A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Watson began to respond, but Araminta shook her head, nimbly passing a Peugeot on the right. “Someone should have stepped in sooner.”

  “It was a mess of my own making,” I reminded her quietly. “I had to sort it out.”

  Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “You,” she said, “were a child, and ‘sorting it out’ nearly killed you both.”

  “Shelby’s doing fine,” Watson said after a moment. “Do you know the story? How Leander and my dad broke her out of that ‘school’ in Maine?”

  He told it well. My Watson, the consummate storyteller. We had been on the run from both Lucien Moriarty and the police, and the two of us had holed up in a safehouse in New York City. We could do nothing for Shelby. Shelby, Jamie’s little sister, who had always loved horses, who had a vivacious smile, who talked a mile a minute about her friends and her paintings and about L.A.D., her favorite boy band. She wanted nothing to do with Lucien Moriarty, in his guise as her mother’s boyfriend, and Moriarty had used Shelby’s resulting rebellion as a means to persuade Grace Watson to shuttle her to this “school” in Connecticut that was, of course, no such thing. What it was was the sort of wilderness rehabilitation/punishment facility with which I was intimately familiar. I had been threatened with many of them over the years. The difference?

  Lucien Moriarty owned this one.

  Araminta shook her head as if to clear it. “I never heard this story,” she said quietly.

  “There was nothing we could do,” Watson continued. Though the police—and Lucien Moriarty—were desperately hunting us down, Watson had risked a message to his father. Get Shelby out. And he had gone to rescue her, Leander by his side. The drive from New York City was four hours; they had made it in two.

  They’d argued the whole way about the plan. James Watson had wanted to go in with proverbial guns blazing (Shelby was his daughter; emotions tended to cloud one’s judgment), while Leander, true to form, had argued for a more subtle approach. They would be state inspectors on an emergency call. They would be electricians, plumbers. They would call the local police and a judge friend of Leander’s and get Shelby out the legal way.

  None of it was enough for James Watson. I want my daughter. And then, when we ride out of there, I want that place burning down behind me.

  You sound like a cowboy, Leander had scoffed, and it was then, as they’d crossed the state line, that they hit on a plan that appealed to the both of them.

  “Horse thieves,” Watson said, with some satisfaction. Araminta coughed in the driver’s seat, but offered no commentary.

  Leander had grown up taking riding lessons; James had insisted he’d worked as a trail guide in college. (“He had not,” Watson said, “worked as a trail guide in college.”) They’d stopped at a twenty-four-hour Walmart and changed from their formal wear into flannel shirts and Carhartts and hats to hide their faces. They bought bolt cutters, shovels, fertilizer, two long-handled lighters, and three twenty-five-packs of Saturn Missile Extremely Loud Fireworks.

  They’d paid for it all in cash.

  After parking the car in the woods, they’d approached the facility on foot. The “school” was protected by a twelve-foot-high fence crowned with barbed wire. Luckily, it wasn’t electrified; less luckily, it was surrounded by cameras. They chose a spot close enough to the stables for their purposes.

  Then James chose a spot a mile farther along, laid down both bags of fertilizer, and started a massive fire.

  At the same time, Leander cut a hole in the fence big enough for a palomino, ducked through, and set off his pack of fireworks. They sang like missiles into the sky as he made his way to the stables. James Watson went for his daughter.

  In short order, the school was surrounded by fire engines and police cars. Those horses that hadn’t escaped through the fence were panicked, whinnying, galloping to the far corners of the enclosure, and as Leander watched from the woods, he saw something he hadn’t counted on—students, at first a slow trickle of them, then a flood. Stealing out of their dorms and through the hole cut in the fence. Backpacks on their shoulders, escaping into the woods to try their luck anyplace else than the prison they’d been kept.

  During the mass confusion, James Watson had broken into the infirmary—Shelby’s last known whereabouts—and found her there alone, left handcuffed to a wooden desk chair. She’d been hacking away at it with a paperweight when her father found her. They’re coming back, she’d said, through tears of rage, he said he was coming right back, and they’re putting me into the Isolation Pit—

  He didn’t wait to find out what that was. The two of them hacked away at the wood until it gave, and then James Watson, his daughter, and the chair arm still handcuffed to her wrist disappeared into the forest, never to be seen again.

  “Until they met Leander by his rented Saturn in the woods,” Watson said wryly. “Though my dad likes to end the story before that.”

  “Leander—” My aunt gave me a look. “Uncle Leander made some calls in the morning. The ones he wanted to in the beginning—the police, the judge, his lawyer. It took some time, and finesse, and a few massive fines for setting fires near a national park—among other things—but in the end, the facility shut down. I think what finally did it in was one of their board members getting arrested for attempted murder of a child.”

  “And that, kids, is why you don’t let a Moriarty buy your school,” Watson said.

  “That’s quite the story,” Araminta said, turning off onto a gravel lane, our tires kicking up dust and rocks behind us.

  “Well, it ends there. That was the last time James and Leander saw each other.” Watson peered out the windshield. “Other than Holmes’s hospital room, that is. My father is too busy fucking up his life. Is this—is this where we’re going to dinner?”

  Araminta had kept him talking for the full half hour it had taken us to arrive at our destination. We’d driven past a full-to-bursting parking lot into the circle drive of a manor house. In the waning light, I had the impression of flowers. Pots of them around the entrance, an arch over the entrance to the garden.

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it?” she said, handing the keys to a silent valet. “I thought you two deserved a treat. Come, our table’s on the terrace. You don’t mind dining al fresco?”

  Our table was bedecked in candles. The waiters brought duck eggs, carpaccio with capers and artichoke hearts, a risotto with salmon and beetroot, a sea bass the width of my arms wrapped in a delicate, fragrant leaf. We didn’t talk much about the program; Araminta didn’t press me on the classes I wasn’t attending, and Watson was loath to discuss a story when he was in the middle of writing it. Instead, I told her more about our case—the mysterious entrance into the theater, the missing girl. The conversation between Theo and George Wilkes.

  “It isn’t Theo after all,” Watson said, spearing an asparagus, and I agreed, and I didn’t agree, but I didn’t offer my opinion aloud. Not yet. Araminta had her head cocked, almost as though she was listening for something, and then she came back to herself all at once, calling the waiter over for more wine.

  As we waited for the dessert cart, I saw that Watson’s eyes had fallen half-shut, whether from the wine or the food or the long day, I couldn’t tell, and he settled back in his chair to look out over the grounds. Couples were playing lawn games, sipping cocktails. Tail flagged high, a spaniel ran loose through the croquet wickets, and a girl gave chase, laughing, a leash in her hands.

  The shadows began to lengthen across our table. Araminta talked about her bees, the new young queen. As the evening cooled, Watson took my hand between our chairs and let them slowly swing back and forth, a pendulum, and I was happy.

  I was happy.

  But it had been some time since we’d seen our waiter, and Araminta was toying with her wineglass. “Lottie,” she said at length. “Would you pop into the bar and order me a decaf coffee? Here, take my card. Jamie, would you like anything?”

  “No,” he said with a yawn. “I’m
fading out. But thank you so much for dinner, Araminta. Aunt Araminta . . . ?”

  She grinned. “Cheeky monkey. You can call me aunt.”

  “Aunt. You didn’t have to do all this. I think it’s wasted on me.”

  “Experience is never wasted,” Araminta said. “And you’re welcome.”

  It took me a few moments to pick my way through the tables to the door back into the hotel, and as I reached out for the handle, I found myself turning back to our table. I didn’t know why. Watson was telling a story with his hands.

  Araminta was staring at me.

  Go on, she mouthed.

  Ignoring the disquieting prickle at the back of my neck, I let myself inside the hotel. There were a number of dining rooms I passed through, some with stained-glass windows, some with paneled ceilings, pink-veined marble floors. It was like something from an old movie, or one of Watson’s favorite novels. Brideshead Revisited, everyone in evening wear, in pincurls and ten-thousand-dollar watches, everyone polished bright with white, white teeth. They were lovely, and they were threatening, and though I’d thought our dinner to be extravagant, there was clearly more extravagance to be had. I found myself holding my breath as I stepped through the final set of doors into the lobby.

  At last. The bar. It was more crowded than I’d expected, perhaps because of the late hour, and it took me a moment to get my bearings. The bar was a looming thing, dramatically lit, and the bartender was rushing about in a crisp white shirt, a cloth tied into his apron strings. He had a polished cocktail shaker in his hands, and the girls sitting before him propped their chins on their fists and watched him work, giggling to each other.

  I took a step forward, my aunt’s card in my hand, and then I stopped.

  I knew those hands.

  I knew that waist, those shoulders. I knew the chin, with its proud upward tilt, and the gentle mouth that balanced it. I knew the Roman nose, the cheekbones, the sweep of the eyebrows. I knew that thick blond hair and how it fell over his forehead, and I knew his eyes, too, and before they could look at me I had ducked behind a column, gasping like a fool, telling myself I was wrong.

  It wasn’t hard to mistake one Moriarty for another. My brother Milo had done it on our lawn in Sussex when he had shot August Moriarty dead.

  I had seen him do it.

  Slowly, infinitesimally slowly, I leaned out from behind the column. I had to be sure. I had to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was right, that I had seen who I thought I’d seen, against all odds, against all logic, behind a bar in this manor house in Oxfordshire.

  The shaker. The hands. The dazzling smile. I saw it in pieces, not as a whole, and I wouldn’t stay any longer to look. I turned and ran back blindly through the dining rooms, one after another—tripping over tablecloths, dodging waiters, not caring about the scene I was making.

  He hadn’t seen me.

  August Moriarty hadn’t seen me at all.

  Nineteen

  THE MOMENT WE CLIMBED BACK INTO THE FIAT, I arranged my head against the window and shut my eyes, feigning sleep. I didn’t trust myself to speak, to my aunt or to Watson or even to myself, in my own head.

  Had one looked closely, the pulse point at my throat would have given me away. My heart was a hummingbird’s.

  We rode back in silence to the city. On our street, Araminta pulled up to the curb, and I pretended to rouse myself. “Watson,” I said, “do you mind going up alone? I want to have a word with my aunt.”

  He had the decency not to look surprised. “Sure,” he said, climbing out of the car. I followed, to move into the front, and he grabbed my wrist. “Are you okay?” he asked me quietly.

  “No,” I said, and shook my hand free, not caring, just then, for anyone else’s feelings. He stepped back, wounded—why was he always so wounded? Was I such a monster, to always be hurting him this way?

  I couldn’t bear it.

  I climbed back into the car and I slammed the door in his face.

  “Lottie,” Araminta said, not looking at me. “Was that necessary? He has nothing to do with this.”

  “You are not allowed to tell me what’s necessary.” I pointed to the road. “I suggest you get us out of here, if you’re so concerned about Watson’s feelings.”

  We left Jamie there on the street, hands at his sides, staring uselessly after us. I realized, too late, that I hadn’t given him the keys. He’d be left there until we returned.

  I turned my ringer off. I didn’t care. I couldn’t. I stared straight ahead with my arms wrapped around myself, and Araminta drove.

  Fifteen minutes later, she found a small, well-lit petrol station on the outskirts of the city. She pulled into a parking space and turned the engine off, folded her hands in her lap.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “How,” I said. “I want to know how.”

  She must have had her little speech prepared, because she started in right away. “I was traveling with a friend over the holidays. She’d wanted to see Blenheim Palace. I hadn’t been away in some time. Months, really.” Araminta studied the steering wheel. “We stayed far longer than we’d intended, far too late to make it back to London, where we planned to stay in Leander’s flat. He didn’t have the Oxford flat yet. It’s how I can afford to travel—your uncle owns so much real estate, and you know that I . . . well. I make a modest living from my bees. Not enough to live like he does. Like your father does, or your uncle Julian. I chose my life, I’m happy with it, but I . . .”

  She was babbling. I’d never heard her babble before.

  “My friend, she . . . she looked up last-minute hotel rooms on some app on her phone, and that’s how we ended up there. There was a deal. We checked in, she took a shower, and I went down for a nightcap at the bar.

  “And he was there. I knew him from his photograph in the news stories, but he’d never met me. It was funny, he was this little axle on which our world turned, and we were strangers to each other. I almost left it alone. But the bar was empty, and in the end, I . . . couldn’t help myself. I asked about his life. His story. He spun some tale about growing up in the Netherlands; he spoke with a slight accent. He’d been a teacher, he said. He told me his name was . . . Felix, I think.”

  I turned away.

  I thought I was going to be sick.

  “He didn’t know who I was, Lottie. I was sure of that. I charged the drink up to our room—it was in my friend’s name, he never saw mine. And then I went upstairs, and I called your brother.”

  “Milo,” I snarled. Milo, who had shot August dead. No. Who hadn’t. Who had lied, to everyone, who had fled the country rather than go to prison, who had stared at me in a safe house in New York like I was the angel of death come for him at last. I had hated him, how he had acted out his grief. The drunkenness. The unkempt hair. The hollow eyes.

  I had scrubbed him from my life.

  “Milo denied it. Denied it all. Told me I was delusional, a plague . . . some other choice descriptors. And then, just when I’d given it up and decided to believe him, he spat out, ‘Don’t tell my sister,’ and he hung up the phone. I knew it then to be true.”

  “So you brought me there to see August,” I said dully. “To be sure.”

  “I brought you there.” She looked at me, her eyes two sunken pools. “So tell me. Is there any way that he can be alive?”

  “I didn’t check for a pulse,” I whispered.

  “When he was shot?”

  Not trusting my voice, I nodded.

  “Why not?” She asked it of me gently. “Why didn’t you look for a pulse?”

  It burst out of me, a torrent of words. “There was so much happening, and I was in such disbelief . . . my brother doesn’t make mistakes like that. He’s far too careful. You don’t become the head of a mercenary company in your twenties unless you’re a master of precision, and he shot him, he had a scope and I knew he could see August’s face and he still shot him and said it was an accident, and I—” I gasped for
air. “I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t make it true.

  “But I—” I shook my head. “I know why they did it that way. Milo. August. I know why I wasn’t told. I ruined his life already. Twice. Why would he trust me with it again?”

  “I didn’t bring you there to torment you, Lottie.”

  “Why, then?” I sounded so much like a child. “Why? I don’t understand any of it.”

  “Lottie—”

  “Can I ask you something? When you had me to your house, before I went to America . . . it felt like you wanted to tell me something. The day I dropped the hives. Did I imagine that?”

  She twisted her hands. “I thought I might be able to offer you a home with me,” she said. “You could work with the bees.”

  I stared at her. “I would have loved that,” I said.

  But she hadn’t offered.

  “But that day you visited . . . well, I was reminded that you were still so young. And so strange. How you just stood there, as those bees filled the air . . . mesmerized. It was unnerving. I didn’t know what to do with a girl like you. And Lord knows that then, you weren’t willing to hear any advice.

  “But you’ve grown up so nicely. It feels like time, perhaps, for you to come under my wing. I took you out tonight because I wanted you to feel—free. You have so much ahead of you, and if August were really alive, I thought you could finally put the past to rest.”

  My kind, businesslike aunt, with her sensible face and her sensible shoes. Her sensible decisions. Her tucking herself away, safe and sound, while the rest of the world raged around her.

  I came at her like a snake.

  “I am fully done with other people telling me what to do with my history,” I said. “My past made me who I am. There is no way to wipe it clean. I am the evidence. If you look at me and see track marks and too-skinny arms and hands that know how to hold a gun and a brain that is sharper and faster than yours, then that is not my problem. Do you hear me? I have regrets, and I have made mistakes, but I am who I am. I’m done pretending that I’ve wholly remade myself, that I’m going to . . . to hide myself away in some lecture hall for the next four years to make you all comfortable.” She was backed up against the door, now, her arms wrapped around herself, and I didn’t care. “If you want to stop seeing it, you’ll have to stop seeing me, and I am not going to disappear.”