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 somehow 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.