Lock & Mori by Heather W. Petty Page B

do.
    I wondered if Lily’s house was quiet now too. I wondered if Mrs. Patel still felt the pull of a magnet buried under six feet of earth.
    â€œWhat do you see?” Sherlock breathed into my ear.
    I shook my head in answer, but I knew he wouldn’t leave it alone, so I excused myself and sidestepped my way out of the pew to escape down the far aisle. The back of the chapel felt like another world. A collage of pictures was spreadabout a table, snapshots of Lily’s dad with his family through the years.
    He hadn’t lived a very posh life, but he’d had a lot of friends and had done a lot with them. There were pictures of them sitting around a fire pit smoking, basking in the sun on a canal boat, bundled up for some snowshoeing. By the time I reached the far end of the table, my gaze was skimming around the remaining pictures, looking for something of interest—something to give me pause.
    I found it.
    My mother’s face, younger and smiling brightly for the camera, flashed out at me from the sea of faces. I didn’t believe my own eyes at first—what with the way this whole day had pointed me to her memory. But when I looked away and looked back, she was still there. When I lifted the snapshot from the table, she was still there, the arm of some bloke I’d never seen in my life around her shoulders, her arm around the waist of a woman with bright blue hair, and Mr. Patel standing behind three other men.
    Before I could study it more, I heard footsteps approaching and slid the picture into my handbag, pulling out a tissue in the same movement in case I was seen. I swept the tissue across my dry eyes and used the ruse to search the rest of the pictures for another glimpse of my mother’s face. But there were no more of her.
    â€œHe certainly lived a full life.” A white-haired woman reached out to pat my back, and I realized just in time that I was meant to be crying over these memories, that cryingpeople were meant to be grateful for a pat on the back from a stranger, not repelled by it.
    I nodded and let my hair fall down to mask my tearless face. “Yes.”
    â€œWe’re glad of that. After all the troubles of his youth, we weren’t sure he wouldn’t have ended up locked away. A life wasted that would’ve been.”
    I was pretty sure there wasn’t strictly a “we” involved in this gossip-filled concern, but Mr. Patel’s troubled youth was exactly when he had known my mom, and I was desperate to learn more about that. “Troubled?”
    â€œAye,” she said, patting my back with more vigor as she leaned in to drop her voice even lower. “In with a wrong crowd. I trust you won’t be doing the same?”
    I risked a glance and caught the woman searching the table.
    â€œI could have sworn there was a photo here,” she muttered. “Female at the center of it all.”
    â€œA girl?”
    The woman clicked her tongue and sighed. “Ah, but there always is. And this one had the face of a cherub. On the street she was the picture of innocent beauty, but inside lived a wolf.” The woman shifted her gaze to my face before I could cover with the tissue. “Ah, there now.” She paused. “You look a bit like her, you know.”
    Her gaze dropped to the table, and I shot a look over my shoulder. People started to rise from their pews, including Sherlock, who was beelining through the crowd for me.
    â€œIf I could just find the photo, I’d show you.”
    â€œI’ve got to go,” I mumbled, stepping into the first surge of people making their way out front. I spilled out onto the street and turned back just as John Watson was walking a stiff, unemotive Lily away from the chapel. Her mother stared after her but quickly turned back to greet the attendees.
    â€œWell, this was a waste of time,” Sherlock pronounced from his sudden appearance at my side.
    I frowned and started to walk