The Case for Jamie
Page 6
WHEN I FINALLY EMERGED FROM BEHIND THOSE RUBBISH bins, I was furious with myself.
I hadn’t done any of the work I’d intended to do, and now the only option I had left was attempting to pick a lock in an apartment stairwell to find documentation that I really didn’t need.
Ultimately, what I wanted—what I needed, I would allow myself that urgency—was a comprehensive list of Lucien Moriarty’s access points in and out of this country. Perhaps I was up my own ass, to steal an expression from Watson, but I had a working hypothesis. I was finished assuming that my suppositions were correct; this time, I intended to test them. Thoroughly.
I knew what would happen if I didn’t. Had my feelings for August been responsible for the actions I took to ruin his life? Yes. Had the steps I took to find my uncle resulted directly in August’s death? Yes. Yes, a thousand times, yes.
The only question, then, was how I could devise myself a punishment while bringing Lucien down in the bargain.
In the months after August’s death, I painted a very deliberate target on my back. I opened social media accounts and tagged my posts with my location. I walked along the river in Lucerne every day for hours, slowly, in bright colors, talking loudly on my mobile. (I told my mother these walks were “constitutionals,” meant to bring me back to full health. Her response was a shrug and a reminder to bring my mace.) I photographed myself walking along the river, and posted it to said public social media accounts.
Lucien hadn’t even feinted in my direction. The last I heard, that bastard was in America. In New York.
I took several months to craft myself a snare, and then I came here myself.
But Watson? I never wanted Watson to be here. And it looked as though he might be again, if he was in fact following my uncle and James Watson on this frankly idiotic search for Lucien Moriarty. Why on earth did they want to find him?
This was my mess, and I would be the one to clean it up.
I waited until I was on the subway to write down the details I’d heard in the stairwell. It was enough to confirm, at least, that Peter Morgan-Vilk was an identity I should keep in mind when I took my next step. I would confirm at least one more, then move on.
We passed through a station with Wi-Fi. My phone buzzed. Tell me you’re there.
There in ten, I texted back, and then I was.
Six bloody flights of stairs again. New York was taxing, though not in any interesting way. The key is in the frog, the text read, as if I wouldn’t immediately know to fish it from the small ceramic animal next to the doormat.
My choice in lodgings this trip was giving me some pause. In the past year, I had undertaken most major travel (trains, planes, et cetera) in the guise of a girl named Rose from Brighton who was traveling on her gap year, filming videos for the YouTube channel she hoped to launch upon her return. Her accent was similar enough to mine to be unchallenging, her interest in film allowed me to carry around recording equipment, and her attention to fashion was easy enough to affect, as far as these things went. I’d built her persona around the nicest wig I owned, an ashy-blond one I’d had made in London. Rose wore a lot of black, as I did, in tailored styles, as I did—but with her hair and cat-eye sunglasses, her clothes took on a purpose. Even though she made me look like a fashion vlogger, I appreciated her.
I thought of her this way, like a person I kept propped up in the corner until I climbed inside. She’d taken short-term sublets in London for the duration of last fall, but this winter in America had proved more expensive. Rose’s finances were limited. My finances were limited, and it was unclear as to when I could replenish them without exposing myself to more attention than necessary in the process.
This is why when DI Green offered me the use of her sister’s apartment while she, the sister, was on holiday, I accepted, though with some hesitation.
You do know you’re funding vigilante work, I told her via text.
She was saved in my phone as “Steve.” I brought you in on a case when you were ten. I don’t think this is the craziest decision I’ve ever made.
The apartment was unremarkable. Before I dropped either character or bags, I swept the room for surveillance. An hour later I had my laptop set up at the kitchen counter, and though I’d had the Wi-Fi base station removed, I still checked to make sure I hadn’t connected to any network. I’d even filled in the Ethernet port myself with glue so that no one could force a connection. This computer had to stay off-grid; here I kept my files, organized in the method my father had taught me.
They held the facts of my investigation thus far.
Lucien Moriarty was entering America often, “on business,” and not under his real name. He flew directly in, oftentimes from London, and once he reached the States he disappeared. He was in effect a ghost, one whose movements I could only really track when he was belted into a plane over the Atlantic.
I had determined this by staking out the most likely airport for three weeks straight. I hadn’t even had to buy a ticket. Heathrow Terminal 5 is rather large, but when you’ve determined that someone is flying out and back every week and then made a color-coded list of direct flights to four major American cities on the Eastern Seaboard, you can be assured of some measure of success. Especially if you set your mind to nothing else.
Besides, no one looks too closely at the girl holding the WELCOME HOME DADDY sign in Arrivals, amongst a half-dozen other girls doing the same.
I had never been interested in where Lucien Moriarty was going to. I wasn’t even interested in where he was coming from. That would come later. I wanted to know on which days he chose to return, and why.
From there things grew very technical, and I spent some time lurking in customs officials’ neighborhood Starbucks, taking temp jobs at their offices, interviewing them for my “high school newspaper.” I learned who he had bribed in England, and from there I made a plan to learn who he was bribing in America.
Why on earth wasn’t he traveling under his own name?
Why he was in America was never a question, not to me. Lucien Moriarty was a British political consultant. He was a fixer, a man who made scandals disappear. And yet for the last year, his client list had grown unwieldy and unpredictable. A Manhattan prep school. A large posh hospital in D.C.
And perhaps most disturbingly, a wilderness rehabilitation facility for teenagers in Connecticut.
He handled their public crises. He helped them build a brand. He kept a base in England, and he flew back and forth weekly, and still he made no move on me, none at all. But Lucien Moriarty had an idée fixe, and I wished it was something as simple as conceit to know that it was me.
Enough. My navel wasn’t growing any more interesting for all my gazing. Besides, the more I allowed myself abstract thought about this case, the more I found myself wandering to thoughts of what life could be like after. Seafood, perhaps, in a nice restaurant, in my own clothes, with my own face on. Uninterrupted sleep, and making a real go at getting myself off of cigarettes. And after . . . I had a storefront in mind, something in Cheapside, and I had hopes it would still be available once I had finished with the prison sentence I would likely serve when all this was over.
In the meantime, I had a plan.
Contact Scotland Yard, provide report.
Contact source at Sherringford, receive report.
Purchase new bulletproof vest. One with moisture wicking, this time. (I was tired of emerging from Kevlar a sweaty mess.)
In bulletproof vest, shake loose information from a certain shop in Greenpoint.
Begin running down remaining specs on Michael Hartwell identity.
Confirm interview with Starway Airlines.
Arrange CPR certification for candy-striping credential.
Text DI Green a photograph of my untaken pills.
Go ten minutes without thinking about Jamie Watson unwinding his girlfriend’s scarf.
Five minutes. Three. Any time at all.
Seven
Jamie
Finally, I stopped to look at my phone. The text was from my father: Leander wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.
The worst thing about my life so far? I wasn’t stupid. It would be so much easier if I was. But we’d been in New York City today, chasing after Moriartys, and I’d come back to an instance of casual sabotage. Even now, I saw the big red circle I’d made on my physics syllabus—individual presentations, 40% of your grade. It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t a kidnapping. It was small, and insidious, and I knew the way things would work now. I could recognize a pattern.
It would only get worse. But I was tired of giving in.
Someone was punishing Charlotte by punishing me.
It was either that, or my girlfriend was really mad at me for skipping writing club.
“Fine,” I said out loud. “Fine,” and I stayed up until dawn to get the damn thing redone.
THE NEXT DAY I HAD FRENCH CLASS FIRST THING. ELIZABETH walked me there, her hand in the crook of my arm. She was telling a story about her roommate leaving piles of orange peels underneath their bunk beds, how they smelled amazing until they began to rot. They’d argued last night about what point they’d need to sweep them out from underneath the bed—four days? Five? Should they leave them there at all? Despite my exhaustion, I was interested by the story’s strange poetry, Elizabeth’s gestures, her laugh. The normalcy of it all.
“So the oranges feels like a metaphor for something,” she concluded, outside the steps up to the languages building. “I don’t know what.”
“I have that feeling a lot,” I said.
“I missed you last night. Writing club was stupid, as usual. More poems about people’s dead grandmothers. You know, you don’t look like you slept at all.” She hadn’t touched her own tea, though I’d drained mine, and she pressed her paper cup into my hands. “Were you thinking about . . .” She trailed off, but I could hear the end of the sentence: about last year, or about Charlotte Holmes.
“No, I had some work to do still for today. I left it until the last minute.” I hadn’t told her about my ruined physics presentation; saying it out loud made it feel real. Besides, just hearing the anxiety in those four words—were you thinking about—made me hesitate to tell her. I had to keep things positive so that I could keep going. “More evidence that I shouldn’t ever run off with my father in the middle of a school day.”
“He’s a bad influence.” She kissed my cheek. “But you should go with him more often, it makes you happy. Try to stay awake. Monsieur Cann already has it in for you.”
He did, but only because I’d skipped French III so many times last fall in favor of Sciences 442. How could I blame him for hating me? Today, I fumbled through his class so badly that Tom texted me under the table, are you okay? and I had to wave him off. Through AP Euro, I kept pinching my own arm until I gave myself bruises, and in Physics I read as carefully as I could from my presentation on the screen, trying not to sway on my feet, and the second it was over I made the executive decision to bail on the only class I knew I had an unshakeable A in—AP English—to get some sleep. On the way back to my dorm I passed Lena, bright like a robin in her red uniform blazer. She looked so awake it made me want to cry.
“Jamie,” she said, grabbing my arm. “What’s going on? You like . . . you look like hell.”
“Didn’t sleep,” I said, and forced a smile. I was so exhausted I could barely get back to my dorm.
In the hall outside my room, I made myself listen. Just in case someone was inside, waiting for me behind the door with a club. But I guess that was never the Moriartys’ way of doing things.
That was more Charlotte Holmes’s style.
I gritted my teeth and let myself in.
Inside, I pushed back against the urge to catalog my things, just in case my presentation-ruining fairy had paid another visit. What was the point? It was the sort of thing that would make you feel crazy—was I the one who left my planner on the chair, when I’d always put it instead on my bookshelf? Had I been the one to leave the window open? The window was open now, I noticed, and who knew if I’d been the one to prop it open—
A wave of panic. Despite my sharp, sleepless nausea and the scraped-out feeling in my head, I wasn’t at all tired anymore. But it was too late now to trek it to English.
I sat on the bed with my phone in my hands. What I wanted was to speak to someone who knew me. A conversation that would tie me back down to the knowable ground. It was dinnertime in England, I realized. My sister would be home from school, and if last night’s email was any indication, she was in desperate need of someone to complain to. I rang her on videochat, and she answered almost instantly.
“Hi,” she said, harried. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
“Probably,” I said.
She shook her head. “Here, let me shut my door. Not like Mum is paying any attention to what I do anyway.”
“Still wrapped up in Dreamy Ted?”
Shelby shrugged. “I don’t know how dreamy he is. He’s bald, but not in that hot-guy way. His only hot-guy selling point is that he’s a little younger than she is. Rawr.”
“But Mum’s happy?”
“She’s happy, I suppose,” my sister said. “I don’t know. I think maybe I’m, like, an awful person, but I’ve decided I hate sharing her attention with someone else. You’ve been gone for so long, it’s become very Gilmore Girls around here. But Mum and I haven’t gone out for frappucinos in ages. We used to go almost every day.”
There was a note of apology in her voice. Shelby had been too young to really remember what it’d been like when my father left us for his new family in America. My years-long refusal to talk to him had struck her as a ploy for attention. (Looking back, I can say that it definitely was.) She didn’t have the same memory of him that I did; it mattered a lot less to her either way how often he called or if he remembered to send us cards on our birthdays. Weren’t all dads just a voice on the phone? Weren’t optional once-yearly visits across the ocean just the way things went?
I wasn’t enjoying the tables being turned on her. She and Mum had always been close, and if I could spare my sister anything, it would be taking a starring role in my own teen drama—My Parents Are Dating Other People Burn It Down.
“Tell her,” I said. “Tell her you miss her. Ask for Shelby-time. She adores you, she wants you to be happy. It won’t be an issue.”
Shelby flopped down backward on her bed. The camera wobbled, then steadied. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because—no. Hold on. I meant to tell you this. I—he like, scolded me last night. He told me to go back to my room and change.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Ted did? Seriously?”
“Yeah. I was wearing these shorts—kind of high-waisted, with tights, nothing that I hadn’t worn loads of times before, and he asked if I was going out to see a boy in those, and maybe I shouldn’t wear it if so, and he was ‘kidding’ but he wasn’t. Mum shut him down quickly.” She pursed her lips. “I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, you know? Like, he doesn’t have any kids. Maybe he’s trying it out, the dad thing.”
“He’s doing a gross job of it, then,” I said, making a mental note to follow up with Mum. “I hate that shit. It makes it sound like he’s looking at you, and finding you—”
“Attractive. Or whatever. I know. It’s horrid. And he’s not even that old.” Her voice went steely. “He better not try it again.”
I had that feeling I got every now and then, that I was missing out on something pretty significant, not seeing my sister grow up. “Or else?”
“Or else,” she said firmly. “Anyway, it might not matter, I’m not going to be around. I’m going to school in America.”
I sat up so quickly I hit my head on the bookshelf above my bed. “What? No. Absolutely not. Not Sherringford.”
At that, she laughed. “Not Sherringford. I refuse to go to your w
eirdo murder school, no matter how much money they offer me. No, there’s this, like, other boarding school in Connecticut that Mum dug up. It’s close to yours. But this one has a one-to-one student-to-horse ratio.” She waited for that to sink in. “Jamie, I know you’re awful at maths, but seriously. One-to-one. Everyone gets her own horse. And it’s an all-girls’ school, which is great.”
It wasn’t really all that surprising, when she put it that way. Shelby had spent our childhood begging for riding lessons, but Mum could never afford them. Instead, she’d given Shelby a Shetland-sized stuffed pony that my sister dragged around behind her on a lead. “I knew you were shopping around for a school, but I always sort of thought you’d stay in England. Isn’t this place expensive? How can she afford it?”
“I think they offer, like, gold-plated financial aid. Or maybe her new boyfriend is feeling generous. I don’t know.”
“And you’re okay with all this?”
“I—” She chewed her lip, thinking. “Mum has her own life here now. And I sort of feel like I’m in the way. This place sounds better than staying in London, slowly making myself invisible.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” Shelby blinked quickly, rubbed her eyes. “Anyway, I’m not going without looking at it first, I’m not stupid. That’s what I wanted to tell you, that Mum booked tickets to come out so I could see the campus, and if I like it, I can start right away. She was talking about wanting to see Dad. I guess she hasn’t seen him since—since—”
“Since last winter. Since he came to pick me up after Sussex.”
Past the phone in my hands, I could see the snow falling thickly out the window. Just this morning the weather was clear.
“Are you okay, Jamie?”
Shelby had sat up on her own bed. I didn’t like the pitying look in her eyes. “Fine,” I said, too sharply. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t be a jerk,” she sang, the way she’d do when we were kids. “You’re being a jerk, such a jerk, such a jerk—”
“Don’t you ‘Jerk Song’ me—”