“What do you know?” I repeated.
“I know!” he shouted, stomping over to his bag and tearing a piece of paper out, slapping it on the table in front of me. It looked like the killer’s page from his wall map. The giant question mark stared out at me, with “Police” scribbled next to it in green marker. “I know. I KNOW!” He shook the page at me, then slammed it back onto the table. “And I know that you know it too.”
My heart lurched so hard, I lost my breath a moment. “What do I know?”
“That a policeman was killing people. That he was altering the reports, like that coroner’s report with a sentence that left off and was clearly tampered with. I knew it was police, and I knew you were acting weird. I just didn’t know it was for one and the same reason until you brought me here.”
He flipped the page over. The other side was the flyer for his nature walk, but at the bottom, where he was pointing, was the name of the shop: White’s Herbalist, with an address in Lewes. White’s Herbalist in Lewes. Reading those words brought the entire text back to me, the obituary of Todd White, the Striped Man from the picture of my mother, whose surviving family ran an herbalist shop. All my secrets undone by a nature walk.
“Neither of us remembered that he was from Lewes,” Sherlock said. “I didn’t even put it together until after the walk, when they dragged us into the shop to pitch their snake oil. They had a shrine to Mr. White on one of the walls, with a table of candles and baubles and snapshots. His face stirred my memory, but it wasn’t until I saw her face that I knew.”
“Whose face?” My voice came out as shaken and drained as I felt. And it was a stupid question. I knew who—he’d seen her face on the cover of her memorial program. He’d stared at it for minutes. He knew that I knew as well, which is why he didn’t answer.
“All of them in one photo. All dead but one. I’m fairly sure that’s who you were going to see today. That’s who you couldn’t tell me about? Some woman from an old photo you’d tracked down to the middle of Sussex. Did you know them all then? Recognize them from the first?”
His tone held more rough, bitter edges the more questions he asked, and something about that made me angry. Defiant. It was just a stupid game in the park to him, and he had no right to grill me now. “What if I did?”
That gave him pause. “Did you?”
“Does it matter?”
He offered me all the sarcastic bewilderment he could paint across his features. “Yes. Yes, it matters. It all matters.”
I looked up at the ceiling and then slid back into my seat. “I didn’t know who any of them were, as it happens. I didn’t know what it meant or how my mother was involved. I didn’t know anything for a long time.”
“And you’ve known who the killer is for how long?”
I crossed my arms. “Ages.”
“Tell me how long.”
“Never mind.”
“TELL ME!”
The train’s attendant chose that moment to peek his head into the compartment. “Everything all right in here? Miss?”
I nodded. “We’re fine.”
“You both get a choice of tea service, fair-trade coffee, or a mineral water.”
I took a breath in a vain attempt to calm myself, but still I spoke through my teeth when I said, “Tea, please.”
“And for you, sir?”
Sherlock waved off the attendant, which only made me want to smack him.
“He’ll have tea as well. Thank you.”
The attendant smiled at me weakly, said, “Tea for two, coming right up,” and then thankfully left.
I glared at Lock’s back. “You’re angry with me. You dare to be angry.”
“You broke the RULES!” he exploded.
“Rules?” I might have laughed if my voice wasn’t already trembling.
“Yes, rules. One rule, actually. We had one rule, that we would tell each other everything, and you broke that rule.”
I stood up to face him down. “This isn’t a game, Sherlock. This is my life! It stopped being a game the very moment it became about my family.”
“It’s not about the game, Mori.”
I took a breath and clenched my teeth to keep from screaming at him. “Do tell. What is it all about, Lock?”
“It’s about us.” He straightened, so that he towered over me, and still he seemed so young to me right then. Just another little kid looking for me to protect him from the truth.
“No. No, it’s not. It’s about dead people in a park, and my world shattering into a million chunks of iron that are falling down all around me, and I’ve got no one to help me dig out. That’s what it’s about, Lock. It’s about me fighting off the avalanche all by myself. And I’m so sorry I couldn’t fit your rules and your games into the mix this time.”