Locked rooms

Epilogue

Late, late that night Holmes and I crept back to our rooms at the St Francis. We had persuaded Officialdom to let Long go home, and even Hammett, but at the cost of remaining and explaining, again and again, what it all meant: why Rosa Greenfield's finger-prints had been found on the toilet-pull of my house; why a bullet from Greenfield's gun would match one to be found in a fence in Pacific Heights; why Greenfield's finger-prints were going to be found on coins in the tin boxes in our hotel's safe.

Had it not been for Holmes' name, the bewildered police would have thrown us all out and let us sort it out on the street.

But in the end, Robert and Rosa Greenfield were charged, and we were free to go.

As we walked towards the lift, shortly before midnight, the night man came out from behind his desk and gave Holmes a packet. His hand reached out automatically for it, and as we rode the lift upwards, my eyes idled across the address on the label as if its letters contained some arcane message. It was, I realised only when we were in the room and he ripped open the paper, the urgent reproductions of Flo's photograph that he had left to be copied—only that morning yet many, many hours before.

I went through the motions of hanging up my coat and divesting myself of shoes and the like, then plodded into the bath-room to wash my face.

When I came out, Holmes was sitting with a photograph in his hand—not that of the Greenfields; he held it out in my direction.

“What is that?” I asked wearily.

“Another photograph I left the other day for copying. I'd all but forgotten it.”

I sat down to save myself from falling and took the picture from his hand.

A tent city. A woman, a blonde child with a book, a man trudging up the hill, looking as exhausted as I felt.

My family.

I took off my glasses to study my father's face. Too tired for the nightmares to reach me, he had written in the document; I wondered if all his dreams had been of the fire.

“Do I look like him?” I asked.

“You do somewhat, without a hat and your hair as it is. To a guilty mind, the resemblance would be startling.”

I picked up a copy of the other picture as well, showing the Greenfields at the Lodge, unscarred and not yet embarked on murder. They were standing by the lake, looking over the shoulder of the photographer at the log house that the young and carefree Greenfield had helped his friend Charles build.

“The sun was red,” I murmured.

“Sorry?”

“During the fire. Everything was a peculiar colour from the smoke and ashes, and it was terrifying, with the sun a red glow in the sky and the earth shaking and the sound of explosions. But my father came back then and he explained it to me, told me that the booms were just the firemen removing houses so there wouldn't be anything for the fire to burn and it would go out. I understood what he was saying, and when he told me it would be all right, I believed him.”

“Your parents were good people,” he said. And then he added the most perfect thing anyone has ever said to me. “They would be proud of you.”

Not that I believed him, of course. Instead I gave voice to the remnants of my guilt. “If I'd told my mother about seeing Greenfield that day, if I'd said something, I might have saved them.”

“I think not. Greenfield was already set on his course. Had you told your mother that you had seen him, it might have caused an argument between your parents, and at most a resolution to confront Greenfield when they returned to the city, but it would not have interrupted the family's progress to the lake. Only Greenfield himself could have done that.”

And I could picture it, clearly: Mother's indignation that Father was meeting the man; a family's final minutes tainted by recrimination and regret; the motorcar setting off down the road . . .

“You would not have changed a thing,” Holmes said firmly. This time, I believed him.

I changed out of my day-clothes and settled into a soft bed that seemed to tremble and sway with my tiredness, but my eyes would not close. I looked at the mezuzah, lying still on the bed-stand, and found myself saying, “Holmes, would you mind awfully if we didn't leave right away? I'd like to see my family's graves, and explore the area a little.”

“No, I do not mind spending more days here. We've been in California for a week and a half, and I don't believe I've set eyes on a redwood tree.”

“And it would also allow you to finish your Paganini research.”

“My—ah, yes, my Paganini research.”

“There is no research project, is there, Holmes?”

“Not as such, no,” he admitted. The bed's sway was magnified briefly as he settled in beside me. I turned to him, closing my eyes with the pleasure of simple human touch.

“Don't let me forget,” he said. “I must be downstairs at nine o'clock for breakfast with Mr Garcia and the Irregulars.”

“I'm sure that if you haven't appeared, we shall wake to find them staring down at us.” He laughed, and stretched to shut off the light. As darkness took over, I had a final thought. “Holmes, what was Dr Ming saying to you?”

“While he was sitting on the motorcar bonnet, do you mean? I apologised for manhandling him so unceremoniously, and said something to the effect of what good fortune it had been to happen across the one person in Chinatown who could summon a crowd's instantaneous response. He replied that the lines of good fortune and the lines of feng shui are often mistaken for each other.”

My sleepy brain chewed on that for a bit. “So, what, he was saying that his presence there was predetermined?”

“His words were ‘Those who perceive the dragon's path may alter it.'”

I wavered: If the old doctor's presence was deliberate, that would suggest that the Fates—or the old gentleman himself—had not only seen the need for his presence at that precise time and place, but had also envisioned our ability to make use of it.

In the end, I shook the troubling conundrum out of my head and settled into the comfort of the pillow. As I slid towards sleep, I felt, or dreamt, the lightest of touches on my hair, followed by the words, “Ah, Russell, what is to become of me? I find I've even grown attached to this infernal hair-cut.”

I felt my lips curl slightly. “That is really most unfortunate, Holmes. I had just decided to allow it to grow back.”

And at last I slept, dreamlessly.