Free The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls by John R. King

my vest pocket.
    Thomas has munched halfway through the apple, but now he hands the sloppy thing back in favor of the carrot. We eat. It’s a quiet moment, a small feast in a dark alley in a foreign town. Still, it cheers us both.
    “Maybe we don’t need the sanatorium,” Thomas says.
    “Huh?”
    “Your arm’s splinted; my wounds are dressed. We’ve got as much produce as you can shove up your shirt. Maybe we’re fine, then … . Fresh slate. New beginning. All that. You don’t know how many times I’ve landed just this way in a new city. Start again.”
    There’s something hopeful and infectious in his voice, but I can’t give in to it. “I have a past whether I want one or not. The man with the gun is my past. Until I know who I am, I can’t be safe.”
    Thomas’s young face clouds. “Then, my friend,” he says, dropping the carrot nub to the cobbles and flicking the apple core from my grip, “it’s off to hospital.”

14
    SANATORIUM
    B y the time we marched up the steps of the sanatorium, I’d hatched a plan. “I know what our story should be.”
    “Better fill me in,” Silence replied.
    “It’s simple enough,” I said. “We’re obviously British—”
    “The moment we open our mouths.”
    “So, let’s be father and son—tourists who were beaten, shot, and robbed.”
    “You? My son?” Silence said, studying my goatee and the greatcoat on my shoulders.
    “I’m the black sheep.”
    “I don’t know, Thomas. It’s not the best plan.” Silence opened the door before me, gesturing me in.
    “Maybe not, but it’s the only one we’ve got.” I walked through the huge oak double doors into a high-vaulted space with walls of sterile white. A few patients sat slumped in a semicircle of chairs around the outer walls, and in the center of the room stood a great walnut desk with papers spread out across it. An elderly nurse sat there.
    “Mademoiselle?” I began.
    The woman looked up, her wrinkled face unfolded, and she coughed. “Frau.”
    “Do you speak English, Frau?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Oh, thank goodness. You must help us. My father and I are on tour from Britain, and we have been beaten, shot, and robbed.”
    “Robbed?”
    “ Beaten, shot , and robbed,” I repeated. Silence nodded gravely as I went on. “We’d been hiking the Alps above the Reichenbach Falls and a man with a rifle held us up. Father surrendered his pocketbook, but I tried to be the hero and lunged for the man, which earned me this bullet in the shoulder.”
    The nurse peered dubiously at my bandage. “The blood’s all in back. How did he shoot you in the back when you were lunging at him?”
    I felt my face flush. “Well, all right, you caught me.” I approached the desk, leaning confidentially toward her. “I was running when he shot me. Shoulder and neck. That’s when Father jumped the man and got shoved off a cliff and broke his arm and hit his head. You see? Amnesia.”
    The word amnesia made the nurse’s eyes jump to Silence, who was affecting a very convincing idiot stare. “All right. I’ll need your names.”
    “My name is Thomas—” I broke off, amazed that I had almost blurted out my true name. “Er, James Thomas.”
    “All right, and your father?”
    “Harold Thomas.”
    She noted both names. “And how do you plan to pay?”
    “Pay?” I said, suddenly recognizing the limits of my plan. “Well, our pocketbooks have been stolen, and—”
    “Switzerland provides charitable treatment for the elderly. Your father is covered, but you will have to pay for yourself.”
    “Well, I, er—I’ll be fine. Just a bullet wound. Got the bullet out—Father did, I mean. And my neck—bandaged. I’ll be fine.”
    “I’ll repack your bandages for you, out here, but that’s the best I can do. Please ask your father to sit there with the other new patients. Then seat yourself here so I can quickly tend your wounds.”
    As I helped Silence to his seat, the nurse turned with chart in hand and