I hadn’t picked a lock in the dark in some time. I hadn’t attempted a lock I didn’t have the specific picks for in years.
The night was looking up.
As I positioned my picks, Watson shifted behind me. He was always so impatient. Moving his weight around, cracking his knuckles, visibly counting ceiling tiles. The world was immensely interesting to him, but only the parts of it he wasn’t supposed to be studying. He didn’t have the sort of laser focus that a delicate art like this demanded, and yes, there it was, the lock giving under my fingers—
“Holmes,” he was whispering. “Holmes.” When I didn’t reply, he reached out and physically removed my hands from the door. “Do you hear that?”
I had been too focused on my work, on listening to my fingers, to hear the girls around the corner. They had to be girls, or slim boys wearing very smart shoes: the hard tap-tap-shuffle-tap gave it away. Two of them, moving slowly through the dark without speaking.
Watson and I put our backs to the cinder block wall. It was only luck that they didn’t have on their phone flashlights, that we were wearing all black, that the Exit sign above the Carter Hall door had been turned out with the rest of the power. That we were for all intents and purposes invisible.
They stopped just feet from us.
“You’re meeting them here,” one whispered. “When?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Do you know what you’ll say?”
“Anna, we’ve gone over this a million times,” Elizabeth said. “Of course I know what to say.”
Twenty-Seven
Jamie
I COULDN’T SEE THEM. SEE HER. I COULDN’T SEE ANYTHING in that dark. All I knew was Holmes’s arm flung across my chest, keeping me against the wall. Like I had any desire to move.
Like I’d be able to even if I wanted.
“You’ll need to go,” Elizabeth said. I knew that whisper. I’d heard it over the phone at night, her wishing me goodnight after her roommate was asleep; I’d heard it at the lunch table, when she was snarking about Tom’s new sweater-vest under her breath.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“You don’t trust me,” Elizabeth said. She wasn’t whispering now.
“I trust you,” Anna said. “My dad says I shouldn’t, you know. But I do.”
Elizabeth sighed, a pitchy sound. “Well, if your dad says it, it must be true. And sane. Completely sane.”
“He doesn’t have to be sending me to Sherringford, okay? He could have just forgotten about me like everyone else. It’s not a lot for him to ask for, that I help him out with this. Jamie and Charlotte killed his brother. Okay? The police aren’t even looking at them!”
“I know.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“Maybe I should call your dad,” Anna hissed. “Maybe I should remind him that Lucien Moriarty”—she said the name with such pride—“holds the deed to his apartment in New York. Or that one phone call can get him fired. My dad owns the Virtuoso School.”
Beside me, Holmes’s spine went stiff and straight.
“Because this is the way to make sure someone’s loyal to you,” Elizabeth said. “Make the same threats every chance you get. Gloat. This is total gloating. It’s gross.”
“Is the money gross too?”
“I’m not doing it for the money,” Elizabeth said.
“Then give it back.”
“You haven’t even given it to me yet. So how can I give it back? We came down here to get it, not to have you question my loyalty again.”
“I wasn’t the one who cut the power!”
“No. You’re just the one with the imaginary thousand dollars.”
“Screw you. Seriously.” Anna started off down the hall. “I’ll get you your money. You can have your pathetic shopping spree.”
As soon as Anna was safely down the hall, Elizabeth whipped out her phone and tapped out a message. The light from the screen illuminated her hair, her upturned nose. It cast shadows under her eyes. Had she looked up in that moment, she would have seen Holmes and I staring her down, a pair of vultures ready to pick her bones.
But she didn’t. She turned as she texted, looking down after Anna’s retreating form, and when she’d finished, she locked her phone. The screen went dark.
My ex-girlfriend might have been plotting against me, kissed me and lied to me and gaslit me in my own dorm room, but she hadn’t gotten too far into my heart. Had I known, deep down, that something had been wrong from the start? Maybe. But maybe that gave me credit for intuition I didn’t have.
Even if Elizabeth was being blackmailed, even if her actions weren’t her fault, she could have told me what was going on.
I’d been too hurt to let Elizabeth all the way in. Too lonely not to be alone. I’d been missing Holmes with a ferocity I didn’t understand I felt until she was back beside me, and maybe Elizabeth had known all that. Maybe she had been scared of how I would have reacted if she’d told me the truth about Anna. Maybe she’d thought I would have blamed her. That I would have run.
In a way, I was responsible for all of this.
“Come on,” Anna called. “If you want your money so bad. My dad will be here soon.” With a snort, Elizabeth started down the hall.
There was so little to be relieved about right now, but I let out a silent breath anyway. Beside me, Holmes relaxed.
Then the phone in her back pocket buzzed with a text.
Twenty-Eight
Charlotte
WHEN I WENT LOOKING FOR A SOURCE TO KEEP ME apprised of the goings-on at Sherringford School in my absence, I needed someone that I could rely on. My former roommate Lena would seem the obvious choice: we trusted one another; she was enterprising and resourceful; she responded to texts within seconds, even when in the shower. For a few weeks at the beginning of the school year, I had asked her for updates. But she wasn’t close enough to Watson anymore to be able to give me workable data. He’s fine I guess?? Didn’t eat much at lunch today but maybe he’s cutting now for rugby he was bulking before lol gross right. How is London girl? Heart emoji. Detective emoji. Two shopping bag emojis.
It wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
I hadn’t wanted information on his personal life, or I’d told myself I hadn’t. I only wanted to know that he was safe. I was on the cusp of writing my awful older brother for help when I’d received a call on an October afternoon. I’d answered only because it came from a blocked number—I had hoped that my uncle Leander might be calling. I always hoped, with him.
“I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Elizabeth? From last year. I got your number from his phone.” She hadn’t had to say who “he” was. “I get that this is weird, me calling. But I think he misses you a lot, and it would help him out if you got in touch. Even to tell him good-bye.”
I didn’t respond. I was sitting at a table in my favorite café by the Thames, and the water was quite loud, and I had nothing to say to this girl.
“Do you even care if he’s okay?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped.
“She speaks,” Elizabeth said with a lonely sort of laugh, and that was when I knew that if she wasn’t dating him, she would be soon.
But if she wouldn’t tell me that, I’d pretend I didn’t know. It was more convenient for my purposes, which were taking shape as we spoke. “I need time,” I’d told her. “I want to come and see him in the new year, and I’ll tell him good-bye then. But for now—could you text me every now and then and tell me how he’s doing? Make sure that there aren’t any more incidents like what happened with Bryony Downs?”
Useful for her: an end date for her boyfriend’s psychic misery. Useful for me: a regular word or two on Watson’s well-being.
At first that was all it was. A line here, about where he was applying to college. A line there, about how the rugby team was doing. There was nothing useful about this information, really, and still I craved it. I reread her messages in transit, at my desk, in bed wh
en I woke in the morning. Jamie has a cold. Two days later: He’s better. Prosaic things. Things no one would care about.
I found I cared immensely.
What was she getting in return? I had always loathed psychology, but I began to think these messages gave her a sense of control. Her boyfriend was still upset about a girl in his past; ergo, by managing that girl’s knowledge of him, Elizabeth could feel as though she had control over her relationship.
It was untrue, of course. You couldn’t control how someone else felt. You could hardly control how you felt most of the time. And so the holidays came and went. New Year’s came and went. Elizabeth pressed me for plans to visit, to finally have it out with Watson, and I provided her with none. This week, when I began getting messages that said I’m worried about Jamie, I think bad things are happening to him and he’s not telling me, and He’s getting hauled in to see the dean, and I think he’s suspended, I thought I knew why. Her plan was to force my hand. If I wouldn’t come to help ease Watson’s mind, I would perhaps come if I thought he were in danger. If she had to manufacture the danger herself, so be it.
It seemed a petty reason to delete someone’s school presentation, but then, I was the girl desperately rereading text messages about Watson’s new shoes.
But Elizabeth Hartwell (Hartwell, of course that was her name) was nothing if not a survivor. Watching her walk away now—watching the darkened hallway where I could hear her walk away—I realized I had given her too little credit. She had been put into a situation where her family was in danger; she had been blackmailed into going along with Anna Morgan-Vilk’s plan; she was forced into hurting Watson, a boy she clearly cared for, and in response she had called in the one person she thought could help, knowing full well that person was me.
The text on my phone read, I don’t know if you’re coming with Jamie tonight, but you need to be careful. Lucien Moriarty and his daughter are in the tunnels. The police are everywhere.
I knew that was what it said, because Watson dragged me into the now-unlocked prayer room, shut the door, pulled the phone from my hands, and read it out to me in a voice shimmering with anger.
“‘Jamie seems like he’s forgiven Tom,’” he said, scrolling up with his thumbs. “‘Jamie’s dad keeps picking him up to go somewhere.’ ‘Jamie is rereading His Last Bow. He looks sad.’ ‘Jamie and I had a picnic today’—what the hell is this, Holmes? How long has this been going on?”
“Keep your voice down,” I said. What else could I say?
“My voice. You’re worried about my voice. Jesus Christ, this is—this goes back for months. This goes back to homecoming. To when she asked me out. Did you have some kind of plan, the two of you? God—” He spun around, and the light from my screen strobed up and down the cinder block wall. “I thought it was bad when you disappeared. I thought it was the worst thing. The worst thing. But this—this is worse.”
“I told you I was keeping tabs on you. I needed to know you were safe.” It came out small. “I needed to know Lucien wasn’t coming after you.”
“Yes, he does really love to ruin picnics, doesn’t he. Rugby games. My shoes. He just loves to ruin my shoes. All of that was necessary information. It wasn’t you washing your hands of me and then getting to keep being my friend by proxy.”
“What you saw out there—she’s being coerced. She’s not working with Anna because she wants to.”
“I got that,” he snapped.
I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders. He shrugged them off, clutching his boots to his chest.
“Lucien’s here,” he said. “Somewhere. Anna is here. Call Detective Shepard. Call Leander. Do whatever you need to do.”
“And what will you do?”
“I’m going to think about some of my life choices,” he said.
This was not an unreasonable response to the situation. Still, I swallowed. The room was cold and dark and bare, and Watson was in sock feet on the concrete floor. If I were him, I’d be looking for a metaphor. Instead I said, “I’m sorry.”
Watson turned to stare at me, my phone still in his hands. The light from the screen made me flinch.
“You’re sorry for a lot of things, aren’t you?” he said.
WE ONLY HAD TEN MINUTES UNTIL WE WERE MEANT TO meet Elizabeth, and if we’d had a plan before, we didn’t now. The worst was knowing that this betrayal of mine was fairly small, in the grand scheme of recent betrayals, and that given the proper amount of time (a few days, perhaps a week) Watson would no longer be mad at me. It made it difficult for me to take his anger seriously, as its timing was so inconvenient.
He was being a bit of a monster. He was doing that by being human.
In short: I did mean my apology; I would not have done anything different; I thought it very stupid for Watson to go thundering out into the darkened access tunnels, and yet he did.
And then I wondered if these were the thoughts a horrible person would have, if perhaps I hadn’t changed in the slightest, that any development I’d made as a human being had been in a vacuum and not in the more demanding arena of my day-to-day life, or that perhaps it was Watson, my indispensible Watson, who brought out the very worst of me—the part of me that loved someone, and then I thought aegres cere medendo, I have come looking for my heart only to be broken by it, and, how pathetic, I am quoting proverbs in a grungy empty room while my idiot best friend is stomping off to get his idiot self killed, and there was no real way to rid oneself of oneself, there was no real way to imagine it, Watson dead, myself dead, or Watson gone, and his mother—his mother and her faith that she had found herself a partner. My veins burned. They burned horribly, and my head was a broken steam valve, and it was like I was under the porch at Watson’s family home, dug into the snow to preserve my own body prematurely—it would be less work in the end—and really I had put my oxycodone in my bag as a challenge to myself, I carried it as a challenge, it would be the sane thing to have been rid of it months ago, and I threw the pills on the ground and crushed them under my heel.
There.
If Lucien Moriarty was in these tunnels, I would find him, and I would deal with him myself. I found that, right then, I had a need to break someone open.
I would see his blood spilled all over the floor.
Twenty-Nine
Jamie
I’D DONE SOME STUPID THINGS IN MY LIFE. SELFISH THINGS. The occasional well-intentioned thing that still nearly got me killed.
That made this a hat trick, then.
The issue wasn’t Holmes. Or the issue was Holmes, and the issue was also Elizabeth. And fear. And sleep deprivation, and being utterly in the dark and out of control while also knowing that (a) she’d been keeping things from me, again, when not two hours ago she was apologizing for that very thing while (b) my now very firmly ex-girlfriend had the sort of bickering session with Lucien Moriarty’s illicit daughter one would expect from a pair of divorcees while (c) my kid sister was somewhere held captive and who knew what was happening to her and (d) Lucien Moriarty himself was probably stalking these corridors, looking to end me, while (e) I, the utter idiot, couldn’t think clearly about any of this, couldn’t make a plan, could only hear the heavy beating of my blood and (f) lash out at Holmes out of fear (because nothing had changed, nothing) and then I’d wanted to do the thing my old therapist had told me about walking away and calming down, and (g)—I was at (g) already, wasn’t I, I had frittered away minutes in this hallway when I could have apologized and been done with it already, and still, even when I turned to put my hand on the doorknob, I knew it was already too late.
By now, I knew the sound a gun made as it was being cocked.
“Going somewhere?” Lucien Moriarty said behind me.
Some distant part of me thought, He’s been waiting years to say that to someone. The rest of me was screaming.
“Hands up,” he said. He’d lost the Welsh accent in favor of his own, and it was unnerving to hear a voice not unlike August’s arranging my execu
tion.
“Okay,” I said, obeying. Like a fool. How could he even see me? The hallway was pitch black.
“Dad,” Anna was saying, somewhere farther away. “Dad, what do you need me to do?”
“A flashlight, girl.”
The cinder block wall in front of me went fluorescent.
“Turn. Slowly.”
I did, flinching as my eyes adjusted. Lucien, in silhouette, and still I could see his cut lip, his two black eyes. His hands around a pistol. An explosion of light from behind him that had to come from his daughter’s phone.
“On your knees,” he said, and I lowered myself painfully to the floor.
“Dad?” Anna said, and this time, she sounded terrified.
That made two of us.
Lucien took a step forward. Another. He held the gun steady. “Now,” he said, not three feet away, “we’ll just wait. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
And, just like that, the door behind me opened.
“Lucien,” Holmes said. She stepped forward, close enough that I could feel her looming over me.
He kept the gun trained on my face. “Do you want to skip the formalities, then, and go right to the conversation?”
“Which conversation?” she asked, levelly. “The one where I apologize for what I did to August? Again? You could have just called. Or blackmailed my parents. Again. As that worked so well the last time.”
“Did it,” he said.
I could hear the smirk in Holmes’s voice. “It got your idiot brother killed, didn’t it? A win in my book.”
The Case for Jamie Page 23