Chapter Four
The following morning passed in a trudge of monotony. Picked at breakfast. My father was still alive. Got dressed. He could've been nearing the other side of the world by now. Tried to walk past Mrs. Hudson's car to leave home and investigate. She stopped me halfway down the driveway and forced me into the car.
Odds were at least even that my father hadn't left town yet, since he had made reference to a continued presence. Granted, there were ways to communicate without direct contact like texting or email. Still, it seemed most logical that he'd be staying in close enough range that he'd known where to leave that letter.
Fifteen minutes of wasted time later, I was standing in front of my school. Mrs. Hudson pulled away from the curb. She waited in the same parking spot and watched me intensely until I walked into the building. If I was going to get out of school, I'd have to do it after I was attending it.
It was early enough before class that I had time to take a detour into the cafeteria. I took two mustard packets from the condiment tray and tucked them in my side pocket. The lunch attendant gave me a strange look. I ignored it. I made a second stop in one of the lesser-used men's bathrooms to fill my travel mug with hot water. That time, no one saw. Twenty minutes more, I was sitting in class. I knew it had been twenty because I was watching the clock in the left corner of the room ticking seconds away.
"I assume you've read up to act three, so let's stop looking at the text and consider the implications. At this point, Hamlet has proven his competence in creating his scheme. To us, the reader, his initial motives seem clear, yet as we move forward, we see less of that clarity and more of the madness we may have assumed he was feigning," the teacher, Mr. K, recited off his lesson plan. K was a stout man, late sixties, spoke with a constant wheeze from chain smoking. The nicotine stained his fingers. I couldn't care less what he said.
I heard a tap on the desk beside me. My eyes shifted towards the source. The girl from the adjacent locker was staring in my direction. Her forehead wrinkled with concern. She shifted closer to my side and whispered discreetly. "You look awful. In the modern definition, not the… are you alright?"
I hunched over the desk, closed my eyes and let out an intentionally shallow breath. "No."
She paused for a moment, likely out of concern. "Then maybe, you…"
"How much of Hamlet's madness can we assume is false? Think back to the beginning, to his father's ghost. Did that truly happen, or was it an extension of his decline in sanity?" K lectured with a lack of passion usually reserved for assembly lines workers.
I pressed one hand against my forehead—the universal signal for being in pain and not wishing to discuss it—and raised the other slightly overhead. I waved for K's attention. No reply. I continued to hold my hand in mid-air. An intentional quiver ran through my body. My shoulders slouched under the weight of fake strain. I sat in that position for roughly a minute, holding my breath, waiting to be noticed.
The chair to my right shifted across the floor. "Do you think the nurse would help?" the same girl asked, somehow even more doubtful.
I slid one hand down my face to clasp it over my mouth. I slammed the other against the front edge of my desk, grasping the desk for support as I rose from my chair. My eyes widened with strain that was, aside from a moment of holding my breath, completely fake and, if the stares from the rest of the room were a good indication, fairly convincing. I swallowed a mouthful of air as if choking it down, grabbed the handle of my bag and glanced to the teacher. He was staring back. Good.
I made a point of taking as shallow of a breath as possible. "K, can I…" I cut myself off to lurch forward and choke back another mouthful of air. I spotted a glimpse of concern in the furrow of his eyebrows, enough to assume he believed me. Also good.
Before there was an opportunity for him to think about this farther, I pushed my notebooks towards me with my foot, picked them up, grabbed my travel mug and stood. I staggered my breathing as I passed the front desks and sprinted out of the classroom. The door shut behind me.
The corridor was clean, or as much as it would be for another fifteen hours. Aside from me, no one was in sight, and I didn't count much in this situation. I slowed my pace to a natural stagger and pressed my ear against the wall to listen.
"His motives could be easily reinterpreted as paranoid delusions," the teacher continued. Even through the wall, he was just as monotonous as before.
The girl from before hesitated to speak. "Mr. K?"
"Is this about the lesson or Holmes?" he asked impatiently.
"Both." Another pause. "May I go, sir?"
"If he can run out of class, he should make it to the nurse."
"What if he can't?"
She was still concerned, the exact opposite of what I needed to get away. Evidently, I'd have to be more convincing.
I lowered myself to my knees, set my travel mug on the floor and unscrewed the lid. Steam rose from the cup. I shoved my hand into my pocket, pulled out the packets of mustard and tore them open. I squeezed them into the water, pressed the lid down and began to shake it.
"Ten minutes, Hooper," K caved with sustained disapproval, but too little interest to keep arguing. I could practically see him shaking his head at, ah, Hooper. Alphabetical seating. That made sense.
A chair squeaked across the ground, followed by the light but determined click of Hooper's footsteps. It'd take her thirty seconds to reach the door if she was slow. I turned my back to the door, took the lid off the hot water and mustard concoction, held my breath and gulped it down. One mouthful and I wanted to gag. By the bottom of the glass, my eyes were watering, which, while not the point, was close enough to not matter.
The door squeaked open. Footsteps tapped down the hall at a more rapid pace than normal, plastic heels clicking on the tile. I curled over on the floor, no longer entirely feigning the disgust lurching in my throat, and hobbled to my feet. Her voice chimed behind me.
"I can run, get the nurse here. You can stay, avoid collapsing," she rushed to say, stumbling on her words and a bit on her footwear, also.
I pressed one hand to the forehead and the other to the wall to support myself. "Go away," I ordered, feigning breathlessness.
"But you aren't-"
"Go away!"
The sudden noise startled her enough to stop her mid-step. She stood in place, staring at a loss for what to do. I lifted my hand off of the wall and stumbled forward. The searing in my throat was progressively worse. My steps slowed down accordingly. Still, they were faster than Hooper's, who hadn't budged at all.
I straightened my posture with as much authority as I could manage in spite of the churning in my stomach. "Farther. Go farther."
"But, the nurse. You really should…"
My throat tightened as I struggled to speak over her. "Get back to class. I'm fi-
Before I could so much as finish the word, my stomach churned in protest. I started to move my left hand towards my mouth to block. My hand and the rest of me froze halfway. I vomited on the floor. It was unusually yellow, which may have been suspect if not for the fact that janitors and students didn't tend to examine vomit.
The hand I'd meant to hold myself back with latched onto the wall for support. I leaned against it, struggling to stand upright. Hooper's footsteps clicked against the ground as she ran to my side. "Sherlock!"
Hooper took me by the arm and gently pulled me down the hallway. I tried to turn my arm out of her grasp to walk on my own. It didn't work. She was holding too tightly, and opening my mouth wasn't likely to result in words at the moment. Small as they were, each step forward sent another wave of instability through my head. I shut my eyes, leaned as far away as possible and concentrated on not being sick until there was someone to prove it to.
What seemed to be hours later, Hooper came to a stop. She lifted her hand off of my shoulder. Two loud knocks pounded at a wooden door, presumably hers. "Excuse me?" she called.
I leaned my side against the doorway and opened my eyes just a bit to the door beside me. It was my first time in the northwest section of the school. Nothing was familiar, yet nothing stood out aside from the worn, overly polished nurse's office door. There was a temporary name-tag printed on a label-maker stuck to the nameplate beside it. The two names stared back in glossy black lettering. John Watson.
My pulse and my perception froze simultaneously as I stared at the tag. Hooper tapped her palm against the door. "Nurse!"
The door rattled from the other side, footsteps clamoring, the second more loudly than the first, as if two impacts were made in unison. One of those clicks was a cane. He opened the door.
I did my best not to look, though I caught a glimpse of him in my peripheral vision. His jumper was faded gray, wool, and likely too heavy for the weather. His eyes sank into his face with exhaustion and his stance did the same. It was him.
"He threw up in the hallway. That's why he's, not, well," Hooper struggled to explain, hesitance seeping into every quiet word.
The cane stopped clicking just beside the door. The slide of his opposite foot sounded as if he turned to her. "Thanks. You can head back to class, now." John's foot shifted again, presumably to face me. "Lie down. I'll bring you a pail. Can you drink something?" he asked as if we hadn't caught each other sneaking around an empty house an hour away for no permitted reason.
I couldn't stay. "I don't want to," I muttered.
"Do it anyway. Please."
I stared past the doorway, into the nurse's office, John's office. Two windows with safety locks were implanted in the walls. It was accessible, a few meter drop, but I couldn't walk out while he was watching, which meant he had to leave first. An old computer and a corded phone rest on the small yet organized desk a few feet between each of the two cots. Medical supplies in marked plastic containers rest along the counters, the same lettering as the door, so likely not organized by him. A single person bathroom was built to the left side. If I locked myself in the room and turned on the water, I could use my mobile to call him to the office. No, that'd take too long. What about the phone?
I slipped past the pair in the doorway and staggered towards the cots, intentionally slouching to one side so as to look off balance if anyone was watching. I presumed they weren't since I could hear Hooper and a distinct lack of other footsteps in the background.
"I had to hold him up to walk him here, if that changes anything."
"Thank you."
"I'll keep extra notes, if you want them. Feel better soon, if you can, which isn't in your control much outside of resting. I mean, bye." Hooper's footsteps pattered away from the door. John's didn't. The door clicked shut.
Before John had more of an opportunity to look closely, I angled my foot at a slant on my next step and tripped myself on nothing. I leaned towards my left and fumbled to grab the nearest object, which intentionally happened to be the edge of John's desk. Papers, a calendar and a couple of pens slid off the desk as I reached for the phone. The desk slipped from my grasp, also on purpose, though I managed to hold onto the phone line. I fell face-down to the floor.
A sudden clamor sounded behind as John rushed over as quickly as the cane would allow. I slipped a hand into my pocket, grabbed a pen, jabbed it through the cord and pulled until the wires snapped. An immediate sense of relief filled me, though I did my best not to show it. The moment he tried to make a phone call from the school line, he'd have to leave. All I had to do was wait.
John's hand nudged at my shoulder. "Can you stand?" He extended a hand from my left, technically in front of me. I pressed both my hands to the ground, leaving the pen in the process, and forced myself to stand. I slipped as far back and to my left as possible to evade his grasp. My back pressed against the wall with increasing rigidity.
John stared directly at me. His right hand drifted back to his side, his palm still open. I could see the wear on his fingers and a lingering stiffness in his posture. A lump formed in my throat at the sight. I sat down on the cot and averted my gaze. It was a dead giveaway I had something to hide, but he wouldn't know what, so I could justify it.
From the corner of my eye, I saw John look away as well. He gathered the papers off the ground, tapped them against the edge of his desk, set the stack back in place and moved on. It wasn't until he was standing in front of me that I'd realized he had picked up two cups and a plastic bucket.
John held the bucket in front of my face until I took it from him. I wrapped one arm around it and slouched over the opening. He then extended the two plastic cups I didn't bother looking at. "If you have to but you think you can make it, you can also use the bathroom. I have Gatorade or water. Take one," he offered.
"I don't want one."
"You'll dehydrate. Pick one."
My eyes shifted to the tiny plastic cups, and then to him. "How do I know they aren't poisoned?"
A look of confusion settled in his face. His forehead wrinkled accordingly. "Why would I do that?" Good enough.
I picked the water off of the tray, raised it to my mouth and took the smallest sip I could manage. It was disgustingly sweet, as I should've expected. I crumpled the empty cup in my hand and tossed it in my bucket. My focus lingered on John. If I stayed quiet, I ran a risk of him mentioning a topic that shouldn't be discussed. It was better I start.
"Must be degrading," I muttered.
"Excuse me, what?"
"Discharged from the military means discharged from your residency. You're an MD, yet you're storing inhalers and clogging nosebleeds. That's degrading."
It took a moment for John to break his confusion long enough to decide what to say. His eyes narrowed in a perplexed squint. "Did you search my name online?"
"No."
"Then how did you know? I never said."
"Well," I lifted my hand out of the bucket and pointed to John's head. "Haircut's overgrown but military standard, a few months out. Posture roughly upright, also military, with the exception of your left leg. Wouldn't be in service with that limp. Not mentioning the tan marks." Halfway through the second sentence, my eyes wandered towards his book shelf. "USMLE study guides are recent, well kept, not yellow, roughly one, two years out of date. If you were just starting, they'd be new, so you passed. Your hands're evenly rough, worn by glove powder with an unusual amount of wear on your right thumb and index fingers on the tip and lower half. Surgical instruments. You've been practicing for an extended period of time, implying you were doing so there. It's November, so you can't have finished normally. Residency matches come in March, so, you're waiting again."
By the time I'd reached the end of my sentence, my throat was sore. My stomach churned with the threat of being sick again. I leaned over my bucket accordingly, though my focus shifted back to John.
He tightened his grip on his cane, his fingers squeezing tightly with possible stress. "Do you do that with everything? Extreme deductive reasoning?"
"Abductive. Deductive's certainty. Abductive's likelihood in context. It's different. But yes," I tried not to gag as I spoke.
John closed his eyes. He exhaled slowly, forcing an outward calm. "If you don't ask why or mention where we both know I was, I'll return the favor." In other words, he had something to hide, and it was significant enough for me to unsettle him.
"I was bored."
Yet again, he squinted at me, though this time with considerably more worry. "What?"
"That's why I was at the house. Boredom."
"I wasn't asking," he tried to defend with less confidence than average.
I looked away dismissively. "Wouldn't ask you, either. You wouldn't reply."
John extended his hand towards my shoulder in an offer of something. I leaned away accordingly. "Can you lift your head? I need to take your temperature," he insisted in the least subtle subject change possible.
"I don't have a fever."
"Yes, but I have paperwork. Roll over, please."
Great. I was being patronized on the same level as a trained dog. "Yes, master," I answered flatly. I shifted across the bed so I was facing John at one of the most awkward angles I could manage. My left foot dangled off the cot and poked into John's side.
John reached around my equally flopped arm and pressed his thermometer into my ear. I lay completely still, staring at him with a deliberately uncomfortable amount of focus. He avoided eye contact and tried not to notice.
The thermometer beeped. John pulled back. My shoulders slouched, my head hovering over the bucket as a second wave of nausea overtook me.
"Ninety nine point five. You do have a fever," he said.
I tried not to gag. "Then the thermometer broke."
John struggled not to express his disapproval. I assumed he was disapproving since it took him ten seconds to answer. "I'll be right back."
John's footsteps pat softly against the floor. Three seconds later, a cabinet door squeaked open. He rummaged through the shelf, searching for something I didn't care to speculate on. I was too entranced by my thoughts and the bottom of my empty bucket to notice. John was hiding something, to the point where he hadn't tried to hide that he was hiding it. Three uneventful months in a numbing town, then yesterday two incidents occurred simultaneously. That couldn't be a fluke, could it?
I swallowed the building urge and poked my head out from the bucket towards John. "Have you ever heard of James Moriarty?"
"I don't think so, no. Is he someone I should know?" he asked back, as surprised by the question as he had been everything else I'd said.
"Not sure."
The wheels of an office chair rattled over wood as John sat down. His filing cabinet slid open, clicking at the final notch. "I'm going to call your parents to pick you up. You should lie there until they come. Keep resting," John instructed. I coughed into the bucket.
"My mother's in England. We'd be here 'til Saturday."
John plucked my file from the cabinet. He opened it against the desk. "Your guardian, then."
"Mrs. Hudson."
"Mrs. Hudson, then."
John turned the page to see the back of my medical file. He entered the numbers into the key pad, picked up the headpiece and pressed call. His expression froze momentarily, presumably the result of the absent dial tone. He rolled back his chair, leaned under his desk and pulled at the phone's cord. The cord, specifically the frayed tear at its back, rose accordingly. His gaze turned to me with subtle exasperation. He leaned upright and reached for his mobile.
"She won't answer an unknown number," I announced.
More exasperated than he was trying to let himself express, John set his mobile on the desk. He pushed his weight against his cane to stand up. "I'll be right back. I have to find another phone. Stay there and keep resting."
"Understood."
I lowered my head into the bucket and waited for the door to shut. When it did, I counted the pace of John's footsteps. Every three seconds, another one passed. Even when I couldn't hear him, I could tell. I waited until he would have reached a fork in the hallway to stand. I exchanged the empty pail for the rucksack I'd dragged in and headed towards the door. I took about three steps before I paused at John's desk.
Aside from the open filing cabinet, my documentation and his phone, the clutter hadn't changed. His flip-phone was perpendicular to his computer's key board. I opened the phone and clicked through the menu for his contact list. There were about twenty names in his contact list. Oddly, none of those numbers were listed by a familial relationship, only by their given names. None of their surnames started with M. The top of the list showed John's own number. 425-224-0587. The area code wasn't from Port Angeles.
Ten seconds of analysis later, I pulled my hand away from the phone to pick up a pen instead. I removed two slips of paper from the pad of sick notes, pressed the pages to an open part of the desk, forged an excuse and left.
I presumed John had gone to the front office, so I turned in the opposite direction. My feet dragged more lethargically than I anticipated, but aside from the slight impairment in stability, I was fine. I slumped as if genuinely sick while I paced down the empty hallway and out of the school.