Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [175]
“Your parents were good people,” he said. And then he added the most perfect thing anyone has ever said to me. “They would be proud of you.”
Not that I believed him, of course. Instead I gave voice to the remnants of my guilt. “If I'd told my mother about seeing Greenfield that day, if I'd said something, I might have saved them.”
“I think not. Greenfield was already set on his course. Had you told your mother that you had seen him, it might have caused an argument between your parents, and at most a resolution to confront Greenfield when they returned to the city, but it would not have interrupted the family's progress to the lake. Only Greenfield himself could have done that.”
And I could picture it, clearly: Mother's indignation that Father was meeting the man; a family's final minutes tainted by recrimination and regret; the motorcar setting off down the road . . .
“You would not have changed a thing,” Holmes said firmly. This time, I believed him.
I changed out of my day-clothes and settled into a soft bed that seemed to tremble and sway with my tiredness, but my eyes would not close. I looked at the mezuzah, lying still on the bed-stand, and found myself saying, “Holmes, would you mind awfully if we didn't leave right away? I'd like to see my family's graves, and explore the area a little.”
“No, I do not mind spending more days here. We've been in California for a week and a half, and I don't believe I've set eyes on a redwood tree.”
“And it would also allow you to finish your Paganini research.”
“My—ah, yes, my Paganini research.”
“There is no research project, is there, Holmes?”
“Not as such, no,” he admitted. The bed's sway was magnified briefly as he settled in beside me. I turned to him, closing my eyes with the pleasure of simple human touch.
“Don't let me forget,” he said. “I must be downstairs at nine o'clock for breakfast with Mr Garcia and the Irregulars.”
“I'm sure that if you haven't appeared, we shall wake to find them staring down at us.” He laughed, and stretched to shut off the light. As darkness took over, I had a final thought. “Holmes, what was Dr Ming saying to you?”
“While he was sitting on the motorcar bonnet, do you mean? I apologised for manhandling him so unceremoniously, and said something to the effect of what good fortune it had been to happen across the one person in Chinatown who could summon a crowd's instantaneous response. He replied that the lines of good fortune and the lines of feng shui are often mistaken for each other.”
My sleepy brain chewed on that for a bit. “So, what, he was saying that his presence there was predetermined?”
“His words were ‘Those who perceive the dragon's path may alter it.'”
I wavered: If the old doctor's presence was deliberate, that would suggest that the Fates—or the old gentleman himself—had not only seen the need for his presence at that precise time and place, but had also envisioned our ability to make use of it.
In the end, I shook the troubling conundrum out of my head and settled into the comfort of the pillow. As I slid towards sleep, I felt, or dreamt, the lightest of touches on my hair, followed by the words, “Ah, Russell, what is to become of me? I find I've even grown attached to this infernal hair-cut.”
I felt my lips curl slightly. “That is really most unfortunate, Holmes. I had just decided to allow it to grow back.”
And at last I slept, dreamlessly.
Afterword
Thanks are due, as always, to the wise and capable people of the McHenry Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, without whom this book would be a smaller and less lively thing.
Thanks are also due to Dick Griffiths, Jon Hart, and Fred Zimmerman