The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(15)

“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.