The Case for Jamie

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Congratulations, man.” I freed a hand to shake his. “When were you going to tell me?”

  Tom looked a little uncomfortable. “Tomorrow, maybe? I heard you had a . . . well, a bad day. Here, let me get you a table. I think Kittredge said he was bringing mixers for the shampoo vodka.”

  “So it’ll be Bright and Shiny Volumizing Vodka Diet Coke,” I said. “Great.”

  Tom stuck his hands in his sweater-vest pockets. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised. “Mariella, could you—”

  “I’m on it,” she said, and took over laying out the bar.

  He and I wove our way out into the hall. Lena had been right; when we shut the door behind us, almost no noise escaped.

  “I meant what I said,” I told him, my voice too loud in the silent hall. “Congratulations. Michigan’s a hard school to get into.”

  “My parents wanted Yale,” he said, then winced. “No. Sorry. I’m working on that. They want Yale, but I don’t, and it’s not, like, unreasonable to not want to go there. I want a good education and no student loans, because God knows they want the Ivy League but won’t pay for it. And anyway, only one Sherringford student a year gets into Yale, and it’s not going to be me.”

  I nodded.

  “Therapy,” he said, as explanation. “I’m working on things.”

  “Therapy. Do you like it?” It’d been one of the conditions of Tom coming back to Sherringford, after he’d worked with Mr. Wheatley to spy on me last fall. Therapy, and biweekly check-ins with the dean, and no grades lower than a B. The Tom Bradford I knew this year was more subdued, but also much more grounded.

  Sometimes I was shocked that he and I were still on speaking terms. But then, he and I hadn’t really been great friends to begin with. If betrayals were measured by how close you were before they happened, then Tom hadn’t betrayed me all that much.

  “Do I like therapy? I mean, I don’t know. I think it’s working. I feel like I understand my decisions more. Sometimes I make better ones.” He scuffed a foot on the ground. “Look, Watson—”

  “Jamie,” I said, pained.

  “Jamie.” Tom looked at me. “I didn’t invite you tonight on purpose, and it’s not because of this thing with Elizabeth.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We weren’t that close, sure, but we were friends. We ate lunch together most days. We studied together in the library at night. I knew his business, and he knew mine.

  At least I’d thought I did.

  “I don’t really know what to say to that,” I said.

  Somehow that pissed him off. “See? Look at you! I say something totally fucked up to you and you’re not even mad. It’s like it doesn’t even make a dent.”

  “You’re like, five steps ahead of me right now. What are you even talking about?”

  “This! All this!” Tom kicked at the dirty linoleum. The sound echoed down the empty hallway. “You don’t care. We’re not friends, not really. You’re not really friends with Lena. You’re not even really with Elizabeth—oh sure, you think you are, and maybe she does too. But it’s a total lie.”

  He was hurt, and it was his party, and even if I wanted to push back against what he was saying, I still felt like shit about it. “I guess I didn’t realize it,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s not— Jesus, Watson. Nothing. I get nothing from you. You don’t tell us anything. It’s clear there’s something going on—”

  “Jamie,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Jamie. Don’t call me Watson.”

  A group of girls rounding the corner paused, not sure if they should interrupt. The one in front had blond hair and a party dress and a baggie full of bright pills in her hand. She looked like the girl Mariella had brought to our lunch table yesterday. A freshman. They all looked like freshmen, too young to be here.

  “Why?” Tom demanded. “Because I’m not on the rugby team with you, I can’t use last names? Are you still punishing me for last year? I don’t care if you are, just tell me so we can work it out! I—”

  Whatever defense I’d been marshaling came apart. Because while I wasn’t punishing him, I was doing something worse. I didn’t think about him at all. Him or Lena or even Elizabeth, not in the way she deserved, not even now when I knew I had hurt her.

  Once I had been good at friendship, or I thought I’d been. I’d followed friendship abroad, to art squats and police stations and cavernous parties, to my father’s house when he and I weren’t speaking, to Holmes’s room to hold vigil at night. And now I didn’t even know what to say to someone who was telling you, clumsily, that they missed you. Maybe Tom and I had been closer than I thought.

  What would I have said, back when I was still myself? How did you slip back on a skin you’d shed?

  What was wrong with me?

  “It’s fine,” I said, turning to open the door. The girls took that as their cue to sweep by us; the one in front knocked into me, dropping her purse and her baggie of pills. I stooped to pick up her bag, then kicked the drugs behind me. She didn’t seem to notice.

  I turned back to Tom. “Hey, how about you call me whatever you want, and I’ll stop being a shitty friend. Let’s get you a shot, yeah?”

  I sounded like a buffoon.

  He gave me a disgusted look. “Talk to your girlfriend,” he said, pushing past me into the party.

  When I looked up, I saw, to my horror, that Elizabeth was trailing along the hall ghostlike, a scarf wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.

  The music swelled. Someone cheered, and then the heavy door clicked shut and closed us off from the sound.

  “Hi,” Elizabeth said, standing there under the horrible industrial lights. It was obvious that she’d been crying. Her eyes had a glassy, faraway quality, and with the shawl around her arms she looked like a seer, or a sea-witch. “Listen—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said straightaway.

  “You are.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah. That whole thing—it was crazy, and awful, and I shouldn’t have blamed you. Of course you had nothing to do with it. But I didn’t send that email. All this weird shit’s been happening, it’s like it’s last year all over again, and I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to have to deal with it—”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You know?” This hallway, apparently, was the place where I knew nothing. “How?”

  She lifted her chin. “Because you sent me another email asking me to meet you at this party. But Tom told me he wasn’t inviting you. He thought it’d make me want to come out, if I knew you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Oh,” I said stupidly. My email. Like an idiot I still hadn’t changed my password. I’d been too busy pretending to be a detective. Pretending, and totally failing.

  “It’s the Moriartys, right?” Elizabeth stumbled over the words, like they cost her something.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think—I think so.”

  “And Charlotte?”

  “Yeah.”

  She pulled the scarf more tightly around herself, her gaze drawn inward. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” I said, and waited. I found myself waiting for her to unveil, layer by layer, her intricate, ridiculous plan. We’d charge back in. We’d be the heroes. We’d end it, finally, once and for all.

  But that was a different girl. That was a different me beside her.

  “All I know,” Elizabeth was saying slowly, “is if they want us at this party, then we need to get the hell out of here, now.”

  We made it all the way to the door to Carter Hall before the panic started.

  Ten

  Charlotte

  THE FIRST TIME I MET JAMIE WATSON, I DIDN’T PAY HIM much attention at all. I’d spent months underwater. My summer in Sussex after my first Sherringford year had been unbearably quiet. I’d been reading about anglerfish because I was certain that I had hung some terrible inadvertent lantern over my
head that had drawn Lee Dobson in. Like the anglerfish, I had sizable teeth, but I was coming to learn I used them poorly in a crisis.

  Reading took me away from myself, so I tried to be reading all the time. When I wasn’t, I found myself doing small things I’d never done before. Imagining some noise when there was none. Scratching my right knee, only the right knee, until I finally broke the skin. Standing up at dinner while my father was speaking because I was certain I was about to start screaming. My father was starting to look old. My father had stopped looking at me at all.

  I spent that summer getting myself clean. As clean as I could. This had, as you’d imagine, suboptimal results, but I was working with what I had. I was realizing I had hardly enough of myself to keep for myself, and then at Sherringford in the fall when Watson came up to me on the quad, all I thought was, Here is someone else who wants something from me that I am unable to give.

  Watson followed up on his rather ridiculous overture of friendship by punching Lee Dobson in the face. If anyone was going to punch Dobson in the face, it was going to be me. Not some moony half-American boy who thought, like my father, that our names meant we should be something other than we are.

  I’ve never been a good detective. I am far too impatient for that. What I actually am is another matter.

  In the past few months, I’ve had enough time to consider the question. Here is my working theory: I am a girl who came to the world rather late. I didn’t know how to care about someone else because I had no one to care for (save my cat Mouse, who did not need all that much from me, considering) and no real training on the subject. I learned quickly, if somewhat painfully. I never wanted someone like Watson to be my test subject.

  Good intentions, road to hell, et cetera.

  FROM THE LOOSE LEAVES ON THE SIDEWALK AND THE wreath on the door, I thought at first that perhaps I’d taken down the wrong address. It was clearly a floral shop, though the sign above just said JUST SO OCCASIONS, obnoxiously vague. If I were to name a shop I’d name it for the proprietor and the purpose. MORIARTY SABOTEURS, for example. It was good to be clear for your customers’ sake.

  Just So Occasions “did” flowers, though they’d taken them in against the cold. They did framing, too, of family snaps like the sort they had hanging in their window and the paintings spotlit on the back wall. And they were hedging their bets against both of those things, because they were hosting some kind of Art and Wine afternoon patronized by kind-looking forty-something women who had two or three children in school and a husband who wouldn’t help with the wash.

  The woman in the window had just been laid off from her secretarial job. You could tell from the short nails on her right hand, by her smart but well-worn shoes, and, most obviously, from the cardboard box under her table holding three picture frames, a lamp, and a jar full of pens. She was looking for an escape before she had to face her new reality, and this place, with its comforts and warmth and the nice blond man wandering the room refilling glasses, provided that.

  I felt rather badly for her.

  Part of me had thought perhaps I’d arrive and plow through the front door, guns blazing. It was what I would have done last year. That fact alone meant it was a terrible idea, and anyway I rather wanted to see what her finished painting would look like. Right now it looked a bit like a gold-plated skeleton.

  There was an alley to the right of the shop. I’d known this already, from studying the satellite map. As I’d surmised, this was where the delivery truck waited, hazard lights on, until it was ready to go off on its run.

  I set off down the alley purposefully, as though I were taking a familiar shortcut home. Once I made it to the driver’s side door, I cast a quick look toward the street and then let myself in. It was unlocked. The fact that it was unlocked gave me momentary pause, but whether or not this was a trap didn’t ultimately matter. I had three minutes at most. I would make good use of them.

  I pulled on my gloves and got to work.

  At first glance the cab was empty except for a half-full bottle of soda. There would be prints on that; I quickly emptied it out the side and stuffed it into my bag. Then I flipped down the sun visors; clipped to the passenger side was a manifest. I assumed the list of goods being delivered was incorrect. It would hardly say hazardous materials or items that would subtly but irrevocably injure James Watson Jr. I didn’t bother scanning it now; instead, I confirmed the address at the top—yes, there it was, Sherringford School—photographed it, and put it back precisely where I found it. With my phone, I took a quick shot of the odometer and the radio preset stations. I searched the seat for hair that I could take away with me, found a stray on the seat, and put it into a jar with a pair of tweezers.

  Watson used to watch me do this with bated breath, imagining that every last action I made had a specific end. It didn’t. Not always. Much like when I solved a math problem, I had an order of operations that I followed, a series of things I searched for ranked by importance. This way if I were interrupted, I had accomplished the most essential tasks first. This strand of hair, for instance, was likely useless, but on the off chance it wasn’t—

  Three minutes had passed. I cocked my head to listen (nothing), and then I stepped lightly out of the cab and circled to the back of the truck.

  DI Green had told me not to look, and it had been a relief to hear it at the time. Intel only, Charlotte, she’d said.

  But the truck was going to Watson’s school, and so I was looking now.

  The lock keeping the rolling door shut had a standard-order padlock. The street was empty, but I didn’t doubt that Just So Occasions had a number of security cameras pointed at this exact spot. And I had thought to come as myself, to prove a point. Even this deciding moment was long enough for the security cameras to get a good shot of my face.

  Professor Demarchelier’s voice in my head: Idiot girl.

  I snarled. Then I pulled out my phone to check the weather, rifling in my knapsack with my free hand for the pack of chewing gum I kept for this precise occasion. I pulled out the gum, then dropped my bag. Then dropped the gum as well. There was no one around to see or to offer help; that was necessary. Grumbling out loud, I sat on the edge of the truck, inches from the padlock, and began putting my spilled belongings away. When I was halfway finished, I patted down my pockets, ostensibly for my phone—I looked behind me, then under the truck, then in my pockets, and then I put my bag on top of the padlock, hunched over its open mouth, and, with the cover it provided, quickly put my pins into the lock and took it apart.

  That was my cue to triumphantly pull out my phone, stuff everything back into my knapsack, shake my head, and take off down the street at speed.

  A good fifty percent of my work was mimicry. Twenty percent, as Watson would say, was magician’s tricks, and the rest was forensics and dumb, dumb luck. Except for the one percent that was entirely reliant on the ubiquity of Starbucks locations and their public restrooms.

  I didn’t even have to wonder; there was one at the end of the street. I ducked into the women’s. Changed into a dress, but kept the Kevlar; put my coat and shirt and pants into neat rolls at the bottom of my knapsack. The store was empty and the barista might notice if I changed something as obvious as my hair, so I moved my wig to the top of my bag. I would put it on at the next blind corner. Bless America and its lack of CCTV cameras; there would be no footage of my transformation.

  Within ten minutes I was back at the truck as a different girl altogether.

  In another century, Holmes, Watson had said, you would have been burned as a witch.

  “Let them try,” I said aloud, and rolled the delivery door up and open.

  It wasn’t the right look to be unloading a truck—fashion vloggers rarely made deliveries—but one had to make do with what one had. I hopped in, then pulled the door back down far enough to hide all but my feet.

  With the flashlight on my mobile, I scanned my surroundings. Boxes, yes, but the kind you’d put around a painting or at th
e very least a frame. Experimentally I prodded the center of the one beside me, then the edges. Frames and canvases, then, for sure. There were professional handling services that moved valuable art, but this had been deemed unimportant enough to flop around in the sort of truck you used to deliver to grocery stores.

  I needed my box-cutter. It was at the bottom of my increasingly full bag; I pushed aside coat, lockpicks, pipette case, soda bottle, silencer, vlogging camera—there.

  The rolling door flung up and open.

  The nice blond man wasn’t holding a wine bottle anymore. He was holding a bowie knife instead. The Kevlar, then, had been a miscalculation.

  “Hello. I’m here to make a delivery,” I said, because at heart, I was a bit of an asshole.

  “Charlotte Holmes,” Hadrian Moriarty said. His eyes raked over me in a vicious sweep. “What is it that you want?”

  “I like your shop,” I said, because I did. It was confused and a bit crowded, but even through the half-open front door I could tell it smelled like roses. I was fond of roses.

  It was often in my best interest in these situations to think abstractly instead of whether or not my quarry was about to kill me.

  “No costume?” he snarled. “No stupid little glasses?”

  “Doesn’t the wig count?”

  “No sidekick?”

  “No,” I said. “You took care of that.”

  We regarded each other. His eyes narrowed. He put one heavy foot on the lip of the truck, then the other, and then he was muscling me to the back, up by the cab, past the boxes and out of sight.

  “Where’s Phillipa?” I asked. “Or was she not given her very own passport and allowed to skip along out of the country, too? Are only the boys allowed to hopscotch the pond?”

  “There it is,” he said. “That cheeky mouth. I was wondering where that girl had gone to.”

  “I’m not here about your sister. I’m here about Connecticut.”

  I was, I realized, on guard for more than just straightforward assault. Hadrian had that sort of low, hungry stare I associated with men like Lee Dobson. Sex, it seemed, was never about sex. It was about power and about subjugation, and Hadrian had been on the losing side of both those dynamics for quite some time.