Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [25]
I placed the picture back upright on the cloth, and one by one, set the others upright as well. My father appeared, stretched out on a travelling-rug laid across a very English-looking stretch of pebbly beach, eyes closed behind his spectacles, the blonde infant tucked under his arm similarly asleep; my dark-haired brother as a small baby was next, his face surrounded by a cloud of lace in our mother's arms, a peculiarly enigmatic expression on her features; me by a lake, shovel in one hand, mud to my waist, a look of great stubbornness on my face. Then a surprise: a pair of strangers who could not possibly be related to me.
I knew who they were, though: Their shades had just visited me downstairs, in the kitchen and just outside its door. Mah and Micah, siblings or, I thought, studying their broad, foreign faces more carefully, a married couple. And if their employment here had struck me as unlikely, how much more so their presence in my mother's collection of intimate family portraits?
I sat down on the padded bench before the dressing-table with the small photograph of two middle-aged Chinese people in one hand, looking between it and the larger one of my brother and myself in Oriental costume. The edge of the carved cabinet could be seen in both photographs; they had been taken in the same room.
After a minute I reached out to prop up the remaining pictures. The first showed a curly-headed blonde girl of about five, bony knees drawn up into a large wooden chair, a book spread out in her lap, squinting in concentration at the pages. Portrait of a young scholar: Miss Mary Russell at her books. And finally, like a familiar face in a crowd, the picture of my house in Sussex. It had been a vacation cottage during the periods we lived in England, and I had insisted on going back there when I was orphaned, to the place where happiness had once lived.
Not that I had found happiness still in residence when I returned: Instead, I got my aunt. But I had held to myself the sensation of refuge, and restored the house to it when I came of age and turned that so-called guardian out. Clearly, my mother, too, had treasured the summer weeks there on the Downs.
My reverie was broken by motion. I looked up, and nearly dropped the pictures before my mind interpreted the ghost it was seeing as Holmes' reflection in the filthy looking-glass.
“Holmes! You startled me. Did you find anything?”
“Dried scraps of soap in the bath-room dishes, beds still made up, two half-packed trunks here and one in the child's room, and in the attic entire townships of mice. What have you there?”
I handed him the picture of Mah and Micah for his examination, watching his reflected face, seeing his eyes flick from the Chinese faces to the ornately wrought frame, then to the identical frames that graced the family pictures.
“Provocative,” he said after a minute, and gave it back to me.
“Why were you so interested in my father's dressing-table?” I asked.
“That was not I.”
Startled, I looked into his dim reflection, then swivelled around on the bench to stare at the swirl of footprints I had taken to be his. This time, I saw: At least two other people had walked through this room, one with feet slightly smaller than Holmes', the other's considerably smaller. I slid the photo into my pocket and went to see what had interested the intruders.
The other dressing-table, which had neither seat nor mirror, stood just outside the door to the bath-room. That it belonged to a man was clear even under cover, since the shapes were those of a man's hair-brushes and a clothes brush, and little else. Kneeling in front of it, I could see that the dust on the top had been recently disturbed; I duplicated the disturbance now, folding the cloth back to reveal a small drawer. It did not take a magnifying glass to see the marks on its brass