Locked (12 page)

How much longer will this last?

Estimate: Not long. Days at most. Something will happen to break through her loyalty. I’ll do something to ruin it.

I always do something.

|||

“Irene!” Robyn shrieks. “You are a terrible person.”

“I am?” I stop mid-bite of rubbery mac and cheese.

“Yes.” Robyn slams her tray down next to me. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“Didn’t tell you what?”

“That you’re going out with Sherlock Holmes!”

“Oh,” I say. “Right.”

“
Oh, right?
That’s all you have to say for yourself? I am
ashamed
of you, Irene Adler.”

“I guess you’re feeling better.”

It’s been a few days since the basketball kiss and the jump into the water. I haven’t heard a word about the photo since then. I have, however, heard many words about my relationship status. My favorite rumor so far is that Sherlock and I are hitchhiking to Vegas next weekend to get married. Sherlock’s favorite is that I dug up something gruesome in Sherlock’s past and now I’m blackmailing him. He always likes the morbid ones.

“I was. Not anymore!” Robyn’s been out with the flu since the beginning of the week. She still looks a bit droopy. Her hair’s down. Not even one bow. “I’ve tried calling you a bajallion times.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“You moron.” She takes a seat. Across the cafeteria, all of her usual friends are sitting with their heads swiveled nearly backwards, unblinking eyes aimed straight at us.

I point at them. “Do they know they look like a bunch of owls?”

“I will nobly choose to ignore that.
If
.” She leans so far toward me that I have to lean back.

“If what?”

“If you spill. Everything. How many times have you done it? Is he good? How big is—”

I choke loudly mid-slurp, spraying milk everywhere. Robyn nobly ignores this too. “Because we’re taking bets,” she finishes. “My guess is—”

“Oh my God. Stop right there.”

“Is it true that British men—?”

“Stop!” I howl. “We haven’t done anything yet.”

“Ah.” She nods wisely. “You’re waiting til Vegas.”

“Yes. Wait—no.
No
. We’ve been—” I swallow, “—dating for like five minutes, can everyone just calm down?”

“Oh, Irene.” Robyn tilts her head patronizingly. “You know nothing interesting happens around here.”

I finish my lunch at top speed. If Sherlock was here, none of this would be happening. With Sherlock around, people are generally too intimidated to interrogate me. But Sherlock’s nowhere to be seen. He’s probably skipping again. I’ll have to talk to him about that. There’s only so far he can go before he gets expelled.

Most likely, he’s already at home. After school, I’ll go over and find him smoking out the house again, or doing some weird experiment. I’ll yell at him and air everything out. And then we’ll have to go find something interesting to do, because Sherlock requires interesting.

I can’t wait.

“Where are you going?” Robyn whines as I stand up.

“Gym class.” I salute.

“You know, you seem…” She leans forward on her elbows. “Different.”

“People change, I guess.”

She smiles. “Go make out with your boyfriend.”

I’d thought the boyfriend thing would get old pretty quickly, but oddly, I don’t mind it all that much. It’s funny, anyway. And yesterday Sherlock had to hold my hand in the hallway, which was downright hilarious. And not altogether awful.

I dump a few things in my locker, consider going to check the locker for Ares letters, and decide against it. I don’t need Ares anymore. Besides, after the whole photo debacle, it’s probably best to take a break.

I head down the stairs just as the bell rings. A few people rush past me. If only I were that excited to get to gym class. Frankly, their enthusiasm is impressive.

That’s when I hear the screams.

Loud ones. Coming from the gym.

People just messing around, obviously. They’re going to get in trouble with Principal Collard. But one scream keeps going, and going—

Of course it doesn’t have anything to do with Sherlock. Why would it? There’s probably a rat in the supply closet. But I’m already running.

There’s such a huge crowd by the doors that at first I can’t see what’s going on. Whatever’s happened, it happened at the worst possible time—everyone from my gym class has just shown up, and everyone from the art department next door has joined the crowd. “
Oh my God
,” someone is sobbing. “
Oh my God
.”

What the hell—

“Excuse me,” I say and shove to the front. Aspen High is notorious for people who shove back if you shove them first, but today, everyone just gets out of my way.

“You killed her!” someone screams.

Killed?

Who killed who?

“That’s Sherlock Holmes,” someone next to me whispers, and then his name is being spoken all around me like a virus. Someone moves and suddenly I can see. All of my breath spills out of me at once. My heart stops.

The open-eyed body of Daphne Brown is splayed on the gym floor, blood in a neat pool around her head.

And Sherlock is standing next to her.

Carol’s hanging from her seatbelt, blood that should be inside her streaming down her face in trickles, rivers, and her eyes are open but they’re wrong—

I try to speak, but my mouth feels like it’s been shot full of Novocain. Finally I manage it. “Go—go get the principal,” I mumble to a stark-white freshman standing next to him, who jolts and flees.

This can’t be real. This can’t. Be. Real.

Sherlock is totally still. He’s holding a bloodied hockey stick, his sleeve pulled down to cover his fingertips. To not leave fingerprints. Or to avoid smudging any that are already there.

Please, Sherlock. Put that down.

I’d love a decent murder.

“You—you killed her!” someone shrieks again, hysterically. It’s a guy to my left, pointing his trembling finger at Sherlock.

They’re all staring at him with a mixture of terror and hate.

He meets my eyes.

There’s a dull sound in my
head, a distant echo—the sound of metalwork underwater.
“Everyone calm down,” I whisper.

“He
murdered
her!”

I imagine plunging into the ice water, the cold shaking me into clearness, and point sharply at a sophomore frozen with her phone in her hand. “You. Call 911. Now.”

I stride out from the half-moon of people, into the empty stretch of space punctuated by Sherlock and Daphne’s body, and kneel next to her. One lens of her glasses is broken, distorting the blank eye behind it. Her hair is stuck to the floor with blood. Last time I saw her, she was crying. Last time I saw her, she was alive. I revive the memory of the cold and press my forefinger against her neck. Her skin is cool. There’s no pulse.
      

“She’s dead. I checked,” says Sherlock.

His voice is dispassionate and clean. I’m probably the only person in the world who could detect that slight shake.

“Get away from him!” cries a girl. Jackie. Jackie, who had a crush on him just the other day. “Irene, get away!”

I stand up, fighting a million things at once—nausea, dizziness, the weakness in my own voice. I have to say it now. It’s very important that everyone understand it right away. “Sherlock didn’t do this.”

He looks at me swiftly.

“What—what are you talking about,” Jackie croaks, her face just as pale and horrified and trembling as everyone else’s. “He’s standing right there.
Next to her
.”

“Did anyone see him do it?” It’s only because I’m shouting that I realize we’ve been talking in whispers. As if it’ll wake Daphne up.

There’s a wave of silence, broken only by crying.

I turn to Sherlock. “You just found her here, right?”

He nods, almost imperceptibly.

“See?” I’m shouting again. I’m verging on hysteria. I have to be steady. “He only found her.”

“We found them.
Together
.” It’s August. Even his usually cocky voice is breaking.

“So he found her first. And he picked—he picked that up.” I add in a faint whisper, “Sherlock, put it down.”

He lets go of the hockey stick like it had cut him. It clatters to the ground.

“Irene, come on,” Jackie whimpers. “Just come back over here.”

Sherlock doesn’t look afraid, exactly. It’s just that he looks so alone. So starkly separated. I reach over and take his hand, squeezing it. Hard. An I’m-not-going-to-leave-you-alone-to-this squeeze. He’s still motionless. Like if he doesn’t move, this will all go away.

It won’t.

This will never go away.

“Yeah, sure,” someone yells, nearly insanely. “Stick up for your murderer boyfriend.”

“Maybe she helped him do it.” The murmur comes from somewhere in the back.

“Irene, don’t do this,” says Sherlock quietly. Sirens wail in the distance. The police are coming. The police will fix this.

I grip his hand so tightly my own fingers burn. “Shut up.”

It feels like a million years before Principal Collard arrives, flanked by cops. This time, he doesn’t turn red—he turns white, whiter than Sherlock had been when we’d jumped into the ocean.

When he’d jumped in the ocean for me.

“Everyone, out. Get out,” Principal Collard is ordering, dividing the crowd as he passes through. “All students to the auditorium, now.”

“Sherlock did it,” someone says. “Sherlock Holmes.” They’re echoed by three others.

“Don’t lie.” I’m still shouting. And now my eyes are burning, too. Maybe this is a trick. Maybe Daphne’s staging some scene from a comic book and in a second she’ll get up and laugh at us.

“Out!” Collard keeps shouting until finally, it works. People bleed around him and filter away until it’s just the cops and us. A vise tightens around my chest. Sherlock still hasn’t moved.

A voice comes over the intercom: “
All students please proceed to the auditorium
.”

“Jesus,” mutters one of the officers, staring down at the body.

Another one approaches Sherlock. “Sherlock Holmes? Son, you’re going to have to come with us.”

“Adler!” Collard is screaming at me, like he can scream things back to the way they were this morning, before anyone was murdered in his school. “The auditorium. Now!”

I don’t let go of Sherlock’s hand. I don’t think I’ll ever let go. We’ll have to go to the bathroom together. A crazy laugh surges in my chest and I have to battle it down. “He didn’t do it.”

The nearest officer takes out a pair of handcuffs. “Back away, now.”

“He didn’t do it. If you take him you have to take me too.”

“We’ll be questioning all you students, don’t worry.”

“Irene,” says Sherlock. “Let go.”

One of the policeman grabs my shoulder and drags me back while the other one cuffs Sherlock, using more force than I personally think is necessary.

“You’re a sick kid,” he mutters to Sherlock, glancing down at the body again.

It makes me furious. “He didn’t do it.
He didn’t do it
. Why the fuck can’t you people understand that?”

“Language, Adler!” And then I’m being hauled back by Principal Collard himself. “I’m sorry,” he says to the policeman. “Her sister passed away recently, she’s gone through some hard times—”

I break free. “Sherlock. Tell them you didn’t do it.”

Two policemen kneel next to the body while the third pushes Sherlock past me.

“It’s all right, Irene,” I hear him saying as they take him farther away. From me.

It’s not all right.

It’s so far from all right.

|||

A day and a half later, they still haven’t released him.

I spend most of the day and a half calling the police station, angrily demanding they

listen. They don’t. School is canceled on Friday and then it’s the weekend, so I don’t have to see the faces of my classmates, most of which I really want to punch. How could they accuse him with no evidence?

Okay, he had mentioned wanting a murder. Once or twice.

And sure, he displayed almost no empathy.

And yeah, maybe he had made it obvious to at least me and the comic book club that he wasn’t a big fan of Daphne Brown.

But Sherlock isn’t a killer. He’s a good person—I think—who happens to not seem very much like a good person when you first meet him. Just because he doesn’t have a filter doesn’t make him a murderer.

He’s also absolutely the absolute worst person to be in this situation. Knowing him, he’d probably already insulted every officer who had questioned him and made himself look even more like a criminal in the process. The only ones who know that Sherlock is human are Sherlock and I, and he’s not about to convince anyone.

So I keep calling.

And trying really hard not to think about Daphne Brown crying.

Her funeral is held on Friday. I don’t go. I can’t. I spend hours scrolling through the messages left on her Facebook wall, unable to write one myself. I’m sorry, Daphne. I’m so sorry.

On Saturday afternoon, I put on my jacket and walk to the police station. Mom’s at work, so I can’t take the car. It’s a bitterly cold day. The tips of my hair, still wet from the shower, freeze solid.

Daphne’s hair was wet too. Wet with blood. Who would have wanted to kill her? She was unobtrusive. Quiet. As far as I know, I’m the only one at school she ever did anything bad to. She helped people with homework. Smiled in the hallway. She didn’t deserve to die. But then, neither did Carol.

I’m halfway to the station when a very familiar figure steps around the corner in front of me.

“Sherlock!”

It’s him. It’s really him. Tall and messy-haired and a very, very welcome sight. When he spots me he gets a very distinct deer-in-headlights look. I don’t care. I sprint forward.

“Sherlock,” I pant, stopping just short of hugging him. A kid and his mom walk past, the mom pulling her kid away. “What happened? They let you out?”

He puts up a hand. He looks exactly as he did in the gym, same clothes, albeit a little rumpled. “Wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For me to think,” he says curtly. “I was in the middle of it when you decided to appear much sooner than I thought I’d be seeing you.”