The Final Step Read online

  “Moria? Where?”

  “She took off. The guy . . . I didn’t see.”

  “I’m calling nine-one-one!” Lexie said, yanking her phone from her back pocket.

  Lowry’s hand swatted it onto the ground. Lexie screamed loudly.

  “Shh!” James chided.

  “No ambulance,” Lowry said. “No time.”

  “We’ve got to get help!” James said. “Call them!” he told Lexie.

  “No!” Lowry yanked Lexie’s wrist.

  “You can’t involve the school, James. The school’s legacy. Think!”

  Lowry was speaking in code to James. He was protecting the Scowerers, a secret society. A criminal society. James had been initiated as a Scowerer following Father’s death. He now headed a secret criminal society hidden in the secret chamber beneath Baskerville Academy.

  The police were unwanted. By talking about legacy, Lowry had made sure Lexie wouldn’t understand. Lowry being shot involved the Scowerers.

  “Headmaster.” Lowry coughed wetly.

  James was glad he couldn’t see all that much.

  “I’ll get Crudgeon!” Lexie said.

  “No!” both James and Lowry said together.

  Lexie, balanced on her haunches, fell back with the rebuke.

  “We’ll both go,” James said, taking the man’s discarded shoe in hand.

  “We can’t leave him!” Lexie said.

  “You have to,” Lowry said, coughing blood. “They’ll come for me.”

  “Who?” James asked sharply. “Who did this? Mr. Lowry? Who?”

  The air was still. Lowry silent and unmoving.

  “I think he’s . . .” James couldn’t get the word out.

  James and Lexie snapped their heads around as something heavy moved through the forest toward them.

  “James?” she whispered.

  “I think he . . . I d-don’t think he’s b-breathing,” James said, stuttering.

  The short distance between James and Lexie seemed to shrink in the darkness. The sounds of breaking of sticks and the clomping of feet marched toward them.

  “This way!” Lexie said, pulling James with her.

  CHAPTER 6

  I’D COME TO LOVE THE SCHOOL’S DARKROOM. Digital and old-school photography occupied one small area in the school’s makerspace. I was old school: it was chemicals, racks, dryers, and projectors for me. At first, the smell of the chemicals made it unpleasant. The eerie red light felt spooky and threatening. And then there were the photos themselves, black-and-white images clipped to wires and hanging down like flags: faces, places, and such. The darkroom was intense. I had to focus on ratios, timing, science. I liked shooting old-school film, as our teacher had us doing our first year. Digital photography would follow next semester, but the idea was that knowing where photography had started, learning how to take a strip of film and make pictures, gave the form meaning. I was hooked. I spent whatever free time I had developing film and making prints.

  Focusing on my darkroom work also served as an escape from my thoughts. It was nice to find a place where I could get into a zone that pushed away roommates, my brother, my studies, the pressures that came from living and playing with other boys and girls. In the darkroom I entered the world of image, leaving the world of personality behind.

  This “zone” was something new to me. I’d heard people talk about it: musicians mostly. I’d never experienced it for myself except when reading—being so immersed in, so part of something I forgot I was breathing. Once into the darkroom I forgot basically everything but the roll of film or the photograph I was developing.

  I forgot to lock the door.

  Locking the door was critical to preserving your film and prints because an open door meant light and calling it a darkroom was not just a cute name. If the room wasn’t dark, the work was ruined.

  The door came open, and with it light. My pictures were toast! I turned to confront the moron who hadn’t bothered to knock.

  A hand clapped across my mouth and a piece of paper was stuffed between my clenched fingers.

  “Your brother.” A man spoke. More wind than voice. He might have been seventeen or forty.

  He let me go. The door shut behind him. I didn’t dare open it or follow him out.

  No, instead I locked it from the inside. I sank to my knees. I wasn’t thinking about the heroic things I might have done. I was trying to figure out what had happened! Door opens. Man. Note. Door closes.

  In the darkroom’s red light, I read “James Moriarty” written on the folded piece of paper.

  Why give me a note for James? I tried to understand what was happening.

  1)A note could be mailed, so why deliver it in person?

  Possibilities:

  a)urgency; no time to wait for the mail

  b)effect; to scare me, to make sure I passed my fear along to my brother, heightening the importance or significance of the note

  c)panic; poor planning on the part of the person who’d written the note, see (a), which leads naturally to the messenger’s feeling threatened or suffering from injury so . . .

  2)Why not leave the note in my brother’s room; why give it to me?

  Possibilities:

  a)the messenger doesn’t know which room is my brother’s room

  b)visitors aren’t allowed into the dorms—the messenger is not a student or faculty member

  c)or . . . the messenger is a student or faculty member but can’t risk being seen in a dorm where he doesn’t belong

  d)the messenger knows me by my face, but not my brother

  There had to be others but I couldn’t think of them. Coming to my feet, I finally switched on the light.

  I ripped the taped edge and unfolded the note.

  Ha Clues He

  I refolded the note and eased the door open, forgetting all about my photography work. The school’s makerspace was empty. I took a step, slipped, and nearly fell. The floor was wet. A small puddle, and from it, wet wheel marks.

  A wombat? I wondered. A student nickname for the dorm janitors.

  Had a wombat passed me the note? It seemed unlikely. A wombat could just slip it under James’s door.

  For a moment, I considered following the shoe prints. They seemed to aim deeper into the makerspace.

  I wasn’t feeling brave. Far from it. I was shaking like a leaf.

  I took a deep breath and took off running for the Bricks, the school dorms.

  Answers could wait.

  CHAPTER 7

  WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT WOULD HAVE BEEN Lexie Carlisle to read the Boston Herald? Who couldn’t have guessed that? The small number of students during summer session left the common room pretty empty.

  I watched as Lexie stood and walked past the empty couches, benches, and game tables. The plastic ficus trees. Over the semicircular shadows cast by the 1960s-style wood-and-polished chrome chandeliers.

  Lexie carried the well-read newspaper tucked under her arm as she searched for James among those awaiting dinner. She shouldn’t have had such a hard time finding him, except that James hadn’t arrived yet.

  Lexie’s presence in summer session was likely as bewildering to others as was mine and James’s. I expected the reason for Lexie being here for summer session, like ours, was more the result of “what to do with the poor darling?” than anything to do with grades. Her father, like ours, had died. Hers in winter session; ours in fall. James and I had also lost our family driver and all-around-greatest-guy-ever, Ralph, to a nasty car accident. What a year! Lexie’s mother wasn’t doing well. James and I didn’t have a mother. She’d run off for unknown reasons years before. We lived with her absence, never accepting it, but what can you do to change a fact?

  The three of us had been swept under a rug for the summer. Lois, our former nanny, who was now employed by our legal guardian to take care of us, simply had no clue what to do with us. Like the two of us, she had been devastated by Ralph’s death.

  So, there we were, Lexie and
I. And it was almost dinnertime. I was spying on her, to be sure, because there was something in the way she carried that newspaper, pinned under her arm like it might as well have been surgically attached. No joke! It wasn’t about the sudoku or crossword puzzle. It wasn’t about the horoscopes. The newspaper had purpose, something worth clinging to. Maybe what was in it explained how Lexie the Loser had won my brother’s attention. For twelve years he and I had been like a person and his shadow. At Baskerville, things were different. At Baskerville, everything had changed.

  James entered the room strutting like a crown prince. He had a newfound high opinion of himself and I resented that. The thing was, I knew James to be internally confident but outwardly shy. Somewhere along the line a switch had been thrown. He acted as if he knew something no one else did and that whatever he knew was something everyone wanted to know. Girls noticed him now in ways they hadn’t before. Several gestured with small finger-waves in his direction, or offered him a telling smile. It made me sick! The boys fell into two camps: James’s camp and those who pretended he didn’t exist. But the funny thing was just by pretending, they made James exist all the more. Infuriating.

  Lexie saw James. She didn’t finger-wave. She didn’t smile slyly like the other girls. She turned her back on him, tightening her wing-clasp on the newspaper.

  I could be really dense. It was something I could admit to myself, but rarely to another living person. Using this scintillating piece of knowledge, I moved to within range of Lexie and got a good look at her prized newspaper, mentally recording two of the paper’s photographs.

  I backed away, turned, and found the table where the daily newspapers lay like terrace stairs. Three copies each: The New York Times, Boston Herald, Washington Post, USA Today. Untouched, to my surprise. During the school year I would have found only one or two copies, and all wrinkled from over-reading. Summer session really was different!

  The photos matched with Lexie’s copy. I had the right edition. I sat down and started turning pages quickly, eyes on headlines. In between turns, I monitored both James and Lexie, somehow knowing they were going to find each other. Opposite field magnets, and all of that.

  The bottom half of the Metro section’s opening page carried four headlines: a drug bust, Boston police security at a hockey game, a major “weather event” predicted the following day. And, top of the page:

  PREEMINENT ATTORNEY MURDERED IN MUGGING

  My eyes raced across the words, picking and choosing, like running through a field of wildflowers.

  Conrad Lowry, Esq., our family lawyer, had been murdered in Boston. He had hired Lois and Ralph to take care of us after Father’s accident. Now his body had been recovered in a park in Roxbury, mentioned as the city neighborhood with the second-highest crime rate. Mr. Lowry dead? I hadn’t known him all that well, but he’d worked with Father forever.

  Mr. Lowry had been found with no wallet, jewelry, or property on his person. He’d been identified by a dry-cleaning tag pinned onto the lining of his suit jacket. With a shortness of breath, I wondered why Lexie had brought the paper. Did she somehow know this was news James—and I—had to know? How could she know Mr. Lowry was our father’s attorney?

  It was weird the way it affected me. Much too quickly, outrage and fear changed to suspicion. Not so much about Mr. Lowry, although that may have been in my thoughts, but about Ralph’s car crash. I don’t know why I would have thought about Ralph, but there it was. A car crash. A mugging. My father falling off a ladder. Taken by themselves, the three deaths seemed like bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. The newspaper article made no mention of why Mr. Lowry had been in Roxbury, alone and in a park. Maybe the police were still trying to figure that out. Maybe they’d never know.

  James and Lexie found an island of empty space to the left of the massive bay window that looked west, down across tennis courts and the varsity football field to the lush green of endless forest and waves of ever fainter hills. Lexie passed the newspaper to him, her action confirming my earlier concern.

  He read; looked up; eyes back to the newspaper; back to Lexie. The two talked and I witnessed confusion on my brother’s face. I saw a troubled brow and squinting eyes. He pursed his lips between his spoken words, which from a distance looked like whispering.

  But something was missing from his reaction. Something big: surprise. Shock. James wasn’t the least bit shocked or troubled or grief-stricken by the news. He didn’t grab for his phone. Instead, he appeared to carefully read the article. He occasionally consulted Lexie, then read some more. The two looked more like they were discussing a term paper than the death of James’s and my legal guardian.

  Jealousy filled me like air in a balloon. I was going to burst. That was supposed to be me talking to James, not Lexie. How had she taken over so quickly? Worse: I liked Alexandria Carlisle. She never wore makeup; her uniform’s shirt went untucked most of the time, revealing nothing of her figure the way some girls tried so hard to do. She did her own nails, and not often enough. Could look pretty if and when she wanted, which wasn’t often. But she’d gone to James about the news. My brother never so much as looked for me in the room. Why hadn’t the school told James and me? Was it a surprise to everyone?

  I wouldn’t know what had been said that night for several weeks.

  “We should have helped him,” Lexie told James.

  “He didn’t want us to. I think he knew he was dying. There was no time.”

  Lexie sniffled.

  “I know . . .” James said. “So awful.”

  Neither spoke for several minutes.

  “Who could have moved his body?” Lexie asked James in a whisper. “All the way to Boston? Why? James?”

  “Hmm? I suppose someone didn’t want him found here.”

  “But why?” she asked. “Are you listening to me, James?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why would someone not want—? The headmaster wouldn’t order something like that. This can’t possibly be about bad publicity!”

  “No. I agree. Not the headmaster,” James said. “Of course not!”

  “You don’t sound convinced,” Lexie said. James pretended not to hear her. “Who would do such a thing? And why?”

  “Really, Lexie? You can’t answer that?” He searched her eyes. “Who’s the one person who cares about moving a body that’s been shot?”

  “The person who shot him! The killer!”

  “Shh! Not so loud! Yes, the killer.”

  “Oh my dog!” she said. “Scum of a beach!”

  “Yeah,” James said.

  “Someone at Baskerville killed your family attorney?” She backed up a step. “James?”

  “No! I mean, how should I know?” James groaned. “The riddle. The one he told me not to forget. The Elves and the Shoemaker. Maybe that’s a clue. Maybe that’s why he wanted me to remember.”

  “Brothers Grimm. I looked it up,” Lexie said. “It’s not much of a story. Some naked elves and this old cobbler. The elves make all the shoes for him when he’s sleeping at night.”

  “Naked. Ick,” James said. “I looked it up, too.”

  “Of course you did,” Lexie said. “I don’t think there’s even a moral to it.”

  “I don’t see how it means anything. A shoeshine guy? I don’t see a connection.”

  “It must mean something,” she said.

  “I think that’s overly optimistic,” James said.

  “Someone shot him, James. Remember hearing that sound?”

  James ignored her question. “But what was Lowry doing on school property in the first place? Doesn’t make sense.” James tried to sound surprised. In fact, he had the explanation: the Scowerers. The secret group met beneath the chapel. But James would have, should have, known of such a meeting.

  He had someone he could ask. It would have to wait until after dinner.

  The dining room’s enormous doors opened, nearly smacking the two. But James pulled Lexie out of the way just i
n time, and held her arm as they searched for a table.

  Mr. Hinchman’s dinner table rarely failed to entertain. The boys’ varsity soccer coach, and father of two day students (the most beautiful girls on campus), Hinchman had boyish expressions and a willing laugh. He was a favorite of the students. Summer session’s light attendance lessened the crush and the rush to find a good seat at his table for dinner. James and Lexie took chairs immediately to Hinchman’s right, with Lexie sitting closest to the math teacher.

  “Reading the paper, I see,” Hinchman said to Lexie. “Wonderful habit to have, Alexandria.”

  She slipped the paper under her bottom. “I like to keep up with what’s going on in Boston.”

  “Head of the Charles is my favorite event,” James said. “The regatta. Ever been?”

  “I haven’t,” said Hinchman. “I hunt on my October Sundays. We have soccer games on Saturdays, of course.”

  “Hunt? You shoot . . . animals?” Lexie said.

  “Birds. Ducks. Geese. Yes. And we eat every one.”

  A disapproving Lexie retreated into string beans and bacon.

  “Quail. Pheasant. Diego, named after Diego Maradona, has such a nose. Best hunting dog, ever, bar none.”

  “I’ve never seen a hunting dog do his thing,” James said. “Is he like a bloodhound?”

  “He can scent anything. Absolutely! And birds, he scents naturally. Dogs have a sense of smell forty times that of humans. You’re welcome to come out with me sometime this fall, James. Would love to have you.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Lexie leveled James with a look of utter disapproval. But James didn’t care. She couldn’t see past her green beans. She wasn’t thinking. Such moments went to his head, reinforcing his sense of superiority. There were the small-minded people and then there was James Moriarty, purveyor of the entire landscape of possibility.

  They got past the meat loaf. Killed the mashed potatoes. Left most of the oily green beans and bacon in the dish. Lexie talked with Hinchman about Diego Maradona’s soccer career. James tuned out all conversation, his mind going like a millstone, grinding away the coarse and refining it into something digestible. Let them have their small talk; James had moved on.