The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  An incomprehensible reply.

  The girl took a step forward, then another. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Stop moving,” the voice said.

  “No!” she cried. “Where are you taking him?”

  “Are you blind? He’s in the warehouse. Where you’ll be. We have business to discuss—” You could see her now, the back of her black-and-white head, blond and curled.

  “Is this worth it? You abduct my uncle, lock him away God knows where, all so that you can continue selling your forged paintings?” (A gasp from the audience, a series of coughs.) “How much are you making off of them? Is it enough blood money for you? Where is my uncle? He’ll blow this up! He’s a detective! We’ll take this to the media! I swear it!”

  She gave her speech clearly. She enunciated her consonants. She stated facts that were pure exposition, and she said each word with a clarity of emotion that was meant for a Broadway production. I turned to her—the now her, the one beside me—and grinned, even though she couldn’t see it under my mask. Holmes, my patron saint of trapdoors and fail-safes, of always remembering to pour the foundation so that, later, if you needed to, you could build a brilliant house on top.

  It was her show, after all.

  In the video, Phillipa took a staggering step forward, and when she turned her head, her face was clearly visible. “You should ask yourself where your uncle is,” she said, like some leering villain, and the audience began to stir. Someone stood and said, “Is this fake? Was this staged?” The rustle of chairs pushed back, paddles dropped to the floor.

  The video kept rolling. “Do you think you’re such a genius?” Phillipa said. “What if I told you he was right under your nose the whole time?”

  “Oh God,” past-Holmes said, with a gasp loud enough to be picked up by the bug in her coat. That was how she’d gotten the audio, she’d told me; the Moriartys had hacked into the bug in her shoe, the one that Milo had put there to track her movements. She’d had one of the Greystone techs break into the Moriarty servers to look for audio she could use for her “installation.” The security footage was their own, she’d said. We found it when we broke in to get the recording. They’ll kick themselves over that one. “How could you? How—”

  “Finally,” Phillipa said, as guards swarmed in to grab the girl and frog-march her out of the frame. “Took you long enough.”

  The sound of a door slamming, then the video cut off. A low-pitched static snuffle.

  Silence.

  When the lights came back up, three things happened in quick succession.

  One: The audience of grandmothers and grandfathers and genteel sons and daughters rioted. There wasn’t any other word for it. A man picked up his chair and threw it at the stage, and then the woman beside him followed, and then another, another, like children throwing bricks at a glass window to see it shatter. The elderly women I’d seen walk by earlier, the ones with the jeweled reindeer pins and fancy Christmas hats, turned like synchronized dancers to run for the door. The clerk held it open. I had to give him credit—he wore the same impassive expression he did when the night began.

  Two: The Greystone guard who had been holding Phillipa Moriarty to the side of the stage, one hand over her mouth, was sent staggering backward when she threw an elbow into his face. I ran to help the guard up, who waved me off—Phillipa was running, arms pumping, toward the winding marble stairs to the museum proper. The sign above her head said SCULPTURE WING. I pulled off my plastic mask and made to follow her. Tom and Lena and the rest of the Greystone guards followed suit. I made it off the stage and three more feet when I skidded to a stop, but they sprinted on ahead, tearing up the stairs, shouting her name.

  Three: Hadrian Moriarty ripped off Charlotte Holmes’s wig and glasses and put a gun to her head.

  “Go help my sister,” he told his own guards, and they took off up the stairs. “As for you, girl,” he said, “you wanted to see your uncle? I’ll send you there, then,” and he pushed the mouth of the gun hard into her temple. Holmes’s face went white. She didn’t flinch, didn’t make a sound. Only her colorless eyes moved, darting back and forth like she was reading lines from a book I couldn’t see.

  “You know as well as I do that Leander is alive,” August said, stalking out from the shadows. A knife glittered in one fist. “So please, stop making canned threats and be a person, Hadrian.”

  “He’s alive?” I asked August, not taking my eyes from Hadrian. “You’re sure of it.”

  “I’m sure of it. Factually sure.”

  “Which means you have to be involved,” I said. Hadrian’s gun still had the safety on. His other hand was wrapped around her throat. “How?”

  “I’m dead, Jamie—”

  “Will you stop acting like you’re the goddamn star of a goddamn tragedy, and answer my question.”

  August took a slow step toward his brother. “This summer, Hadrian saw me at a punk show here in Berlin. I was in deep cover. It was the first time I’d gone out alone since—since everything happened.” He jerked his head. “Word got back to my brother, but I only found out that night. I met up with Nathaniel. Or I guess I should say, with Hadrian.”

  “You’re posing as a teacher,” I said to Hadrian. It came out as a sneer. “You’re disgusting.”

  At that, he ground the gun into Holmes’s head. I clenched my fists. “You don’t know a single blessed thing about me, Simon.”

  “So August helped you.”

  While Hadrian was preoccupied with me, his brother had moved even closer. “No. Of course not. I found out that Nathaniel had been letting my brother pose as him for his meetings with Leander. For those nights at the underground pool, where Hadrian trolls for new art. Nathaniel Ziegler is a real person. He teaches during the day, has friends, an apartment in a crappy part of the city. But he’s been letting my brother moonlight as him. Apparently Milo’s intelligence made that possible. That, and my brother’s money.”

  “And I’m sure that made it easier to convince Nathaniel to recruit his students to forge paintings for him to sell.”

  “All but the Langenbergs. Those Hadrian did himself.”

  “I’m sure you’re so proud,” I spat.

  “Yes, well.” He gripped his knife. “As usual, I’m thrilled to be part of my family.”

  “And you knew Leander was alive. Do you know where he is?”

  August hesitated. “No,” he said.

  “This is all beautiful, really,” Hadrian said calmly, “but I’d like to get on with it.” At that, Holmes shut her eyes. Her mouth moved, almost like she was counting.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “It’s simple.” He cocked the safety off his pistol. “I want her dead. She spent the night wrecking my livelihood, my reputation. My reputation is everything. Did you see how much she was enjoying herself? Yesterday, she put my bodyguard in the hospital. She crushed his windpipe. She killed you, August. You have no future. You have nothing, now. She’s a child that thinks she can play with adults, and she needs to understand that this isn’t a game.” He dug his fingers into the flesh of her throat, and Holmes gagged. “Lucien and I might disagree on our methods, but our goal is the same. We want her punished. My brother wants to draw this out. I want it over. Now.”

  I had no weapon. No plan. I wanted Milo then, desperately—where was he? Why was he in Thailand? Since when had we gone from solving the case ourselves, from our dorm room, to relying on his resources? We were in Europe. In Europe, and alone. How had this happened? And August, gripping that blade like he knew how to use it—that was a lie, too. Even now, he held it up in front of him like it was a candle, or a prayer. So much for geniuses. So much for getting out of this alive.

  August put the knife to his own throat.

  “Hadrian,” he said calmly. “Drop the gun.”

  His brother stared back at him. They looked so much alike—the nose, the square jaw. A pair of mirrors on either side of a black-haired girl. Only the eyes wer
e different. August’s were suffused with such bitter melancholy that, looking at him now, I didn’t doubt his intentions.

  “Stop pretending,” Hadrian said, “that you care about what happens to her. What are you even doing?”

  With a steady hand, August pressed the knife harder into his skin. A red stitch of blood sprang up on either side of its blade.

  Hadrian’s brows furrowed. “What the hell are you—”

  “She killed me,” he said. The blood trickled down his neck, a strange echo of what leaked, even now, from my own cuts. Involuntarily, I touched my own throat. “You keep saying it. Lucien screamed it, the night the police came to her house to haul us away. My brother took the fall for me—went to jail for a few months for selling coke, but sure, who’s counting—and because of that I’m in hiding. Forever. I’d worked my ass off for years to get to where I was. I persuaded people to believe in me, despite my name. They expected me to be a monster. They expected me to be like you.

  “And now”—August laughed wildly, a high-pitched sound that must’ve moved his throat, because the knife cut in still deeper—“what does it matter? I have nothing. You saved my life and then you cast me out, and I live in Milo Holmes’s gilded tower. I’m in the wreckage of it all. All I have left are my ethics. Do you know how I do it? Live my life? All I think about is, what would Lucien do? And then I do the opposite. Spy on Milo’s mercenary operation? Of course he would. Poison Charlotte’s parents just to watch her agonize? He’d do that, too. Tell this Watson kid to stick around so that I could mess with his head, use him to get to her? No. I warned him. I stole one of Milo’s cars and drove him around and orchestrated a bloody massive scheme to try to convince him to go home. What would Lucien do? Plot this teenage girl’s death because she was a drug addict and lost and confused and no one ever loved her and she lashed out at me when I couldn’t give her what she wanted?” His voice quickened. “Lucien hates her for that. And, despite everything else, despite everything I do, I guess I’m a failure because I hate her for that too. I hate her. I hate her. And I don’t hate her at all.” A deep breath. “I refuse to let myself see her as anything but what she is. She’s a lost girl, and I was a lost boy for all those years too, growing up, and you used to know what you were, Hadrian, you used to go to plays with me and stay up late reading A Wrinkle in Time and you’d make things out of clay and we’d bake them in the oven when Mum wasn’t around to complain about the smell, and some of them cracked, but you make beautiful art—”

  “Shut up,” Hadrian said.

  “Even those Langenberg paintings—I know your handiwork, Hadrian. They’re beautiful—”

  “Stop,” he said, begging. “Just stop—”

  “You were my older brother. I looked up to you. I don’t anymore,” August said. “You say you want to kill her for me. But if you do it, if you kill her, I swear to God I’ll end myself, too. It’s all the same to me. You’ve made sure of it.”

  I was aware of my body, then, my useless limbs, how heavy and damaged they were, how slow I’d be to stop either of them. Behind the stage, up in the wings, there was shouting, like maybe Tom and Lena and the Greystone mercs had caught Phillipa after all. They’d be bringing her back down, their guns in tow, and with every pistol pointed at everyone else, this could only get more complicated.

  Throughout all of this, through August’s confession, the blade to his neck, Holmes’s eyes hadn’t once focused on him. They weren’t focused on me, either. They were shut, as gently as though she was sleeping.

  “Charlotte!” Lena called from an upper balcony. “We caught her! We caught her! I think I gave her a black eye!”

  In front of me, Holmes took a ragged breath. She opened her eyes. In one smooth motion, she grabbed Hadrian’s arm, the one with the gun, and wrenched it away from her while she slammed the back of her head into his face. Hadrian Moriarty yelled, staggering backward, and she disarmed him, neatly, with a single hand.

  His pistol went off into the floor.

  A pause, where no one really knew what to do, and then Charlotte Holmes dove down on top of him, pressing his nose down into the marble ground, pinning his arms behind his back.

  “August,” she said over her shoulder. “If you’re done trying to kill yourself, will you please fetch me some handcuffs?”

  thirteen

  WE FLEW, ALL OF US TOGETHER, BACK TO ENGLAND ON one of Milo’s military-grade planes. Me and Holmes and August and a pair of Moriartys in chains. Not to mention the armed guards, still nameless and interchangeable, all staring at Hadrian and Phillipa like they were rabid dogs about to slip their leashes.

  “Mr. Holmes has requested that we watch them closely until he arrives to claim them,” a soldier said, when I asked what was going to happen next.

  “Are they under arrest? Proper arrest? Like, going to jail?”

  Holmes shrugged. “Does it matter?” she said. “We’ll dispose of them one way or another. Sussex first, though, please.”

  “When will Milo get here?” I asked.

  “He’s on his way now,” she said. “He has information about Lucien that he needs to tell me in person.”

  August stared down at his hands. “Can you take the two of them somewhere else?” he asked quietly, and the soldiers hauled his brother and sister to the back of the plane and out of view.

  We’d left Tom and Lena at the Prague airport. They were about to catch a flight back to Chicago to spend Christmas with Tom’s family. A compromise, Tom told me, for having spent so much of his break bumming around Europe with Lena.

  “And your parents agreed to let you be away all this time?” I asked. We were at the curbside drop-off. Holmes and Lena were inside, arranging for the faux-Langenberg paintings to be delivered back to Germany. It was Christmas Day; everything but the airport was closed.

  He nodded at me, hands in his pockets. “Her family’s paying for it all, you know? My parents figured it might be my best chance to do some traveling. They can’t afford any of this stuff. Even after I got suspended, they thought . . . well, why pass up an opportunity?”

  So they weren’t the parents of the year. I was beginning to understand Tom a bit more. “Was it worth it? I mean, did you and Lena have fun?”

  To my surprise, Tom shook his head. “I kind of miss them. My family. After all the crap that happened this semester, I thought I wanted to escape them . . . but like, Lena and I went to all these fancy restaurants and crazy stores where they make you tea while she tried on dresses and yeah, it was all interesting, but I kind of miss my couch. And my TV. And then this stuff with you and Charlotte?”

  “Yeah?” I pulled my hat down further around my ears. Without that plastic mask, I felt self-conscious in public, especially now that my bruises were beginning to turn green around the edges. I looked like a piece of rotting meat. August had a bandage around his neck. Holmes wasn’t speaking to anyone except Lena, and then only in dark whispers. I didn’t need Tom to tell me that the last few days had been hard.

  “Dude, just . . . you need to get yourself out, now. Like, guns? Soldiers for hire? A whole family of weirdos trying to kill your girlfriend? You’re not married to her, and I really like Charlotte, I think she’s interesting and, honestly, really scary, but I kind of think that if you keep following her around, you’re going to wind up dead.”

  “August’s taken care of it,” I said.

  Tom shrugged. “Maybe. If so, it’s a hell of an anticlimax, isn’t it?”

  Before I could respond, Holmes and Lena came through the sliding doors in their dark jackets and hats. Lena slipped her gloved hand into Tom’s back pocket. “Ready?” she asked.

  “Let me know if the Germans don’t reimburse you for the cost of those paintings,” Holmes said to her. “The Moriartys had some nerve, auctioning every last one of them off. I think you have a complete set. I don’t think my surveillance videos would be permissible in court, but we do have enough evidence to at least lean on the government to write you a check.” />
  “It’ll be fine,” Lena said. “I kind of like the paintings, anyway. I might put one in our room this spring.”

  Holmes nodded tightly. “If they give you trouble,” she said, “tell them to shine a flashlight onto the canvases to look for cat hair.”

  “Cat hair?”

  “Hadrian’s trouser cuffs were coated in it. White,” she said, “so I assume it’s one of those wretched longhaired Persians. Hans Langenberg famously died alone. It was weeks before they found him. Since I haven’t read anything about his face being eaten—”

  I wondered how long she’d been sitting on that information.

  “No cats. Got it. I’ll tell them, if they ask.” Lena leaned in to kiss her roommate on the cheek, leaving a smudge of red where her lips had been. “Bye, guys. Merry Christmas. See you back at school!”

  Holmes smiled briefly. “Go on, you’ll miss your flight.”

  We met August at the airstrip. The Greystone plane was there waiting for us, and he was too, standing at the foot of the stairs with windswept hair and exhausted eyes. He looked like a photograph of himself rather than the real thing.

  We all nodded to each other, too tired to say much. When we boarded and took our seats, Holmes huddled up against me. She tugged my arm down around her shoulders. Through the layers of sweaters and scarves and coats, I could still feel her shivering, and so I held on to her more tightly.

  She’d almost died. We both had. I still wasn’t sure why we were alive, where her brother was, why we were headed back to Sussex at all. Her mother was still in a coma. Leander was still lost. We’d pulled off a feat back in Prague, to be sure, but had things veered off one inch to the left or the right, the three of us would all be in refrigerated drawers. I was still processing it there in the museum lobby, my mask in my hands, when Holmes looked down at a handcuffed Hadrian Moriarty and said grimly, “I suppose there’s no delaying it further. We need to go home.”

  “Go, then,” August had said.