Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [59]
Which may have been when the coloured window and the small furry dogs had lodged themselves into my young mind.
We lived in San Francisco from September 1905 until the summer of 1906. Many of my parents' friends had fled the shattered city in April, but Mrs Greenfield was quite clear that Mother had insisted on staying on until at least June, assisting with the early weeks of the emergency, before the demands of her young family took her back to England.
This time, without my father. For the next few years, he had lived half the year here and half in England, taking a train to New York and sailing back and forth across the Atlantic in order to be with his family, until finally in the summer of 1912, Mother relented and joined him in California. Two years and three months later, they died, and I had gone away for good.
I laid my scribbled notes in front of Holmes, who glanced at them thoughtfully. “When I first met you,” he said, “I heard a solid basis of London in your voice, with a later overlay of California. Clearly, the influence of very early childhood had been put aside. I shall have to look into this—it would make an interesting monograph.”
“Why don't I remember it?” I protested, then flinched at the tight strain of agony in my voice. “I can understand the early years, but don't people remember things from when they were five or six?”
He studied me appraisingly. “You do honestly wish to know?”
“Don't be ridiculous, Holmes. Why wouldn't I want to know about a large chunk of my missing life?”
“I can think of a number of reasons,” he said, his grey eyes unwavering in their intensity.
“Well, I can't. It's vexing. And more than a little humiliating. Why wouldn't I want to feel whole?”
“If, for example, you discovered that your parents were not the paragons you think them?”
“I loved my parents and respected them, but they were hardly paragons,” I scoffed. “My father was easily distracted and my mother could be cold. And after all, disillusionment is a part of growing up.”
“And if the disillusionment was more serious? If, say, you discovered your father was involved in some act of criminality during the earthquake?”
“What sort of criminality?” I asked sharply.
“Perhaps whatever it was that happened during the Fire, the thing that so upset Mr Long's loyal father.”
I tried to picture my father in the rôle of a criminal, and failed. I shook my head. “Holmes, he was an ethical man. And my mother enormously so—she never would have put up with a real wrongdoing. No, I can only say that, if he did something criminal, there would have been a reason for it.”
“She would not have put up with it, you say. And she left for England a few weeks after the Fire.”
“Wouldn't any woman with two small children?”
His gaze neither changed nor left me, and I shifted uncomfortably. What was he getting at? Why did I feel suddenly uneasy, as if a masseur were closing in on some bruised and tender spot?
But Holmes said nothing further; in its way, that was even worse.
Chapter Nine
Friday morning, faced with a plethora of urgent tasks and troubling questions, I decided that the two things preying most heavily on my mind were my need for a dress for the evening and the continued lack of communication from Dr Ginzberg. As soon as we had finished our breakfast, and after a glance at the changeable spring sky, I put on a light rain-coat and crossed Union Square to the dress shops.
It took a couple of hours to find a frock and shoes sufficiently formal for an evening out, but since my other options were a kimono or salwaar kameez, I persisted, arranging for the necessary alterations (my height exaggerated the hem-lines past current