The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  And no, this wasn’t my mission. It was our mission. Her uncle was missing, but he was my father’s best friend, and I had as much of a right to be there as she did. I was done taking a constant backseat. Taking bullshit from strangers who hauled me off the street at gunpoint to dress me down. I was done with the way August was looking at me, even now, with the kind of indulgence you showed to a well-behaved Chihuahua.

  “You want this solved by midnight?” I said, rubbing my shoulder. “Then I’ll get my father to give up the IP addresses on Leander’s emails if he won’t give us the emails themselves. Your uncle had to live somewhere while he was conducting his investigation. Let’s go there. Shake it down. Someone run Nathaniel Ziegler through Milo’s criminal databases. Can we get some known associates? It was smarter to send me on a date with an art student while you played mechanic here at home?”

  Holmes stared at me. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “Your uncle is missing, Holmes.”

  “Jamie,” August said, a warning.

  “Whatever. I don’t care. August, you’ve been here all afternoon? Haven’t hijacked any black cars today?”

  “No,” he said, inflectionless.

  “Then what have you been doing?” It was hard to keep from shouting. I needed to see some answering anger flare up in her face. Any reaction at all.

  August stepped forward to put a hand on her shoulder. They looked at each other. He shrugged; she nodded. It was the kind of wordless back and forth I was used to having with her.

  “My mother,” Holmes said at length, “is now in a coma.”

  “A coma?” I stared at her. “I thought the poisoning was an isolated event. I thought—”

  “We thought wrong.”

  “Shouldn’t this be our priority?” I asked, starting to pace. “Shouldn’t we put the rest of this on hold? Go back to England? Your mother’s life is on the line here.”

  She regarded me evenly. “No.”

  “You’re sounding kind of heartless right now. Just so you know.”

  “These things are connected, Watson. My mother? Leander? If I solve one, I’ll solve the other, and I’m so sorry if it offends your delicate sensibilities if I happen to love my uncle more.” Visibly, she swallowed. “I love her, too, you know. But—I need to prioritize. My mother can take care of herself.”

  “From her coma.”

  Behind Holmes, August glared at me.

  Her expression was a mirror of his. “I’ve only heard about this from my brother’s intel. My father hasn’t told me anything at all.” Annoyed, she gestured to the screen. “Milo is beaming me footage from Thailand so I can review it for myself, but no one, and nothing, has entered the house that wasn’t there yesterday. Milo just fired the whole staff, as a precaution. The only people—” With a sigh, she raked back her hair. “My father and the doctor are tending to my mother. That’s all I can tell.”

  “And Lucien?” I asked.

  “Moriarty hasn’t made any kind of move. Not that Milo can tell. Nothing that he can stop.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She slipped out from August’s hand and crossed to me. His eyes tracked her across the room. “I’m tired, Watson,” she said. “I’m working two cases at once, and they both concern my family. It’s not like anything I’ve taken on before. Milo’s stupid surety isn’t helping. I’m positive he’s missed something. I know who the culprits are. I just don’t know how they’ve done what they’ve done.”

  “Don’t you usually reason from the facts?” I asked her. “Instead of assigning blame and working from there?”

  Holmes shrugged, but I could tell I’d hurt her. “I’m not Sherlock Holmes. This isn’t a case study. My uncle is missing, and the only possible answer is that it’s the Moriartys behind it. One way or another, they’ve done this. Sorry, August.”

  August grimaced.

  “Is there any value in having Milo . . . remove Lucien?” I asked.

  “And Hadrian?” she asked. “And Phillipa? And their bodyguards? Why do you think they haven’t taken us out directly? Why do you think they haven’t sent us Leander’s body via parcel mail? Put a bullet in my mother’s head?”

  Rubbing my shoulder, I thought about it. What was the only worse thing than the confirmation of your greatest fear? “Because the uncertainty is worse.”

  She spread her hands as if to say, There you have it. “Are you done berating me?”

  “What about my ideas?”

  “They have value,” she admitted. “Of course they do. Of course you do. What do you take me for? Some kind of machine? If I wanted a yes-man, don’t you think I’d find one that wanted to ‘yes’ me more often?”

  I bit back a smile. “That’s fair.”

  “Don’t you think,” she said, drawing closer, “that there’s some irony in someone taking the trouble to anonymously kidnap you? If everyone keeps insisting you’re unimportant, you have to ask yourself why.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” I told her quietly.

  “I am, too.” She considered me for a moment, eyes bright. “Should we divide up the work, then? You’ll call your father? I’m sure August wouldn’t mind doing some data mining in Milo’s systems, he was hired to do that sort of thing”—August shrugged—“and if you don’t mind, I’d like to spend more time with Milo’s security feeds. When I was younger, I was made to find my way through my own house, blindfolded. I know every room. This feed is missing some.”

  “Was Milo trained that same way?” I asked, wondering why he’d skip surveillance, wondering why we were all apparently wandering around with our eyes covered.

  “No,” she said absently. Her attention had drifted back to the broken screen. “He was always away in our father’s study. He speaks five languages, but I doubt he’s ever seen our basement. Shall we regroup in an hour?”

  But when I reached the door, she cleared her throat. “Watson?”

  “What?”

  “You only—you kissed her?”

  Her back was to me. “Yeah,” I said, wishing I could see her face.

  “Will you see her again?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Holmes bent her dark head over the tangle of wires on the desk. “That’s all,” she said finally, and when I left, August was at my heels.

  “I’m going to call my dad,” I told him. “Can you give me a minute?”

  “Do you two fight like that often?”

  “No. Well . . . yes. Lately, I guess we fight like that a lot.” I shrugged. “I’m sorry you had to see it.”

  “I don’t know how you two are still friends.”

  “That’s kind of bizarre, coming from the aberrant Moriarty who can’t get mad at the girl who ruined his life.”

  His eyes wandered over to the closed lab door. “Isn’t getting past it better than the alternative?”

  “It depends what the alternative is.”

  “Is there one? A sane one, I mean.” He sighed. “I don’t hate her. I’m not a terrible person.”

  I watched him, the sad mask of his face, the dark clothes edged bright against the fluorescent-lit hallway. “You could be a decent person,” I told him, “and still not like her.”

  “Then what am I left with?” His mouth twisted into a smile. “I’m her friend. And because I’m her friend, I’m going to go do some data mining for her. For free.”

  “You’re hunting down art forgers,” I called after him as he set off down the hall. “You can be excited about it. I give you permission not to be a sad sack.”

  “Sorry about your shoulder,” he said. “Just so you know.” And he was out of sight.

  I wasn’t sure if he was just being very English, or if August had actually orchestrated that whole blindfolded joyride. Access to Milo’s cars? His team? Resources? I should be mad about this, I thought. He had a gun pointed at me by proxy. He told me to leave all this and go home for Christmas. He . . . well, he threatened to call my father.

  No
. I was crazy. He wouldn’t go that far just to prove a point. Just to get me to get safely home. Would he?

  Breathe, I told myself. Friends don’t kidnap friends. If we were friends. I took a deep breath. I needed another opinion.

  When I called him, my father picked up on the second ring. “Jamie,” he said, too eagerly. “News! Tell me!”

  There was a commotion in the background—the crackle of a party, a child crying. “What time is it there?”

  “I’m at your stepmother’s family’s Christmas brunch.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to bother you,” I said. “Can I call back—”

  “Yes! That’s such an interesting, complicated problem! Oh, no, Abbie, I need to go take this outside—it’ll only be a minute—no, go ahead and play without me, ha! I’m so sorry to miss another round of charades—”

  “Having fun?” I asked him. For some reason, I’d never stopped to think that my father had a whole new set of in-laws. I wondered how they stacked up against my mother’s family, the Baylors. On her side, I had one cousin. He was a fifty-five-year-old accountant.

  “I’m on the porch.” I heard him slide the door shut behind him. “There are so many of them, Jamie, and when they’re not burning down the kitchen, they’re giving Robbie fireworks to set off in the backyard. It’s been a hazardous holiday.”

  My half brother Robbie was six. “They sound a little like you.”

  “If I watched professional wrestling instead of solving crimes,” my father huffed. “Well, what have you discovered? Or are you calling to apologize for ignoring my texts?”

  “I haven’t discovered anything. Milo’s doing all the work.”

  “You and I both know that Milo is doing none of the work, or else Leander would have been delivered home this morning. Tell me what you’ve found.”

  I filled him in on the day’s findings, including my brief kidnapping and my theory as to the perpetrator.

  “Well, it certainly sounds like a ham-handed attempt at altruism,” he said. “You’re not badly hurt? Then no harm done, really. August does seem like a nice young man, from what you’ve said.”

  Maybe I was mad at him, after all. August and my father. “Thanks for your support.”

  He ignored that. “It’s good to hear that you’re coming up with some strategy of your own. It sounds like your poor Charlotte is distracted, and with good reason. It’s terrible to hear about her mother. Emma might be a bit of a witch, but no one deserves that.”

  “You’ve met them? Holmes’s parents?”

  “A few times. They were quite fun when we were younger. Emma’s a brilliant chemist, you know. Works for one of the big pharmaceutical companies. Mostly I saw her flex her skills when she made us cocktails. Molecular mixology . . . anyway, she and Alistair came to visit us in Edinburgh, when Leander and I were flatmates. Alistair would tell us wild tales about his exploits in Russia. I always thought of him being a bit like Bond. I’m sure that was the image he wanted me to have of him, anyway.”

  “What happened?” They sounded nothing like the people I’d met.

  “They got married. Had Milo, and then—and please don’t tell your friends this—they went through a bad patch and had Charlotte, I think, as a fix-it. People do that with children sometimes. It’s a terrible idea for everyone involved. But Alistair had gotten sacked by the M.O.D.—”

  “I thought the Kremlin tried to have him assassinated,” I said, “and that the government made him retire for his own safety.”

  “Is that what Charlotte told you?” He sighed. “I don’t know for certain what happened. I got the impression, from Leander, that he’d gotten caught feeding classified information to the Russians. It’s not important. Either way, he lost his job. They were having money problems—you’ve seen that house, it’s absurd to imagine the upkeep—and they were fighting about it, and so they had a child. That child was Charlotte. And while I love your friend, Jamie, I don’t think she’s ever made anything easier for anyone.”

  I bristled. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “The state of her parents’ marriage isn’t her fault,” he said. “But she put extra weight on an unsteady foundation. They’re not happy people, Alistair and Emma Holmes. Not the way Leander is. Not the way I imagine myself to be.”

  “I know.” My father could be called a lot of things, but miserable wasn’t one of them.

  “Try to keep that in mind as you’re going through all this with Charlotte. It can be so easy to get bogged down in it. The darkness. The heartlessness. Not in Holmes, of course. Well, sometimes . . .” I didn’t know what Holmes he was talking about, there. I don’t know if he did. “Besides, you’re young, much younger than I was when I got mixed up with this lot. I don’t want it to ruin you.”

  “Why won’t you let me read Leander’s emails?” I asked. He’d mentioned his friend’s name so many times, always with such . . . longing. It didn’t sound romantic. It didn’t sound unromantic, either. It sounded like he was mourning the loss of a limb.

  He was silent for a moment. “Well, he says a few things about his niece that aren’t very nice.”

  “Really? They seem really close.”

  “They are,” he said. “But she’s a teenage girl, and makes mistakes, and—oh, dammit, those emails are private, Jamie. They weren’t meant for you. I’m sorry to put it so plainly, but I need to make you understand. I’m so far away from all of it, and thank God for that, because the last case I took with him? It almost killed us both. I have small children. I live in America. I need that distance, but . . .”

  “But you can’t cut him off completely.”

  “Yes. Well. Listen, I’ll send you the IP addresses from his last few emails. Maybe Milo’s grunts can make something happen on that front. Hold on—” He covered the receiver with a hand. There was some muffled conversation, and when he got back on, his voice was ridiculously jolly. “Well, son, I’ve been told that I need to go sing about figgy pudding! Happy I could help with your girl problems! We’ll talk more soon. I’ll send what I promised. Love you, Jamie.”

  “Bye, Dad,” I said. “You too.”

  “SO. NATHANIEL ZIEGLER,” HOLMES WAS SAYING AN HOUR later, spinning back and forth in her rolling chair. “Was arrested for possession three years ago. Want to know the address?”

  “Let me guess.” August paused for dramatic effect. He was sprawled on Milo’s couch. We’d taken over his penthouse, despite the complaints of his staff. There was more space here than in our room. “221B Baker Street.”

  “Yes, you’re a rare wit, August. Have a cookie. The address, in fact, is one we visited last night.” She gave us a street name ending in strasse. “Would the underground pool ring a bell?”

  “The place was raided?” August sat up. “During a party?”

  “According to the report, he lived there.”

  I remembered what Hanna said, about the art school girls who hung on older men’s arms for money and connections. “I wonder if that was how he met Hadrian.”

  “It certainly fits.” Holmes frowned. “And Leander’s supposed to be meeting him tonight, Watson?”

  I thought back to my conversation with Nathaniel at his loft. “Yeah, if he shows up. The way he reacted when I told him that Leander was hanging out, back at home, it was like . . . it was like he knew that wasn’t possible.”

  “You mean to say, he reacted like he knew Leander was dead.”

  I shifted in my chair.

  “Leander isn’t dead,” she said. “I know it for sure.”

  “For a fact?” August asked. “Or for sure?”

  Holmes lifted her chin. “He can’t be dead,” she said, and there was only the slightest quaver in her voice.

  I had a lot of experience fighting Holmes over her outlandish assertions, but I didn’t have the heart to insist that, yes, in fact, her favorite uncle could be lying in a ditch somewhere. “We can. So?”

  “So. It’s seven o’clock already. I doubt Leander’s ‘usual
time’ for meeting Nathaniel was any earlier than eight. He’s been at this for a while; he wouldn’t want to meet even at twilight. He’d want the cover of darkness. Still, I have access to the cameras covering the corners in case he shows early.” She swiveled her chair to look out the window. “East Side Gallery is a big place. It’s a tourist destination. We need a plan to make this meeting work for us.”

  “You do have an entire company of trained men at your disposal,” August said.

  “Do I?” she asked. “Even if they’d follow my lead, using other people’s men leaves a rather large margin for error.”

  “You really think your brother would hire subpar help.”

  Holmes snorted. “You’ve met my brother, haven’t you? No, we do this alone.”

  “You could kidnap Nathaniel,” I said, only half-joking. “Hey, maybe August could do it.”

  He started. “Better not,” he said.

  Was that an admission of guilt? I was going to murder him.

  “And what? Torture him back at home until he tells us that he thinks Leander’s dead?” She got to her feet. “Think, would you.”

  The ceiling fan whirred. The clock in the kitchen chimed the hour. Holmes paced in front of the window, talking to herself.

  For my part . . . well, I had no part. What could I possibly suggest? “What do we even want from Nathaniel?” I said aloud. “His ties to Hadrian Moriarty? We have August, there. He’s a better link than Nathaniel could ever be, if we need to flush Hadrian or Phillipa out. She’s already asked us for access to August. Look—do we want Leander back, or do we want to solve the crime he was investigating?”

  Holmes and August looked at each other.

  “What? Is that a stupid question?”

  I thought about it while we suited up. It only took a few moments to put myself into my Simon guise—a hat, a vest, the steel-toed boots. I was playing him again in case Nathaniel managed to catch sight of me, since I didn’t look dissimilar enough from Simon to convincingly claim I was anyone else. But as I parted my hair in the mirror, I realized that it was weirdly comforting to be him again. Simon. I knew how he walked, talked. How he thought. What he’d say. I didn’t always know those things about myself.