The Case for Jamie

by Brittany Cavallaro

  That said, I was currently sober, and I had stopped scratching my right knee months ago, and even if everything inside of me was screaming, I was still holding my box-cutter and would not hesitate to carve out both his eyes if he laid a single finger on me.

  Distantly, I remembered that this man had made out with my uncle. I would have to have a word with Leander about that, if we ever spoke again.

  “Connecticut,” Hadrian was saying. “Forget Connecticut. Let’s talk about Sussex for a second, shall we? How about, your mother drugged Leander and sent him off to hospital to blame it on me and my sister? Tidy, wasn’t it. Brother-sister forgers with a cursed last name poisoning one of your sainted Holmeses. You must have loved that.”

  “Lucien had been blackmailing my parents. He sent a ‘home nurse’ to poison my mother. Turnabout is fair play.”

  “Is it, now? Is that why Milo killed August? Fair play?”

  I had been waiting for this question. “No,” I said, as coldly as I could. “He thought August was you. He thought you were trying to hurt me.”

  We regarded each other.

  “Kid,” Hadrian said, and there was the smallest touch of humor in his eyes, “you’ve opened quite the can of worms, haven’t you.”

  “You could say that.” Someone was walking quickly by the truck; he and I both fell silent. “You don’t seem to have a bad setup here,” I said finally.

  “No. It could be worse.” His sister, Phillipa, was languishing under house arrest for poisoning my uncle—one of the few crimes she hadn’t in fact committed. His brother August was dead. His brother Lucien was still by all accounts pursuing a vendetta that would bring the rest of us to our knees.

  Working in a floral-stroke-frame shop in Brooklyn was not a bad deal, all considered.

  Hadrian saw my mood soften. He smiled, toothily.

  “Connecticut,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “It isn’t worth it. I don’t care what it is you’re actually delivering. Stop while you’re ahead.”

  “I have my orders,” he said.

  “From your brother. Your brother orders you around,” I said, and watched that one land. “Do you actually want to get back into this game after you’ve escaped it? What, your brother gave you a passport, so now he owns you? Please. You’re better than that. Get out from under his thumb.”

  Hadrian set his jaw. “Don’t tell me who I’m beholden to.”

  “I’m telling you what’s in your best interest.”

  “And what’s that?”

  I stared at him, gauging the size of the bluff I was about to make. Despite our shared history I didn’t know him well enough to read a change in his tells or his behavior from the last time I’d seen him. All I knew was that once, he had been a talk show guest all over Britain, discussing art and antiquities with a sort of smart charisma that I saw no sign of now.

  The forged paintings that he and Phillipa had sold, the ones that fetched the highest prices, were ones that he had painted himself. He still was painting now. Any child could have told you that from the pigment beneath his fingernails. Through the shop window I’d seen the canvases hung against the back wall—darkly romantic portraits, done as though in a series. The Last of August, I thought. The Thought of a Pocketwatch. August had said that art was his brother’s only passion.

  I reached out a hand for Hadrian to shake. He took it. My fingers were dwarfed in his.

  “Don’t make the delivery,” I said. He stared at me. “Don’t make it. I don’t care if they’re going to exhibit your paintings. It isn’t worth it.”

  Hadrian jerked his hand away, and I knew then for sure what was in the boxes at my feet.

  “They’re not worth it, the students there,” I said. I believed what I was saying; it would be pearls before swine. These particular pearls were also made by swine, though that wasn’t the issue at hand.

  “I thought you’d be here to get some revenge for that Watson boy.” Hadrian cleared his throat. “You don’t seem here for that.”

  I looked at him.

  I had brought a small revolver. I had worn a Kevlar vest in case it came to a scuffle over the gun. I had come as myself so he could know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was my doing, if I had in fact decided to kill him.

  I had thought about it for months. Hadrian, Phillipa, Lucien. Remove them as though they were rats that had gotten into the walls of my home. Remove the threat, and then I would let the matter rest. Let my former friend get on with his life, as he so obviously—and wisely—wanted nothing to do with me. I would perhaps go to prison. Prison didn’t scare me; I understood how to handle monotony interspersed with the occasional deadly interlude, and anyway I’d always thought I’d end up there eventually. Perhaps I wouldn’t. I was tidy in my methods, and I might walk away from it all. Perhaps I would finish my formal schooling and take a position in a lab somewhere. Do graduate work in chemistry. I’d have to find a specific topic to pursue, instead of dabbling, but there could be pleasure in specialization. I’d certainly interacted enough with poisons to want to know more about antidotes, and perhaps . . . perhaps I could change my name—a symbolic gesture, but one that might allow for appropriate mental gymnastics. No one had expectations for Charlotte Something. No one directed her Saturdays but her. I thought about it: an apartment overlooking something appropriately scenic, some rain or fog or smog. I could compose again on my violin. I hadn’t written a melody since I was a child. I could, after refining it, of course, perhaps play it for—

  For myself. I would play it for myself. It was what I’d always done, after all, and if I was lonely, I could cry myself to bloody sleep.

  You need to feel the blood underneath all that reason, DI Green had said. Looking at Hadrian Moriarty, I didn’t feel angry. I felt very, very tired.

  I knew, then, that I didn’t want to kill the three of them after all.

  “Leave Watson alone,” I said, “and I’ll leave you alone.”

  To his credit, he considered it. “If I don’t?”

  “Then I’ll see you again soon.” With that, I jumped down from the truck.

  I wasn’t a sentimental fool. I didn’t plan on forgiving him, but neither would I gun him down. I had the manifest, the delivery confirmation, the bottle and the hair and the radio presets and my seven-hundred-dollar Kevlar vest, intact. I had seen a moment of doubt in Hadrian Moriarty. It had been a productive afternoon.

  As I passed the women in the shop, I saw that they were all painting the Eiffel Tower. The woman I’d been watching had turned her skeleton into a tall, elegant structure. She’d depicted it at night, lit up and twinkling.

  Perhaps she hadn’t been fired. Perhaps she’d quit her job, instead, to take a trip to Paris. The evidence didn’t quite suggest it, but perhaps, this time, I’d give her the benefit of the doubt.

  I had been to Paris before. I had been to Berlin and Copenhagen and Prague and Lucerne and most of Western Europe, in the name of an education or in pursuit of a crime, and I had seen nothing of what made the world worth looking at.

  That was a pity, now that I thought about it.

  At the subway stop, I checked the weather again. Then my email. Then my bank account balance, and when I saw the number, I swore out loud. I had to refill my coffers.

  I made three calls and got on the train, my nerves already shot. My day had taken a turn.

  I would have to spend the next few hours reading celebrity gossip blogs.

  Eleven

  Jamie

  THE YELLING WASN’T THE KIND FROM A FIRE OR AN EXPLOSION. It was panic, for sure—how else could I hear it through the heavy door?—but from what, I didn’t know. All I knew was that there wasn’t any screaming.

  At least not yet.

  Elizabeth looked at me, her face white, her hand on the push-bar of the door. We were seconds from making it out of this unscathed.

  “Go,” I told her. “No one’s seen you.”

  Elizabeth had always been smarter than me. She didn’t protes
t or ask what I’d do. She didn’t take my hand and refuse to go. Without another word, she bolted into the open air.

  I pounded down the tunnel toward the party. The overhead lights cast shadows down the hall, catching in the doorways, making monsters, policemen, Moriartys.

  By the time I reached the door, the noise had stopped.

  Somehow that was worse.

  There were twenty people at the party, and they were all clustered around something on the floor. Someone had turned the music down instead of cutting it completely, and the sound skittered crazily above us, a voice howling get it get it get it get it while the strobe light flickered in time. The power strip was by the door. I jerked the cord out of the wall.

  Everyone looked up at me.

  “That’s him,” someone said.

  “Watson?” Kittredge said, incredulous.

  “Tom said his laptop got all fucked up—”

  The girl on the floor, curled up with her arms around her knees, crying and crying.

  “What happened?” I asked. “What did she take?”

  Murmuring. Exchanged glances. Randall clambered to his feet, his eyes hard. “What do you mean, what did she take? What did you give her?”

  The feeling like I’d done this all before, that I knew how it would end.

  “That’s the girl who brought pills with her. Right? I saw she had a baggie with her. She dropped them in the hall. I didn’t pick them up because clearly I didn’t want her to take them—what is going on. Is she sick? Does she need a doctor?”

  Randall did that rugby-player thing I’d never been good at, where he squared his shoulders to make himself look bigger. “Someone stole her poker money. She had a grand with her.”

  “A grand?” Usually the buy-in for a game was two hundred, which was already too rich for my blood. With a grand, you could buy an entire car. A crappy one, but still. “Are those the new stakes? You guys are out of your mind.”

  “Of course they aren’t,” Randall said. “Anna was staking her friends. Because she’s nice like that. And someone took it right out of her bag. Which you picked up in the hall.”

  Whatever the saying was about good intentions and the road to hell . . . “I hope you’ve all turned out your pockets already,” I said.

  “We all did,” Kittredge said, still on his heels. He had a hand on the girl’s—Anna’s—back. “You haven’t. Do it.”

  I reached into my pants and pulled my pockets inside out, then the pockets of my jacket. I kicked off my shoes and shook them out. I tossed everything I had onto the floor—which was nothing except an almost-empty wallet and my mobile phone.

  “He was out in the hall after Tom came back in,” Anna said. She lifted her chin. “He could have stashed it somewhere.”

  “Tom, you were there. Did you see me take any money?”

  He was staring at the ground, unresponsive. Right, I thought, I’m the bad friend. The reversal didn’t bring me any satisfaction. “Is this thousand dollars for real?” I asked. “Did your friends see it?”

  Her friends looked at each other. “I saw it,” the brunette girl said, but there was a note of doubt in her voice.

  “I’m calling the police,” Anna said. “This is so messed up, I can’t even believe you guys.”

  Kittredge rocked back. “Whoa. No. We’ll settle this here. No one is calling the police.”

  “No one is getting expelled, more like,” Randall said. “Because we all would if they caught us here.”

  “Where did you put the money, Jamie?” Kittredge snarled. “Just tell us and we can pretend it didn’t happen. There are like a million rooms down here—”

  “The mythical money. The money no one’s seen.” I stared at him. “The money you’ve arbitrarily decided that I’ve taken. Don’t condescend to me, Kittredge.”

  “You’re the one who sounds condescending,” Tom said into the sullen silence.

  “Hello?” Anna was saying into her phone. “I’m calling to report a theft—”

  Randall looked at Kittredge, who looked at Tom, who looked at the girls who’d come in with the girl on the floor. Everyone waiting for permission to do the shitty thing, and leave.

  “Just go,” Lena said from the corner. I hadn’t seen her; she was sitting silently on a folding chair in the corner, flanked by the rows of bikes on the wall. She had her top hat on, the one she always wore to parties, but tonight it made her look like a sort of sad clown. “I’ll stay. If you’re so sure Jamie’s done it, then he can wait here for the cops too.”

  “Sherringford School?” The girl was saying to the 911 operator. Everyone else filtered out, whispering. “Carter Hall. We’re underground. Yes, the access tunnels, how did you know—” She followed them out into the hall, presumably so she didn’t have to keep looking at my face.

  Lena leaned back in her chair. “Fun party, huh.”

  “They decided it was me pretty quickly.”

  “You’ve been, like, so much fun recently and so awesome to hang out with, I think it’s obvious why.”

  “Thanks,” I said, sourly.

  “Anytime.”

  It was a good space for a party, I thought, industrial and strange, made entirely of metal and bike wheels. Someone had set up a poker game in the corner by a broken-down ATV, but now the little piles of cards were kicked out, scattered on the ground. Beside me, Lena’s shampoo-booze bar had been organized according to what looked like bottle color. I started pulling them off the table, intending to toss them out.

  “Stop,” Lena said. “I’m sure they’ll want this for evidence.”

  “You’re really leaning into this whole getting-suspended thing, aren’t you.”

  She shrugged. “They won’t suspend me.”

  “Your family are major donors, then.”

  “You knew that,” she said. “But yeah. Short of killing someone, I think I’m fine.”

  I could hear the scrap of Anna’s voice talking to someone in the hall, almost as though this was our cell and she was our warden.

  “Elizabeth got an email telling her to be here,” I said, finally. “From my email account. But I didn’t send it. That’s what I was doing in the hall, talking to her. This was planned. This was going to happen, or something like it was.”

  Lena sat up a little straighter. “I heard about your laptop from Tom.”

  I frowned. I hadn’t told him about the soda explosion, though maybe Elizabeth had. “Well. I guess I’m saying that I’m not surprised. She had a baggie of pills with her—brightly colored, they were shaped like stars, moons. This money thing is so vague, I wonder if she meant to hang me with those, and then found them missing, and went for something else instead?”

  “I don’t know, Jamie.”

  Outside, Anna’s voice fell silent. “Hold on,” I said, and opened the door. “Can you come back in, so I can ask you a question?”

  I got a good look at her, then, for the first time. She was wearing bright colors, a choker around her neck, her hair long and straight and blond and glossy, and the look on her face said she’d rather eat a box of scorpions than talk to me a second longer.

  “No,” she said.

  “That’s fine. We can do it here.” She was trembling a little, and while I didn’t really want to frighten her, a part of me was glad someone else got a turn at being scared. “How long have you been taking money from Lucien Moriarty?”

  Anna set her jaw. “You’re crazy.”

  “No? Let’s try this. How long have you been taking money from someone—anyone—to ruin my life?”

  I could feel Lena draw up behind me. “Jamie,” she murmured.

  I whirled on her. “She dropped the bag in front of me. On purpose. With witnesses. You’re sure you don’t know this girl? I thought this party was invite only. Did you know her friends? Have you even seen them before?”

  “I didn’t know any of them,” Lena said, and to my surprise, she sounded furious. On my other side, Anna was inching away from me like I had pulled ou
t a gun. “But I wasn’t going to throw out some poor freshmen in front of everyone. Jamie—you should probably, like— You should go. You brought this with you, didn’t you? There was shit going on with you and you came to this party and—”

  “And I had to do my English homework, and you wouldn’t give it to me, and fine, maybe I should have said something to you but what, exactly, that didn’t sound crazy? ‘All these bad things are happening to me but they have loads of plausible deniability’? ‘If it seems like I’m really clumsy lately and an asshole, I’m actually not’?”

  To my surprise, she said, “How about, ‘Hey guys, I think I have PTSD,’ or ‘Hey guys, more of that messed-up shit is happening to me which obviously isn’t pretend because you’ve seen it for real when it happened to me before.’ Maybe we could have helped you.”

  “We who? You and Tom? What could you have done? I didn’t want to drag you into it. And Tom? Seriously? Since when does Tom want to get involved in my shit?”

  “Well, I would have! I was in Prague, Jamie. I was in Berlin. I watched you get taken away on a stretcher—I bought all that goddamn art!” To my shock, Lena shoved me. Not hard. Not to hurt me. Just enough that I staggered backward into the hall. “I could have done something. Maybe gotten you to do some therapy. Tom goes to therapy! Tom could have talked to you about it! But you just pretend . . . God, you’re just selfish. You think you’re the only one who misses her.”

  “This isn’t about—”

  “Don’t pretend this isn’t about Charlotte!”

  “Why the hell does it matter to you, Lena? I was her best friend!”

  Lena stared at me, eyes dark and angry. “Well, she was mine.”

  “I can’t— Lena, there’s only so many come-to-Jesus moments I can have in a single night, okay?”

  “Guys?” Anna cleared her throat. “I have literally zero idea what you’re talking about.”

  Lena took her ridiculous hat off her head and swept it under her arm, like we’d come to the end of a performance. “Jamie, you, like, don’t want friends, you know that? You just want to float in your little misery bubble alone. Then you walk around being all like I’m miserable, I’m so alone. Well, you do it to yourself! I’ve seen what this Lucien guy is like, okay? I was there. We would have believed you.”