle of the wall, the ceramic the exact color of soap scum. I started the water and turned my back to the spray. When it was warm, I faced into it. The water needled my closed eyelids.
I counted. I had once counted four hundred and seventy-nine prime numbers before I lost.
I lost again, and I lowered my head, and I opened my eyes, water running into them. I blinked it away.
You could look quickly, I had learned. But smoothly. Casually. His bottom and his upper thighs and his penis were almost as pale as I was, but the rest of him was brown: arms, chest, calves, feet. He had more body hair than I did, which—as Cliff Patterson had pointed out a few years before—was also true of a bar of soap. He held his head at an angle, letting the water wash suds from the hair on the side of his head. The suds coiled around his neck, washed down his chest. The water slicked the silky-looking hair on his chest. It was like someone had smoothed all that hair with a finger, gathering it into an arrow that shot down his flat stomach. He turned his head and angled his shoulders, and his penis shifted. He was cut. His balls were visibly uneven. I thought we were close to the same size.
His head came up, and I turned into the spray. The water was too hot. I could feel my pulse in my face.
The change in sound told me that he had turned off his shower, but silence followed—no slap of bare feet on the wet tile, no rustle of a towel. I leaned forward, the water pouring over the crown of my head, fingers of it trailing across my cheeks, into my open mouth. The prickling or tingling sensation that some people called ‘pins and needles,’ I had read, could be due to a limited supply of oxygen and glucose reaching the nerves.
I tried counting and only got to twenty-nine before I looked. He was gone. The hammer of blood in my ears mixed and dissolved into the pounding water. I turned the water colder and ran soap under my arms. I ducked my head under the spray again. I thought of Hewdenhouse and a boy with a sleepy, one-eyed smile.
3
Jack
After fishing out the second burrito, I straightened up the restroom and wheeled the cart back toward the maintenance building.
It was a beautiful day—September in Utah, high in the mountains, the aspens starting to turn and the brush on the slopes as red as if it had caught fire, the smell of pine and the smell of water from the sprinklers that had left the lawns glistening that morning. High in the mountains, with stone on three sides, it was colder than the valley, and I shivered and kicked myself for rushing out of the house without a jacket. But a thumbnail of sun had made it over the mountains; by the afternoon, the day would be perfect.
I made my way slowly—in part because of the headache that hadn’t gone away, in part because I was still pissed at the burrito bitches, and in part because it was my way of sticking it to Mr. Taylor, who was going to be pissed that I was covering for Dad. Again. So, I stopped to sweep up a gum wrapper. I stopped to set upright a planter that some numbnuts had knocked over. I stopped to empty an overflowing trash receptacle, which was mostly paper coffee cups from the dining hall, fast food takeout bags, and the random, perfectly-good-but-some-Walker-kid-didn’t-want-it-anymore stuff that ended up in the weirdest places—in this case, in a receptacle near the center of the quad. Today, it was flat-bill U of U hat (ok, a little coffee stained now) and an unopened screen protector for a MacBook.
I didn’t have a MacBook, but I was thinking maybe I could wipe it off and sell it to Shivers when the coffee cup hit my Vans. The cup was empty, mostly, although a few drops of coffee splashed onto my shoes. They beaded on the black canvas before I kicked them off as best I could.
The kid was Minor League material. That’s how school works; in that sense, Walker wasn’t any different from my last school. You’ve got the kids at the top—here, the Boy Band and the Bloopies. Think, pros. Think, the Dodgers. Then you’ve got the Minor Leagues—those kids in the middle that never quite make it, for whatever reason. Think, OkC Dodgers. This guy had stubble he couldn’t quite pull off, flannel, Jesus, a beanie.
Head down, I told myself. You’ve got a place to live. You’ve got food. You can take care of Dad.
He didn’t even look up from his phone as he passed.
If I’d brought my Walkman, I’d have put on my headphones, but no—today, I’d done everything wrong because I’d been in a rush. Instead, I took a few deep breaths, taking longer than I needed to as I emptied the receptacle and inserted a new liner. After fastening the lid, I grabbed the coffee cup near my feet and tossed it in with the trash on the cart. I looked up; a girl on a bench was watching me, and to judge by her face, she’d seen the whole thing.
I tried one of my better smiles. “These guys love to throw things.”
She smiled, but it was a confused smile. Like someone talking to her in a foreign language. Like her mom’s pet Pomeranian wanted to chat about the weather. My face heated, and I grabbed the cart and started toward the maintenance building again.
Mya Stuart. Meghan Caufield. A’kaya Dodd. Hell, Richie Olivas, if you count messing around under the bleachers. I thought about turning back. I thought about telling that girl, For fuck’s sake, Lexi Taylor asked me to prom when I was a freshman because she liked my smile, because she thought I was funny. Sweat made cotton cling under my arms, and I could smell my shirt, not quite as fresh as it had seemed when I’d dragged it on. I pulled at the polo, trying to fix it without slowing down the cart. At my last school. That had all been at my last school. Another life.
I was passing Woodruff, one of the girls’ residence halls, when I spotted a garbage bag that someone had left by the side door. It was the kind of thing these kids did when they were trying to cover their asses—or when there was something so foul that they couldn’t wait for me to pick up the trash later that day. I kept going. Then I swore under my breath and turned the cart around; if I left it, the raccoons might get to it, and then who would spend his afternoon raking up garbage and listening to Mr. Taylor bitch?
As I hefted the overfull bag, the smell of what was definitely cheap weed floated up, and the door opened and clipped my elbow. The girl who poked her head out was Utah blond, pretty, with a round face and too long eyelash extensions. To hell with it. I gave her my best smile.
