The Case for Jamie

  Dedication

  For Annalise, Lena, Rachel,

  and every other girl genius

  I’ve had the privilege of working with

  Family Trees

  Epigraph

  You are the one fixed point in a changing age.

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “HIS LAST BOW”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Family Trees

  Epigraph

  One: Jamie

  Two: Charlotte

  Three: Jamie

  Four: Charlotte

  Five: Jamie

  Six: Charlotte

  Seven: Jamie

  Eight: Charlotte

  Nine: Jamie

  Ten: Charlotte

  Eleven: Jamie

  Twelve: Charlotte

  Thirteen: Jamie

  Fourteen: Charlotte

  Fifteen: Jamie

  Sixteen: Charlotte

  Seventeen: Jamie

  Eighteen: Charlotte

  Nineteen: Jamie

  Twenty: Charlotte

  Twenty-One: Jamie

  Twenty-Two: Charlotte

  Twenty-Three: Jamie

  Twenty-Four: Charlotte

  Twenty-Five: Jamie

  Twenty-Six: Charlotte

  Twenty-Seven: Jamie

  Twenty-Eight: Charlotte

  Twenty-Nine: Jamie

  Thirty: Charlotte

  Thirty-One: Charlotte

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Brittany Cavallaro

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Jamie

  IT WAS JANUARY IN CONNECTICUT, AND THE SNOW HADN’T stopped falling in what felt like forever. It gathered in the window wells, in the hollows between the bricks of the rebuilt sciences building. It hung from the boughs of trees, tucked itself up in the root systems below. I shook it from my wool cap before every class, ruffled it out of my hair, pulled it from my socks. Underneath, my feet were rubbed red. I found it everywhere, snow that never seemed to fully melt, that lingered on my backpack and my blazer and, on the worst days, my eyebrows, melting down my face in the warmth of first period like it was sweat, like I was guilty of something.

  When I got back to my room, I took to laying out my parka like a body on the spare bed, so that the snow could drip somewhere other than into the carpet. I was tired of having wet feet. A wet spare mattress seemed less important. But as the winter stretched on, it was hard not to see a metaphor in that pathetic almost-man, especially on those nights that I couldn’t sleep.

  But I was done finding metaphors everywhere.

  MAYBE I SHOULD START HERE: THERE AREN’T A LOT OF benefits to being framed for murder. Once I would’ve told you that meeting Charlotte Holmes was the only good thing that came out of that mess. But that was my former self speaking, the one who mythologized that girl until I couldn’t see the person beneath the story I’d made up.

  If I couldn’t see her for what she was, what she’d been all along, then I’d had trouble seeing myself clearly as well. It’s not an uncommon delusion, the one I had. The Great Big Destiny delusion. That your life is a story that twists and turns its way up to a narrative precipice, a climax, the moment where you’ll make the hard decision, defeat the villain, finally prove yourself worthy. Leave some kind of mark on the world.

  Maybe it started when I read my great-great-great-grandfather’s story about Sherlock Holmes going over the Reichenbach Falls, after finally vanquishing the evil Professor Moriarty. A great sacrifice made by a great man—to defeat great evil, Holmes had to give himself. I studied “The Final Problem” like I’d studied all the others, using those tales to cobble together an instruction manual for adventure and duty and friendship, the way any kid looks for models, and then I’d clung to those ideas for years longer than I should have.

  Because there aren’t any textbook villains out there. There aren’t any heroes. There was Sherlock Holmes, who faked his own death and reappeared three years later like nothing had happened, expecting to be welcomed with open arms. There were selfish people, and there were those of us who yoked ourselves to them out of a misplaced sense of loyalty.

  I knew now that it was stupid, the way I’d obsessed so much over the past—not just my own ancestry, but over the recent past, the months I’d spent with my own Holmes. I’d lost too much time over it. Over her. I was done. I was changing. Butterflies, chrysalises—whatever. I was building one. I was going to emerge from it a more realistic Jamie Watson.

  AT FIRST, IT WAS HARD TO STICK TO THE PLAN. WHEN I’D gotten back to Sherringford from the Holmeses’ estate, I’d found myself more than once on the fourth floor of the sciences building without any real memory of taking myself there. In the end, it didn’t matter. I could have knocked on the door of 442 as long as I wanted. I wouldn’t have gotten an answer.

  It didn’t take long for me to decide that moping wasn’t doing me any good. I had to take stock. On paper. Instead of making a story out of it, the way I’d done in the past, I’d be objective. What had happened to me since the day Lee Dobson turned up dead in his room? What were the facts?

  The bad: dead friends; dead enemies; utter betrayal; widespread suspicion; heartbreak; concussions; kidnappings; my nose broken so many times that I was beginning to look like a two-bit boxer. (Or like a librarian who’d been violently mugged.)

  The good?

  My father and I were on speaking terms, now. I was beating him at cell phone Scrabble.

  As for my mother—well, not a lot of good there, either. She’d called the other night to tell me she was dating someone new. It’s nothing serious, Jamie, she’d said, but the hesitancy in her voice suggested that, in fact, it was. That she was afraid I’d bite back with the same resentment I had for my father, way back when I was a child, when he’d met and married Abigail, my stepmother.

  “Even if it is serious,” I’d said to my mom, “especially if it is. I’m happy for you.”

  “Okay.” A pause, then: “He’s Welsh. Very kind. I told him you were a writer, and he said he’d like to read some of your stories. He doesn’t know how dark they are, but I imagine he’d like them anyway.”

  Those stories that I wrote, the ones that were all about my own life. They weren’t stories at all, and my mother knew it. She just couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud.

  Weirdly enough, that was the last straw—not the list of pros and cons, but the realization that the months I’d been friends with Charlotte Holmes were so depressing my mother was handing out content warnings.

  Ten minutes in the headmistress’s office, pleading my case, and I was packing my things to move down a floor in Michener Hall. I’d used the whole wrongfully-accused-of-murder thing to wrangle myself a single room. That excuse was a year old, but it still held water. It got me what I wanted. No more roommate to stare at me while I cried. No more anyone at all. Just me, alone, so I could rebuild my life into one I actually wanted to be living.

  So time passed, as time tends to do.

  It was January again in Connecticut, and it wouldn’t stop snowing. I didn’t care. I had a literary magazine to edit, drills for the spring rugby season, hours of homework every night. I had friends, new ones, who didn’t demand all my time and patience and unearned trust.

  It was my final semester at Sherringford. I hadn’t seen Charlotte Holmes in a year.

  No one had.

  “I SAVED YOUR SPOT,” ELIZABETH SAID, PULLING HER BAG off the chair beside her. “Did you bring—”

  “Here,” I said, pulling a can of Diet Coke out of my backpack. The dining hall ha
d done away with soft drinks last year (and the all-day cereal bar, a loss we were all publicly mourning), but my girlfriend neatly sidestepped the rules by keeping a six-pack of soda in my room’s mini-fridge at all times.

  “Thanks.” She popped the top and poured it into a waiting glass of ice.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked, because our lunch table was empty.

  “Lena is still microwaving her tofu. She’s trying this soy sauce–honey thing this time, it smelled awful. Tom’s therapist had to reschedule his session, so he’s there, but he should be almost done. Mariella’s still in line with her friend Anna, she might sit with us today, and I don’t know where your rugby bros are.”

  I grimaced. “I saw them over by the bread. I think they’re carbo-loading.”

  “Gettin’ huge,” Elizabeth said, in a credible imitation of Randall.

  This was an old joke; I knew my line. “Huge.”

  “Huuuuge.”

  “Yuuuuge.”

  We snickered. It was part of the routine. She got back to her burger; I got back to my burger. Our friends showed up, one by one, and when Tom finally arrived, he patted me on the back and stole a fistful of my fries. I raised an eyebrow at him, the how was therapy eyebrow, and he shrugged back that it was fine.

  “Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked. In my darker moments, I thought it was her favorite question.

  “I’m fine.”

  She nodded, looking back down at her book. Then looked back up. “Are you sure? Because you sound a little—”

  “No,” I said, too quickly, then forced a smile. “No. I’m fine.”

  It was like a dance I knew all the steps to, one I could perform upside down, backward, on a sinking cruise ship that was also on fire. In the fall we ate on the quad; in the spring, the steps outside the cafeteria. It was winter, so we’d claimed our usual table inside by the hot bar, and I listened to the low hum of the lights keeping the food warm. Mariella and Tom went over their odds of getting into their choice of college early decision. They were supposed to hear this week (Tom, University of Michigan; Mariella, Yale), and they couldn’t talk about anything else. Lena was texting someone under the table, eating her tofu with her free hand, while Randall and Kittredge compared bruises from practice. Kittredge was sure someone was digging holes into the rugby field at night. Randall was sure that Kittredge was just a clumsy asshole. Elizabeth, as always, was reading a novel next to her tray, deaf to everyone else as she turned the pages in her own Elizabeth-world. I never knew what went on in there. I didn’t think there was enough time before graduation for me to find out.

  More than anyone else I knew, Elizabeth was competent. Frighteningly competent. If her uniform pants came back from the tailor a half-inch too long, she’d learn how to hem them herself. If she wanted to take both Shakespeare and Dance II, and they were scheduled for the same time, she’d have an independent study in Romeo and Juliet Through Irish Step Dancing approved by the end of the day.

  If the boy she’d had a crush on came back to school heartsick and bitter, she’d wait a semester for him to get over himself before she asked him out. Go with me to homecoming? the note slipped in my mailbox had said, this past fall. I promise not to choke on a diamond this time.

  I’d accepted. I really wasn’t all that sure why, at the time—though I wasn’t still mourning my and Holmes’s not-relationship, I hadn’t been looking at girls. Mostly, I’d been studying. It was as boring as it sounded, but if I didn’t bring up my grades, there wasn’t any possibility of me getting into college anywhere, much less where I wanted to go.

  Dobson’s murder won’t excuse your grades forever, you know, the guidance counselor had said. Though it’ll make for a really compelling college essay!

  So I studied. I played rugby, both seasons, in hopes that if my grades still weren’t good enough, some dream college somewhere was looking for a wiry English halfback. I took Elizabeth to homecoming out of a sense of duty—that plastic diamond down her throat was more or less my fault, even if I hadn’t put it there myself—and to my surprise, I’d had a better time with her than I’d had with anyone in months.

  It hadn’t surprised Elizabeth. “You have a type, you know,” she’d said, laughing under the dance floor lights. Her blond hair was in long, ribbonlike curls, and she had this bright necklace that swung as we danced, and when she laughed, she did it with her whole body, and I liked her. I really liked her.

  I had the strange sense that I was taking an old chapter of my life and writing over it until the text beneath was gone.

  “What’s that?” I asked. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to hear the answer. Already, with the music, the smoke machine—I had one foot in this year and one foot in the last.

  But she’d grinned at me, wickedly. It was a different kind of wicked than what I was used to. Wicked without secrets. Wicked without danger. It was the smile of a smart girl who was coming into her own, who knew she was about to get the thing she wanted.

  “You like girls who don’t take any of your shit,” she’d said, and kissed me.

  She was right. I liked girls who pushed back; I liked girls with thoughtful eyes. Elizabeth had both, and even if sometimes I got the sense that I was an item on her checklist that she had successfully crossed off (Date boy you crushed on freshman year), well—

  Well, it was more my own bullshit than anything I got from her. Because, as usual, I was staring out the bright-lit window, thinking about my essay for AP Euro, my problem set for calculus, about the million other balls I had up in the air—and more than that, convincing myself that I did need to think about them, that I needed to make myself care.

  Then someone dropped a tray behind me with a sharp pop and a clatter, and I was back there again.

  Me on a lawn in Sussex, August Moriarty at my feet, blood on all that snow. Police sirens edging closer. Charlotte Holmes’s white, chapped lips. Those last few seconds. That other life.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, but no one was listening, not even Elizabeth, lost in her book. At least I made it to the bathroom before I started to dry heave.

  One of the lacrosse starters was in there washing his hands. “Brutal,” I heard him say over my retching. By the time I came out of the stall, I was alone.

  I braced myself against the sink, staring at the drain, the fissured ceramic around it. The last time this had happened to me, it’d been a slammed car door, and that time the nausea had been followed hard by rage. Horrible, mind-bending rage, at Charlotte for making assumptions, at her brother, Milo, for gunning a man down and getting away with it, at August Moriarty, who’d told me, two weeks too late, to run—

  My phone pinged. Elizabeth, I thought, as I fished it out. Checking on me. It wasn’t a bad thought.

  But it wasn’t Elizabeth. It wasn’t any number I knew.

  You’re not safe here.

  That feeling, like someone hit Play on a movie I’d forgotten I was watching. A horror movie. About my life.

  Who is this? I wrote back, and then, horrified, Is that you? Holmes?, and then I called the number once, twice, a third time, and by then they’d shut the phone off.

  Leave a message, it said. I stood there, stunned, until I realized I’d let it record a few seconds of my breathing. Hurriedly, I ended the call.

  I made it back to our lunch table somehow, my head crackling with dehydration and fear. Elizabeth was still reading. Randall was eating his third chicken sandwich. Mariella and Kittredge and that Anna girl were bitching again about the cereal bar, and there was a whole ecosystem here, a landscape that functioned fine without me.

  Why would I put any of this on them? What did I want to do, go back to being some kind of victim? Even Elizabeth, the person I’d usually turn to, couldn’t help me here. She’d dealt with enough because of me.

  No. I squared my shoulders. I finished my burger.

  I kept one hand on my phone, just in case.

  “Jamie,” Lena was saying.

  I shook my head. br />
  “Jamie,” Lena repeated, frowning a little, “your father’s here.” I was dully surprised to see him hovering over our table, his wool cap dusted with snow.

  “Jamie,” he said. “A bit in your own head?”

  Elizabeth smiled up at him. “He’s been like this all day,” she said. “Off in dream land.” I didn’t point out that she’d been ignoring all of us in favor of Jane Eyre.

  I put on a smile as best I could. “Ha, yeah, you know. Lots of, uh, school things. Schoolwork.”

  Across the table, Lena and Tom exchanged a significant glance.

  “It’s true,” I said, and my voice wobbled a little. “Uh, Dad. What’s up?”

  “Family emergency,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “I’ve already signed you off campus. Go on, grab your bag.”

  Oh God, I thought. This again. Plus, I wasn’t sure if my legs would hold me if I stood. “Can’t. French class. We have a quiz.”

  Tom frowned. “But that was yester—”

  I kicked him, weakly, under the table.

  “Family emergency,” my father said again. “Up! Come along!”

  I ticked it off on my fingers. “AP English. Physics. I have a presentation. Stop looking at me like that.”

  “Jamie. Leander’s waiting in the car.”

  A surge of relief. Leander Holmes was one of the only people I could be around when I was like this, all shaky and strange. I knew as well as my father did that he’d played his trump card, and that I’d lost this round. I packed up my things, ignoring Lena’s stage-wink across the table.

  “See you tonight,” Elizabeth said, already back in her book. But then, she was used to this by now.

  “I actually do have a presentation in physics tomorrow, you know,” I told my father as we left the cafeteria.

  He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Of course you do. But that’s hardly important, is it?”

  Two

  Charlotte

  WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, I CONVINCED MYSELF I WAS psychic.

  It wasn’t a wild conjecture. My father had always said to build only on fact, and the facts were there. For a solid week, I’d been having dreams about going to London. These dreams were based on fact. My aunt Araminta had to go to settle some financial affairs, and she’d offered to take my brother and me along and after, to a national history museum to see an exhibit on dinosaurs. Milo was mad for the stegosaurus.