The Case for Jamie

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “I didn’t even know we had a museum!” I was sounding sort of shrill. “Why on earth do we have a museum?”

  Bill the curator looked nonplussed. “We have a rotating historical exhibit, normally. This being the centennial—”

  “Right,” I said. I’d had it. I was in some kind of farce. Any moment now, I’d be handed a rubber chicken and a knife and told to dance. “Well, I’m sure if you go back to my room right now, you’ll find that someone has left fifty-three cans of hot pink spray paint on my floor and, like, a grammar book open to ‘to be’ conjugations. I don’t care. I didn’t do it! I didn’t do any of it, but that obviously doesn’t matter, because I’m being framed, and pink spray paint? Hot pink? Are you kidding me—”

  Harry stuck his head back in. “Ms. Williamson? There’s a call for you. From a place called Just So Occasions.” He adjusted his glasses. “Do they know how late it is?”

  “We hired our artist through them,” Bill said. “I’d gone to them for some framing work and mentioned the project, and they’d recommended Mr. Jones’s portraiture skills to us. Very reasonable rates.”

  “Put them through,” the headmistress said, rounding the desk to her phone. “Hello? Yes. Yes, this is highly irregular. Midnight? Oh—oh. I see.” She frowned and scratched something down. “Yes. Yes. Well, thank you. I do appreciate it.”

  “Well?” the dean asked, after she hung up.

  The headmistress sighed. “Apparently Just So has caught their clerk vandalizing outgoing deliveries, and wanted to warn us. Former clerk, I should say; apparently this vandalism was in retaliation for his termination. His name was Frank Watson. He defaced their store, as well. This sounds like a case of mistaken identity on our parts.”

  The detective gave me a hard look. I smiled at him as blandly as I could, but my pulse had picked up the second Ms. Williamson had answered the phone.

  “The owner had discovered it and thought to leave us a message, in case he’d done the same to our delivery.” The headmistress sat down heavily in her chair. “I think she was surprised to actually reach someone, this late. Gentlemen, ladies, I am so very tired. Mr. Watson, why don’t you take five days to get yourself and your . . . affairs straightened out?”

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “Frank Watson.” The headmistress stared at me. “Frank Watson. It . . . well. I suppose it adds up. I’m sorry to drag you into this.”

  “So I’m not suspended, then?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know yet. We’ll see what the police say in the next few days about this supposed theft. And about these drugs, apparently. Take five days off campus. Stay with your father. If your name is cleared, we’ll call it a leave of absence, for health reasons. You’re clearly not doing well—it’s hardly a stretch. And if you are found culpable . . . then yes, it’ll be a suspension, and we’ll have to notify those colleges you’ve applied to of this new development.”

  Five days.

  It was a challenge. And I was already making my plan.

  I’d speak to Anna. Bargain with her. Get her to talk. I’d corner Kittredge and Randall, find out if either of them were holding a grudge, if someone on my hall had been hurting for money or hanging around Mrs. Dunham’s desk too often, by the locked drawer where she kept the master keys. Mrs. Dunham could tell me who’d she seen come in and out of the dorm, midday, faculty or students or maintenance staff. Elizabeth could tell me if she saw anyone fleeing the scene once she’d gotten topside at Carter Hall.

  And Lena could give me the invitation list to the party, as soon as she’d finished pretending to be the clerk from Just So Occasions on her phone in the bathroom.

  “It’s suitable,” the dean said, already halfway out the door. “I’m done here. Headmistress, until tomorrow.”

  “Yes, goodnight, and my apologies. Bill, why don’t you . . . honestly, I don’t know what to do with those paintings. I think they look sort of avant-garde, don’t they? Keep them. Maybe the performing arts elective will want to shoot them out of cannons or something. Detective, I imagine we can pick this up tomorrow? And Jamie—”

  I was still reeling from all of it—the party, the emails, the exploded soda can, the brocade of the sofa scratching against the back of my neck, the defaced paintings, the parade of friends calling me out, the way Shepard was x-raying me with his eyes. There was so much to dread, and God knows I’d been a master of it these twelve months. I’d tangled myself so much up in the what-went-wrong to forget why I’d gotten involved with Holmes in the first place. There was danger here, loads of it, and my future at stake.

  There was a case to be solved.

  God help me, I was excited.

  “Moriarty?” the headmistress was saying. “Do I know that name from somewhere?”

  Just then, Lena slipped back in the door, face flushed and nakedly triumphant. “What did I miss? Anything good?”

  “Miss Gupta,” Shepard said. “Do you mind if I use your phone?”

  Twelve

  Charlotte

  WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN I DECIDED I WAS DONE. FUCK IT. My mother was ineffectual, my father pathetic. I was the idiot child who thought I could mold myself into their image, that it was a worthwhile endeavor.

  I had taken them sporadically at first. The pills. When all the white crushing nothing got to be too much. When a new book or a game of chess with my brother couldn’t take me from myself. I had a sort of dread all the time, a feeling that an ax was going to fall, and if I could hide myself behind a buffer, why wouldn’t I do that? I halved them. To be safe, I told myself, but I knew really it was to make them last, and when my mother slipped at work and fractured her leg, I knew they’d send her home with more, and it was lifting those from her bathroom cabinet that finally got me caught.

  “Caught” is a prosaic way of saying it. Really I was sent to rehab. The nuclear option, my father had said, the man who’d taught me to spot a lie and clean a gun and make myself into another person because I myself was never quite right, would never be. Better then to be another girl. He always was so disappointed that I was still his daughter underneath the disguise.

  At Paragon Girls San Marcos I learned how to play five-card stud underneath the bolted-in television playing Days of Our Lives. I developed an interest in Days of Our Lives. At night, discussing Days of Our Lives with my current roommate, Macy, we taught ourselves how to fill a syringe and then how to flick it to expel the excess air. The syringes themselves were from the married orderly who was sleeping with the team’s lead psychologist (unbuttoned fly, ten minutes late from lunch; I cheerfully blackmailed him for months); the contents were from my former roommate, Jessa (a hole cut into the heel of her boot, a trick I soon adopted myself) who visited us every Sunday when not filming the detergent commercials that were her bread and butter. This arrangement lasted for four rather transcendent weeks. They weren’t friends—to make friends, one had to share oneself and one’s past, and I would do neither. Conspirators worked with you in the moment. We were conspirators, and good ones.

  Then Macy ratted us out and was rewarded with a single room. Jessa was readmitted. I was summarily thrown out, and I took my habits with me.

  I thought, like a child, that I’d be allowed to go home.

  At This Generation Now! Petaluma, I tried. I did. I did everything to keep myself off it, the thing that crept under my skin like a pulse. Wanting, wanting, wanting. I was never anything if not in control of myself and now I was a current for something else’s electricity. I took up smoking; it was, as they said, an acceptable alternative. I was forced into yoga classes, which made me both limber and furious. I cried for the therapists who wanted me to cry. I wanted so badly to escape into myself, felt it like an itching in my gums, in my skin, a real burning fire in my blood that was not in the least metaphorical and instead of crawling under my bed to die I lined the girls up from my hall and told them each their shoe size just by looking at their feet. I told them what sort of pets they had at home. I looked at their
palms like a fortune-teller and told them if they’d ever had a job. None of us had, never, in our lives. Modeling didn’t count.

  I did it, all that they asked.

  But my parents never came to visit. My uncle never called. My friends rotated in and out, and it wasn’t friendship, it wasn’t even conspiracy, it was them looking for an ear and I was the silent sort who would listen. The Funfetti cake they’d eat when they got out, the radio station they’d play on the way to the beach, the prom, the ex-girlfriend, the ex-boyfriend, the relentless pushing toward a future that they could see and I couldn’t. What future? If I “got better,” where would I go? What did my next year look like?

  My resolve faded. I am, of course, human. I couldn’t find a reason to change without any conceivable reward, and anyway, the teachers in rehab were wretched. I didn’t need to relearn the periodic table. I had mental energy to spare. I put it to use. Taught the other girls how to palm their pills, how to cut holes into their mattresses. Did it in plain sight. I wanted to feel bigger, louder, stronger, so I took stimulants. Took cocaine. It was the easiest thing to find. It was the most obvious drug I could do. I had a mission: at Petaluma, as with most places, it was far easier to be dismissed as a destructive influence than to ever “graduate.”

  So I was dismissed. I went back to Britain for my mother to evaluate my progress; as with all things, I’d been given an opportunity to go home right after I’d stopped wanting to. They didn’t send me away this time. At home I had my lab. At home I had my violin. I had Wi-Fi and a driver and silence, so much silence, and no one to speak to and no lessons, no school. Demarchelier had gone off to work at a lab in Tunisia. No one thought to replace him. I took an online organic chemistry course. I finished it in three weeks, studying sixteen hours a day, and then when I finished I had four college credits and still the itching in my veins. I took a week to paint my walls black. I repainted them navy. Black again. Bone white. I ran endless miles on my mother’s sad little treadmill, and there were good things, too, there were the plants I kept, there were the uninterrupted hours with my violin, and the plants again, the lab table, the sifting and mixing, the motions of my hands. Doing my work reminded me of my body. It gave me a modicum of control. Then I’d look down and remember my skin, the fact of it, and the burning would begin again.

  I woke up one morning to find I was content. I would feel this forever, I told myself, stretching my arms above me in bed. I could be alone. I could stop being a creature made of want.

  The next day, I began feeling the itching inside of my mouth.

  In short order I had a supplier in Eastbourne. It was easier than breathing.

  I had my tells. Watson could never see them, though he looked for them every day. Maybe they were only there when I was using. Maybe without the drugs I was a blank. My mother always knew when I was back on; she raised the alarm straightaway. She was “done,” she said, watching the housekeeper empty my drawers; she would never touch my things herself. My father, of course, wasn’t there. He was consulting at Whitehall, now, in London; one of his contacts from Milo’s school had finally wrangled him a position. When he’d been caught out at MI5 double-dealing information, his reputation had suffered, and without his good name he had had no work. My father had steadfastly refused to take any job that didn’t make him the lion at the top of the food chain. The charismatic megafauna. He had chosen not to work, for years, rather than feel that lack of power. We had suffered for it.

  And now he had wriggled his way back in. He was being groomed for office. It would be the first thing written down if he were vetted: junkie daughter a liability.

  I would get help. Or, at least, the appearance of help.

  I was sent to the cheaper places, the stranger ones, the ones that threw all of us addicts in together indiscriminately. The one in Brighton—I couldn’t think in all that white. Girls in sweats with dirty hair, painted nails, and none of us allowed sharps so our leg hair grew long. There was nothing to do so I taught myself German. All day and night I spoke it in my head: nichts, danke, nichts, danke, nichts, danke. I told myself I’d go to see my brother and I would know the language. I graduated. I went, and he looked at me like I was an object to wrap in glass. Went back. I had my schoolgirl French; now I was fluent. It was easier to learn since I still had my Latin. Learned euchre, whist, cribbage, Texas hold ’em, played cards all day at a table full of girls trying not to want.

  I wanted. I couldn’t stop. I took it and buried it in the ground beneath me and when I couldn’t I found another way. I would try anything so I didn’t feel like I was wrong. I grew like a plant would in the dark, twisting in on itself in search of any bit of light.

  I kept my own company. That was a polite way of saying that I was my only friend and if I wanted to be alone I’d have to get rid of myself.

  I didn’t.

  The money ran out, or their patience did, and my parents finally pulled me home to stay. There was about to be a scandal. They were marshaling their forces. They’d hired August Moriarty, you see.

  I SPENT THAT EVENING IN A LUXURY HOTEL IN MIDTOWN Manhattan taking money from dilettantes.

  The girls I was playing poker with tonight, Jessa Genovese and Natalie Stevens and Penny Cole, were actresses. They were also models, and hawkers of diet tea on social media, and girls who had very expensive athleisure wear gifted to them by brands. As Watson would say, they had a hustle. I could respect that. For some, the most thrilling chase had a bag of gold at the end, not a criminal.

  If I sound disdainful, it was because I was jealous of them.

  There was the matter of the acting. Any good detective worth her salt knows that to winnow information out of someone, you need to play a part. The all-consuming roles I’d been playing, like Rose, the fashion vlogger, were the extreme version of this; as I didn’t have a badge and so couldn’t compel answers, I had to resort to more underhanded ways of learning information. But even when being “themselves,” a good police detective needed to know when to intimidate, when to cajole, when to make promises, when to lie.

  I’m also sure that if you asked those police detectives late at night, when they were wistful and a little bit drunk, if they thought they’d do a bang-up job at some Shakespeare given the chance, the majority of them would say yes. (I’d often thought I’d make a good Cordelia. But I digress.)

  The other girls at poker night were doing something I’d always longed to do. They could play poker passably well. They were very beautiful and rich and no one wanted to kill them, at least not that I knew of, and so yes, I was a little jealous.

  I was there because I needed the money.

  Jessa Genovese was hosting us in the junior suite she’d been living in while filming The Hollows, her new art-house horror movie. She’d moved up from the detergent commercials she’d been doing when I first met her, back when she was my roommate at Paragon Girls San Marcos. Jessa had been three years older than me, which I’d known from the orderlies letting her smoke, and she was an actress, which I’d known because, when she talked, she talked quite loudly and with her hands, projecting her voice, watching her plosives, scanning to see who was looking and changing her presentation accordingly, and she was Italian, yes, which would account for some of the volume and vivacity—I quite liked Italians, actually—but did not account for the way Jessa jumped at any small noise when she thought she was alone. She jumped also when she was reading and one surprised her, and as she was reading constantly, endless romance novels set in Scotland, she was constantly spooked. One might assume she had a quiet home growing up and was used to silence. But no—she smothered her reaction, kept it to a jerk of the lips, a stuttered hand on the bed.

  As though she was habitually afraid of someone creeping up on her, and whatever they’d do to her then. As though she’d had to hide that fear in the past.

  One night, stoned in our room, I’d told Jessa the full extent of what I’d learned just by looking at her. She cried. She told me some things about her moth
er. And then she began to sketch out a plan for how my abilities would keep me in cash and her from ever having to go back home.

  Hence, the poker.

  In New York or London, whenever Jessa and I overlapped, we would meet for a game. She would bring along some friends; different ones every time. I would win their money, slowly, and then very, very quickly. And Jessa would make sure they were having enough fun that they didn’t really care.

  Then, after they left, I would tell Jessa every last scrap of information I’d gleaned about them that night, for her to do with what she wished.

  Six months ago I had had quite a bit of fun pulling this scheme in London. Tonight . . . it made me feel a bit ill. But I was broke, and Watson was in danger, and there was currently two thousand seven hundred dollars on the table, and Penny Cole and Natalie Stevens, the two girls tonight, could leave whenever they wanted to.

  And they didn’t want to. Jessa was seeing to that. She’d ordered champagne and chicken fingers and fries and foie gras, and she was playing the kind of cool-toned, echoing hip-hop that made one feel sort of sexy and important, and she was telling endless stories about bad behavior by musicians I hadn’t heard of but that made Natalie and Penny howl.

  “Then he zipped up. And by zipped up, I mean the back of his unicorn costume. It was incredible.” I didn’t really understand this story, but I could tell Jessa was telling it well.

  “And was that how you guys met?” Natalie was giggling. “At a show like that?”

  “No, Charlotte and I go way back,” Jessa said. “Rehab.”

  The girls shot each other a look. Penny had her own Disney channel sitcom. Natalie was a Lifetime movie veteran turned Christian recording artist. If Jessa and I were drug addicts and this night of ours went public, their public image would suffer.

  “Eating disorder,” I said, to make myself seem like a safer prospect. It wasn’t exactly a lie. Still, I hated the implication that that was intrinsically “better” than the addiction, or “less my fault.” “I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m doing better now.”