The Initiation Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Betsy Dodge Pearson,

  who loved a mystery

  and then became one herself.

  —R.P.

  MAP

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Map

  A Note About James

  Chapter 1: Late August

  Chapter 2: The Invaders Strike

  Chapter 3: The Great Unspoken

  Chapter 4: Our Uneasy Arrival

  Chapter 5: Belonging

  Chapter 6: Headmaster

  Chapter 7: The Legacy Issue

  Chapter 8: The First Note

  Chapter 9: Bones and Ribs

  Chapter 10: Crying Shame

  Chapter 11: Diversion

  Chapter 12: Running Like Cold Honey

  Chapter 13: Out of Reach

  Chapter 14: A Visitor

  Chapter 15: Heated Interest

  Chapter 16: His Opinion Matters

  Chapter 17: Blood Connection

  Chapter 18: A Soldier, A Guard, A Spy

  Chapter 19: The Philosophy of Truth

  Chapter 20: A Most Unexpected Moment

  Chapter 21: Right for Once

  Chapter 22: Taking Sides

  Chapter 23: A Most Important Visitor

  Chapter 24: Ambush

  Chapter 25: Off the Record

  Chapter 26: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

  Chapter 27: No Easy Way

  Chapter 28: Broken Trust

  Chapter 29: A Sad Night

  Chapter 30: Escaping Spirits, Returning Fears

  Chapter 31: Family Photos

  Chapter 32: A Rebel and a Thorn

  Chapter 33: Reunion

  Chapter 34: Unlocking a Secret

  Chapter 35: Waking to a Nightmare

  Chapter 36: A Most Welcome Visitor

  Chapter 37: Overpowered, Underprepared

  Chapter 38: Decoding

  Chapter 39: Of Friends and Enemies

  Chapter 40: Only If You’re Lucky

  Chapter 41: In an Unexplained Hurry

  Chapter 42: The Dumpster Question

  Chapter 43: Spies, Together

  Chapter 44: The Initiation

  Chapter 45: In The Middle of the Woods

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A NOTE ABOUT JAMES

  HE WASN’T ALWAYS THIS WAY. I THINK OF HIM as a shy boy who spent time in Father’s library and, on occasion, in the cellar practicing chemistry. He is my older brother, James. That makes him a boy, which I can’t help, but I don’t hold it against him either. And though I could claim “I don’t know where he went wrong,” it would be a lie. I know exactly where he went wrong: Baskerville Academy.

  What follows is a sister’s written account of events as witnessed by me and told to me, for you see I was and am my brother’s confidante. We have, for as long as I can remember, been best friends.

  There was a time he told me everything—and I mean everything! Lately, not nearly as much. I can tell you this, my reader: from an early age James Keynes Moriarty seemed to understand he was bound for greatness. Not the kind of greatness all would choose, but a kind of greatness just the same. I believe he understood the importance of keeping an objective record, thus I gained his confidence. I became his chronicler, his scribe, his biographer. And now you are the recipient, as I pass along what is perhaps an unwanted baton—the burden of the truth.

  I have taken certain liberties in these pages with dialogue, as James’s recollections often flow out of him like water from a burst dam. I have developed my own shorthand which I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say I can keep up. Most if not all of the descriptions are mine, as I’ve been in these places, sometimes with him, sometimes much later as I returned to document what I’d heard took place. On occasion, I’ve sought out or have endured the descriptions of events from others and have hereby interpreted them to my liking. James has not exactly been forthcoming of late. As you can imagine, in certain instances I have been required to interview others and then rebuild a situation or labor to reconstruct the happening as might the lens of a camera. The emotions expressed are from James himself, though I don’t pretend I can keep my own, and even those of others, from entering these pages. I trust my witnesses to have given me a fair account of situations, language, and emotions. One other secret: my brother kept a journal that, until the start of this story, he did not know I knew about. I borrowed from it then, I borrow from it still. Sisters will be sisters.

  Over the course of compiling this, I have learned to accept that greatness comes in all forms. Great evil is as rarely accomplished as is great heroism.

  Through the events of a few brief months, my brother transformed. I should have seen it coming, meaning I am not entirely blameless for what happened. Possibly it might have been avoided—though can greatness ever be avoided?

  As his sister, what happened to James took me by surprise. It scared me then, scares me still. I submit the events as objectively as possible. Whether beast or monster, messenger or prophet, my brother’s transformation was nothing short of mythical.

  I was there. So now, dear reader, are you.

  MORIA MORIARTY

  CHAPTER 1

  LATE AUGUST

  TERRIFIED FOR MY LIFE, I RAN FROM MY brother. I was faster. We both knew it. Faster, when outside on grass running toward a finish line marked with two tennis racquets at the end of a stretch of manicured lawn on Boston Common.

  Currently, however, I was running down a first-floor hallway in a Beacon Hill home. It was lined with oil portraits of horrendous-looking stern faces, old people to whom I was related: great-uncles, women with hairy moles, a grandfather with a scornful brow and distrustful eyes. The family Moriarty.

  At the end of the portraits was a gargantuan mirror with a gilded frame and, in it, someone I knew all too well. The girl I saw had a teardrop face, intense gray-green eyes, tightly formed bow lips. My father called my looks, and my nose in particular, “statuesque,” which I hoped was a good thing, given that my eyebrows were unpleasant, narrow slashes with no curve to them whatsoever. My brother and I shared the discolored skin beneath our eyes, something for which I would forever curse my mother, as my father and his ancestors didn’t possess that particular trait. The mirror had stopped me for a nanosecond—I had trouble looking away from the portraits. I ran on.

  The oriental carpet runner, as old as the faces on the wall, muffled the footfalls of my bare feet. I dodged a black-lacquered table and the frosted-glass cat perched upon it that served as a nightlight when the reproduction gas lamp wall sconces, now electric, were switched off. (Father did not believe in dark hallways or stairs. Each night, he lit the place up like a Christmas tree.) I dodged the hideous stuffed raccoon that stood on its hind legs and, farther down, the some-kind-of-weasel that still scared the gee-whiz out of me. One of the weasel’s glass eyes was missing, leaving it looking like it was constantly winking.

  My speed advantage did not play out within the house where I was careful of the antiques and my brother more reckless. He knocked over the raccoon without pause. Charged me like a train. I carried his treasured diary in hand. Only its surrender could save me from his wrath. And only then if I could quickly convince him it was all a joke—that I’d never intended to read it—which, as we both knew, was a far-fetched lie. Of course, I intended to devour its contents—I was reading as I ran. I knew if he caught me he was basically going to kill me. I deserved it. I was a thief, even if I preferred to think of myself as a researcher or historian. I felt like a criminal. It turned out I had a lot to learn about that.

  James, was tall for his age—fourteen—and
, I guessed, already shaving. His pitch-black hair (parted far too high on his head) created a kind of dirty look to his face that recently came and went. By all accounts he had quiet looks: no sharp bones to his round face, darker skin surrounding his sad eyes. If Malfoy was salt, my brother was pepper, and with a Scotsman’s perma-blush complexion to his high cheekbones. His sullen dark eyes seemed to be looking everywhere at once and he had ears too big for his head. I didn’t know if he’d grow into his ears the way he was expected to grow into his silly clown feet, but if he didn’t, he was going to have trouble at dances.

  “You are so dead!” he called out. We both knew that was nonsense. He was special to me; we were special to each other. Father didn’t encourage social activities for his two children, so James and I had learned to build forts out of blankets, cook unfathomably horrible meals together, act out scenes from our favorite books, and had even created our own language that neither Father nor Ralph, our Romanian driver, nor our cook, the Caribbean “Miss Delphine,” understood. Only Lois, our nanny growing up, now Father’s rail-thin, gray-haired secretary and the person in charge of our houses and properties, could translate.

  Already hiding within, I heard the smooth click of my father’s study door opening and closing. It was a room we were forbidden from entering without Father. Naturally, it was where I was hiding. Dressed in rich red-leather book spines, an antique world map globe in a brass stand, dark woods, and thin frayed carpets, it smelled of walnut oil, a fragrance that would stay with me, and make me cry for years to come.

  There were limitations to where I could hide. James knew it. Under the harvest table; behind the door; tucked within the plush red velvet floor-to-ceiling curtains hanging on either side of the mahogany bookshelves; in the unlit fireplace; or where I currently was hiding: inside the Italian armoire.

  James drew out his search, displaying sadistic tendencies which to my mind had only gotten worse in recent months. Time was when he would have joked with the unseen me, coaxed me into laughter so I’d reveal myself. Playing on our affection, he’d set a bee trap, like the one my father hung outside the kitchen’s sink window—all sugar water and inventive cunning. Now instead, James was more the insect zapper variety. If we’d lived in the Middle Ages he’d be in training for the dungeon work where he’d turn the screw on the rack. He was the proverbial kid who picked the wings off living houseflies. Only I was the housefly. He removed my confidence, bit by bit, scheme by scheme. He made me afraid of him and dependent upon him all at the same time. My brother was learning how to be sly, and I didn’t care for it one bit.

  “‘What fools these mortals be,’” he cried out loudly. He probably didn’t know I knew he was quoting Shakespeare. That was the other thing: he didn’t give me any credit. None. He thought I was a stupid girl. Period. I wanted so badly to shout out, “Midsummer Night’s Dream!” but kept my mouth shut for fear of the torture I would invite. “You’d have been smarter to go through to Lois’s office or into the kitchen. Father’s study is a no-no, little girl.” He knew I would boil at being called that. I kept myself from screaming out in anger.

  A sharp, electronic peal of our home security system drilled through the house. The feature was called “On Watch.” It chirped whenever a window or door was opened. It allowed Father to monitor if anyone entered or left the house, effectively making us, his children, prisoners in our own home. It wasn’t the way he saw it, but Father saw most things differently than we did. The current warning suggested the front door had opened: Father had returned.

  James flung open the antique left door of the hand-carved armoire, the side that contained our father’s winter coats, the side that smelled of moth balls, and climbed in atop me. I jabbed him with my finger, believing he intended to drag me out into the room as a sacrificial lamb, but it wasn’t that at all. He pulled the door shut behind him and we were two kids in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Maybe, I thought, if we started clawing at the back wall of the armoire we’d tumble out into snow. As it was, James’s right leg was between my knees, as I was sitting down, his knees in my face, and my face in his stomach. I thought he must be holding on to the clothes rod since he was able to remain so steady in such an awkward position. He stole his journal out of my grip. I didn’t put up much of a fight.

  Father’s sixth sense brought him shortly into the adjacent library. “Children?”

  Next, he entered his study, only the thickness of an armoire door away. Again, I nearly screamed: my hair—dark brown going on black like my brother’s, if you have to ask—had twisted around one of James’s shirt buttons. Strands ripped loose with each subtle movement.

  I could foresee more than a few serious problems. Father was known to spend hours in his office. He often napped in the chair facing the fireplace. If my brother pulled any more of my hair out I was going to scream. My nose was already running from the tears in my eyes from the hair being pulled. Worse, I heard the sniffing of our two English shepherds, London and Bath. London loved James. Bath was all mine. There was no way the armoire would stay closed for long.

  A curious thing: Father did not sit in that favorite reading chair by the fireplace, one that made a particular, and peculiar, squeak when sat in. No, I could picture him standing a few feet away staring at the inquisitive dogs whining at the armoire, or perhaps sitting behind his desk in the chair, which was sturdy and silent. I heard a click, like a fence gate, followed by another, and then, a few moments later, a clunk—as if something heavy had been set down.

  The globe wouldn’t make such a sound. Neither would any chair in his study. James bumped the inside of my knee intentionally. He was asking me what was going on. This was the unspoken language between brother and sister that only came from endless hours together. A punch in the arm, a flick of a finger on the back of the neck, a hand placed gently onto the shoulder, a ruffle of one’s hair, a light pat on the cheek, a strong pat on the cheek. James and I could see each other well enough for me to know he was as confused by Father’s actions as was I.

  I found myself trying to explain the heavy sound—as if a door had opened. This, in a room with only the one door. Like the study and its door, James and I had only the one parent, and before today, we had liked to think of him as predictable. Maybe that was out of want, possibly out of necessity; single-parent children need stability, I would later be told by the headmaster of Baskerville Academy. We need role models and codes of conduct, a sense of the spiritual and three meals a day. “The rest will take care of itself.”

  It has since been proved that headmasters can be as wrong as the next person. The “rest” doesn’t always take care of itself. It didn’t take care of me or James. It abandoned us, just as we’d been told our mother had done. It left us groping for answers, struggling for solutions, and at odds about the quickest road to self-preservation. In short, that brief time spent huddled together in an armoire in Father’s study would be one of those wonderful shared secret moments between me and my older brother. As things turned out, it would also prove to be one of the last times I truly felt so close to him.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE INVADERS STRIKE

  BOSTON IS A BIG CITY. IT SPREADS OUT FROM the bay like a fan, the denser population at the apex where a small brick building marks the start of our country. At night, its streets teem with vehicles old and new, big and small, coughing out exhaust, honking horns (despite ordinances forbidding it), grinding gears, screeching tires, blasting music, covering intimate conversations whispered between pedestrian lovers or the combative rants barked by competing academics.

  Our neighborhood, called Beacon Hill, is a world apart, its cobblestone lanes crowded with parked cars, set aglow by yellow gas lamps, quiet, private, and preserved from another epoch. If you were to spill change from your pocket on the way down the stone steps from our front door, half the neighborhood would hear it. Inside the remodeled and refurbished centuries-old brownstones and walk-ups a librarian would be well suited and comfortable. Going to s
leep with his window open was a common event for James because Father ran the air-conditioning too low. The open window was not allowed; Father had insisted all summer that the house be “buttoned up” before bed. James could defeat our home security system with a magnet and two wires, as only an older brother could. He did so each night after Father had retired. I often heard his window opening and, when I did, I opened mine. Not because I enjoyed the air, but because I followed James in so much of what he did.

  The night of the attack, city sounds called clearly. Beacon Hill was not only charming, given its preservation of the past, it was charmed. Magical things happened here. Costumed carolers sang in its streets at Christmas. Little girls with bows in their hair walked with their mothers. There were neighborhood Easter egg hunts, and everyone dressed in Irish green on March 17th.

  James and I had come to know each and every sound like the face of a friend. He had both a telescope and binoculars at our disposal. On warm summer nights when we couldn’t sleep, we would find each other out on the fire escape and stargaze or locate a fire truck or police car responsible for a specific siren. We learned both the geography and the layout of city streets, the Charles River, and the major highways and bridges. We knew this town. Our town. Secretly, we both felt privileged to call it home.

  Later, I would discover that three invaders had climbed an extension ladder in order to reach the fire escape. They entered through James’s open window, lucky that James was a heavy sleeper.

  The sound that awoke James—my brother’s telescope and tripod going to the floor in a cacophony of broken lenses—also shook me from sleep.

  One moment I was lying down, the next sitting up and throwing my feet off the bed.

  While I ran toward his room, James coughed awake. A gloved hand slapped over his mouth as he did. Someone held his legs while the one gagging him pinned his right arm with a knee and his left with a hand. James bucked like a wild horse, and struggled to be free; he screamed, making little more sound than that of an amorous alley cat; he forced himself to sitting, only making things more difficult. The one muffling him switched positions, constraining him from behind, binding both his arms. The guy at James’s feet—all three wore balaclava ski masks pulled down over their faces—wrapped a length of rope around James’s ankles, the implications of which threw James into a fit. Kidnapping! A third ninja, watching the door, turned to assist his partners. Three against one was unfair; no kind of sport whatsoever. James was quickly subdued.