The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  He had on his quoting voice for that part. “You can’t believe that,” I said.

  “She certainly did, by the end of it. The funny thing is that Fiona was loaded. She had enough money to bribe the local judges. To bribe the police force. To bribe the Tammany Hall mobsters. And she tried, but none of them would touch her money. Too afraid of the consequences, on our end. Ultimately, one of them wrote his old friend Henry Holmes, who got on the next ship for America, just in time to uncover her scheme and put a stop to it.”

  “And that wasn’t the end of it, I guess.”

  “No. It goes on like that. 1930. Bank vault heist. Glasgow. All the culprits caught, but the jewels missing. Guess who shows up in society wearing a million pounds’ worth of rubies?” He laughed at my expression. “Jamie, you’ve been in America too long. Pounds sterling. The currency. Apparently one of their hired cons had delivered the rubies to them through the sewer, using a pulley system. Quentin Moriarty claimed his wife’s jewels came from an inheritance, but Jonathan Holmes disproved that through a pair of rats, a scalpel, and a lady’s handkerchief. 1944, and the Moriartys are raiding the museums of Europe during the second World War; 1968, and they’re chairing the Nobel Prize Committee; 1972, and my older sister Araminta was asked to decode a series of messages that used Francis Bacon’s substitution cipher. They were being used to negotiate the sale of nuclear warheads. To Walter Moriarty. What on earth would a Moriarty do with a warhead? Sell it again, probably, and at a profit. He went to trial. Two jurors developed rare forms of cancer. The judge’s wife went missing. All quiet. All out of the news. And then someone killed all three of Araminta’s cats.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “That’s awful.”

  “Walter Moriarty was out of jail sixteen weeks later. A travesty. And still—you must remember this—the family wasn’t all bad.” He refilled his cup. “Really there was only one bad apple in a generation. The rest . . . well. I knew a Patrick Moriarty when I was younger. We ran into each other at a party at Oxford, got drunk enough to duck into a corner and compare notes. We got to talking about the bad blood between our families—though it was nothing like it is now—and he said that the fundamental difference between us was that Holmeses were heartless optimists, and they were hedonist pessimists.”

  “Heartless optimists?” My Holmes didn’t seem particularly optimistic. “Meaning?”

  “Do you know that old image of Lady Justice? All done up with the blindfold and the scales. Made of shiny copper, not to be touched. I’ve thought of us that way. In order to pass judgment on other men, you remove yourself from them. Not all Holmeses are detectives, you know. Far from it. Mostly we end up in government. Some scientists, some lawyers. One really dry stick of a cousin sells insurance. But when we do detective work, we tend to work outside the law. We have our own resources. And, at times, when the law won’t prosecute, we are our own jury. To wield that kind of power . . . it makes sense that you wouldn’t let yourself be blinded by your emotions. Would it really help you to put a man away to know he’d leave behind a starving child? And, to top it all off, it’s not in our natures to be effusive. We’re mostly brains, you know. The body’s just something to get us from place to place. But over time, we calcified. Went brittle, staring at ourselves for so long. Maybe it made us better at our jobs. Because you don’t do this kind of work unless you think it’ll really make a difference, really make the world better. And you don’t think you can make the world better unless you are a tremendous egomaniac.”

  “And the Moriartys?”

  Leander considered me over his teacup. “They have gobs of money, and a family name that made them pariahs, and quite a few of them grow up to be geniuses. So they feel entitled to the best parts of the world. Extrapolate from there, my dear Watson. But it wasn’t really until this current crop that there were so many marvelously depraved specimens all at once. I miss the ones like Patrick,” he said with a laugh. “He grew up to be a hedge fund manager. We’re talking minor evil. Ran a couple Ponzi schemes. This lot . . . well, August was a nice kid, much nicer than Patrick could ever be. August was patient with Charlotte. Smart as a whip. When Emma and Alistair hired him, it was because Alistair was about two seconds from being the eye of a media hurricane, and we needed to build up some public goodwill. We hadn’t had a run-in with the Moriartys in twenty years. Memories fade. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “That’ll be written on a few tombstones before this is over,” I said.

  “You have quite the mordant sense of humor.” His eyes went faraway. “Still, I wonder if you’re right. The cycle’s beginning all over again.”

  “And my family?” I asked him. “We didn’t play a role in any of this?” I sounded like a child, I knew I did, but I’d been raised on the Sherlock Holmes stories. My father styled himself an ex-detective. I’d imagined that we’d been in the thick of it all this time, right beside the Holmeses, fighting the good fight.

  “Not in a long while,” Leander said. “Too many of us were automatons, maybe. Too distant. Our families were friendly, to be sure, but not friends. Not in pairs. Not until I met your father. Until you met Charlotte.”

  I sighed. I couldn’t help it.

  He leaned forward to clap me on the shoulder. “You’re a good influence on her. Just give her a bit of space. I don’t think she’s ever had a friend before you.”

  SO I GAVE HER SOME SPACE.

  My Faulkner novel in the mornings, and silence in the afternoons as I wandered through their library, pulling down the books I wanted to read and wouldn’t, because they were all first editions, gilt leaf and delicate pages, things meant to be looked at and never opened. I was afraid I’d ruin them. I was afraid for so many pathetic reasons, scared that, in a few weeks, I’d be back at school and without Holmes’s friendship, that the dread that prickled the back of my neck was the sensation of loss before it came. I was so messed up that I couldn’t shake the feeling even at our dinners, sitting next to Leander, who had taken Emma Holmes’s place beside me. In an attempt to cheer me up, he told me ribald, ridiculous stories about my father that always seemed to end with one of them bailing the other out of jail.

  “I never really bothered to get a license, you see, and the police don’t love working with amateurs.” He grinned to himself. “The clients did, though. Rather avidly. Remind me to tell you the one about your father and the redheaded lady lion tamer.”

  “Please,” I said, “please, please don’t.”

  Where was Holmes? There, and not there. Silent as a crow on a power line. Her father was speaking in German to that night’s dinner guest, a sculptor from Frankfurt who didn’t speak English. There was a whole roster of them, these dinner guests, one or two every night, and as soon as the meal was over, Leander and Alistair would slip away with them to the study and shut the door. It was interminable, waiting for them to stand up and leave so that we could too.

  Then that day’s spell was broken, and Holmes and I would go back to my room, and suddenly we would be able to talk again.

  The first night, she stood, straightened her skirt, and cast a long look at me before she swept out of the room and down the hall. I followed her as though I were in a dream, losing her around a corner in the house’s long and winding corridors. But I knew where she’d be. There, in the guest room, at the end of my bed, she was easing the heels off her feet. She dangled one from a finger as she looked up at me, biting her lip, and it should have been ridiculous, but instead it made something in my chest burn.

  “Hi,” I said, dry-mouthed.

  “Hi,” she said, and picked up an encyclopedia that had been invisible on the dark floor. “What do you know of the Bhagavad Gita?”

  Nothing.

  I knew nothing about a seven-hundred-verse Sanskrit epic or why I was supposed to care at midnight on a Tuesday in her parents’ house when, the night before, she’d slipped into my bed like an apparition and pulled me down on top of her. She stayed up telling me its history until I
fell asleep in a harmless ball.

  The next night, she told me about 1001 Arabian Nights.

  No Holmes in the morning; more darkness when I opened the curtains. More Faulkner in the window seat while Holmes’s cat Mouse glared up at me from my feet. I wondered if she was watching me out of its eyes. I wondered if I was in a feedback loop, an experiment, a never-ending bad dream. When I wandered down the halls, I could hear her playing her violin, and yet she wasn’t in her cluttered basement, she wasn’t in the parlor. She was nowhere. The arpeggios she played came up as if from the house’s foundation.

  I wandered the house like some Victorian ghost. When I passed the hall hung with paintings, the one that led to Alistair’s study, I could clearly hear him say, He won’t call here again, could hear Leander reply, You won’t have to leave this place. I won’t let it happen. Money, always, was the subtext here, money at stake and the family home, and though I only heard bits and pieces, I couldn’t put it all together. I was surrounded by wealth. By power. Why all the whispered arguments? Is this how you kept your prizes once you’d won them?

  I found myself looking up train schedules. When could I go back to London? Christmas was only a week away, and Shelby was getting an easel from our mother. I wanted to watch her open it. I could go to London, I thought. I could call Lena and see if she was with Tom, my Sherringford roommate and her boyfriend. It would be a relief to see them. We’d play poker. Get roaring drunk. He might be my only friend, anymore, I found myself thinking, the boy who spied on me for money all this fall, and then I knew I needed to break something right that second.

  That was how I ended up down by the Holmeses’ man-made lake. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, so it was pitch-dark, and I didn’t trust myself to find the ocean. Did it even exist, or was it just a sound, something unreal in the distance, threatening with its weight? It didn’t matter. I didn’t need it. All I needed were the giant rocks half-buried by this pond, my fingernails to pull them up from the mud, my arms to hurl them away from me into the black water.

  When Leander found me, I’d taken a hatchet from the toolshed and started looking for something else to do.

  “Jamie,” he said. He was smart to say it from a distance.

  “Leander,” I said. “Not now.” There was enough deadfall under the trees to do the job. I started kicking it into a pile, looking for the biggest, thickest branches, the ones that would put up a fight.

  “What are you doing?”

  I stole a glance at him. He’d stuffed his hands in his pockets, and his roguish smile was nowhere to be seen. “I’m expressing my anger in a healthy way,” I said to him, the air quotes visible. “So leave me the hell alone.”

  He didn’t. He took a step closer. “I can get you a sawbuck from the shed.”

  “No.”

  “Or a coat.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Another step. “I could get you a bigger ax?”

  At that, I stopped. “Yeah, okay.”

  We worked in silence, cutting the brush off the thicker branches, weeding out the pieces with knots. There wasn’t a stand anywhere near the house, so I braced my first piece on the ground, piling up rocks to keep it upright. Then I lifted the ax above my head and brought it down, hard.

  I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face, couldn’t hear anything but the blood in my head. Leander set the next piece up, and I split that, too, and the next, and the next, feeling the hot pull in my shoulders build until it broke down into incredible, brain-numbing exhaustion. I stopped to catch my breath. I had bleeding blisters on both hands. I felt, for the first time in days, like myself, and I let that feeling wash over me for a minute before it too disappeared.

  “Well,” Leander said, brushing off his clothes, “it’s too bad they only have gas fireplaces in that house, or you’d be quite the hero.”

  I sat down on the woodpile. “I don’t need to be a hero.”

  “I know,” he said. “Sometimes, though, it’s easier to be one than to be a person.”

  Together, we looked up to the looming house on the hill.

  “I thought Sherlock Holmes kept bees,” I said. I could open all the apiary doors. I could funnel them into that massive, awful dining room and let them build honeycombs down the walls. “I don’t see any bees.”

  “His cottage is my sister Araminta’s now. It’s down the lane,” he said. “I don’t go all that often. She doesn’t much like visitors.”

  I lifted an arm experimentally, then stretched it. “I guess you got all the friendly genes in the family.”

  “Alistair has his small share, along with the family home.” There was a trace of bitterness in his voice. “But yes, you’re right. I have friends. I throw parties. I, shockingly, leave my house on occasion. And, if my deductions are correct, I’m the only Holmes in recent memory to fall in love.”

  I opened my mouth to ask about Charlotte Holmes’s parents, then thought better of it. If the two of them were in love, it seemed like it was beside the point.

  “Are you still with him?” I paused. “It was a him, right?”

  Leander sighed, and sat down next to me. The woodpile shifted under our combined weight. “What is it that you want from Charlotte?”

  “I—”

  He held up a finger. “Don’t give me ‘boyfriend’ or ‘best friend’ or any of those other vagaries. Those terms are too loosely defined. Be specific.”

  I wasn’t going to say either of those things; I was about to tell him to stay out of our business. But it wasn’t our business, anymore.

  “She makes me better. I make her better. But right now we’re making each other worse. I want to go back to how it was before.” It sounded simple when I said it like that.

  “Can I give you some advice?” Leander asked, and his voice was like the night around us, cloaked and sad. “A girl like her wasn’t ever a girl—and still, she is one. And you? You’re going to get yourself hurt either way.”

  Speaking of vagaries. “What do you mean?”

  “Jamie,” he said, “the only way out is through.”

  I was too exhausted to talk it through further, so I changed the subject. “Have you been learning anything? From your contacts, I mean. Anything useful to take back to Germany?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Of a sort. I learned that I need to have a word with Hadrian Moriarty. But then, I imagine I’m not alone in that.”

  Hadrian Moriarty was an art collector, a high-class swindler, and, as I’d learned this fall, a frequent and valued guest on European morning talk shows. I wasn’t surprised to hear he was involved in an art scandal.

  “And everything’s okay? I heard someone yelling about leaving.” I looked down. “I know it’s not my business.”

  “It’s not,” Leander said, but he patted me on the shoulder. “After all that hard work, you’ll sleep well tonight. Though I suggest you do it alone, and that you lock your door. And then put a chair against it.”

  “Wait.” I paused. “You and that guy. Are you two still together? You never said.”

  “No.” He touched my shoulder briefly and stood to go. “We never were. He didn’t—he’s married, now. Or was. And is again.”

  I was beginning to put together a puzzle of my own.

  Because history ran in circles, and my own life especially so, if Leander had been in love with my father. I thought of that list he’d made. #74. Whatever happens between you and Holmes, remember it is not your fault and likely could not have been prevented, no matter your efforts. I watched Leander Holmes walk up the hill to the house, and then I buried my head in my hands.

  I LOCKED MY DOOR. I PUT A CHAIR AGAINST IT. I WENT TO bed alone, and woke up to find Charlotte Holmes curled up in a small, dark ball on my floor.

  “Watson,” she said sleepily, lifting her head from the carpet. “You kept getting texts. So I tossed your phone out the window.”

  The window in question was still open. A cold wind was driving through it. To my credit—to my eve
rlasting credit—I didn’t wrap her in blankets, or scream, or demand answers, or douse the room in gasoline.

  At least we were on the ground floor.

  As coolly as I could, I got up, stepped over her, and pulled my phone from a rosebush. “Eight texts,” I said. “From my father. About Leander.”

  “Oh.” Holmes sat up, rubbing her arms. “Can you close that? It’s freezing.”

  I shut the window with a snap. “Apparently your uncle wasn’t in touch yesterday. Which wouldn’t be a big deal, except my father’s gotten an email from him every night for the last four months. He wants us to check in, make sure he’s okay.”

  I tried, unsuccessfully, to keep myself from remembering Leander’s forlorn voice. My father. My father, who was perpetually rumpled, pleased with himself. My father who bumbled through two countries, a dead-end job, a number of awful mystery stories he wrote out longhand and then read to me, dramatically, on the phone, doing all the voices. How anyone could love him that way was the real mystery.

  Holmes’s gaze flicked over me, assessing. “You saw him last.”

  “I did?”

  “Leander. He wasn’t at dinner. Neither were you.”

  I’d taken two pieces of bread from the kitchen and gone to my room, unable to face a room full of scrutinizing eyes. “I guess I wasn’t.”

  “No, the two of you were—” She peered at my hands. “Chopping wood? Really, Watson?”

  “It was an outlet,” I said. She was shivering, so I pulled the duvet from the bed to put around her shoulders.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she snapped, tossing it off. “I forgot that if we don’t talk about your feelings every few hours, you devolve into a hipster lumberjack. Never mind how I’m feeling.”

  “Yes, in fact, never mind how you’re feeling. Because it’s so easy to talk to you while you’re hiding from me all day, playing your violin in invisible closets, barricading your door and pretending you’re not there. I’m a marvel of sensitivity compared to you. You’re the one who picks a lock and kicks out a chair to sleep on my floor.”