The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “There’ll be a time when you regret not taking my offer,” Holmes told Phillipa, and then she and I ran like hell.

  Through the maze of tables, through the strangely bustling kitchen, and then instead of out the back door—“There’ll be men there, too,” she hissed—she dodged a surprised line cook and yanked me into the walk-in freezer, slamming the heavy door shut behind her.

  “Your brother better be two seconds away,” I told her, coughing, “because that thing locks from the outside.”

  “By key code,” she said, pulling out her phone. “Didn’t you see? This is a very fancy seafood restaurant, can’t be letting people see you freeze your Dover sole— Hello, Milo, could you please hack the walk-in freezer at Piquant? Watson’s stubble is starting to freeze. Change the code and then send someone to fetch us.”

  She hung up. We looked at each other.

  “Milo just told us this morning that there wasn’t any way that Hadrian or Phillipa had your uncle captive,” I told her. “So what was that all about?”

  “Milo can be myopic. Thinking you know everything is dangerous,” she said. “I know the Moriartys are involved. I’m sure of it.” She said it so fiercely that I took a step back.

  “Orchids?” I said, an attempt to defuse her. “That was your master plan? To poach away her orchid gardener?”

  Her eyebrows were beginning to bead with snow. “She’s won several international awards for her flowers,” Holmes said. “I thought Milo could use some pointers. Grow a tree or two in his penthouse.”

  “You are awful.”

  “I know,” she said, and grinned.

  “So all that, back there. It was just a pissing contest.”

  “It was me giving her a final chance.” She sighed. “Sometimes I’m far nicer than I should be.”

  “I’d hate to see you when you’re mean,” I said. “God, it’s cold. I think I can feel all my teeth. How long until your brother’s men get here?”

  “I think they were on the roof. Just another minute or two. I don’t hear gunfire, that’s good.” She stomped her feet a little against the cement floor. “Watson?”

  “Holmes?”

  For a long second, she studied the ground.

  “I left my coat back at the table,” she said, and when she looked up, I saw that her eyes had gone glassy and sad.

  I took a step forward. “Hey,” I said softly. “What’s wrong?”

  “Did you know that when my uncle goes away, he always leaves me a present? He didn’t this time. He didn’t . . . the last time he went, he left me a pair of gloves. They were black cashmere. Fingerless. Perfect for picking locks.” She looked down again, shoving her hands in her pockets. “I wish I had them now.”

  Five minutes later, they opened the door. There was ice in my mouth and snow on my shoes, and Holmes had stopped crying. Though really, I guess she’d never started.

  BACK AT GREYSTONE, WE BYPASSED THE SECURITY CHECKS by the simple expedient of telling them to fuck off, and rode the elevator back to our room. Holmes had that sort of deliberate silence around her that meant that she was brooding. Ten more minutes of this, and she’d start chain-smoking under an avalanche of blankets.

  “I didn’t get to eat any lunch.” It was the sort of deliberately stupid comment I’d make to draw her out of herself. It also happened to be true. “I sort of wanted an oyster.”

  “We’ll go,” she promised. “You can always get a sandwich from Milo’s penthouse. He keeps a spread in there, usually.”

  “No one will snipe me when I get in there?”

  “No one will snipe you,” she said. “Where’s your phone?”

  “I left it here. Why?”

  “We went to meet a Moriarty and you left your phone at home? What if we were separated?”

  “We weren’t separated,” I said irritably. I really was hungry. “I still don’t have anything to tell my father, and he keeps texting me.”

  “Check it now,” she said, sitting straight down onto the floor. After a quick once-over, she hauled a book out of one of the stacks beside her.

  There it was, that familiar mix of dread and anticipation I always felt when she told me to do something like this. I climbed up to my loft and dug my phone out of the tangled sheets. I had a text from a number programmed in as FRENCH LOVE INTEREST. Simon, it read. Do you still want to get coffee this afternoon? I’d love to talk more about my paintings.

  I swore. Down below me, Holmes smiled to herself, balancing her book on her knees. She must’ve dug my phone out in the night, but how, I couldn’t imagine—when I’d left that morning, she was starfished out in the same position she’d been in when she fell asleep. Still, she’d managed to send Marie-Helene the world’s most awful text:

  Hi luv, hope u don’t mind. Tabitha gave me ur number. Ace wingwoman she is. Fancy a cuppa tomorrow?

  “Holmes. This is wretched. This is like British by numbers.”

  “Can’t help it. It’s what you sound like when you’re playing posh.” She bit her lip. “Isn’t that right, mate.”

  Aren’t you the sly one, Marie-Helene had written back. Jesus Christ. Sending your cousin to do your dirty work! Yes, of course I’d love to see you.

  Luv to see ur paintings and talk more about them. Sorry was a bit shit last nite at ur teacher’s. Got nervous.

  “Simon wouldn’t have used an apostrophe if he’s too lazy to type out a full word.”

  She looked innocently up at me from the top of her book. “Bloody hell, I made a bleedin’ mistake.”

  Why nervous? Marie-Helene had asked, and added a line of angel emojis.

  Isn’t it obvious? Ur beautiful. U kno it 2.

  Blush emoji.

  “No,” I groaned. “No. Absolutely not. This is like a L.A.D. song. This is like my sister’s L.A.D. fan fiction.”

  “I learned quite a bit from your sister,” Holmes said with some satisfaction. “I learned that when you were a toddler, you once insisted on wearing your underwear outside your trousers for an entire week. I saw the photos.”

  “No.” I was going to murder Shelby, and creatively.

  “I also learned every word to every song on L.A.D’s debut album.” To my surprise, she started warbling, “Girl / yeah girl you’re beautiful / you know you’re effin’ beautiful—”

  I threw a pillow at her. She dodged it nimbly. “How can someone with a private music teacher have such bad pitch?”

  “We all have our own personal skill set, Watson. Not all of us are professional heartbreakers.”

  “Is there a real reason why I’m meeting Marie-Helene for coffee this afternoon? Or are you just feeling punchy?”

  She lofted the book up in the air. Gifte, the title read, on a marbled textbook cover.

  “Are you asking what I want for Christmas?” I asked. “Or should I suddenly be able to speak German?”

  “Poisons, Watson. The word means poison. There are some things you can’t tell from surveillance footage and from frisking the housekeeping staff, as much as Milo would deny it. If I can’t do anything about Leander . . . I’m going to run some things I know about my mother’s medical history. Try to narrow down what she’s been exposed to, and from there, determine how it’s gotten into the house. Milo’s gone, you know, and now I have access to his labs. To his techs! It’s going to be an excellent afternoon.”

  “I thought we’d have this case solved by midnight,” I said.

  “We will.”

  “This case. Not the one with your parents.”

  “Obviously, they’re connected. Occam’s razor, Watson. How often are your family members kidnapped and poisoned inside the same week?” Her words were flip, but her voice wasn’t. “The simplest explanation is the truest. Always. So I’m boning up, as it were. While you’re using this girl as an in. Pump her for information. Turn on that skeezy laddish charm.”

  “Any more gross puns?”

  “I’m just not up for it—”

  “Stop.” What did it say abou
t us, that the best we’d gotten along in days was when we were planning my date with another girl? “Fine, I’ll get a look inside Marie-Helene’s studio, ask her friends some leading questions, try to get a read on Nathaniel before we stake out East Side Gallery tonight. But I’m getting a sandwich first.”

  “Yes, good.” Like she was donning a cape, Holmes threw her ratty robe over her clothes and tucked her book under her arm. “And Watson,” she said, “wear your fedora,” and she snickered to herself all the way down the hall.

  MARIE-HELENE LIKED MY HAT. SHE LIKED MY BOOTS, TOO, and the band shirt I wore with my ripped jeans, which wasn’t exactly a good thing, since I’d never listened to them.

  “And anyway,” she was saying, holding her latte in her gloved hands, “Faulkner’s always been my favorite, but I like Murakami a lot, too. They’re so different, it’s hard to choose between them.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure.” We were standing outside the café where she’d wanted to meet, a half block from her studio. She’d pointed it out to me earlier—the steepled roof, the brick walls—and I was waiting for an excuse to ask to see it.

  “And graphic novels. I think they’re what got me drawing in the first place.” She sipped at her drink. The fuzzy ball on the top of her hat bobbled back and forth. “Are you okay? You look distracted again.”

  I forced a smile. “Just a bit lost in my thoughts, love,” I said, and I was. I wanted to move things along. I wanted to be back at Greystone with new evidence. I wanted to know when talking to a French girl about our favorite authors on a snowy street in Berlin stopped being my idea of a perfect Sunday. All I really wanted to do was get to her studio so I could rifle through her things while she was in the bathroom.

  Sometimes I wondered if hanging out with Charlotte Holmes had made me into a monster. At times like this, I knew it for sure. “So how did you get into art?”

  “Well, once I got lost in the Louvre—wait,” she said, frowning. “I thought I told you that already, at the Old Met.”

  She had. I backtracked. “No, of course. Ha. But that was when you decided you liked art. I meant, like, when you wanted to, uh, make it.”

  Marie-Helene raised an eyebrow, but she gamely launched into a story about seashells, and her grandmother’s spoon collection, and a pencil she stole from her postman. It was a well-told story, funny and smart. I stopped listening almost immediately. Instead, I took her hand in mine and set off toward her studio in a wandering sort of way.

  “Do you have any of that old work up there?” I asked when we reached the door.

  “I don’t,” she said. “Are you trying to get me alone, Simon Harrington?”

  The last name Holmes had given me. “I might be.”

  I watched her think about it. The tip of her nose was pink in the cold, and she was wearing some bright lipstick that made her look like she’d wandered in out of a fairy tale. And I didn’t want to kiss her. How did I not want to kiss her? I’d been completely ruined.

  “Okay,” she said shyly. “I’ll show you my paintings.”

  “Is anyone else around?” I asked as she fiddled with the keys.

  “It’s only a few days till Christmas. I’m going home tomorrow, but I think that I might be the last one here.”

  “Good,” I said, too eagerly. There’d be fewer witnesses, fewer occupied studios, and I wanted to dig around. If I could, I wanted to rule out Nathaniel’s students as suspects. I liked Marie-Helene. In another life, I could’ve liked her a lot, and I wanted to stop wondering how I could use her as a tool in our case.

  The studios were dark, except for the pale winter afternoon streaming in through the windows, and Marie-Helene didn’t bother to flick on any lights as we went along. Not until we got to her space at the end of the row, and she hoisted herself up onto her worktable, kicking her legs.

  “Hi,” she said, biting her lip.

  Crap, I thought. Because of course. Of course I’d be expected to make a move here. Touch her neck. Kiss her; hell, maybe sing her an L.A.D song—do something to live up to the ridiculous texts Holmes had been sending.

  They were ridiculous texts, and in more ways than one. There had to have been a way to arrange this meeting without all that over-the-top flirting. If they’d gotten friendly last night, why hadn’t Holmes gone and met Marie-Helene herself? She was the better detective. We both knew it.

  Okay, I’d been kind of petty that night before, keeping my arm around Marie-Helene, bragging to Holmes that the French girl liked me, Ha-ha, I don’t care that August is hanging around, I have someone, too, and yeah, it was kind of a dick move, but I thought she’d brushed it off, and Oh my God, I thought, she’s totally setting me up. Either she knows I’m going to totally cock this up, or—

  Or she knew I was going to cock this up, and she wanted me to go after Marie-Helene and leave her, Holmes, the hell alone. I could see it now, her laughing to August about it—You know what Watson’s like, she’d say. It’s never been about me. He likes every pretty girl.

  Well, there’s a pretty girl right now, I thought, that wants me, and I let Simon come crawling out of his cave. I slipped my arms around Marie-Helene’s waist and kissed her like a man coming home from war.

  Here was another point under the “monster” column: it was a good kiss. She leaned into me, she put her hands in my hair, she pulled me down into her like she wanted me, like I wasn’t the terrible person Holmes thought I was, like I was somehow good enough for a girl like her.

  Like Marie-Helene, I mean. Of course that was what I meant.

  With a small noise, she drew me in closer, pulling out the tails of my shirt so she could touch my stomach. Her hands were warm, but they were still in her gloves. We realized it at the same time, and laughing, she pulled them off, one, two, with her teeth. Something pulled hard in my chest, something open and raw. I wanted to get my hands under her jacket. Unbutton her blouse.

  A bigger part of me wanted to be back in Sciences 442, knee-to-knee with Charlotte Holmes, while she talked to me about her vulture skeletons.

  “Hey,” I said to Marie-Helene, out of breath, “hey, you’re leaving tomorrow. Isn’t this a little fast?”

  “I don’t think so.” She traced a finger up my arm.

  “I think—I think it is for me, actually.”

  With a show of surprise, she sat back. “Simon, you’re a gentleman,” she said, teasing, but I could tell that she was hurt underneath it.

  “Not like that.” I ran a hand through her hair. “I mean that I actually wanted to see your art.” True, but not in the way it sounded. “And I want to see you, too, again, after Christmas.” True, sort of. “When are you coming back?”

  “This wasn’t—” She sighed. “I broke up with my boyfriend last week. I don’t want . . . I don’t want to see you after Christmas, okay? I wanted to hook up with you because I thought you were leaving, and I . . . when I go back to Lyon, I’ll probably see him. I didn’t want him to be the last person I’d been with.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sorry. Too honest?”

  It wasn’t. Both of us were in too deep; it just wasn’t with each other. “I’m fine,” I said, and it was completely true.

  Marie-Helene smiled a bit sadly. “You’re cute, you know. I just . . . my heart’s somewhere else.”

  “That’s fair.” I offered her a hand, and she hopped down from her worktable. We looked at each other, and I laughed a little at it all. The cup of paintbrushes. The straightforward way she’d shot me—Simon—down. That I was in Germany at all, with a strange girl in her art studio, and that Charlotte Holmes had set it all up to see what I would do.

  “While I’m up here,” I said, “would you show me some of what you’re working on, art-wise? Or is that a bit weird?”

  She giggled. “A bit weird,” she said, wandering over to a stack of paintings by the wall, “but sort of nice. Yeah, okay. How about this one? It’s a riff of one of the Turkish baths in Budapest. I really loved the tile—look, I want
ed to represent the mosaic I saw there in abstract. I used these brushes. . . .”

  Even though the canvases she showed me were all clearly originals, studies of places she’d seen, landscapes that had stayed with her, I found myself interested and asking questions. Real ones. At first, I was trying to distract myself from how I was still uncomfortably turned on—a case of my body acting without my brain’s permission—but she spoke with such authority about the work she made, rifling through canvases in her little fur-collared coat. I was coming to realize that I always found that compelling, that kind of mastery and passion, that she could be talking about her rock collection this way and I’d still want to know more.

  We’d come to the back of her finished work. “These last few are exercises for class,” she said. I caught a glimpse of a piece that looked familiar.

  “Wait,” I said. “That looks like—well, Picasso, actually.”

  “That’s because it is.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “It is.”

  “Simon,” she said, ruffling my hair, “you’re really sort of adorable.” While she pulled out the painting for me to get a better look, I decided that I needed to do something about my haircut.

  “It’s a take on the really famous one, The Old Guitarist. For Nathaniel’s forms and figures class. All first-year students have to take it. He’s really into imitation as a teaching practice.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, peering at the painting. It was obvious what it meant, but I wanted to hear her say it. Especially because this didn’t seem like an outright copy. I didn’t know much about Picasso, but I was pretty sure that the guitarist in his painting was a man. This was an elderly woman, wrapped around an instrument that wasn’t a guitar.

  “It’s a kokyū,” she said in response to my unasked question. “My father has one in the house. It belonged to my great-aunt. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah.” I reached out to skim my fingers across the canvas. “Why doesn’t he have you come up with your own ideas?”

  “Because, when you’re searching for your own style, it can be useful to try on those of successful artists. Nathaniel says we should see what we can steal from them. So, like, if I imitate Picasso, really try to do the same thing with my brushstrokes that he did with his, I’ll probably fail, but I’ll understand something about his process and so,” and she put on a Nathaniel voice, “‘I’ll learn something about my own! About my soul!’”