Lock and Key: The Gadwall Incident Read online

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Ridley Pearson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO BE HAPPY ALL THE TIME. Anything that’s “all the time” can’t be a high point or a low point, which is the point. The same is true of one’s closeness to her brother. I can love him but I don’t always have to like him. He can be my best friend without being a friend at all times.

  I don’t know exactly when I started keeping track of him, because I failed to date the early entries in my notebook. By the time I thought to record the days and months, so much had already happened. It’s like those arctic shelves of ice two miles thick that scientists can tell are slipping: my brother and I started to separate as slowly as that. And sometime long after it had begun, I picked up a pen and started keeping track.

  It may seem odd, but our mother walking out on us had actually brought us together as brother and sister. We skipped the part of growing up where we’re supposed to hate each other and be jealous about the other’s successes. Our mutual abandonment, along with a father who could be politely described as rigid, made us a team. He kept a rigid schedule while juggling a college professorship and managing our family’s (inherited) fortunes. He ruled rigidly over his home—quick on discipline, short on praise. He rigidly employed his driver, Ralph; his secretary, Lois; and our Cajun cook, Miss Delphine. He was a father who maintained a rigid demeanor, never overly excited, never overly dour, never terribly warm. He was the Mr. Banks of Boston’s Beacon Hill, James and I the Michael and Jane.

  Without ever discussing it, James and I had arrived to the same conclusion: we were on our own; we were a team, a pair.

  Then one day your heart cracks, however infinitesimally. Your eyes leak. Your gut wrenches. You start writing in a journal. You ask people for details of the stuff you miss or have no way to overhear. You go back after the fact and fill in details that escaped you in the present. You do your work. You make it your job to get all the facts down correctly.

  After a while you panic. All the note-taking is having no effect on your brother’s downward spiral. You build a history of him, something to hold on to, something to look back upon. Something to keep you close. To hold close.

  Bear with me, dear reader; this is not easy for me.

  CHAPTER 1

  FATHER’S BRIEFCASE BULGED IN AN UNUSUAL manner. That’s how all this started, simple as that. At fourteen, my brother, James, was a specimen of fierce intelligence and keen observation. He spotted oddities, like newspaper advertisements with misspellings. He performed complex math problems in his head. He studied our father like the man was a science project. Maybe that was because one morning we’d awakened to find Mother had packed a bag and left the family; maybe James couldn’t take his eyes off our father for fear we’d lose him too. Abandonment hurts. Not just your head; your whole body aches, and it never goes away; it lives inside you like an alien creature. Like that. So maybe James should have seen a counselor instead of fixating on the movements of our father. But we Moriartys didn’t take our problems to counselors; we handled things ourselves. We were private, rich, and complicated. We were that kind of family.

  “So what?” I said. “You woke me up for this?” My bedroom, I confess, belongs in Royal Antiques magazine.

  “You’re twelve, what would you know?”

  “That’s entirely unfair, James. I’m looking for specifics,” I explained. “His briefcase was fatter than usual. Duly noted. But did it appear he struggled with added weight as well? Did he, for instance, switch hands with the briefcase as you spied on him walking away? The question is contents, isn’t it? A briefcase bulging with paperwork is one thing. He is a college professor, after all. Bulging with food? Bulging with clothing? Equipment? Each presents its own interpretation, doesn’t it?”

  “Okay, I admit it: that’s clever.” James rarely dished out compliments unless he needed something. He desperately wanted evidence confirming Father was not leaving us without saying good-bye. It wouldn’t be the first time; Father had a way of disappearing and reappearing without explanation. Given our history, it was only right that we both assumed one of these times there would be no return ticket.

  “I need my beauty sleep,” I said. “Go back to bed. It’s probably exams or something.”

  “Clothing.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “There was a piece of fabric sticking out.”

  “You’re lying just to keep me interested. Go back to bed, Jamie.”

  “The green bow tie.”

  I sat up, head off my pillow, so that I arrived just under James’s chin as he stood alongside my bed. His face is more grown-up than boys his age, wide and with expressive eyebrows, a small mouth, and a penetrating gaze. “You’re making that up.”

  “Am not. The one with—”

  “The black clovers. His favorite! The one with a four-leaf clover over on the edge.”

  “Exactly!” he said. I knew then he wasn’t making it up.

  “Clothes.”

  “Another trip. But why wouldn’t he have said good-bye? He always says good-bye.”

  “A girlfriend?” I suggested. “His most favorite bow tie in the world? A date? Is Father going on a date?” I threw my legs off the bed and motioned for him to get out of my room. “This, I gotta see.”

  “Meaning,” James said, backing out of my bedroom.

  “You win, OK? We’re going to spy on Father!”

  CHAPTER 2

  WE NEVER CAUGHT UP TO FATHER. ARRIVING onto the quad at Croft University, James hurried inside the humanities building to confirm Father was there teaching as expected. I stood in line at the student union to buy two coffees. Father didn’t allow us to drink real coffee, only decaf, so it only seemed right that if we were spying on him we could pretty much make up our own rules. I took mine with three sugars and cream. James said he preferred it black, which disgusted me. I thought he was just showing off by trying to act older than me.

  On my way back, still no sign of James, both my hands occupied, I searched out a bench with a decent but not obvious view of the doors Father would use upon leaving. We couldn’t afford to be seen by him as he departed. Not if we were going to follow him to a date! Just the thought of it gave me chills. I was both excited and brokenhearted, which was pretty much how I’d been living since Mother failed to show for dinner six years, ten months, and three days earlier. But who’s counting?

  The bench I selected was somewhat obscured by twin sugar maple trees that must have been planted around the Civil War. A four-story brick Victorian hall with two Gothic doorways and a mansard roof with dormers occupied my attention. It was through the archway on the right that Father would emerge, and through which James now appeared. Call it instinct or intuition, I sensed and spotted a man watching either James or the entranceway.

  He wasn’t sitting, as I was, but standing alongside a tree trying to blend in against it with his dark suit and sunglasses, his phone in his hand as if he were reading it. But we all know reading a phone in dark glasses is just about impossible. It was that pretending-to-read-the-phone that
caught my interest. A grown-up stalking a coed campus is bad enough, but a guy faking it with his phone made him about as subtle as a space shuttle launch. So, either he was a creep checking out the young coeds or he was a creep waiting for someone, as I was. Or maybe, just maybe, he was a husband or boyfriend of the mystery woman James and I suspected Father was planning to meet. Maybe he was there to defend his honor. Maybe, I thought, this was about to get very interesting.

  “See him?” I asked James as he sat down alongside me.

  “He’s up there. Father’s up there in the classroom.”

  “Are you listening?”

  “Just like any other day. His briefcase’s on the floor. Doesn’t look like he’s opened it.”

  “He’s just standing there, watching, same as us.”

  “That guy?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “So what?”

  “So what if he’s a husband or boyfriend?” I said.

  James took another look. “This could get interesting.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “He could be waiting for anyone, Mo. He could be someone’s brother or dad, uncle, whatever.”

  “Woman’s intuition.”

  “You’re not a woman yet.”

  “What would you know? I have feelings. I feel things. Something you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Is that supposed to sting? Guess again.”

  James did feel things, or he once had. I think the string that tied his heart to his brain snapped when Mother left us. He became robotic after that, went hours—days—at a time without speaking. Father, too busy to notice, treated him, us, like he always had: as mild inconveniences. Tolerated amusements. Lois, his personal secretary, stepped in to get us off to school, take us shopping, arrange for Ralph to drive us to movies. Father, always too busy, a condition that took on numerous forms, ate dinner, quietly, with us. That was the start and end of what he took as his parental obligations. James claimed we reminded him too much of Mother. He meant me, of course, not him. So I was to blame for Father’s internal agony and James’s internal silence. I had my face to thank for that, I suppose. With its tiny mouth, big brown eyes, perfect nose, my face was neither stretched nor wide. I looked more like Mother as seen in the home videos and photographs James and I obsessed over. I didn’t remember her well. I invented memories by combining stories told by Father or James and associating them with the pictures. My looks were a throwback to another time. James’s too. He claimed it was our aristocracy, our heritage, that the clan Moriarty’s Irish and English lines, Mother’s Scottish blood, made us who we were. He said I looked too much like Mother, but I always took that as a compliment.

  “When he looks up from his phone, he looks two places: the archway, and a window on the second floor, three to the right.”

  “Father’s classroom.” James gasped, for as if on cue the gentleman did exactly as I had described. “Nice one, Mo.”

  “I’m just saying,” I said, playing the humble card.

  “No! I think you’re right. Now,” he said, “get off your fat bum and get away from me.”

  “I was here first. Find your own bench, you cretin! And I do not have a fat bum! It’s . . . shapely. I have a figure.”

  “It’s ginormous.”

  “It’s just out of proportion for the moment. You’ll see.”

  “The two of us together are too easy to spot. Father’s no dummy.”

  Father was, in fact, brilliant, the smartest man I knew. He was kind to others, if not overly secretive. Brooding, yes, often. But his wife had left him and his kids were fast becoming teenagers and from what Lois had said, in fits and starts, that combination was enough to drive some men to drink. Father didn’t drink, at least not excessively. Lois I wasn’t so sure about, given her occasional and inexplicable outbursts of laughter, a certain sway to her stride after long lunches, and the way her eyes seemed to refuse to focus in the late hours of the evening.

  James was right, of course. (He was right far too often!) Father, however much he seemed to exist in his own world, might easily scan the quad and pick out the pair of us. Separated, there was far less likelihood of that happening, given that he failed to see us, or refer to us, individually. We were to him—in James’s way of thinking—mini-Mothers, and we came in a set. Among all the college students crisscrossing the quad I doubted very much if Father would recognize us if we walked right up to him, but no sense in taking chances.

  “There’s a bench just behind the spy. Take that one,” I suggested.

  “You take that one.”

  “I was here first.”

  “Seriously? You’re going to be a baby about this?”

  “Absolutely. I’m going to stand my ground. Or, in this case, sit my ground. Go find your own bench. What’s the plan, anyway?”

  “We follow him at a distance. I’ll go first, then you.” I didn’t like this arrangement but knew my older brother well enough to know he wouldn’t cede me the privilege of leadership.

  “Heads down.”

  “Duh!”

  “At least half a block back.”

  “Agreed.” James stood, heading in the direction of the Stranger.

  CHAPTER 3

  CALL ME BRILLIANT. I ACCEPT. IF IT HADN’T been for me, we would have sat there all day, James and I—and the Stranger, if you include him. Fact: boys are less observant than girls. I don’t mean to make sweeping generalizations, I’m just honest. At the time he was expected, Father failed to appear. Even from across the quad I could feel James’s heightened anticipation matching my own. A meeting, maybe? Class preparation?

  I missed it the first time, as did James and the Stranger. Once I caught it, I realized the clues were camouflaged amid other attention-getters. I tried to signal James, who in typical brotherly fashion was doing everything possible to ignore me while attempting to fool himself into thinking the girls walking past might believe he belonged in college. Sure, that was going to happen.

  Credit girls with caring about shoes. We look at shoes. Hair—bouncy or flat? Arms, withering? Height—isn’t it obvious? The second time I looked, the man was well past James’s position, nearly even with mine, and still had a ways to go to draw even with the Stranger. I spotted the incongruities: 1. The shoes, black Ferragamos with a small silver buckle. They cost five hundred dollars a pair. I couldn’t imagine any other college professor, especially one with questionable taste, spending that kind of money on shoes, which led me to my next two observations. 2. He was wearing a green bow tie. 3: It was patterned, no less, with black shamrocks. How I’d missed the tie baffled me until I realized the slicked-back, gelled hair and heavy black-frame glasses had thrown me. This man leaving the humanities building looked nothing like Father. I didn’t even recognize the rest of the clothes.

  Having failed in my attempt to alert James, I stood. That worked. He looked at me like, “What’s up?” I looked at him like, “There! There! You idiot!” Of course he didn’t get it, because he can be as thick as concrete. So I lifted my right leg, grabbed my shoe, standing like a flamingo, and pointed repeatedly at my shoe. I cocked my head in the direction of Father. To give him some credit, James was probably too far away to see Father’s Ferragamos, and Father’s back was to him so James couldn’t see the bow tie. But discounted from that same credit was his unwillingness to work to understand my interpretive dance.

  It was only as the Stranger turned toward Father that I made my move. Adding to my alarm, the Stranger also recognized Father in disguise, despite Father not carrying a briefcase; despite him looking nothing like Father. This raised a flag, for I had apparently either discovered the one man on earth who cared about shoes or, far more likely, one who was an agent or a spy or police detective whose very business it was to care about shoes and altered appearance. I couldn’t let go of Father pursuing a girlfriend, but this Stranger was becoming more difficult to fit into that scenario.

  James caught up to me
, the two of us twenty yards behind the Stranger, who was himself ten yards behind Father. A Spy Parade, I thought.

  “Are you sure?”

  “His shoes,” I said.

  “The fancy ones.”

  “Ferragamos, yes. And the bow tie. I can’t believe we both missed the bow tie.”

  “I wasn’t looking for a bow tie,” James said. “I was looking for Father.”

  “A disguise.”

  “I noticed. So strange.”

  “Who wears a disguise to a date, even a blind date?”

  “What about him?” James asked of the man in front of us.

  “Weird. I can’t believe he picked up on the disguise. He’s got to be a professional.”

  “But what? Stalker? Security? Hey! You think he recognized Father because he knew who to look for? You suppose Father hired him?”

  I nearly stumbled. I hated to say it but it made so much sense. “That certainly would explain it, not that it makes me feel any better.”

  “Train station.”

  “What?”

  “This is the way to the train station,” James said.

  “This is Boston, James. This is the way to a hundred places.”

  “Didn’t you see him reach into his pocket?”

  “Father?”

  “When does he check his inside pocket like that, Mo?”

  “You’re kidding, I hope.”

  “Airports and train stations. Right hand into the left inside pocket of his jacket.” Maybe boys were more attentive than I’d realized. Maybe a son studies his father more closely than does a twelve-year-old girl.

  “I might have missed that.”

  “He taps his back pocket to make sure his wallet is there before we go into restaurants. Right coat pocket is his cell phone.” James tugged me hard.

  “Hey! Watch it!”

  “The Stranger turned his head a couple times. I don’t think it’s smart to hang back here. I know a shortcut.”

  “You are going to base this decision on Father reaching into his coat pocket?”