“Watson,” he said, stomping his snow boots on the mat. “You look awful, man.”
I couldn’t deal with it right now. “I feel awful,” I said. “Can you hold on a second? I think—Elizabeth said she wanted to talk to you—”
He brushed his asymmetrical hair out of his face. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s cool. Hey, can I have one of those?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Dunham said, holding the container out.
I hunched over my phone, trying very hard not to look at Beckett stuffing a red-and-green cookie into his mouth. SOS, I texted Elizabeth. Beckett Lexington at Michener. Kittredge thinks he gave Anna the money. Having an Incident, like an asshole.
You’re not an asshole. There in five, she wrote back, almost immediately.
I wasn’t sure what information she could get out of him, especially if she went after him with a hatchet like she had the girls at lunch, but I was in no state to try to interrogate someone. All I could really do was call my father. “Dad,” I said, as soon as he picked up. “You need to come get me. Like, now.”
“I’m just in town running errands,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
I waited for him outside on the steps, breathing in and out, slowly, trying not to immediately assume that I’d been infected with a nanovirus. Ever since the run-in with Bryony Downs where she’d stuck me with an infected spring, I could work myself up into a panic any time I felt ill.
Panic, or fear, or was it trauma, or maybe Mrs. Dunham was poisoning me—
No. The cold air felt good on my face. I shut my eyes for a second, swaying, and when I opened them Elizabeth was staring at me.
“You okay?”
I gestured inside to Beckett scrolling through his phone, cookie in hand. “Talk to him?” I asked.
Unexpectedly, she grinned. “You have frosting on your face,” she said. “Blue frosting. You look like a snowman. Did you eat cookies for dinner?”
I hadn’t eaten lunch, I remembered; we’d left the Bistro without me ordering anything. In fact, I hadn’t eaten anything all day. The thought made the nausea lessen, a little. It’s just panic, I told myself again.
“Jamie,” she said, starting up the steps toward me.
“I’m okay,” I said. She had a knit hat on, and the color matched her eyes. In that moment I was so grateful that I could cry. “Thank you. For everything you’re doing to help. You don’t need to be doing it.”
She took off a glove, then reached out and, with a finger, took a bit of icing off my lips. “Well,” she said softly. “Of course I’m helping.”
My father’s sedan pulled up to the curb.
“That’s my cue,” I said.
“I’ll go talk to Lexington. Find out what he knows. Will you call me later?”
“Yeah,” I said, and on impulse, I kissed her cheek. “Talk to you tonight.”
I popped the trunk of his car and made room for my backpack amidst a cluster of grocery bags. There were fancy things spilling out of them—goat cheese, a few bottles of wine, some pickled Italian things I didn’t recognize. I swallowed down my nausea and hopped into the front seat.
“You’re excited to see Mum, I take it,” I said. “Big dinner plans?”
My father shrugged. “Just trying to be a good host.”
The car was warm, too warm, and I cracked the window as he pulled out of the school gates. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m feeling kind of gross.”
He gave me a look. “Apparently not that gross. How’s Elizabeth? Are you two back on?”
“No. Maybe. No. No, we’re not.” I knew it wasn’t a good answer. I thought about saying something like I can only solve one mystery at a time, and then cringed. What was it that Elizabeth had said? Being aware of it didn’t excuse your crappy behavior?
My father didn’t say anything else until we’d made it out of Sherringford Town and into the cold, white fields beyond. “It isn’t nice to leave people in the dark,” he said, finally, with an odd vehemence.
I looked at him. “Am I leaving you in the dark about something?”
“Elizabeth,” he said, gripping the wheel. “That poor girl. She has expectations, you know, and I don’t want you jerking her around. It’s not very nice. I don’t like to see that kind of behavior in you.”
I didn’t like it in me either, but it was sort of beside the point—my father never came down on me like this for anything. “Are you all right? Is everything okay with Abbie?”
“You don’t need to get yourself involved in that.”
“Okay,” I said, unsettled. I’d groused a lot over the years about my father’s relentless good humor, but I was discovering I didn’t know what to do when it wasn’t there.
The night got darker, streetlights winking out as we drove further into the countryside. It wasn’t proper farmland, with farms and turbines and hay for miles and miles; instead, the road wandered through little towns, none of them any bigger than a gas station and a couple of bars, surrounded by ancient farmhouses. During the day it was unremarkable, but at night, with the snow turning into sleet, those old houses were strange and sad.
“Then again,” my father said, out of nowhere, “it isn’t fair for her to expect things from you that you can’t give her. Has she even said anything to you about it?”
I blinked. “Yes?”
“Well, that’s good. Good. Good for her. That’s better than—than just wanting things and never saying anything about it and hanging around, feeling tortured, instead of communicating your feelings like an actual adult.”
We were definitely not talking about Elizabeth. “Dad.” I swallowed, then said, “Is everything okay with Leander?”
He almost swerved off the road. “What are you talking about?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about,” I said, not unkindly.
More silence. More farmhouses, standing like sentinels in the dark. My father pounded his hand against the wheel once, twice, three times. “Your stepmother doesn’t like Leander hanging around so much, looking at her like—she says, and I quote—‘like he’s just waiting for James to realize how much more he likes him than me.’”
“He’s been at the house a lot, I take it.”
“He’s renting a place down the road,” my father said. “I haven’t gotten to see him this much in ten years! We’ll usually put together a few weekends in the summer—run around Edinburgh like we used to, tidy up the ends of some case he’s solving—but you know, it was never enough. It was the best when he lived so close to us, in London, but that of course made your mother furious. I—ah. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Abbie is different, you know. More adventurous. We have a lot of fun.” He nodded, as if talking himself into something. “She thinks he’s in love with me.”
There it was. “Is he?” I asked.
“No.” He sounded almost relieved that the conversation had made its way here, as though this had been the end point all along. “No! No. No, he’s not. Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he’s in love with his straight best friend. I hate when people insinuate that. You know, that’s insulting to both of us, and anyway, I’m just—he’s brilliant, you know? Leander is the life of every room, and he’s obviously a good-looking man. He could have anyone he wanted, he’s not just hanging around pining after me. Of all people! That would be absurd. That would be . . .”
He trailed off.
“It would be really sad for him,” I said, looking down at my hands.
“Oh, God,” my father said.
The sleet was coming down harder. Little dots and dashes of hail were bouncing off of the windshield.
“Yeah.” I paused. “He’s your favorite person?”
Mechanically, he put on the wipers. “I’ve never—I’m not attracted to men. He’s not an exception to that.”
“But he’s—”
“He’s my favorite person.” He was talking almost as if to himself. “Don’t
you wish sometimes that who you—you spent your life with was determined just by that? Wouldn’t that make it less complicated?”
I was seventeen years old. I was dating-or-not-dating another girl who was right now questioning the campus dealer about a crime I hadn’t committed, and I was in love with my best friend, who I hadn’t seen for a year but who lived on in my day-to-day like a splinter in my goddamn heart. I thought about the rest of my life a lot more than I’d like to admit.
“I don’t think that makes it less complicated,” I said.
Our house came into view. Despite the weather, the garage was open and lit up, and inside it, figures were hauling in suitcases from a rental car.
“Your mother’s here,” my father said happily as we pulled up into the drive. He was doing that adult thing that I hated, where he pretended an uncomfortable conversation hadn’t happened. “Go in through the front, will you, and make sure the cat hasn’t gotten out? And see if your stepmother needs help.”
I grabbed my backpack and a few of the grocery bags, trying not to look inside them (my stomach still wanted to pretend that food didn’t exist), and fought my way through the sleet through the front door.
Abbie wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Neither was the cat. I was checking inside the pantry, looking for it, when my phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”
“Jamie, it’s me.”
“Shelby?” I said, moving around some bags of potatoes. No cat. “Where are you? Aren’t you here? Are you okay?”
“Are you alone?” Her voice was urgent, ragged.
I grabbed the pantry door and shut it. “I am now. What’s wrong?”
“Jamie, everything is seriously so messed up, I don’t even know where to begin, and I think I only have a minute—”
My heart was racing. “What’s happening, Shel?”
“That school? In Connecticut? It’s not a school, Jamie, it’s like some kind of rehab, and I have no idea why I’m here but I’m here, I’m in the infirmary because I fainted, I guess, when I figured out what was going on, and I’m using the phone here because they took mine, but the doctor might be back, and Jamie, you have to do something, you have to come get me—”
“Rehab?” I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “What was their justification? What the hell is going on?”
“It was Mum. I don’t even understand it. She’s super furious about the stuff going down with you, still, which is weird, first of all, because usually she, like, rages but then gets over it, and then she was going through my things and she found a bottle of vodka in my drawer, but it wasn’t mine, I swear, I’d never seen it before!”
“I believe you—”
“And Ted tried to talk her down and then— Footsteps. I hear footsteps. Wait.”
I stood there in the dark pantry, clutching the phone to my face, listening to my sister’s frightened breathing. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
“They’re gone,” she whispered. “I don’t know when they’re coming back. But the school—I can’t. It’s like a wilderness camp, and there are horses, but it’s like survivalist, they put you in the woods for days, there’s no school at all, and Mum insisted—and she and Ted got married—”
“What?”
“It was supposed to be a surprise.” Shelby had been talking so quickly I could only half-understand her. “In the middle of the day yesterday. In London, at the courthouse. So like . . . meet your new stepdad?”
“Are you serious—”
A rustle, a man’s voice. “No no,” she was saying, and then the line went dead.
The nausea hit me again, full force, this vertiginous feeling like I was crashing, and I was sure now that all of it was panic.
I made myself breathe. Be logical, I thought. Be a grown-up. Shelby could be lying about the vodka, it could have been hers. The school could just be more severe than she was used to. It could be homesickness. Ted could be a nice guy.
Breathe.
From the garage, I heard my father saying a hearty congratulations. Laughter. The garage door groaning to a close.
They staggered in through the door, then, laughing—my mum with her hand on my father’s arm, chatting excitedly, my new stepdad hauling a pair of bags behind them.
“Jamie,” my mother said when she saw me, rushing forward. “I swear you’ve gotten taller—hello, sweetheart.” She grabbed me by the shoulders; she was never this effusive. “It’s so good to see you.”
“Hey,” I said, forcing myself to sound friendly. “Where’s Shelby? Thought she was coming.”
“Loved her school,” Ted said, behind my dad. “Just loved it. Wanted to start right away.” He had a wonderful speaking voice, a round tenor with a Welsh accent.
“She did,” my mum said, and turned back to me. “Just loved it. And we have news!”
“Gracie, not so fast,” Ted said. “I haven’t even met the boy yet.”
“Hi,” I said, stepping forward to shake Ted’s hand. I was going to rewrite this conversation, take control. I’d figure out exactly what was going on. “I’m Jamie, it’s nice to finally meet you.”
He took it, scowling a little. Ted was tall, broad-shouldered, surprisingly bald. Maybe my sister had mentioned that to me before? But he didn’t have eyebrows either—it looked almost as though he’d shaved them—and his eyes beneath were small and shrewd. He looked like someone, I thought, my pulse beginning to speed up. Who did he look like?
“Jamie,” he said. “Hi. Ted Polnitz.”
“His given name is Tracey,” my mother said, coming up beside him, smiling. She’d had her hair done, her makeup. She was wearing a necklace that belonged to my grandmother, pearls on a long string. She looked beautiful. “Tracey! Isn’t that cute? But he prefers his middle name. Theodore. More serious. And we have plans for tonight—a reception!”
“A wedding reception,” my father said, bemused. “We’re doing a dinner thing in New York. Tonight.”
I was hardly paying attention. “You remind me of someone,” I said to Ted, slowly.
He grinned at me. “I get that a lot.”
“Jamie?” my mother asked. “Are you okay?”
When he smiled my new stepfather looked just like August.
And Phillipa. And Hadrian.
“I’m fine,” I said to Lucien Moriarty. “Really. It’s just so good to finally meet you.”
Eighteen
Charlotte
BACK AT THE FLAT I WAS THROWING THINGS INTO MY SUITCASE, not bothering to fold them. I could hear Leander on the phone, pleading with someone. “Tonight,” he was saying, “it can’t wait,” and had I wanted to I could have gone to the door to listen.
It didn’t matter now what he was saying, not really.
“We’ll regroup from a distance,” he’d told me. “We don’t have the time to bag him when he arrives, and God knows what he plans on doing when he gets here. We’ll find some high ground, girl. Pack your bags.”
There was a kind of relief in it, the giving up. We would plan, and in the meantime Leander would let me live with him. He hadn’t offered, not as such, but for the rest of the walk home he’d been listing places we could go.
As the eldest of his siblings, my father had inherited our house in Sussex; my aunt Araminta had been formally given the cottage and apiary where she’d taken to spending her days; my uncle Julian our flat in London, and presumably leave to never talk to the rest of us again. (A smart decision.) My uncle Leander had been too peripatetic to be given land, the will had read. He’d been granted my grandfather’s money instead, our intelligently invested takings from the life rights of Sherlock Holmes.
In his early twenties, back when he was rooming with James Watson in a tiny flat in Edinburgh, Leander had socked away his inheritance in smart investments and lived like a churchmouse. (My uncle, despite his well-groomed appearance, had always been a frugal man.) When his investments brought him returns, he bought property, and with the income from letting ou
t those, he purchased new places, sold others, tailored his portfolio.
All of this to say, we had some places to hide.
“They’re largely under my name,” he’d said. “The flats in New York and Edinburgh, the house in Provence. Those are the ones I’ve kept.”
“We can’t go there, then.”
“No. We can’t. But London—London is another matter. I bought a flat there a few years ago through a dummy corporation. I was on an undercover case—I needed a bolt-hole for quick-changes, a place to stash my things that couldn’t be traced. I never did sell it. I worried that it might be useful again.” He gave me a grim smile. “And here we are.”
Here we were.
Good-bye to New York, I thought, stuffing my wigs back into their wooden box. Good-bye to Connecticut. Good-bye to America; who knew when I’d have reason to be back here again. Good-bye to picking locks, prying doors with crowbars, to putting on doe-eyed masks to learn what I needed to know. I would help him research. I would help, and I would stay out of the way.
My mother hadn’t called me once since I’d left home. I thought again about the argument she and my father had had in Switzerland, where she pled my case to him for five minutes and then, as far as I knew, never did again. Any love my mother had for me was bound up in the frustrations she had with my father, and now, with him absent, it was as though I’d ceased to exist as well.
There had been so many losses: My parents. August. Milo, gone radio silent during that never-ending murder trial. And while I had always imagined Jamie Watson leaving me bit by bit, he’d instead done it all at once. Pulled the bandage off while the wound was still bleeding.
Had it been wild denial or self-destruction that had sent me running headlong into the jaws of the beast that was hunting me? Why really had I spent the last year chasing Lucien Moriarty, except to put a speedier end to it all? I had diligently photographed my pills each night. I had eaten and bathed and traveled and plotted, I had pretended to be looking to the future, and all the while it looked like I was living.
But the moment I knew I wouldn’t kill Lucien Moriarty was the moment I wrote my own ending. I saw that now. I didn’t know another way to be rid of him, the spider that had built a web over the world. Chasing him down without a gun in hand would ultimately end with my death.