Where all paths meet, p.9
Where All Paths Meet, page 9
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“Fine.”
“Do better than that.”
He cut his eyes toward me—a bit sulkily, which was weirdly gratifying—and said, “It took fourteen stitches, but it’s shallow, and Noneley provided me with antibiotics.”
“How often is he supposed to take them?” I asked.
“Every eight hours,” Noneley said.
“I’m perfectly capable—” Holmes began.
“With food,” Noneley said.
Holmes met me with a challenging look that lasted less than a moment before he broke and turned away.
“Uh huh,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’re quite welcome, Jack. But Holloway is being decidedly obstinate, and he refuses to tell me what the two of you have been up to. What kind of trouble did my baby brother drag you into?”
“We dragged each other into it, I think. That’s kind of our thing.”
“That means you’re a bad influence,” Tom said. “You should be helping him. If you were really a Watson, you’d be helping him. That’s what Watsons do.”
“Good Lord,” Noneley said as she poured more scotch. “He’s been like this for weeks, you know. It’s unbearable, and Father eats it up.”
“You should leave,” Tom said. “If I have to, I’ll make you leave.”
I was getting ready to say something suitably—well, butch, which felt like it was proving Holmes’s point. Before I could, though, Holmes said in a dead voice, “If you touch Jack, I will kill you. Do you understand?”
The silence had a sprung quality behind it. Then Tom gabbled, “I wouldn’t—I wasn’t going to hurt him!”
Holmes lifted those silver eyes long enough to stare at Tom, and even though I had a lot of reasons to imagine all sorts of fun things happening to Tom, things like getting thrown through a plate-glass window or taking a weed whacker to the face or getting eaten by that mountain lion prowling around outside, I honestly felt bad for him. A little. He backed up, his sun-bleached hair falling into his eyes, and fell over a chair.
“Weeks and weeks,” Noneley said to no one in particular. “It has to be one of Father’s jokes.”
Tom righted himself, and he put the chair between himself and Holmes.
“I was going to say something butch,” I told Holmes.
Holmes held himself very still for a moment. Then, his fingers trembling, he traced the back of my hand. He withdrew the touch a moment later, hugging his good arm around himself.
“Well, since no one is going to tell me what’s going on, I’ll have to figure it out myself, I suppose.” Noneley cracked a look at me over the tumbler. “Let’s see. Holloway, you’ve been suspiciously quiet for weeks now, and you didn’t put in an appearance at the party—what little there was of it—even though Father expected his heir to be present. Meanwhile, Jack, you showed up uninvited and managed simultaneously to surprise Father and ruin his evening, which means I would have liked you even if my baby brother weren’t desperately in love with you.”
The color in Holmes’s cheeks deepened. Tom let out one of those outraged breaths.
“Then you disappeared,” Noneley continued, “and the power went out—I’m assuming that was you, brother; he’s always been unbearably dramatic, Jack, so you must prepare yourself for that—and no one could find Father, and the bitch went berserk. I tried to follow her and lost her in the chaos, and now here the two of you are. So, what did you try to steal from the bitch, and what went wrong?”
“Does she mean Maggie?” I asked Holmes.
He rolled his eyes. “They go back ages. Noneley can’t stand being outdone.”
“The bitch stole my maths paper,” Noneley said with a grin. “Forgive me if I prefer to call her by her proper name. Come on, Hol, tell me. It had to be something important to you—so important, in fact, that Daddy’s perfect boy did something naughty and broke one of Daddy’s rules—”
“Stop,” Holmes said in a tight voice.
Where I knelt next to him gave me a direct line of sight to Noneley’s face, so I couldn’t miss the unfathomable look that transformed her expression. Then it was gone, and she was smirking again.
“Well, what did you need, then?” she asked. “Besides patching up—I’m assuming you did something perfectly swoonworthy to get yourself that little beauty. What was it, Jack? Did he throw himself in front of a knife for you?”
“Yes, actually.”
“If you were properly trained—” Tom began, but when Holmes looked at him, he cut off and took another step back.
Noneley let out an aww and mussed Holmes’s hair, and while he sputtered and tried to fix it with his good hand, I said, “We need to access a laptop and phone, but I can’t tell you why. Not yet. Can you help us do that?”
“Can I? I imagine so. But why would I, Jack? Aside from my devotion to my baby brother and, by extension, to you.”
“He’s not even a proper Watson,” Tom said.
“Let’s go with devotion and all that,” I said. “Plus, there’s a significant chance it will fuck with Maggie.”
“Well, I do love fucking with the bitch. Do you have the devices?”
I retrieved them from the truck, and Noneley looked them over.
“These are Zodiac company property.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re asking me to breach my own family’s proprietary security.”
“Good God, Non,” Holmes muttered.
I grinned. “That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you say so? Anything to ruin Father’s day.” She turned toward Tom. “You, come along. And don’t speak unless spoken to.”
Tom shot me a poisonous look—although why any of this was my fault was beyond me—and he trailed after Noneley into one of the bedrooms, and the door shut behind them. Then Holmes and I were alone, and the room became a vacuum, and everything that had taken place between us in the Dodge came rushing in to fill that emptiness.
He had said, I love you.
Present tense.
Meaning, right now.
He was also still trying to fix his hair.
The second scotch was sending curling tendrils of heat through me, reaching from my belly to my fingertips, to my toes, my body unknotting.
“Here,” I said, and I finger-combed it into semi-respectability. Then I studied his face. “Did she give you anything for the pain?”
“I’m fine.”
“You can do better than that, please.”
“No. I do not require a topical analgesic for stitches.”
“I swear to God, I could almost hear you say exoskeleton. Will you take some aspirin? For me? Since it looks like your jaw is about to break off?”
After a moment, he gave a short nod, and I rooted around in Noneley’s kit, which looked hardcore enough to handle World War III, until I found Tylenol. Holmes took two, and I felt his forehead.
“I don’t have a fever.”
“Christ on a cracker, H, I know. You got stabbed keeping me safe, and I have no idea what to do. You’re lucky I’m not rubbing Vicks on your chest.”
Silence answered me. Then he huffed one of those little breaths and leaned into my touch, and I scratched his scalp. Somehow, he ended up with his head pressed against my thigh. My body still had a lot of hormones running through it, plus the second scotch, and I tried to think righteous thoughts.
“Thank you for the acetaminophen,” he whispered.
I made a noise that I hoped was enough for an answer.
“I don’t know if coming here was correct.” The words sounded wrung from him. “Noneley’s feelings about Maggie make her involvement…complicated.”
“Meaning, she could have recruited Baca to break into Maggie’s office, and she might be the killer.”
“In so many words.”
I didn’t answer right away. His breathing had slowed, deepened. My hand followed the back of his head. I raked my nails lightly across his nape, and he shivered and let out the tiniest sound of pleasure. Not to be crass, but at that point, thinking righteous thoughts wasn’t cutting it any longer.
He couldn’t have missed my reaction. He was right there, so to speak, and he had an annoying tendency to notice things. But he didn’t move, didn’t pull away, didn’t freak out.
I heard myself talking, heard myself like it was someone else saying all these sane, rational things, when the other ninety percent of my brain was thinking about the way he’d looked with the hoodie hanging open over his chest, about the delicious red lines my nails left on his pale skin, about the way his body had fit against mine that one night, months ago. Like now. Like this.
“We needed help,” that rational, non-hormone-crazed part of me was saying out loud. “We didn’t exactly have a lot of options. It was a calculated risk, and besides, she obviously cares about you.”
Holmes let out that little huff again.
“She does,” I said with a laugh. “She’s psycho like the rest of your family, but she loves you.”
Holmes said nothing, but after a moment, he made a deep noise that vibrated through his chest. It might have been agreement. It might have meant anything.
“You need sleep,” I whispered.
He nodded. The movement brought him precariously close to my, uh, situation.
“Let’s get you into one of the bedrooms.”
His protest was small and squeaky, and it made me grin as I crouched to get an arm around him. His eyes opened when I urged him to his feet, and they were molten in the soft light.
“Come on.”
“Can’t sleep.”
“We’ll see about that.”
His next noise was wordless, kittenish defiance.
“Uh huh,” I said with a quiet laugh. “Tell me about it in the morning.”
The bedroom was clearly not being used, so I fumbled with his clothes in the dark: the hoodie first, his skin warm under my hand, the ridges of muscles the same as I remembered and, yet, different. Harder. More defined. It wasn’t doing anything to help my situation. I got him out of his shoes, which I only now noticed were an ancient pair of Vans, and I felt oddly flattered by that choice. Then I rolled the overalls down and slipped them off. He sprawled across the bedding, his body a delicate marblework anatomy. I left him his boxers because he’d freak the fuck out if I didn’t.
By the time I got him under the covers, his breathing was soft and regular, and sounds of movement came from the cabin’s main area. I eased the door shut behind me and saw Noneley pouring herself another scotch.
“Where’s the fanboy?” I asked.
“I sent him back to his hotel.” She made a face and gestured to the laptop and phone. “There’s not much, but you’re welcome to it.”
I wanted to take the computer and phone back into the bedroom, but I was worried the light from the screens would wake Holmes—and, worse, that he’d insist on examining everything right then. So, even though I didn’t want to stand there with Noneley not-so-figuratively breathing down my neck, I did. I checked Baca’s laptop first: her emails, her browser history, her hard drive. I even checked the calendar and saw only a series of meetings, appointments, calls. A quick check, but everything looked like it was connected to Zodiac, the kind of thing you’d expect to find on a work laptop. Then I checked the phone and did everything again. More of the same. Nothing interesting.
Except for one message. It was in the trash, delivered six days before, with only a number—no name—and it was short and sweet: We need to talk, luv.
Now, who did I know who talked like that?
I copied the number into my phone and forwarded myself the message. “Do I need to leave these on? So they don’t lock, I mean?” I asked Noneley.
She watched me. The smirk was gone, and her face was intent, her fingers tight around the tumbler. “I’d like to keep them, if I may. I might be able to find something useful.”
I wanted to know what useful meant to her. I wanted to ask what she’d meant when she’d said, Daddy’s perfect boy. I wanted to ask what she knew about her father. If she knew he was a killer. If she knew what he’d done to Sarah Watson. I wanted to ask if she was the one who’d sent me that invitation, and if this was all a game to her. I wanted to ask what Holmes had said about me.
But I didn’t ask any of that. I closed the laptop and powered off the phone, and I nodded and started for the bedroom where I’d left Holmes.
“Jack,” Noneley said.
Her voice hooked me, and I turned.
She didn’t look like Holmes at first—their coloring was so different, and her face was so animated, so expressive, so mischievously playful that the fact that it was all an act only seemed to be part of the fun. But the intelligence behind those hazel eyes, their tremendous focus when she brought them to bear on me—that was pure Holmes, and in that moment, the similarity was so obvious that it felt shocking I hadn’t seen it until now.
“I suppose I should say something big sisterly.”
“You’ll kill me if I hurt him,” I said. “Got it.”
“You’ve already hurt him, Jack. If he weren’t so attached to you...” She trailed off. She shrugged. The shrug was Holmes too, like watching a sculpture move.
I waited for more, but nothing came. She was ice and bone and amber in the shadows, and when I moved again, retreating to the bedroom, her hazel eyes followed me, glinting like the mountain lion’s.
In the room, I thought about putting a chair under the handle, then fought a laugh. That wouldn’t stop a Holmes. Each one of them was crazier than the last. I texted Dad: Can I sleep over at Rowe’s? Please?
His reply came through almost immediately, and I barely scanned it—just enough to know it was an affirmative.
Holmes’s breathing was quiet and steady. I kicked off my jeans, hung Rowe’s blazer on the bedpost, undid the buttons on my shirt with trembling fingers. I was going to be a perfect gentleman. There would be an extra blanket in the closet. I’d put a pillow on the floor. He was tired, God only knew how tired, and he needed all the sleep he could get. And anyway, I hated him, although the details of that were getting fuzzier by the minute.
When his head came up from the pillow, his hair was standing up on one side, and his voice was cottony. “Jack?”
“Go back to sleep.”
He put his head down. His breathing was still so soft. And then he stretched out an arm, hand turned up, fingers open.
I might be butch and stereotypically masculine and whatever else they wanted to say, and I was most definitely, most seriously, fucked in the head. But I’m not made of stone.
When I got under the covers, he curled up against me, his cheek pressed to my ribs. I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t help myself: I let my arm cradle him, drew him closer, settled him into place. We had always fit together. Always. From the beginning.
“Did you find anything?” he mumbled.
“Go to sleep,” I said.
He stirred, trying to lift his head.
“Knock it off,” I said. And then, hoping it might settle him: “I think we need to talk to Paxton. Tomorrow. After you sleep. God knows how we’ll find him, though.”
“Easy,” Holmes said, burrowing into my side again, his body already loosening again with sleep. The last words were barely more than a breath, and I thought, at first, I’d misheard him. “We live together.”
Chapter 11
A Living Saint
I shifted into park too hard, and the truck lurched to a stop.
Shading his eyes against the mid-morning light, Holmes glanced at me. He looked remarkably better after a full night’s sleep. I’d only had a couple of quick looks in the mirror, but I was pretty sure I looked remarkably worse.
“What?” I asked.
“You stopped abruptly.” Which, in true Holmes fashion, was both a statement and the beginning of an inquisition.
“Huh,” I said and got out and slammed the door.
For those of you who haven’t experienced this yet, apparently finding out that the boy you don’t care about—scratch that, the boy you hate—has been shacked up with his super hot, super confident, super, uh, endowed friend, who also happened to be his first love and basically was Holmes’s idol because he was mature and sophisticated and perfectly at ease with all the other Holmeses—apparently finding out something like that can really fuck up your sleep.
We were in another of the north-Salt Lake residential neighborhoods, not far, actually, from Baca’s condo. If I’d had reason to suspect Holmes of killing her, and if I hadn’t personally seen him sleep off the ketamine from a dart gun, I might have wondered about the proximity. As it was, I was doing plenty of wondering about Holmes’s new—or maybe not-so-new—roommate.
The sidewalk did steady traffic in white yoga mommy types, with their leggings and long-sleeve athletic tops and sporty vests. Some of them were pushing strollers. Some of them were waddling with a bump. Only a few of them were carrying coffee, but again, this was Salt Lake, and most Mormons would rather be boiled alive in a fiery lake of coffee than drink it. One pair strolled past me, an older woman explaining vigorously how this new essential oil company was not a pyramid scheme.
Holmes’s building looked out of place on the block—new construction shimmed into place between redbrick walkups. It was too sleek, too modern, a jigsaw of stucco and glass that was undressed and tinted, so that it looked more like an office building or a hotel. The grounds were zeroscaped and minimalist and obviously expensive, in contrast to the little patches of vibrant green cultivated in front of the other buildings. I studied it, trying to keep my engine going, but it was hard to stay mad at him when he was so goddamn stupid sometimes.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Paxton picked it.”
“Well—” He darted a sidelong look at me. “—yes.”
I sighed, rubbed my eyes, and fought a losing battle against shaking my head.
“What?” Holmes asked.
“I don’t know, H. What do you think?” Then I added, “Are we checking the garage first?”
His hesitation was obvious, but he ended on “Yes. Jack, is something—”
