The Case for Jamie

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Maybe some of us weren’t meant to.

  I thought, like a reflex, about Holmes. My Holmes, that night in the hotel in Prague, determined and afraid and her arms around my neck, whispering words I couldn’t hear, words she maybe thought I could read from the shape her lips made against my skin, and it wasn’t something I ever let myself think about, much less in front of her uncle who was like an actual reader of minds, or after I’d just been thinking about my father, and I flushed, and then flushed again when Leander gave me a startled look—God, he was deducing things—and then I hurried away as fast as I could to pour myself more hot water.

  Leander cleared his throat. “Want a ride up to campus?” he asked after a moment. His voice was very, very neutral.

  “No,” I said, fanning the steam away from my face. “Nope. No, I can walk.”

  It was a very long walk. In the end, Leander insisted, and I was back at Sherringford by noon.

  Fourteen

  Charlotte

  STARWAY AIRLINES WAS ONE OF THE OLDEST IN THE BUSINESS. They’d been one of the few not to go bankrupt in the early years of the new century, and they had responded by doubling down on their luxury offerings (leather seats, free checked bags, a steam room in the airport lounge) while the other airlines cut their costs. They specialized in long-haul flights, nonstop to Dubai and Melbourne and Kyoto, trips that took days and were expensive to begin with, and they decked out those planes with beds and masseuses.

  Which is to say, one couldn’t look cheap for an interview to work as a Starway gate agent, not if one wanted to represent their brand. I slicked my hair back into a high bun and put on false eyelashes. I put on the skirt suit I’d pressed and prepared for the occasion. In short, I looked the part. There was pleasure in that.

  At the airport, I gave my credentials at the Starway information desk.

  “The recruiter will come and walk you there in about fifteen minutes,” the kind-eyed clerk said.

  I asked him the exact time, and then where the toilets were, scrubbing out my accent into the Queen’s English. For whatever reason, Americans love the English. The clerk smiled and pointed the way, and now I knew he would remember both me and exactly when we’d met.

  I had spent some time with the airport map these last few weeks. Starway had the smallest presence of any airline at this airport; their desk was at the far end of the terminal, and there was no one in line for the kiosks or for an agent, not at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday for an airline that had so few commuter flights. I waited until the only agent on duty stepped off for a break, and then, in my skirt suit and pumps, I stepped behind the counter and up to their monitor.

  Thankfully, the agent had left himself signed in. I didn’t have to try the clearance code I’d watched an agent enter at Heathrow; it had been the weak point in my plan, and I was relieved to dispense with it.

  Once in, I needed a moment to get myself oriented. The screen was black, with scrolling white text, and the only way to navigate was with keyboard shortcuts. It took several false starts before I even got myself into the right system. Above me, cheerful pop music was playing, and I tapped my foot along with it to steady myself.

  There. Future reservations.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the desk agent approaching, hands in his pockets, looking out the giant windows at the end of the terminal. And then he focused his gaze on his destination. He saw me at the monitor, and he began to walk faster.

  I’d assumed this would happen. I’d styled my clothes as closely as I could to the existing Starway employees so that, from a distance, any employee would have a moment of doubt that would keep them from immediately calling in the police. I knew I had about two minutes.

  But I only had one hand to type with now, because with the other, I was pressing the desk phone up to my face and crying.

  Reservations. I ran Michael Hartwell, then Peter Morgan-Vilk. Quickly I put the names into the system, and the results began to scroll downward. I’d watched hours of tutorials online, but there were a number of keyboard shortcuts I hadn’t quite mastered. When I pressed what I thought was the Page Down button, the screen went blank. I pressed it again, and the screen returned. Quickly with my index finger I punched in the three-key sequence to bring me back several pages, and I put the names back in again with that same finger, the phone against my face, my face itself in tears, my body angled away from the screen to make it seem as though I was a harmless young professional girl who couldn’t possibly be hacking into their system.

  The agent was talking into his radio. By the door, the security officer perked up and turned my way.

  Moments. I had moments. I needed a flight record, a complete one, and to know the next time Moriarty was arriving. Today was Wednesday. The day that Lucien always flew to New York, from what I’d seen from my weeks at Heathrow in London.

  “Hey,” the agent said gruffly. “Hey, you! What are you doing?”

  I’d found it.

  Quickly I hit the Print key. The results tumbled out onto the carpeted floor. The agent was in sight of me now. “Stop! Stop what you’re doing!”

  I gasped, dropped the phone, and crumpled to the floor.

  He rounded the desk to find the screen blank, and me sobbing. “What—who are you? What are you doing? Young lady?”

  “I’m having a panic attack,” I said, through the tears. “I have a Starway interview today—I couldn’t, I—I had to call my doctor. I couldn’t breathe. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, don’t arrest me.”

  Crouching, he picked the phone up off the floor and put it to his ear. I could hear the cheerful message. Press eight if you need to make an appointment. Press nine to hear these options again.

  “You don’t have a phone?” he said, helping me to my feet.

  I smiled at him shakily. “Not one that works in the States,” I said, my accent posh and plummy. “I’m just getting myself set up.”

  The agent’s eyes went again to his monitor screen. It was blank. He relaxed, infinitesimally. Let him think he’d signed himself off.

  “This might not be the best job for you,” he was saying, steering me back toward the information desk at the center of the terminal. “It gets pretty stressful here.”

  “Does it? I bet it’s awful around the holiday.”

  It was enough to get him telling a funny story, something about a girl in a reindeer suit, and when the bewildered clerk at the desk confirmed that I was, in fact, there for an interview, that I’d checked in five minutes ago, that he had spoken to me himself, the agent said, “Listen, Charlotte, don’t worry about it—but maybe don’t take this job,” and before either of them had another thought about calling the police, I was outside and in a taxi en route to Manhattan.

  The driver raised an eyebrow at me when I fished a sheaf of papers out from under my skirt. I’d barely had the time to stuff them into my tights.

  I flipped through them slowly, trying to make some sense of what I was reading. Michael Hartwell wasn’t flying to New York. Peter Morgan-Vilk wasn’t flying to New York. They weren’t flying to Boston or D.C. Nothing confirmed, nothing in the reservation system. I checked it through again to be sure.

  That left the last page. The contingency search I had done at the last possible second. We bumped along in traffic, thick now as any London rush hour, and as the driver rode his brakes, I took a deep, steadying breath, then held the last page up to the light.

  There.

  Lucien Moriarty was flying to America. Tonight. As Tracey Polnitz.

  I had waited for this for the last year and still I wasn’t ready. I—I couldn’t quite breathe. Why couldn’t I breathe? I needed to speak to someone, to someone who knew me well, and from before all this, someone I could trust.

  Without even really thinking about it, without considering the repercussions, I picked up my mobile and called the only number I had thought to save.

  Fifteen

  Jamie

  I’D ARRANGED TO MEET ELIZABETH OVER HER LUNCH bre
ak; I’d called her, so she knew for sure this time that it was me. The parking lot was near the far end of the quad, at the bottom of a slope, and I could see her walking toward me long before she arrived—the red flag of her blazer under her parka, her legs in tights, the scattering bright of her hair.

  She was beautiful, and magnetic, and I was wasting her time.

  I knew it especially when she passed me a hot paper cup from the cafeteria. “Cocoa,” she said. “I figured you wouldn’t want anyone to see you in there, since you’re sort-of suspended.”

  “Thanks,” I said, cupping it in my hands. “I don’t think they have a watch out for me, but yeah, I’m trying to lay low.”

  We looked at each other for a long minute.

  “You’re not a good boyfriend,” she said, like it was simple. Maybe it was. “Someone is playing on that, I think. They want me to be mad at you. I am, but for different reasons.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “I thought that I could—I really like you. You’re really cool, and really pretty, and—”

  “I know,” she said, a bit despairingly. “I think I am too.”

  “And I just have my head somewhere else. I’m graduating, and last year was a mess, and I know I haven’t been good to you.” I had this urge to reach out to touch her, but I didn’t know what that would accomplish. “I don’t know if it’s because of that, or if I’m just not a good guy.”

  Elizabeth shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Just because you know something about yourself doesn’t mean you should be forgiven for it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, again.

  It was over, then. It was for the best.

  “So stop.”

  “I’m sorry—what?”

  “Stop,” she said again, louder. “If you know it, just stop. Stop. You like me. This shouldn’t be this . . . hard. I can’t believe you’re so hung up on someone you never even dated, not really—was she ever your girlfriend? She broke your heart anyway. Maybe that makes it worse. Do I need to break your heart? Is that how I can get in there, under your skin?”

  An hour ago, I’d been thinking about Holmes in my bed. Even the memory now made me feel claustrophobic, too hot, and whether it was the way love should feel, I didn’t know. “I don’t know,” I said aloud. “I don’t want that to be true.”

  “I’ll help you clear all this up,” she said. “This mess.”

  “What mess? The Moriarty mess? Elizabeth—”

  “Stop it with the pity voice.” She crossed her arms.

  “Why would you put yourself in that kind of danger? What would any of this prove?”

  “That I’m a better person than she is?”

  I took it like a knife to the gut. No matter how many times I’d thought it to myself, that Holmes was a garbage human, a real piece of work— “Don’t say that. It isn’t true. This isn’t a contest of who’s less of a fuck-up. I think I’d lose, if it was.”

  “Stop,” she said, shaking a little with the force of what she was saying. “I’ll help you clear this up, because it involves me, and I hear things around here that you don’t, and God, Jamie, you need a little help, I think.”

  “It has to be over, though,” I said. “Between us.”

  “Okay. Fine. So we’ll fix this. Then we’ll see.”

  I should have said no. I had Lena’s help. I had my father and Leander. I had a five-day maybe-suspension lighting a fire under my ass. But Elizabeth was so adamant, and so cracklingly smart, it felt wrong to refuse her help.

  “Where do we start?”

  We walked slowly back up the hill toward school. “Anna’s in the hospital. Word is that Lena put her there, what with the ratting her out for the MDMA.” Elizabeth’s mouth twisted. “No one’s really sad about that. Anna’s not a prize.”

  “I don’t know her that well.”

  “She’s Sherringford swine,” she said with a bitterness I didn’t expect. “Lots of money. There are these amazing scholars who teach at this school, people who’ve written biographies of Elizabeth Bishop, who worked at the White House, who worked at NASA, and Anna doesn’t take notes and pays her hallmates to write her essays. Money gets you a lot here. But a thousand dollars is a whole ’nother level.”

  “Did it exist in the first place? Like, did she bring it to the party?”

  Elizabeth gestured with her cup. We were approaching the student union. “Let’s go find out.”

  The union had a restaurant inside, the Bistro, where for ten dollars you could have them make you a sandwich with the same ingredients they had in the cafeteria. Students went in the evening, if they’d had to miss dinner for sports or studying, and the faculty had lunch there if they hadn’t packed their own. I hadn’t heard of any students going during school hours. It seemed sort of pointless.

  But there they were, Anna’s friends, in pleated skirts and snow boots, eating their sandwiches next to the fireplace. Three of them had their hair up in high cheerleader ponytails, but the girl at the center had her long red hair loose and wavy. They sat almost as if arranged.

  “They’ve been watching too many CW shows,” Elizabeth said, and determinedly started forward.

  “Elizabeth,” the redhead said, placidly. “Hi. Oh, hi, Jamie.”

  I didn’t know any of their names, but I guess I had just supposedly scammed their friend, so. “Hi,” I said.

  “Was the money real?” Elizabeth asked.

  I blinked. I was used to Holmes maneuvering herself in with a suspect, building trust and planting bombs. She never went for the jugular this soon.

  “No,” the redhead said, and took another bite.

  There was some history between the two of them that I was missing. “I don’t remember you at poker night. Were you there?”

  The redhead regarded me over her sandwich. “I wasn’t invited. I don’t have an upperclassman boyfriend.”

  “We don’t either,” one of the girls said.

  “You wish you did,” the redhead retorted.

  The other girls looked at each other. One shrugged. They went back to their conversation.

  “Jamie’s not a status symbol,” Elizabeth said. “He’s—”

  “Something you wanted and went out and got. I was there. I was your friend, before you dumped me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, backing away. “I sort of feel like I shouldn’t be here—”

  “So the money wasn’t real,” Elizabeth was saying. “Did you put her up to it? Who did? Why was she there?”

  One of her friends piped up. “She wanted to be there. We all did. Kittredge was there.”

  “Kittredge?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s gorgeous.”

  The redhead shrugged. “Don’t go thinking it’s all about you,” she told me. “It’s not.”

  “No,” I said, trying not to laugh. They were talking about a guy who had farting contests with his roommate that you could hear all the way out in the hall. “It’s all about Kittredge, I guess.”

  “And the money—”

  “Look, honestly? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Anna,” the redhead said. “She spends a lot with Beckett Lexington and his stash. She spends a lot at Barney’s online. Maybe she overspent and was embarrassed. She told Lainey and Aditii and Swetha that she was going to stake them”—the other girls, if their expressions were any indication—“and maybe she didn’t realize she was too short on cash to do it. Got to the party, decided to blame you. I don’t know. I think there’s more to it than that.”

  “If anyone knows, it’s Jason Kittredge,” said Aditii. Lainey? “He was on her from the second she showed up. He’ll know if she had it to begin with.”

  “Thanks.” Elizabeth lingered there for a beat. “Marta,” she said to the redhead. “Your hair looks really good.”

  “Thanks,” Marta said. Her eyes didn’t soften. “I like your boots.”

  “Thanks.”

  This strange ritual comp
lete, we left.

  “What’s the story there?” I asked, pushing the union door open.

  “There isn’t one,” Elizabeth said. “They wanted things from me they couldn’t have.”

  I stared at her, washed over with the strangest déjà vu. “What?”

  “It’s pretty simple. Undying loyalty.” She pulled out her phone. “Which means, no fuckboys. And everyone’s a fuckboy. Crushes are fine, boyfriends aren’t. Dinner with the group every night at seven. Those are the rules.”

  “Wait. They think I’m a fuckboy?”

  “You have a fuckboy haircut,” she informed me, rapid-fire texting someone. “And no, I’ve been dating you for too long for anyone to think that. You were famously in love with a junkie who’d dropped out of school, you’d been framed for murder together and now she was gone, and they thought it was all crushingly romantic. Marta told me you’d break my heart. And we stopped being friends over it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Elizabeth put her phone away. “Because I didn’t want you to tell me it was true. I have to go to Biology. I’ll see you later?” She kissed me on the cheek, and trotted up the hill.

  There was so much about this girl I still didn’t know.

  Three hours to kill until the end of the school day, when I could corner Kittredge in his room. I ducked into the library and hurried quickly up into the stacks, to the PQ–PR section. It was silent—most students didn’t have a free period, and almost no one had it after lunch—and smelled overwhelmingly like old leaves. The heater, as usual, was working overtime. I shed my outer layers into a pile and sat down at a carrel.

  On the ride back to my father’s last night, I’d finally changed my email password. I pulled the account back up to go through the sent messages again. The remarkable thing was that the fake emails sounded so much like me. Whoever had been forging my mail had read through my old messages, listened to the tone, noted the way I’d signed off. The final one “I’d” sent yesterday, to Elizabeth, read: