Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [18]
“I'm not really hungry. You go ahead, if you like, and join me later.”
“No, I shall go with you,” Holmes said. We assembled our possessions, and at the door he paused to ask, “Do you have the keys?”
“Of course,” I said. “They're in my . . . No, they're not. What have I done with them? Oh, yes, here they are.”
I had left the brown envelope on the foot of my bed, I saw, and went back to pick it up. As I turned back to the door, I thought about the walk before me and the condition of the house—and, no doubt, its facilities—at the end of it. “I'll be with you in a moment, Holmes,” I said, and stepped into the marble-and-gilt room. When I had finished, I dried my hands, patted my hair (unnecessarily—the bob minded neither wind nor neglect) and strode to the door.
“The keys?” Holmes reminded me.
“They're—Damn it, where have I put them now?” I spotted the manila rectangle, half hidden between the mirror and a vase of flowers, and picked it up curiously: The wretched thing eluded me so persistently, it might have been possessed. With a spasm of irritation, I ripped it open and tipped its contents into Holmes' outstretched palm. His long fingers closed around the simple silver ring with half a dozen keys that ranged from a delicate, inch-long silver one to an iron object nearly the length of my hand. I tossed the scraps of paper in the direction of the trash basket, and marched out into the corridor.
Twice on the way I took a wrong turn; both times I looked around to find Holmes standing and watching me from up the street. The first time he had a frown on his face, the second a look of concern; when we finally reached the house itself he stopped before the wide gate, studying the keys in his hand.
“Russell, perhaps it would be best for me to enter first.”
“Open the gate, Holmes.”
He raised his eyes to my face for a moment, then slid the big iron key inside the padlock's hole and twisted. The metal works had clearly been maintained—oiled, perhaps, on the gardener's yearly visits—and the key turned smoothly.
I stepped onto the sunken cobblestones of the drive, my nerves insisting that I was approaching the lair of some creature with teeth and claws. I could feel eyes upon me, and not simply those of the guardian neighbour across the street. Yet there was no movement at any of the windows, no evidence of traffic apart from the footprints and crushed vegetation Holmes and I had left the day before. With Holmes at my back I walked towards the front door—and nearly leapt into his arms with a shriek when the branches above us exploded with sudden motion: three panicked doves, fleeing this invasion of their safe sanctuary.
I forced a laugh past my constricted throat, and gestured for Holmes to precede me to the door.
The solid dark wood was dull with neglect, the varnish lifted in narrow yellow sheets where the years of rain had blown past the protective overhang of the portico. Thick moss grew between the paving tiles; an entire fern grotto had established itself in the cracks where stonework met door frame. I heard the sound of the tumblers moving in the lock, a sound that seemed to shift my innards within me. Holmes turned the knob without result, then leant his shoulder against the time-swollen wood, taking a sudden step across the threshold as the door gave way.
The dark house lay open to us. I looked over Holmes' shoulder down the hallway, seeing little but a cavern; steeling myself, I took a step inside. As I did so, the corner of my eye registered an oddly familiar rough place in the frame of the door, about shoulder height. I stopped, one foot on either side of the threshold, and drew back to examine it.
A narrow indentation had been pressed into the surface, some four inches in height and perhaps half an inch wide. Screw-holes near the top and the bottom, and a gouge a third of the way down from the top where someone had prised the object out of the varnish that held it fast. A mezuzah, I thought, and suddenly she was there.
My mother—long rustling skirt and the graceful brim of a hat high