The Case for Jamie

by Brittany Cavallaro

  The police would be here soon. There would be questions, and handcuffs, and an interrogation room, and questions from the dean, calls from parents who thought I was a thieving scholarship loser, a killer, a boy who stuffed jewels down girls’ throats, and I had put on so much speed in the last year that I had thought I’d left this all behind me. Now I’d been suddenly slammed into reverse.

  And fine. Fine. If it came to that—I missed her.

  God, I missed her. Especially now.

  “Yeah,” I told Lena, and she was right, she was right about all of it, and it didn’t matter, because maybe I didn’t want any other friends. Maybe I didn’t want anybody but Charlotte. I couldn’t cure the poison with anything that wasn’t also poison. Missing her was sick, and pathetic, and made me a fucking fool, and maybe I hated myself so much for it that, even now, I couldn’t look Lena in the face. “Yeah, that’s totally how it went down the last time.”

  THE POLICE ARRIVED, YAWNING AND BORED, AND IMMEDIATELY took Anna away with them to be questioned. Lena trailed behind them, for whatever reason; she was saying something about an ambulance. That took care of two of the uniformed officers, but left one behind to glare at me alongside my old friend Detective Shepard, who looked like he’d rather have swallowed a hive of bees than to be back on this campus again. By now he and I knew the drill; he didn’t even try to question me without my father, just left me to wallow while he examined the scene. The uniformed cop knocked a bike off its hook, and when it fell, it took down another, and another, slow and unstoppable, like a rhinoceros playing slow-motion dominoes. Then the dean of students arrived in pajamas and robe and a pair of neon trainers, and my father after that, bright-eyed and, as always, horribly bushy-tailed, and after a huddled conference amongst the adults, the whole awful parade of us walked up to the headmistress’s office in the clock tower on the hill, our shoes tracking slush and dirt into the paisley-carpeted entryway.

  “Like I said, I’d rather question him at the station,” Detective Shepard said, as we stomped the snow off our feet.

  The dean shook her head. “You already took away the girl. I’m lucky I got here before you vanished Mr. Watson here.”

  “It’s not how it’s done—”

  “They got me out of bed,” the dean said darkly. “After last year, with the Dobson boy, we’ve come up with a new way of handling these . . . situations. And that ‘new way’ hauled me out of my house at midnight on a weekday, so yes, we are handling it here. I have no idea why that child called the police. This is an internal matter.”

  As everyone started up the stairs, bickering, my father hung behind. He looked as energetic as though he’d just drunk a pot of coffee and run a triathlon. I hated him a little bit right then. But I guess I had a lot of frustration to go around.

  “So perhaps I should have picked you up when you asked me to,” he said.

  “Probably.” I took off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets. The clock tower offices were surprisingly warm.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “No ‘Dad, why aren’t you taking this more seriously’? ‘Dad, why aren’t you cursing my name and wailing over our misfortune’?”

  “Honestly?” I said. “I’ve been . . . pretty shitty, lately. I’m not going to tell you what to do. Just go ahead and be your weird self.”

  “Thanks,” he said dryly. “But the detective looks a bit like he wants to disembowel you”—Shepard was waiting on the landing, watching us—“so shall we go on and be our weird selves in front of the firing squad? They might appreciate some of your wailing, if you want to try it out.”

  The head of school’s office took up the top floor of the tower, and we clustered inside of it, everyone waiting for their cue to sit. The headmistress herself was an imposing presence in a crowd of exhausted adults. She was scrubbed clean, perched at the edge of her desk in a suit, while her assistant poured coffee out into ceramic cups.

  “Ms. Williamson,” my father said, extending a hand. “James Watson, Jamie’s father. It’s a pleasure. I only wish we could be meeting under better circumstances.”

  “Yes,” she said simply. She had been head of school last year as well. I don’t know how often she actually encountered “better circumstances” when it came to dealing with me. “Please sit, all of you. Harry, hand around the coffee, then go handle the phone. We’ll have calls before tonight is over.”

  “Can you update us if they find the money?” I asked, sitting down on her settee. “Once they find out what happened?”

  The headmistress and Detective Shepard exchanged a look. “We’ll see,” he said, finally.

  “Jamie.” The dean of students pulled an iPad from her bag. She had a rattle sticking up next to it; she’d left small kids at home. “I’ve pulled your records. The events of last year notwithstanding—”

  “He was cleared,” my father interrupted. “That matter’s handled. We have the good detective here to thank for that.”

  The good detective rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, and said nothing. I thought, not for the first time, that maybe we should have had him help us bring in Bryony Downs. Instead of, well, telling him about it. Two days after the fact.

  “Notwithstanding,” the dean said, peering over her glasses, “Jamie’s had a good academic year. APs, high grades. And then the last few days. I’ve looked at your teachers’ gradebooks from this week—it says here that you did very poorly on a presentation that was nearly half of your semester grade for physics? The note says that you went off on a three-minute tangent about space elevators.”

  “Space elevators?” I searched my memory of the presentation to find that I didn’t really have one. “Oh.”

  “Oh,” the dean said. “Yes. And you skipped your classes yesterday—you didn’t hand in any of your work? You had a response paper due in AP English. You missed a quiz in AP calc. Your French teacher says you sent him a bizarre email about him eating snails that looked like you put it through a translate program a few times—Monsieur Cann’s note under ‘discipline’ expresses his dismay, and he also would like to know if you’re a vegetarian and were offended by last week’s lesson on French delicacies. Does any of this ring a bell?”

  My father clapped a hearty hand on my shoulder. “Eating snails is barbaric, isn’t it, Jamie?”

  I really, really should have changed my email password. How had I been so stupid? How had I been so in my own head that I hadn’t taken the one practical step that was actually in my power?

  “This is erratic behavior, you see,” the headmistress said, more gently than maybe I deserved. “And now a girl’s been stolen from. Did you have any contact with her before tonight?”

  I shook my head.

  “Anna was attending a party thrown by Lena Gupta, your friend—”

  Detective Shepard muttered something like “known associate.”

  I sunk my head into my hands. “She sat at our lunch table the other day, but I didn’t talk to her,” I said through my fingers. “The girl, I mean. Anna. I didn’t send those emails. Someone broke into my room and deleted my physics presentation so I stayed up all night redoing it, and so I didn’t sleep much, and . . . okay, yes, I think space elevators are really cool and so that part is completely my fault, or my subconscious’s fault maybe, or I was like, lack-of-sleep hallucinating, but someone broke into my room the next day while I was napping and hacked into my laptop—”

  “You didn’t tell me this,” my father said.

  “—they sprayed Diet Coke all over my room and into my laptop and now my girlfriend hates me and Lena wouldn’t give me the AP English homework until I went to Tom’s party, and I am really, really tired, I have no idea what day it is, and honestly I know Lucien Moriarty is behind all of this, it’s all his fault.”

  The dean and the detective and the headmistress all peered at me.

  “You’re saying that a man named Moriarty ate your homework,” the dean said. “So to speak.”

  Detective Shepard cleared his throat. “It isn
’t totally impossible.”

  “And then you attended an illicit party, on a school night, at which a girl is claiming you stole a thousand dollars of her money,” the headmistress said. “I should remind you that that’s the reason why we’re here. I don’t usually call emergency midnight meetings about space elevators.”

  “It isn’t totally impossible.” Shepard was in apparent psychic pain from having to say the words again.

  “The space elevator?” my father asked.

  “That it was a Moriarty.”

  “See!” I pointed at Shepard. “You were there, last year. You remember.”

  “Can someone please just bring in Charlotte Holmes?” he asked. “Where is she, anyway? Usually if something blows up or someone’s hurt, the two of you are lurking together around the corner, talking about your feelings.”

  The dean of students’ phone rang. “Rang” was a generous word; it was sort of a quacking sound. “That’s my babysitter,” she muttered. “How long will this take?”

  “Miss Holmes didn’t come back to school this year,” the headmistress said shortly. “This is about Mr. Watson alone.”

  Her assistant knocked on the half-open door. “Ms. Williamson? The museum curator is on the phone for you? And also there’s a student here named Lena Gupta—”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “Of course there is. Show her in.”

  Lena swept in in her furry coat. She unwound her scarf as she spoke, around and around and around. “Anna is fine. You can call to check if you don’t believe me. She says she bought the pills from Beckett Lexington in the cafeteria, and that he gave her a sampler, and that he said he’d see her in the access tunnels tonight to deliver the rest, so that’s what the money was for.” She frowned. “Anyway I had the cops call an ambulance once we got outside. I was really worried about her. Can I have a cup of that coffee?”

  The room exploded.

  “This is about drugs?” the dean asked, turning to Ms. Williamson. “Drugs? I thought this was about money—”

  “Are you also on the E?” My father was studying my face.

  Exhausted, the headmistress put up her hands. “Everyone, please. Lena. Are you aware that the issue here isn’t what substances your friend was abusing, but that she had money stolen from her?”

  Lena was a genius. An absolute genius. By the time this giant mess she was creating was cleared up, the money would be either confirmed missing or nonexistent, the freshman girl would get help for her drug issue or, at the very least, a stern talking-to—and in the meantime, while the police went after yet another Sherringford dealer, we might have a chance to investigate the situation ourselves.

  Beginning with who Anna was working for.

  Lena frowned. “You’ll really have to check with her about that? I don’t know. Mostly she was talking about E. Or MDMA? I don’t really know the difference.” She paused. “Maybe she did both? Jamie, you’d take a drug test, right? Neither of us took anything.”

  I hadn’t done E, or anything, really, for that matter, except for the occasional drink when I was in Europe, where it was legal. Even if I’d felt some draw toward pills or pot, my personal history with the police was a long and storied one, and I hadn’t really ever felt like adding another chapter to it.

  “I’ll totally take a drug test,” I offered. That one, at least, I could pass.

  My father’s phone chirped with a text. He ignored it.

  “Who was at the party?” the detective asked me, pulling out a notepad. “I need a complete list of names.”

  “The curator still wants to talk to you,” the headmistress’s assistant said. “He’s on his way.”

  With a sigh she capitulated, stepping out to take the call.

  “The party,” the dean said. “Lena. Who was there?”

  “Oh.” Lena looked genuinely surprised at the question. “I’m totally not going to tell you.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Social suicide,” Lena said. My father passed her a cup of coffee. “I just ratted out Anna, and I can, like, feel my stock plummeting. Plus it’s my senior spring. Not worth it. Do you have any milk?”

  There was a long silence. The headmistress came back in, frowning. “Why aren’t you taking Lena’s statement?” she asked Shepard, who’d stopped writing.

  “I can’t interview her without a parent present,” Shepard said. “Remember? It’s your policy.”

  “Everyone is getting snippy, don’t you think?” my father whispered to me. “Caffeine jitters, perhaps?”

  “We might have to suspend you if you don’t,” the dean of students said to Lena. “Tell us who was at the party. Not the detective—”

  “Shepard can interview Jamie, his dad’s here,” Lena said. “Do you all have any sugar?”

  My father passed her the sugar. His phone chirped again. He ignored it.

  “Aren’t you going to answer that?” the dean asked.

  “Everyone, please,” the headmistress said. “Again, for the cheap seats—Jamie, who was at the party?”

  “I can’t tell you,” I said. If I went to burn this building down with all of us inside, I didn’t think anyone would stop me. We were all already in hell, anyway. “Social suicide.”

  “Lena—”

  “My dad was talking about donating a new dorm,” she said, idly. “I know you all like the three he’s donated already.”

  “This isn’t about the party!” I said. “This is about Lucien Moriarty! Look, I’m doing it right this time. I’m telling you about it. You are literally the authorities. Can we just actually get ahead of this shitshow, for once?”

  “All of you. Please.” Ms. Williamson crossed her arms over her blazer. “I am very, very tired. Jamie, I have a curator coming in with a delivery that is about to make your life a lot more complicated—”

  “Is that possible, though? For it to be more complicated?”

  “—and I suggest you stop telling tales about some Mori-whatever scapegoat and actually cooperate.”

  “Ma’am?” Harry said, sticking his head in. “The curator’s here, with his assistants.”

  “It is midnight,” the dean said loudly. Her phone was quacking again. “Midnight. I am a single mother. I have four children, and my neighbor is watching them. My neighbor, who I woke from an actual dead sleep. How many more people are we going to pull from their beds because the students are cavorting in the access tunnels again? How is this in the least surprising? Which janitor did you pay for the key code this time, Lena?”

  Lena opened her mouth like she was going to answer and then thought better of it.

  “We all have children,” Shepard said grimly. “We all have responsibilities. A girl’s been stolen from—”

  The dean stepped between him and the headmistress, physically cutting him off. “Really, what is the point, Headmistress. So this boy is having a bit of a nervous breakdown in his senior spring. Stop the presses! It doesn’t make him a thief, or a—a druggist—”

  “Druggie?” my father supplied. “I think ‘druggist’ is actually the word for pharmacist. Or perhaps you meant dealer?” He stopped short. I had clamped my fingers around his arm.

  “Dealer,” the dean said. “Yes. Fine. Can we please go home.”

  “One moment. Send Bill in, please,” the headmistress said to Harry-the-assistant, who was still helpfully holding the door open.

  Bill the curator turned out to be a harried-looking man with white hair and a pair of assistants who looked like Harry’s fraternal twins. The two of them were dragging along giant framed portraits with such carelessness that I was shocked; one smacked his against the doorframe, swore, and kept on going.

  The headmistress, to her credit, didn’t look surprised. “I assume these are the portraits we had commissioned for the Sherringford centennial? And that something awful has rendered them un-showable, since you’re treating Headmaster Emeritus Blakely’s face like that?”

  The blond assistant blinked rapidly. He had the painting
turned in to face him so that Headmaster Emeritus Blakely’s face was resting against his crotch. “I’d left my glasses—I’d been wearing my contacts to work, but I had my glasses back at the museum and it was late, and I needed them because of the eye strain, and I went back and someone had defaced these.”

  Bill raised a bushy eyebrow. “A bit confused, but that’s the long and short of it. These were delivered this afternoon from New York. I’d expected professional art handlers, but they had come in a truck, in a stack. I hadn’t unwrapped them yet. My assistant here came in tonight to find the wrappings everywhere, like some art raccoons or something had gotten in, and the portraits looking like this. I brought the most, er, eloquent ones along here to show you. Didn’t figure we’d have to handle them gently anymore.”

  The other assistant turned his portrait around. It was Headmistress Joanne Williamson, cut large and magisterial, beautiful shadows on her face and neck, and in her arms a bound copy of the Sherringford honor code. It had a certain mood to it—windswept, romantic, a bit melancholy. It was a terrific portrait. It looked, in fact, just like the Langenberg forgeries we were hunting down in Berlin.

  Except that someone had scratched out her eyes and written in hot-pink spray paint WATSON WUZ HERE.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Lena said, abruptly, and left.

  “Seriously?” The words flew out of me. “Are you serious? Are you actually, totally serious?”

  My father looked faintly worried. “Jamie,” he said.

  “‘Wuz.’ They spelled it ‘wuz.’ ‘Wuz’! I’m in AP English! I read a lot! I read books. Big fucking books! I read Tolstoy, and Faulkner, and—‘wuz’?”

  Detective Shepard bit his lip. “You haven’t been anywhere near the museum?” he asked, busying himself with his notebook. “Recently?”