The Case for Jamie

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Uncle,” I protested.

  “No. Show him what you’re made of. Show him why you’re a good fit for this school.” Leander turned to the counselor. “That’s the idea, right? She’ll be able to pursue professional opportunities, and she’ll have the finest instruction. Play for him!”

  Hartwell sat back in his leather chair. “I’m no judge. She’d have to play for the music faculty, at auditions.” Then the corners of his mouth turned up indulgently. “Is she any good?”

  I drew my instrument up to me like the living thing it was. It hadn’t been in my hands now for so long—an extravagance and a danger, lugging it around with me, a hobby of mine that I couldn’t hide. I could almost feel it breathing there under my fingers.

  “That’s a Stradivarius.” Hartwell’s eyes glittered. “Interesting.”

  I put it up under my chin, arranged my fingering. I always thought a little about the sky when I held my violin. A bird wheeling. The sun. That sort of thing. It was difficult to explain.

  A very, very cursory Google search had found that Michael Hartwell was a significant donor to both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Hence, the violin.

  Leander gave me a moment to settle. Then he said, “Mr. Hartwell, I think she’ll make you weep. Play him an original, Charlotte?”

  Had my eyes not already been closed, I would have startled like a hare. This hadn’t been in the design at all, which already skewed far closer to the truth than I wanted it to. I had proposed that Leander play my father. We’d be Americans recently returned from abroad. We would say that I wrote songs on my guitar about our quaint life in Surrey and how I missed it so. I would ask Hartwell to introduce me to his daughter, the songwriter; I would be a fan. He would be flattered, he would feel appreciated, perhaps be more willing to talk.

  Leander had refused. Bring your violin. Be my niece. Let me take the lead.

  I never let anyone else take the lead, not when I was involved. I never deviated from the plan unless I had to, and “had to” had a very narrow definition. (I could comfortably bluff my way through having a gun put to my head.) But I didn’t trust my instincts today, not with all that fear still rattling around in my chest. I’d taken a step back.

  Was this willingness to give up the lead maturity, or hesitation? I didn’t know. It had been one thing with DI Green, who could give me directions but wasn’t there to see me follow (or not follow) them. This was something else.

  And now Leander was calling me Charlotte when the name on my form read Harriet Heloise Simpson, and he was telling me to play a composition that I hadn’t, well, composed.

  Had Hartwell noticed the name? He must have. I couldn’t risk opening my eyes to check. Whatever my uncle was playing at . . . but more than a moment had passed now, long enough for an eighteen-year-old girl to believably compose herself, but anything longer, and—

  I began to play, pulling from a folk tune I remembered from a village concert as a child. My parents had never taken us. There wasn’t much art in their blood. But I had been eight and obsessed with my fiddle and Milo had been home for the summer, and when our housekeeper told us about the festival, he’d seen the longing in my face.

  “You’re indulging her?” my father had asked. Not judging, not surprised.

  Milo shrugged. “She wants to hear the band,” he said, the only time I could remember him pushing back against my father, and he hoisted me onto his skinny shoulders and took me into town.

  We didn’t have much down there—a Tesco, a wine bar, a few nebulously purposed shops that sold “gifts,” the usual lineup for a tourist haunt by the sea. But that night, we had a gazebo on the village green, and a quartet playing folk airs, and my brother kept me on his shoulders as we watched. People weren’t used to us being out, as a family. We Holmeses were the vampires up the hill. But I clapped my hands along to the music, and my brother bounced me in time to the beat, and soon an elderly gentleman approached and asked me if I wanted to dance with him. Milo heaved me down and watched, bemused, as I was spun and spun and spun in my dress and then sat dizzy onto the ground.

  “Did you like that?” he said, when it was over. The old man had bought me a taffy apple at the stand, and I held it out on the walk back to our land, too afraid to eat it.

  “Yes,” I remember saying. “I liked how sad it was.”

  Because the day had ended. There would be no more days just like it. If I ate the apple, it too would be gone, and soon enough Milo would be back at the school that was changing him.

  My brother didn’t press me to explain.

  I took that day and laid it under this one. I spun those two parallel moments into a song and then played it, and I played for some time.

  When I opened my eyes, Michael Hartwell was weeping.

  “Charlotte,” he said, and the hair on my neck stood up. “That was beautiful. I’m so—I’m so sorry.”

  I set down my violin on my lap. Then I said, “You know who I am, then.”

  Hartwell said, “I’ve been shown photos of you, yes.”

  “But not me,” Leander said, standing.

  “No. Only the girl. Charlotte.”

  My uncle put himself more fully between me and Michael Hartwell. “You’re here,” he said, as Hartwell wiped his eyes, “but you did your residency at Washington Mercy in psychology. Is that right?”

  Hartwell, I noticed, was shaking; perhaps it was an aftershock from his tears. “Yes.”

  “What does Moriarty have on you?”

  “Nothing,” Hartwell said, “nothing.”

  I cleared my throat. “Then what is he offering you? He’s using your passport to get into the country. Why isn’t he just using a dead man’s identity?” I wanted to hear what his answer would be.

  Hartwell looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. I didn’t think this show of emotion was for my music. I think the music had reminded him of something. Someone. His daughter, by the way his eyes kept straying to the photo on his desk of her in a blue dress, holding her guitar. The frame said MY MUSICAL GIRL.

  “It’s a deal,” he said slowly. “I have—I have connections. I know people, at Washington Mercy, at— I know people, okay? He wants me to use those connections to arrange something for him. And if I don’t, he’s going to . . . I can’t talk to you about this. I have children. I have a family to protect.”

  A posh hospital in D.C. A wilderness rehab in Connecticut. A prep school in New York.

  Hartwell turned to Leander. “If you’re really her uncle, you’ll get her far away from this. As quickly as you can. Okay? Pack your bags. Get on a flight, go somewhere inaccessible. I don’t even know if this office is bugged—”

  Leander took a step forward, his finely made hands in his pockets. “When’s the last time you swept it?”

  “Swept it?” Hartwell stared at him. “I’m a psychologist. I— Mr. Holmes, I’m not like you. Any of you. I don’t know how to sweep an office for bugs.”

  A helicopter buzzed the roof. The sound came on like a swarm of bees.

  “Is there a helipad nearby?” I asked, tracking it.

  “It’s not—he doesn’t—he isn’t here,” he managed to say. “Not yet. So go. Leave town. And if you don’t, I can’t be held responsible for what happens.”

  There was nothing else to be said. We bundled up our things quickly and ran outside, my violin case banging clumsily against my leg. It was wretched outside, the rain turned to sleet, and we held on to each other, pulling ourselves up the block step by sleety step.

  “You called me Charlotte,” I said to him at the corner, as we waited for the light to change. “You outed us. Why?”

  “What are the markers of a good man?” he asked me.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The markers,” he said. “Of a good man. How can you tell if a man is someone you can trust?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t trust—well. I trust you.”

  I thought, strangely, that Leander was going to laugh, an
d that it was a laugh that I didn’t want to see. His hair was slicked back off his face, and he was hatless, and the sleet was beading on him like pearls. His greatcoat was beautifully tailored. His boots were a soft brown and quietly handsome. And he had a look on his face so wolflike he would have driven any sheep back to pasture.

  He could be terrifying. I realized it now.

  As I watched him, Leander carefully put his expression away, as though he were folding it up like a jacket. The light changed. He was benign again, a benevolent gentleman, a lamb.

  “You’ll learn,” he said. “But not yet. I don’t want you to trust anyone again until this is over.”

  “Even you?”

  He looked at me. “Perhaps,” he said.

  I put my hand in the crook of his arm and said nothing. Someone was close behind us, slipping on the snow to overtake us, and I took a breath, and Leander steeled his shoulders, and then he was passing us, an older man with a cane who wished us a good afternoon and disappeared into the fading light.

  Even now, Lucien Moriarty could be playing back our conversation with Michael Hartwell.

  New York was a trap, I thought, and we’d walked right into it.

  Leander was nodding as though he could hear my thoughts. “When we get home, you’re packing. We’re leaving. Tonight.”

  Seventeen

  Jamie

  THE RUGBY PLAYERS I KNEW WERE MASTERS AT A CERTAIN kind of intimidation. It had everything to do with their bodies—drawing their shoulders back to call attention to their size, or yelling and hollering with their friends until the veins in their neck stood out. Licking a guy’s forehead to make him squeal “like a girl”; pissing in a guy’s shoes to see if you could make him step in them and scream “like a girl”; coughing up shit from their lungs and spitting it, breathing heavy in each other’s faces, then howling; pushing each other over on the field between plays, all to see if their macho macho-ness would break someone down into what they saw as feminine weakness.

  Being a girl was their worst fear, and they chalked up all kinds of behavior to “girliness,” things that didn’t make sense. I don’t know why they were so specifically afraid of it. From what I could tell, most of them liked girls, had them for friends, wanted so badly to date them or screw them that it was all they could talk about after practice. But when we were all in a pack together, practicing a game where we tackled each other into the ground like beasts, there were the guys who liked the game, and then there were those who lusted for it, the hard takedown, the feeling of pushing someone else down into the mud. It bubbled up outside of practice in physical ways. Not all my teammates were like that. Barely half, if I had to count. But it was more than enough for me. I’d learned to go stoic and invisible when this kind of shit started so that I didn’t become its target. It was a strategy Kittredge took too.

  Not today.

  I turned in my chair. “You have things to say to me? Say them.”

  He licked his lips. “You’re trying to blame this on me,” he said. “Marta told me. She told me everything.”

  “Blame what on you, exactly? What are you being blamed for?” All I did was berate people, anymore. I might as well be my ex–best friend. “I don’t see you being threatened with suspension, or anyone pointing their finger at you for a thousand goddamn dollars. So what? Because Elizabeth and I asked questions about who Anna talked to last night, I’m suddenly putting your ass to the fire? I don’t think so.”

  Kittredge shook his head. “I didn’t take her money,” he said.

  “Her alleged money—”

  “Stop saying that,” he interrupted. I had taken this strategy from Holmes, and it rarely failed—people could always be provoked to correct you. “You act like you know what happened, but you don’t. I saw it. She had this fat wad of bills in her pocket, she took it out to show me.”

  “She did? Why?”

  He looked around carefully, but the library stacks were empty except for us. “Because she said someone gave it to her. She was laughing, like, in disbelief—it’s not like she needed the money, she said. But she was giddy about it. I couldn’t tell if it was the MDMA. I don’t do that shit, so I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Listen.” He spread his hand on the table, then balled it up. “If I were you, I’d be talking to Beckett Lexington. He sold her those pills. Maybe he was giving her a cash advance on some sales she was going to do for him. He does that, sometimes—Randall was telling me.”

  It was a better working theory than anything I had. My estimation of Kittredge went up a notch. “I will,” I said.

  Kittredge stood. “We didn’t talk about this. Okay?”

  “You don’t want Anna to find out,” I said.

  “No.” He eyed me cautiously. “But I also don’t want someone suspended for shit they didn’t do. Beckett works at the school radio station. Start there.”

  He stuck out his hand. I clasped it, and just like that we weren’t animals anymore.

  “Let’s just get out of Sherringford before it eats us alive,” Kittredge said.

  But Beckett Lexington wasn’t easy to find. I checked the radio station, a poky little warren in the basement of Weaver Hall, and found the system on autoplay, records scattered across the floor. The cafeteria wasn’t open for another hour, so I couldn’t corner him at dinner. Finally I looked up his room in the online directory. Apparently he lived on the first floor of my dorm. But I hesitated at the steps up to Michener. Mrs. Dunham would be at the front desk, and she would have heard about my forced leave of absence. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk being thrown off campus, especially by someone I respected.

  My phone buzzed. Your mother’s getting in tonight, my dad had texted. What time do you want me to pick you up?

  Can I let you know? I wrote back.

  I was standing in the shadows, debating, when Mrs. Dunham came to the door. “It’s freezing,” she said, ushering me in. “Come on, I’ll put the kettle on for you. Isn’t that how you say it? ‘Put the kettle on’?”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  She waved a hand. “I won’t tell the administration if you won’t,” she said, walking back up to her desk. “I’m just icing some cookies I brought from home. Do you want to help?”

  There were worse things to do on a stakeout.

  I dragged a chair over from the lobby. Mrs. Dunham’s desk was a riot of cheerful uselessness. Her knitting was in a basket, full of the bright scarves she made to send off to her daughter at school, and a series of dala horses she’d brought back from Sweden, red and blue in a line, that she said were for luck. She kept her coffee mug on an ever-rotating stack of poetry books, Mary Oliver and Frank O’Hara and Terrance Hayes, and beside that a tablet that was always streaming something mindless, a buddy cop show or a British baking program. All of her projects could be abandoned at a moment’s notice if she needed to run off to put out some small fire in the dorm.

  Today, she had sugar cookies in a giant plastic container, and a number of smaller ones full of red and blue and green frosting. She handed me a knife, then started back up her baking show. I watched the door and tried very hard not to eat every cookie I iced.

  Guys came in and out, on their way back from practice or the library or the union, and I steeled myself against the looks I’d get if the news about Anna’s money and my “leave of absence” had spread. But they didn’t. A few said hi, or asked if I was sick, since I hadn’t been in class, and I told them, yes, very sick, not contagious, no, I’ll see you guys next week.

  When things were going wrong, it was so easy to imagine that everyone knew, that everyone was talking about it. But nobody cared nearly as much about your life as you did.

  We finally came to the bottom layer of cookies just as the 4:30 lull hit, the moment before everyone came down to go to dinner. No sign of Beckett Lexington yet. I looked again at Mrs. Dunham’s desk, but this time my eyes drifted down to the place she kept the master key.

>   “Something strange happened to me the other day,” I said.

  “Oh?” she asked, only half-listening. A girl on the baking show had burnt her English muffins.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Someone got into my room and sprayed a can of soda everywhere.”

  Mrs. Dunham turned to me, shocked. It looked genuine. “That’s terrible, Jamie. Are your things okay?”

  “Not really. But, you know, I lock my door. I was just wondering if anyone came through and asked for the master key yesterday afternoon.” I was starting to feel a little sick from everything I’d eaten.

  Frowning, Mrs. Dunham pulled out the maintenance record. “A carpenter at seven a.m., fixing a broken window sash—”

  “Too early.”

  “And of course Elizabeth when she came up to find you after dinner.” She glanced at me. “Do you want me to stop doing that? I do know that you like to keep your door locked even when you’re in there, love, but she’s your girlfriend—”

  “It’s fine,” I told her. “I appreciate it.”

  “You two have been through enough. I like to make your lives easier in little ways, if I can,” Mrs. Dunham said, stoutly. She returned to her record. “Otherwise, I gave it to a student at bed check when he locked himself out. Do you want his name?”

  “No.” I was starting to feel really nauseous, actually, enough that I was starting to sweat. “No, that’s too late. It’s okay.” I pushed the cookies back toward her. “Thanks for looking.”

  “You know,” she said, “you actually don’t look very well. Do you want to go to the infirmary?”

  I reacted to the word “infirmary” the way you would to being hit in the face.

  “Oh! Oh—you know Nurse Bryony doesn’t work there anymore, it’s fine to go if you’re ill, you’d be safe—”

  “I’m fine,” I said, gasping a little. PTSD, Lena had said. Was it true? I hardly even knew what that was.

  “Jamie,” she said, reaching out to touch my forehead. Unthinking, I jerked away.

  Because the week I was having wouldn’t allow for anything else, Beckett Lexington chose that moment to walk in the front door.