The Final Step Read online

  DEDICATION

  In Memory of Zackery Kendall Luff, who

  loved Shakespeare, lived like Michelangelo,

  and never looked back.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  About the Author

  Books by Ridley Pearson

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dearest Reader,

  The following is as best I can remember it. I’ve used a variety of sources to re-create the events. When I wasn’t actually in the room, I’ve interviewed witnesses who were. I’ve studied texts, photos, and my brother’s writings in his diary. Harder than tracking the events was keeping my emotions out of the passage. It’s my brother, you see. My once sweet, loving brother who went from my best friend to something of a stranger. I’d never experienced anything like it.

  Our mother left us when we were young. Our father died recently, leaving us orphans and in the care of our former nanny. Yes, our family was wealthy, but we were never rich. Rich is a whole family, and that’s nowhere in my or my brother’s memory.

  I didn’t want to tell this story. It’s not easy to lose your best friend. But I owe an explanation to all concerned. Read at your own risk.

  MORIA MORIARTY

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SOUND CRACKED THE NIGHT LIKE A DISTANT limb tearing from a tree trunk. It briefly put a halt to the riotous complaint of the cicadas, crickets, and bullfrogs. The forest canopy, thick with leaves, blotted out the ambient light from the stars.

  James Moriarty, huddled in no-man’s-land with two of his summer school classmates, Maverick Maletta and Ryan Eisenower, snapped his head up with the sound.

  “That sounded like a gunshot,” Eisenower said. Big and thick, even for fifteen (he’d stayed back a year—twice—in middle school), Eisenower had the voice of a man, the buzz-cut head of a sailor, and the chin of a boxer.

  “Ryan,” Maverick said, “you really think people are shooting at each other in a game of capture the flag? Seriously?”

  “It was a firecracker. Maybe a distraction,” James said, his eyes shifting as he calculated. “Did you hear it echo? It came from way over there somewhere. It’s perfect for us. We can use it. We should attack now. At most, they’ve got two or three guys on this side of their defense. You two sweep in at a full sprint. They’ll go after you. I will delay and come in behind. If they catch you, I’ll free you. The three of us get the flag and get back.”

  The field of play, marked by battery-generated red-flashing roadside emergency lights, was a big chunk of forest and meadow on a bench of the hill leading from the main campus down to Baskerville Academy’s hockey rink. No-man’s-land divided the teams’ territories. At either end hung a flag. Half the summer school had signed up to play. It was a lot of forest to defend for both teams, making the game all the more electrifying. Two teachers were supervising, one at each flag.

  “You’re saying we’re the sacrificial lambs,” Maverick said.

  “Something like that,” James replied, laughing.

  “Works for me,” said Maverick. He checked with Eisenower, who nodded and grunted.

  “So, what are you standing here for?” James asked, prodding.

  The boys took off, crossing the no-man’s-land boundary and entering into enemy territory.

  James began counting to thirty.

  CHAPTER 2

  TEAM BLACK HAD MORE ATHLETES THAN WE did. More speed. Probably more dumb nerve. The other Red girls and I—nine of us—had powwowed briefly. We agreed not to come off as girly or timid. We would not be afraid of the dark. We would not shriek at the first breaking of a twig. We would, in essence, “man up,” the irony of which was not lost on any of us.

  My brother, James, was on Team Black. That complicated things for me. For one thing, I knew how sneaky he could be. We had spent our childhoods playing two-person hide-and-seek. For another, he was devious, mean, cruel, and fun. A brother. Most of all, he was devilishly smart. If he got control of Team Black he would make a plan that the Reds could not beat. Thankfully, he wasn’t all that popular. He had a group of goons he bossed around, but I think the other students saw him as a loner. Our great-great-grandfather had started Baskerville Academy, meaning most of the kids at school believed James and I got special treatment. It wasn’t entirely true, but when did truth matter in high school?

  Team Red’s strategy, dictated by our team captain—a boy, naturally—involved putting more of our team on defense at the start of the ninety-minute game. I didn’t say anything—no one would listen anyway—but it was a good strategy. James was aggressive. He would be thinking offense.

  We Reds would focus on putting as many of their team in jail as possible. (Those in jail had to be tagged by a free teammate to win release and could not try for the flag until crossing back into no-man’s-land first.) When we had ten of Team Black in our jail, the plan was to shift our resources to offense.

  As a result, over twenty-five out of the thirty Reds were assigned to patrol a grid space on our side of no-man’s-land. We each had a lot of ground to cover.

  We had agreed on code words to help signal each other.

  “Charge!” I heard a fellow Red announce. As long as the attack did not intrude into my zone, I was under orders to stay within my area. I heard the breaking of sticks, the whipping of leaves, the rake of feet flying across the leaf-strewn forest floor. Two, three, four, or more at once. I held my ground, as agreed.

  Ten yards in front of me, a crack of a twig. I posed, stock-still, with my arms away from my body in an attempt to appear more treelike. The forest was painfully dark. My eyes saw only blobs of purple and black among the inkish columns of tree trunks. Pinpointing the source of a sound was tr
icky given the occasional granite boulder and dozens of trees surrounding me. I waited.

  The moving shape that appeared from the gloom was that of a boy darting from one tree to the next. He utilized a zigzag pattern, his silhouette pausing to blend into the tree trunks.

  I held my breath as he came within five yards of me.

  “You,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Moria?”

  “Brother Bear.”

  “I’m faster than you.”

  “So you think,” I said. “You going to test it, James?” He was the endurance runner. A sprinter, I could catch him before no-man’s-land.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I’ll pretend to chase you back to no-man’s-land,” I offered. “Next time you cross, stay out of my zone.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “What are sisters for?”

  “I’ve wondered that for a long time.”

  Someone set off a firecracker. That would not go down well with our chaperones.

  “Now or never, Jamie. No more chitchat.”

  He took off. I followed, close enough to where I knew I’d tag him if he tried to burn me. I stopped twenty yards short of the no-man’s-land line and watched him disappear across the rough dividing line.

  As I made my way back to my zone, I heard the shout of “redcoat” twice from deep within our territory. We’d taken two prisoners. A few minutes later, the same code word was shouted three more times. Five total. Ten minutes later we had seven in our jail. It seemed our strategy was paying off. I kept to my zone, patrolling on tiptoe, making sure I covered all my allotted ground. On this warm summer night, I was sweating more from nerves than temperature. I didn’t like the dark. I rounded a tree and recoiled from a face full of spiderweb, tipping forward and brushing out my hair and dry-washing my face to remove any chance of a spider crawling on me. I shivered, all raw nerves.

  Twenty minutes into the game, we’d taken eleven of Team Black as prisoners. Those of us on Team Red designated as offense were expected to move toward no-man’s-land, me among them. I found my way into a vacant stretch and quietly searched for my teammates. I gave up when I realized I had happened upon an abandoned lane into enemy territory. I had an obligation to my team to explore.

  The move to offense filled me with a needling static. My skin prickled. My heart sped up. I marveled not only at the changes, but their cause, the switch from protective to vulnerable. My earlier experience told me it was a game of sound. Not running speed. Not even strategy. Sound. In this kind of darkness, the quietest team would win—of this I felt certain. Moving with great care, toe-to-heel, I pretended I was walking across a freshly iced pond, uncertain if the ice would hold me. With patience as my ally, I used all of a twelve-year-old little sister’s guile and fortitude to withstand the temptation to hurry. Let others hurry, I told myself. I was in this to outsmart and win. James and I had played countless games of hide-and-seek, whether in our Boston townhouse or the Cape Cod compound, both of which had been left to us following our father’s fatal fall from a stepladder. I knew all about staying put, holding my breath, and outlasting my brother’s intemperance.

  Fifteen minutes passed. I’d made it less than twenty yards. But there was close to an hour left of playing time; I wasn’t in any rush.

  Pretty soon, I reached a break in the forest where it gave way to a small meadow of knee-high grass and bunches of gnarly thornbush. I hesitated at the meadow’s edge, considering circumnavigating it to avoid being seen. The meadow basked in starlight that the forest did not. Calculating the time it would take to go around, I elected to risk the crossing, but on hands and knees.

  I’d not worn shorts the way others had. Despite the heat, I was in jeans to protect against the underbrush. With the Midsummer Dance quickly approaching, I didn’t want to show off gashed legs and scabs. I crept forward slowly, sensing I was being watched.

  Before I could decide on a plan, an anguished cry echoed across the field. It was not a call of peril. Not a call for help. It was the sound of something done and unchangeable. Something tragic.

  I wanted to think of it as part of our game, a squeal of defeat or surprise. But it came from someone older than anyone on Team Black or Red. Not bigger, as some of the teen boys playing were, but seasoned. A voice that knew enough to try not to be heard. I wanted to turn back. I longed for no-man’s-land.

  A shadowy figure stepped out from behind a tree ahead. Suddenly my feet wouldn’t move. I felt as if I might pee myself. The shadow dissolved in the starlight. A boy appeared.

  James.

  CHAPTER 3

  “I THOUGHT I WAS BEING WATCHED,” I SAID, MY pulse restarting, my breathing returned. “You owe me one. Lucky me!”

  I knew my brother’s body language. I instantly understood my mistake: Never trust James. He was not going to play fair. He was going to attack. He was going to capture me.

  I was saved by blind luck: As he charged for me, James tripped and fell. It wasn’t a stumble. It was a face plant.

  I took off like an Olympic sprinter. I watched for trees, thickets, and rocks. But I was a scaredy-cat in panic mode and I glanced back. I ran straight into a tree.

  Off-balance, I grabbed for anything to keep me from falling.

  I grabbed for what felt like a branch.

  But it was . . . warm.

  Not a branch. An arm.

  Not a kid, but a man wearing a sport coat.

  My grip slipped or I missed. I tore off a button as I fell.

  And from the ground, I looked up into his face.

  He wasn’t any of the grown-ups at Baskerville.

  CHAPTER 4

  FEAR OWNED ME.

  I couldn’t get a breath. I didn’t want to look into his face again. I wanted to vanish into thin air. I looked away.

  I heard a thump. The man groaned and staggered. A small stone fell into my lap and spilled into the leaves at my feet. He’d been beaned with the rock. James! I thought. My Brother Bear the savior.

  I wasn’t about to strike up a conversation. I rolled, came to my feet, and ran. Team Red didn’t have any alarm codes for adults crashing our game of capture the flag. And even still, my throat was too tight to scream.

  No idea why I thought about the rock, but I did. It was too small to have been thrown from a distance. And James was not the boy to carry around a slingshot. So who had saved me, and why?

  My voice burbled back up. “Red dog!” I tried to shout. It came out “Ed hog” or “bed log.” Like I was choking. Definitely not “red dog.”

  I broke into a clearing. I saw five kids standing next to the flag. It hung from a low tree branch and was lit by a flashlight. Prisoners! My Team Red teammates! I spotted two Team Black guards as well as a solo defender of the flag. (By rule, the defender had to stand outside a fat white circle on the ground.)

  Two of my teammates appeared, responding to my earlier alert. We matched the defensive team in numbers. There were rules concerning freed prisoners. Our team had discussed how to deal with this situation. Given the even numbers, we had a real shot at winning the flag.

  For a moment, I’d nearly forgotten about the man in the suit.

  Nearly, but not really.

  CHAPTER 5

  IN ANY OTHER GAME, JAMES WOULD HAVE GOTTEN up and come crashing after me.

  But he was, instead, on all fours next to the thing that had tripped him. It wasn’t a log. It wasn’t a rock. It was a leg. A man’s leg. A man attempting to crawl.

  As I had broken away from the dazed man in the suit, James had stayed still on the ground to avoid being seen. He’d heard the stone whiz overhead; had heard it thunk and a man’s voice groan. A teacher? Whoever had beaned a teacher was going to get it!

  But why would two teachers be in the woods in the middle of capture the flag? Made no sense. He stayed low as the man hit by the stone lumbered off.

  By this point, James could see the face of the man he’d tripped over, who was dragging himself ac
ross the grass.

  “Mr. Lowry?” James rose to his knees. Not a teacher. The family lawyer. Out here, in the middle of the forest, a long way from Boston, where he lived and worked. “Are you okay? What are you doing here?”

  James saw a large, oddly-shaped stain on Lowry’s suit coat. How’d he get wet out here? He touched it. Sticky, not wet. Blood, not water.

  “What’s going on? Are you all right?” It was a stupid thing to say given the man’s position on the ground and the size of the blood stain. A better question might have been: “How are you possibly still alive?” James spotted a tiny dark circle inside the stain. “You’ve been . . . shot!” He tried to roll the man, but Lowry groaned, reached out, and stopped him. “It’s James, sir.”

  “James?”

  “Moriarty. Yes, sir.”

  Lowry grabbed James by the shirt. It happened so fast, it frightened James. “Elves and the Shoemaker, James. Elves and shoemaker. Repeat it.” Lowry’s legs were twitching. He looked like a guy trying to take his shoes off without unlacing them.

  “James?” The man’s voice had jumped an octave.

  It wasn’t Lowry. It took James a second to recognize the new voice as Lexie Carlisle’s. He and Lexie had issues. They’d been a little closer than just friends in ninth grade. Things hadn’t worked out so great.

  “Lexie?”

  “Who is that on the ground?” She came out of the dark. The clearing offered starlight.

  “Say it,” Lowry demanded of James.

  “Elves,” James said.

  “And?” said Lowry.

  “Elves and the Shoemaker,” James said.

  “Take it,” Lowry said. He pushed his right shoe all the way off.

  Lexie kneeled alongside James. “He’s hurt.”

  “You think?” James said.

  “Shut up.”

  “Take the shoe,” repeated Lowry.

  “James?” Lexie said.

  “It’s Mr. Lowry. You know, Father’s lawyer.”

  “But . . . What’s he doing here?” She inhaled loudly. “James! You didn’t—”

  “What? Me? Come on, Lexie! Seriously? I found him like this. Just now. Right here. There was this other guy. And Moria. Over there.”