Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [5]
“So I tell myself.”
“But yourself will not listen.”
“A lifetime's habit of self-preservation leaves one disinclined to accept the idea of coincidence.”
“Holmes, one event does not a coincidence make.”
“But two oddities catch at the mind.”
“Two?”
“The fallen balcony, and the ship's passenger who enquired about us, then disembarked. In Aden.” He raised an eyebrow at me to underscore the importance of that last.
“The ship's . . . Oh, yes, Thomas Goodheart's little story. A Southerner, didn't he say?” Tommy Goodheart, American aristocrat and occasional Bolshevik, had led us a merry chase across India over the course of January and February. Deep in a tunnel beneath a hill palace, with the maharaja's guards close on our heels, Tommy happened to mention that a female passenger on board our ship, a passenger who mysteriously disembarked in Aden, had been talking to him about Sherlock Holmes. Later, in a spymaster's office one sultry afternoon in Delhi, Holmes had pressed the young man for further details, but there were few to be had.
“From Savannah, or so she'd claimed. It might be noted that the accents of the American South are among the easiest to feign.”
“Holmes,” I chided, “don't you find it difficult to mistrust that the sun will rise in the east come morning?”
“Not in the least. I am more than willing to operate under the hypothesis that past experience will continue to provide the paradigm for Nature's functions. Although I do not believe that witnessing the sun rising in the west would cause my heart to stop.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Watching my wife go over the rail of a ship, however, might have done the job.”
“I was only—”
“You were three degrees from overbalancing.” His hard voice brooked no argument, and although that in itself would not normally have prevented me from arguing, at the moment all I could think of was my inadvertent shudder at the alluring smoothness of the ship's wake.
When I did not answer, he sighed. “Russell, clearly something is tormenting your mind. And while I firmly believe that all persons should be allowed to wrestle with their own demons, it is nonetheless possible that two minds working in tandem on the problem might have more effect than one tired mind on its own.”
“Yes, very well,” I snapped. I set my feet onto the deck, then spent some time studying my hands while the words arranged themselves in my mind. “When I suggested that after Bombay we should go to San Francisco, it seemed a logical idea. My business in California is best served by my presence, and . . . Well, I thought it a means of saying my farewells, which I was in no condition to do when I left ten years ago. But I am finding that the nearer we get, the more I wish we'd just turned for home. I . . . I find I am dreading the entire thing.”
“Of course you are,” he said. “It is quite natural that you do not wish to go to San Francisco.”
“What do you mean?” I protested, stung. “It's taken me days to admit to myself that I was wrong, yet you claim to have known all along?”
“I do not say you are wrong, merely that you are torn. Russell, the moment we turned for California you became irritable, insomniac, restless, and without appetite. When we paused in Japan, your troubles were suspended—you slept, ate, and concentrated as you normally do—but when we resumed our easterly progress, they began again. What else could it be? Some curious aversion to the ship itself? I think that unlikely.”
I could only stare at him, openmouthed, until his face twisted in a moue of impatience. “Russell, we are sailing on a straight path for the place that holds the most troubling memories of your childhood. It is only natural that you feel concern about seeing the place that burned to the ground when you were six—yes, yes, you weren't there, but even if you were not present you would have been told about it, over and over. Furthermore, it is the place where, at the age of fourteen, you