Free The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King

meeting had left in Holmes. The world is large, when a man wishes to disappear, and the tantalising possibility that he was still out there had gnawed silently at us both.
    I was especially pleased that Damian had grown into a man with weight to his personality—it would have been hard, had he turned out charming (a shallow quality, charm, designed to deceive the unwary) or dull. Instead, he was intelligent (which one would expect) and madly egotistical (marching in and laying his life and problems before us, without so much as a by-your-leave—but again, what might one expect of the offspring of two divas?) and he possessed that animal magnetism born of intensity.
    It was difficult, with the artistic personality in general and the Bohemian way of life in particular, to know how much of their eccentricity was cultivated and how much was true imbalance. Damian had been hiding a lot, both in fact and in emotion. I had sensed deceit woven throughout the fabric of his story, everywhere but in his declared love for wife and child. However, subterfuge was perhaps understandable in a man coming to ask a favour of the father he barely knew, the eminent and absent father whose hand he had refused to shake, five years before.
    The complexity of the man was both a comfort and a concern. I could only hope that, now he was here, Holmes would take considerable care not to drive him away—but, no, I decided, there would be littlechance of that, not after he had held that photograph of Damian’s family. I looked forward to meeting Yolanda Adler, wherever she had taken herself off to.
    If nothing else, I thought as I pulled up the bed-clothes, a renowned Surrealist with a missing Chinese wife and small daughter promised to fill nicely the anticipated tedium of Holmes’ return.
    I woke many hours later with birdsong and the first rays of sun coming through the open window.
    The house was still: Lulu would not arrive until ten, and the two men had talked until the small hours. Holmes had not come to bed, but that was a common enough occurrence when he was up late and did not wish to disturb me.
    However, he was not in the small bedroom next door, nor on the divan in his laboratory. He was not in the sitting room, or on the terrace, or in the kitchen, and there was no sign that he had made coffee, which he did whenever he was up and out before the rest of the house.
    I walked down to the door of the guest suite, where Lulu would have installed Damian. It was closed. I pressed my ear to the wood, hoping it wouldn’t suddenly open, dropping me at my step-son’s feet, but I could hear no sound from within. I frowned in indecision. Perhaps they had talked all night, after which Holmes had been struck by the desire to see his devastated hive.
    Without coffee?
    I tightened the belt on my dressing gown and reached for the knob. It ticked slightly when the tongue slid back, but the hinges opened in silence. I put my head around the door.
    Nothing. No sleeping Damian, no foreign hair-brush or pocket change on the dressing table, no reading matter on the bed-side table, no carpet slippers tucked beneath the wardrobe. The bed had not been slept in; the window was shut. Stepping inside, I confirmed that the room was bare of his possessions, although clearly he had been here: He’d left a few crumpled bits in the waste-basket, along with a clump of hair from a hair-brush.
    Upstairs, a quick search revealed that Holmes had not packed a valise for himself—but then, a man who maintained half a dozen bolt-holes in London did not need to carry with him a change of shirt and a tooth-brush.
    Especially if doing so risked waking me with the creaks of the old wooden staircase.
    I went back through all the rooms in the house, ending in the sitting room, where ashes and the level in the cognac decanter told of a lengthy session. There was no note to suggest when or why they had left, or for how long.
    I sighed, and went to the kitchen to make