Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [12]
I continued south, which I knew was the general direction of downtown—it is difficult to become seriously lost in a city with water on three sides. And I was beginning to take note of my surroundings again, raising my eyes from the pavement to look around me. This was a more heavily residential area, the houses both older and larger than they had been in the area I had fled through, the residents less strikingly regional. As the ground rose, steeply now in a delicious challenge to my leg muscles, the houses began to retreat from the public gaze behind solid walls and gated drives. Street noises diminished with the loss of restaurants and shops, the trees grew taller and more thickly green, and the paving stones underfoot were more even although the number of pedestrians was markedly reduced.
The hilltop enclave might have had a moat around it and signs saying Important Persons Only. From here, the bank manager's driver could take his employer to the financial district and easily return in time to run the man's wife to her luncheon date downtown. There was no risk of roving gangs of boisterous children here, or late-night revellers walking noisily past by way of a short-cut home.
Even the air smelt of money, I thought, crisp and clean.
I looked up smiling at the house opposite, an unassuming brick edifice of two tall stories, and nearly fell on my face over my suddenly unresponsive feet.
I saw: snippets of red-brick wall and once-white trim set well back from the street, now nearly obscured by a wildly overgrown vine and an equally undisciplined jungle of a garden; a grey stone garden wall separating jungle from pavement, in want of repointing and somehow shorter than it should be; one set of ornate iron gates sagging across the drive and a smaller pedestrian entrance further along the wall, both gates looped through with heavy chains and solid padlocks; the chain on the walkway gate, which for lack of other fastening had been welded directly onto the strike-plate—the very strike-plate that had reached out to gash open my little brother's scalp when he had tripped while running through it.
There was no mistaking the shape of the house: My feet had led me home.
Chapter Three
I don't know how long I stood there in the fading light, gawping at the house. I do know that it was nearly dark when a hand on my shoulder sent me leaping out of my skin in shock.
I whirled and found myself face-to-face with a tall, thin, grey-haired gentleman with sharp features and sharper grey eyes. I expelled the breath from my lungs and let my defensive hand fall back to my side.
“Holmes, for goodness' sake, do give a person some warning.”
“Russell, I've been standing behind you clearing my throat noisily for several minutes now. You appeared distracted.”
“You might say that,” I said grimly.
“Am I to assume this is your family's house?”
I turned back to look at what was gradually becoming little more than a blocky outline against the sky. “I couldn't have told you for the life of me where it was, but my feet knew. I looked up and there it was.”
“Do you wish to go in?”
“I don't have a key,” I said absently, then caught myself. “Not that the lack of a key would stop you. But frankly, I don't think your lock-picks would do much good against the rust on those padlocks.”
“The wall, however, is easily scaled. Shall we?” So saying, he bent and hooked his hands together to receive my foot. I eyed the top of the stones, which indeed were scarcely five feet tall, although my memory of them was high—my childhood memory, I reminded myself. The wall was not set with glass or