E,
I’m so sorry about before. Maybe it’s best if we meet somewhere public, and then we can go talk? Come to Tom’s party—I’ll be there. J x
It was stupid to be unnerved by it—the template was literally right there, in the hundreds of samples I’d sent just this school year—and still I was. The initials (E, J) were easy enough to copy, and the one-or-two-x sign-off was standard practice for any email you sent in Britain. But the long-short sentence combo, the statement that ended in a question mark, the dash—they were all things I did all the time and hadn’t realized until now.
There wasn’t any clue there, at least not that I could tell. Nothing to learn except this wasn’t a slapdash job. They would have taken at least a few hours to learn how to convincingly sound like me.
It had to be Lucien. Who else could it be? But I’d seen firsthand what you got from forming conclusions before you had the facts. You dragged in Moriartys, Milo Holmeses, you threw your weight around trying to make your guess right. You ended up with a friend shot dead in the snow.
On my phone, a text popped up in my international app. I was grateful for the distraction. I’ll see you soon, Shelby said. Checking out that school, then headed to Dad’s house. Lots to tell. Hear you’re in trouble again. Shock-er.
I sent her a line of vomit emojis and a see you soon.
I still had time to kill, so I did my best to begin a response paper for AP Euro on one of the school computers. It was hard to feel focused. If I was suspended for stealing in the spring of my senior year, it didn’t matter what grades I got; I wouldn’t be going to college anywhere.
I felt a weird sort of calm about it. Maybe it was fatalism. Maybe it didn’t matter if it was. I was good at writing papers—not amazing, but good enough—and we had been reading about the causes of the First World War, and I found myself getting into the rhythm of it, laying down sentences, rearranging them, contradicting myself, and then stopping to figure out what I actually thought.
I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice Kittredge was sitting next to me until he leaned in and breathed, hot and disgusting, into my ear, “You were looking for me? Because I have a lot to say to you.”
Sixteen
Charlotte
I HAD MADE THE CALL. I WAS WAITING FOR A RESPONSE. I was receiving three text messages a minute from my Sherringford source, saying Why aren’t you responding? Where are you? Don’t you even care?
I was too anxious to go inside, too anxious to stay put. I paced up and down the steps of the building where I was staying, and I thought, Lucien could find me here, I’m only one degree removed from DI Green, he knows I work with her, I am an idiot for staying in this flat. I thought, There are places in America where no one could find me; I thought I could change my name and move out to Oklahoma. I would be safe, I thought. Safe. Safe, safe, safe. Moriarty had paid for two other plane tickets; I didn’t have their names on the reservation, I hadn’t known how to look it up. Phillipa, I thought, and perhaps another henchman, another tattooed man to hunt us through the woods like deer.
Why was I feeling all of this now? Was this what happened when you carved a door into the dam—that the water eventually blew it out, came rushing through?
I wasn’t safe. I had never wanted so badly to be safe. I had been chasing this man for so long, and now I would give anything to be in Switzerland with my mother, accepting whatever comfort my mother was capable of giving me.
But if Lucien Moriarty didn’t already know where I was staying, he would if I kept on causing a scene, in daylight, dressed as myself. I was making a spectacle of myself. Already an elderly woman had stopped to ask if I needed help. Did I need to make a call. I was fine, I assured her. I was just locked out and very badly had to pee.
That excuse had a ninety-eight percent success rate. She nodded, then walked away.
I ran through Latin declensions in my head; I started listing the bones in my legs out loud, first alphabetically and then by size; I named the stars I knew by heart. A long, unrolling scroll of data in my head. Things I knew. Things that could be put into tables, and lists, and studied. Things that you learned that wouldn’t change, no matter how the world did.
I’m changing, I thought suddenly. I had wanted to, and so I was. Last year I would never have behaved this way if I knew Lucien Moriarty was coming.
What would I have done?
Smoked, for a long time. Considered Watson’s capabilities. Thought about what I could stand to lose. I would have gambled big on a plan to snare Lucien and leave him helpless, using my brother’s money and my father’s connections, and after I saw him hung I would have washed my hands of it completely. Put him in a black box. Sunk him to the bottom of the sea.
That was, of course, before August’s death.
Again I was thinking about it. I never let myself think about it, and now, in the last twenty-four hours, I had to create a litany to keep myself in the present. What safeguards did I have left? I went back through my list. The quadratic equation. Fermi’s paradox. Numbers and letters, in concert, balanced. I thought about—
I thought about the day that August Moriarty knocked on my bedroom door the day after my fourteenth birthday.
I was in bed. I was in bed quite a lot, after that stint at rehab. I’d gone back to my old supplier the moment I’d returned home, and then tried, unsuccessfully, to cut myself off. It had been a week. The symptoms were the same as they always were. There was a strange comfort to the nausea, the burning, the accompanying black mood. I knew them like they were old friends.
“Charlotte,” he’d said, then knocked again. “Ah. Do you mind . . . coming out? So I can meet you? I realize this is rather awkward.”
I was still in bed. I was spending rather a lot of time in bed. “Yes,” I told him, and rolled my face back over into the pillow.
“Yes, you do mind? Or yes, this is awkward?”
“I’m—” What was the word I wanted? I had read it in a book once. But I was blurry. The walls were raw. The walls of my head. I was having some trouble with it, the thinking. “I’m indisposed. Come back tomorrow.”
A sound, like him putting a palm against the door. Then the door opening.
“Oh,” he said. “Do you want some light?” And before I could protest, he’d gone into a flurry of motion—flicked on the lights, pulled open the blinds, retrieved my blanket from the floor, and folded it up at the foot of my bed.
I heard all of this, rather than saw it. I still had my face pressed to the pillow.
“Charlotte.” I finally turned to look at him. He had a lock of blond hair that curled up and away from his face, like a decoration. Later I would find it beautiful. “Your parents aren’t here?”
“No,” I said, then realized that might be a lie. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“And you’re ill?”
That was a simple explanation. I took it. “Yes.”
I watched him come to a decision. “If this is to be our first day, then we’ll have a first day.” He fidgeted for a moment, looking at me (I did look back, though I’m sure I had all the affect and charm of a wall clock), and then looking around the room. Idly, with a finger, he scanned the bookcase that housed my library.
“When I was ill, I used to like to have someone read to me,” August said, quietly. Then: “Do you like to be read to?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. What did he have in mind? A calculus textbook? That seemed difficult. “I can try to find—”
“Ah.” His finger had stopped. “How about this?” he asked, pulling a volume from the shelf.
“I can’t see it, so I can’t offer an opinion.”
“Hush,” he said, but kindly. “I’ll just sit in this chair, then, and we can begin here. You’ll find it illuminating, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure,” I said. He was hiding the cover with his hands.
He thumbed it open, flipped to the back of the book. “‘It is with a heavy heart,’” he said, “�
��that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished,’” and that was how I came to know August Moriarty: his slow, steady voice reading The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes to me, as though I was his younger sister, or his beloved, or both.
He wouldn’t ever do that again.
I realized then I was crying.
That was how Leander found me, on the bottom step of a brownstone, my arms around my knees.
“You came,” I said, and then I cried a bit harder.
He got me upstairs and into the apartment. Sat me on the overstuffed sofa, put a blanket around my shoulders, and left me there to cry. Moments later I heard him running water for a bath.
“Up,” he said, “come along,” and led me to it by the hand, as though I were a child.
“It has bubbles,” I said, numbly. “Pink bubbles.” They were foaming up out of the water. They smelled like roses.
“It does,” he said. “Go sit in that for a while. At least twenty minutes. Understood?”
I nodded.
“Okay then,” he said, and pushed me inside and shut the door.
I sat in the bath, as instructed. I pulled the pins out of my hair and laid them out in a row. I took off my makeup with a cloth and put my head under the water for a long, warm moment, and when I surfaced, I realized I hadn’t had a bath in ages. I didn’t like the waiting of it, the patience needed for the tub to fill.
Leander had gone out. I heard the front door open again now, and his particular footfalls as he returned. He was exaggerating them on purpose so I knew it was him. My breath started coming faster—perhaps Lucien had tracked me here; perhaps Lucien knew Leander and me both well enough to know how Leander walked and—
But then he started singing. He never sang, but he was singing now, some Irish folk song about a man named Danny. It was unmistakably my uncle, sweet and resonant and sad, and I wanted to cry again. Whatever is making me like this is wretched, I thought, and ends now, and I got up and toweled off my hair and put myself into a robe.
I realized then that I had spent the last hour in emotional turmoil and not once thought about the pills stashed away in my coat.
“You have a terrible singing voice,” I told Leander in the kitchen.
On the kitchen island, he had laid out a paper bag of giant pastries, a pair of salads, and a well-polished sawed-off shotgun.
“I can’t be completely perfect,” he said, and offered me a cronut.
We ate. It would be more honest to say that Leander bolted his food and then watched me eat. I made it through a pastry in my usual way, slow bites and sips of water and tearing the thing into pieces to give my stomach time to settle as I went.
“It’s still like that for you?” Leander asked.
“Yes,” I said. As a child, mealtimes had been difficult. I didn’t like food then. I didn’t now. Verbum sap. “What is that shotgun for?”
He inched the salad toward me. “One bite for one answer.”
“I’m not a toddler. I don’t need to be bribed.”
“Really.” He opened the lid. “It’s a salmon salad. From Dean and DeLuca. And if you eat it, I’ll get you oysters for dinner.”
I smiled a little, despite myself. “Fine. Hand me a fork.”
Leander talked at length. He paced as he spoke about the past twelve months, up and down the narrow aisle between the kitchen island and the sink. What he told me about Watson I had largely already known (though I obediently ate a forkful for each fact), but he filled me in on what he’d learned from his research into Peter Morgan-Vilk, after his and James Watson’s interview with him in the stairwell.
“Morgan-Vilk’s father, the one Lucien left in the lurch during his political campaign, isn’t hiding out in Europe with his mistress. Not anymore. Merrick Morgan-Vilk is back in New York.” Leander gestured at my salad, and I took a bite. “He’s putting together an exploratory team for political office—though which office, or why a British politician is doing so in the States, I don’t know. What I do know is that he hates Lucien Moriarty, and he has a fair deal of money and influence, and you owe me at least two bites for that.”
I took my time with them, thinking. “Do you think Merrick Morgan-Vilk knows Lucien is working with his son? Peter?”
“Probably not. And Lucien has his son’s passport for a reason. Peter Morgan-Vilk might just think he’s gotten a good deal—he gets to piss off the father he hates while making a paycheck, and all he has to do is stay in America—but Lucien has to have a plan, and I doubt it has anything to do with foreign travel. If you have someone’s passport, you can steal their identity. Take their money. There are even cases of people’s houses being stolen.”
I laughed. Then I realized he was serious. “I’m sorry?”
“I dealt with a case last year,” he said, fishing out another pastry. “It’s absurdly simple. The con downloads a transfer of property form, makes copies of the stolen passport and forges the signature, and signs the house over to his actual name. A woman I worked for paid her mortgage for months, not realizing she was lining someone else’s pocket. I found the thief in Vancouver, after a long search, and . . . persuaded him to come back to the States with me. I’m not saying this is exactly what Lucien has planned. But you can do quite a lot with someone else’s identity, and I imagine that he plans to.”
“And he has Merrick Morgan-Vilk’s son involved. Merrick, who has no love for Lucien Moriarty.” I thought for a moment. “Do you think we should approach him directly for help? The father?”
Leander laughed, surprised. “Not unless you want to announce our presence with a bullhorn. I’m sure Lucien knows about Morgan-Vilk’s current political plans—it isn’t public, but it isn’t on lockdown, either, and he’ll have eyes on the campaign. No, I think we have to convince Morgan-Vilk more indirectly.”
“Put that on hold for now,” I said. “I had an idea for this afternoon. You know about the Virtuoso School?”
“I do. Spent any time on their website recently?”
“Why would I? I’ve been reading New York’s private school forums.”
Leander began to smile. “And?”
“Hartwell,” I said. He wasn’t listed on the official website, or on any of the provisional pages I could find online. The only connection of his name that I found with the Virtuoso School had been a man named MHartwell43 asking a question about paid vacation leave. He was a new employee, too new to be officially listed, and already he was looking to switch jobs.
But he hadn’t yet.
“Hartwell.” His mouth quirked up. “Good work.”
As we’d been talking, I found myself warming from the inside. Perhaps it was simply the bath, or the food, or the presence of an adult I admired. But there was more than that. I had that feeling of being known, of having all my dark corners illuminated. It wasn’t a new feeling. I’d had it in the past, with Leander and Watson and once even with my mother. But it had been a very long time.
“I’ve been—” I struggled with saying it. “I think I’ve been impossibly awful to you. I won’t be again.”
Leander nodded. His eyes were bright.
“Thank you for sharing what you know, and for trusting me. I know I don’t deserve it.” The words were coming easier now. The dam door blown open.
“Darling girl,” my uncle said, a bit hoarsely, “of course you deserve it. How would you like yourself a partner?”
THE VIRTUOSO SCHOOL WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF MANHATTAN, on a surprisingly serene street in Chelsea. We weren’t far from Peter Morgan-Vilk’s apartment, in fact, and I put my umbrella up against the rain, not out of worry for my hair or clothes, but because I wanted a shield ready against recognition if I needed one.
The school itself was quiet, furnished in the spare style my mother had always liked, and yet there was a hominess to it I hadn’t expected. Natural light. Wooden rafters. A pair of girls holding hands, running late to class.
It made me nostalgic for a school life I’d never had. Somewhere in the background a girl was playing her cello, but I didn’t recognize the piece. It might have been of her own devising.
We were shown to the admissions suite, where we were greeted, to our disappointment, by a girl in a smart dress who had us fill out a dossier. “I thought Hartwell worked Wednesdays,” I whispered to my uncle, but he shook his head imperceptibly.
“Don’t worry,” he said at normal volume. “We’ll get you in, you belong here,” and the man walking into the suite laughed a bit to himself.
“I admire your confidence,” he said.
Leander stuck out his hand. “Walter Simpson.”
“Michael Hartwell,” he said. “Why don’t you come into my office and tell me a bit more about your daughter?”
“My niece,” Leander said, with his thousand-watt smile, and this time when he reached out to guide me into the room, my hesitation was all pretend.
“This is such a gorgeous place,” I said, sitting down and smoothing out my skirt. “I keep hearing music! It’s wonderful.”
“I know it’s late in the year for a transfer,” Leander said.
“Of her senior year. Miss Simpson will have already applied to colleges, by now, yes? I don’t know how much we can help her.” Hartwell flipped through my file again, then shut it. He gave me a sympathetic smile. “May I ask why you’re looking to change schools now?”
I stared down at the shiny tops of my Mary Janes. “My tutor died,” I said. “Unexpectedly. My parents thought I should come be with my uncle in the States for a change of scenery. And besides, I didn’t apply to conservatory yet. I thought I’d perhaps take a gap year.”
“Her tutor’s loss has been quite the blow. They’d worked together for a long time.” Leander stole a look at me. “She’s going to hate me for this, but—”
I colored. “No, don’t! You promised you wouldn’t!”
“You should play for him.” He reached into his bag and pulled out my violin case.
The Case for Jamie Page 15
