Sometime later I find myself lying on my back up in the hayloft. I haven't really hidden up here since I was much younger, but it seemed a good place to be in the middle of an autumn afternoon. It was only after I'd stretched out that I realized Daddy's notebook is tucked into the back pocket of my jeans. One of the barn cats has bravely asserted herself and is lying on my chest asleep, purring. I pet her head and she stretches out her legs, toes akimbo, then curls back up on my breasts. That is certainly one thing I inherited from my mother.
Thank you. I whisper into the wooden rafters. Barn swallows pop in and out through the open windows and I can hear the rustling of horses below me. There is a slight breeze up here, but it is not uncomfortable. If I turn on my side and actually look out the windows, I would be able to see several of the mares in the pasture. Amber is down there, quite enjoying having a day off, I think. I settle in a little more with my back against a hay bale I manhandled into its current position. It smells so wonderful that I cannot help but draw in a deep breath. Peace. This is what I have needed since I came home. Just a little time to think.
I pull Daddy's notebook out of my pocket and open it up to the first page.
John H. Watson
Daddy's quite boyish handwriting, written left-handed in a precise manner. I peruse the pages, some are written out paragraphs about one case or another. Some pages only a couple of words, almost like he had been interrupted at some point when he was jotting his notes down. At first, Daddy only wrote down his thoughts after a case had been completed and there was some down time. The further into the notebook I get I notice that sometimes the handwriting is sloppy, almost as if the book was pulled out of a pocket and notes jotted down fresh. Towards the end of the notebook, a name, Moriarity, is written across the top of several pages. At some point, Papa has even gone in and added some of his own little illustrations and the occasional map. This is amazing. It is just like sitting at the kitchen table with them, learning how they worked cases, sometimes from completely different angles, to solve the puzzles.
I flip back to the beginning of the notebook and really start paying attention to what I am seeing. The very first case they worked together, the one that Daddy titled "A Study in Pink" on his blog all those years ago, is a mere three sentences in the notebook.
Rachel, password to her mobile.
Hope, the cabbie, with the pills. He is a dead man walking.
I shot a man for him today.
For some reason, that last sentence brings tears to my eyes. Those seven little words that say so much, even now. I shake my head and realize that there are tears on my face. I huff and angrily wipe at them with the back of my hands.
That loyalty can never be exaggerated. It reminds me so much of Micheal. I don't want to think of Micheal at all, but at least here in the peace of the loft I can give in for a time. I can think about his brown wavy hair and deep brown eyes and how much he meant to me. I can think about how many times I fantasized about telling him how much he meant to me and holding out my arms for a hug that he will now never step into.
I am crying hard now, but its time to let it out. I can't keep holding this in forever. The calico cat has moved from my chest down to my lap and I am sitting up, caressing her soft fur slowly with my fingertips. I am hardly aware, but the purring sound is comforting in a way human voices so rarely are to me.
I never knew that two people who were so opposite could come to care about each other so much. Micheal came from a normal working class family. His dad worked on the docks and his mum was a baker. I met them once or twice, they were wonderful people who cared about their son and daughter very much. They seemed to like me, at least until they found out that I had two fathers. Never mind who my dads are, that wasn't even important to them. Daddy was there the first time I met them and they were cordial to him, as most people are when they meet him the first time. I guess they hear "doctor" and think...who knows what they think? Daddy's smile usually encourages people to talk to him, even complete strangers.
The second time Micheal took me to his house was almost one year ago. He lived half-way between our house and the school, so Papa came out to pick me up. Mr. and Mrs. Tripp had heard me talk about my parents and even heard me use the terms "daddy" and "papa." I don't know why I never thought about it, but apparently they believed that to mean one and the same person. It wasn't until that day when Papa was standing in the doorway in his aristocratic long coat that they put two and two together and came up with the right answer. Papa has been insulted many times before, but the things Mrs. Tripp said to him that day were uncouth. She was cruel and by the time I was able to pull Papa away from Mr. Tripp, he was trembling as much as I was. That woman lit into my father, calling him every name in the book and then some I had never heard until that day. She shouted abuses that probably could be heard several kilometers away.
Micheal stood by my side in the kitchen, his head bowed and tears running down his cheeks. As much as a man any other nineteen year old could be, he looked in that instant to me like a little child. It was then that I knew who he was. It did not change the way I felt about him, but our friendship grew stronger despite his bigot parents. After we got home that night, Papa and Daddy and Grammy and I sat together in the sitting room. Papa was hurt and angry, but more upset that someone could treat their own son this way. I agreed. I knew it was hard for Micheal to be himself around other people, but I never knew it had been that bad. At home! The one place you should be able to be yourself and he couldn't. Daddy hurt for all of us, including my friend. Grammy shook her head and held me close. Papa paced the room for a while but finally settled next to Daddy and we all sat quietly on the sofa for a while, giving comfort to each other.
It hurt me that Micheal could not have this sense of belonging, so I invited him up to the manor on the last couple of breaks we had before the end of the year. The first time he was shy and would barely talk to anyone but me and then he opened up to Daddy and Grammy, but he was still learning Papa. Everyone knew the Great Sherlock Holmes and I'm sure he was a bit intimidated, but Papa was always kind to my friends, all of them, and Micheal especially.
The most memorable moment was last Christmas when he talked to us about a young man he had met at school. I had been in several classes with Richard and had been impressed with my classmate's intelligence. Not to mention looks. It seemed to us all that Micheal was in love. I was so happy for him that I thought my heart would burst. That evening after an excellent dinner prepared by Daddy and Grammy, we had all retired to the sitting room. We were all having a glass of wine and Papa was playing his violin softly in the window, right next to our huge Christmas tree. Uncle Mikey and Greg had come over and we were having quiet conversation when the music stopped suddenly. Apparently, Papa had noticed Micheal watching the violin the way a hawk watches mice. Papa had smiled and handed the bow of the Stradivarius to my friend. Micheal had gaped for a moment but then lovingly accepted the instrument from my father's hands.
He had turned toward the Christmas tree and begun playing so quietly that we could barely hear the notes over the crackling of the fire. In moments, Micheal had recovered from his shock and the instrument was singing in his arms. I knew that Micheal had played several instruments in the past, but to actually get to hear him was something else again. I leaned back against Grammy as we listened to my friend snap the notes out with his eyes closed against the lights. Richard was very lucky and my fervent hope was that he would be able to see this side of my best friend.
I had girlfriends, sure. Some of them had even been invited to our house, but over the years they all seemed to drop away, some married, some moved on to jobs outside the city (one even to Denmark) but Micheal had been my friend for so long that it seemed he would always be there. I knew he would eventually find someone of his own and he regularly encouraged me to go out and date, but the timing never seemed right. Guys either wanted to date me to see how much like my Papa I was or just to get into my pants. Boring. Girls wanted to date me just to catch a glimpse of Papa.
So, yeah, the dating thing was never much my forte.
I shifted my weight and stretched my legs out. The little cat jumped up onto another bale and gave herself a thorough bath. My lap was empty, but my heart was full. Micheal used to laugh and tell me that most normal best-friendships didn't work out this way: one girl and one guy. Since we were ten years old I had asked him why and neither of us ever had an answer. It was funny then that we were friends at all, considering how far apart we lived.
It all started the summer I turned ten years old. Our stable was hosting a Pony Club show and Micheal had shown up with some of his friends. His friends and my friends got along famously and by the time we stopped mucking about with the ponies and our picnic was laid out up at the house, we had become fast friends. It didn't bother him that I was girl and it sure didn't bother me that he was a boy. Maybe I was just used to boys. I don't know.
Regardless of the reasons, Micheal was best friend. We would chat on the computer or we would talk on the phone. Several weekends during the summer, he would get here by means of older friends with wheels and we would all hack out and have a blast. Years later, he encouraged me to try the bow after I told him how Daddy had taught me to shoot with his gun. After I saw the American horse show on the telly, with the "cowboy mounted shooting," it was Micheal that I called, all exited about something new.
It hurts me now to think about how encouraging he had always been to me while living with such a nightmare family. I feel so stupid for not being able to see it. I had nothing to go on, nothing to ever think that someone close to me could be in so much pain, even after I studied some of the cases my parents had worked. The bodies, the passion, well just everything about the human condition. Really, my parents never held anything back from me. They had even told me about the Big thing that my mother had helped them with...
And yet I was still so naive. I sighed and stood up as much as I could in the loft. I needed to get Amber bedded down for the night so I climbed back down the ladder. I was very glad to note that no one had been hanging around listening to me blubber like a fool. I grabbed a pitchfork off the wall near the big doors and opened the door to Amber's empty stall. I sat the pitchfork up against the wall and checked her water buckets. Ugh. She's been dunking her hay again. I pulled the buckets off of their hooks and carried them outside. I walked a few steps off of the path and emptied the buckets, watching the arc of the water as it cascaded towards the ground. I carried them over to the hoses and rinsed them out. I refilled them both about half way and hung them back in her stall, knowing that they would be topped off by the stable hands after the horses were all fed.
After returning Amber's buckets to their places, I poked around in the tack room until I found the big yellow plastic wheelbarrow. Gah, the thing is absolutely hideous, but it is light and really deep. I go back to Amber's stall and proceed to pick up the piles and dig up the wet spot, my mind silently turning back to my dead friend while I work.
Micheal had been there for me through so much and in the end, when it really mattered, I hadn't been there for him. When we got back to school following Christmas break, he and Richard had had some sort of argument. I've never found out what it was all about, but ultimately they had broken up. Apparently, but once again unknown to me, Micheal had argued with his parents on the phone the three days he had been here with us. I knew that his mobile had rang a couple of times, but he always took it outside and I was never one to snoop, mainly because I believed that if it had been important he would have told me about it.
That makes me a fool then, I guess.
I finished cleaning Amber's stall and put the business end of the pitchfork into the wheelbarrow and pushed it down the aisle and out the doors to the muck heap. I pulled the fork out of the way and flipped the wheelbarrow over to empty it. I then pushed it back up the aisle and across the indoor arena to the pile of shavings. I filled the wheelbarrow with the clean shavings and dumped it in the center of Amber's stall. After pushing the wheelbarrow back out into the aisle way, I smoothed the bedding down with the pitchfork. I worked quickly and precisely. I had been cleaning stalls almost as long as I had been hanging out down here in my free time. I never wanted anyone to think that I thought myself above any job, and sometimes I even filled in for stable hands who needed a day off. I enjoyed the work.
I turned back to where I had left the wheelbarrow to find myself looking upward into a pair of blue eyes. Darren had his gloved hands wrapped around the handles of the wheelbarrow and was looking at me with a mixture of annoyance and something I failed completely to recognize. (Oh to have Papa's deducing skills about now would be nice.)
"Sorry." I mumbled. Darren was picky about keeping the aisle way clean, especially at feeding time. He had already opened the gate to the back paddock and the mares were slowly winding their way into the barn and turning into their stalls, all on their own. He held out a hand and I handed him the pitchfork. He nodded at me in appreciation and turned away just as Amber came to a halt outside her stall. A perfect halt, too. Not the half-hearted one she liked to give me when we tried dressage, where she would only stop on three legs with the other one still moving. Figures.
Mares. I sighed and patted her barrel as she walked past me. If she had been human, I could swear she was giving Darren a naughty look out from underneath that thick black forelock. I did not feel much like laughing, but my horse always made me smile. I love these little hairy cobs and she could have as much attitude as she wanted and I think I'd still love her. Who wouldn't love a horse that didn't flinch when you pulled the trigger on her back? She was amazing.
I clicked the latch on her stall door and slowly made my way back up to the house. No doubt my dads would be waiting on me and possibly an explanation for my earlier behavior. What could I tell them that at least one of them didn't already know, and possibly the other one suspected? They both knew that my best friend had killed himself and that it had hurt me in ways I never even thought possible. They understood all of that, I'm sure, and were willing to give me the space I needed to work through it. They knew that I had found him there in the dorm that day. Daddy knew what it was like to see death and be unable to prevent it, so he knew I needed time.
What they didn't know, however, and what I was so lax to tell them or possibly even admit to myself is that he had used my own weapon to do it.