The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(26)

Either way, she recovered quickly.

“There you are,” Holmes cried. I thought she was about to blow my cover when she turned to August and said, “I told you he couldn’t ditch us for long.”

Marie-Helene gave me a questioning look.

“They’re my cousins, visiting from London,” I told her, trying to reclaim the narrative. “And I didn’t ditch them. They said they wanted a night to do touristy things by themselves.”

“Well, tell them to come along.” Her friends were already on the street. She disentangled her hand from mine and pushed the door open into the night air.

August and Holmes were on my heels. “What’s your name?” she hissed.

“Simon. Yours?”

“Tabitha and Michael.”

“Are you supposed to be siblings?” I asked August. The both of them were wearing brown color contacts.

“We are, but it’s not believable. I’m much prettier than she is.”

I grinned, then reminded myself that I hated him. “She drag you into this?”

“I am standing right here,” Holmes said, stamping her feet a little in the cold. “Where are we headed, Watson? What have you found out?”

Nothing yet, but I didn’t want to tell her that. I was still smarting about her and August ignoring me before. We were having lunch with Phillipa tomorrow? We weren’t at all dealing with the fact that her mother had been poisoned? “I found out that French girls like Simon a lot,” I said instead, and trotted to catch up with Marie-Helene and her friends.

The air had gotten colder since earlier this evening. I reclaimed Marie-Helene’s hand under the pretense of warming it up. Was I aware that Holmes was behind me, watching? Obviously. Was I above doing things to make her jealous? Well . . . no.

It wasn’t hard to like Marie-Helene and her friends, though. They chatted about the new Damien Hirst show going up the next week, and when, tired of maintaining my know-it-all pose, I confessed I didn’t know who that was, they were kind about filling me in. Apparently he put cows in formaldehyde. This was art? Yes, they told me, it was. In a world where information was currency, I was usually bankrupt. It was nice, for once, not to be mocked for it.

“Where are we going, exactly?” I asked the girl with the paint-splattered backpack.

“Some of our friends rent from this super-rich art dealer. He has a house up ahead.” With her chin, she pointed to a tall brick building on the corner. “The only catch to living there is that he can use it to throw parties on the weekends, when he’s in town. You’ll see why, it’s a pretty cool space. We all usually go.”

“But?” I asked, because her tone was darker than her words.

“But he’s a creep,” she said, shrugging. “He’s like fifty, and his new girlfriend is always some baby Sieben student. A lot of these girls have dated him. It’s like making a deal with the devil for a little while. You meet some people, you get bought some nice things, you sleep with a gross old man, and by the time he ditches you you’ve gained something from it. You’ll be fine, though. He doesn’t like boys.”

My skin crawled. “You’re Gretchen, right?” I asked, hoping she’d point toward who was.

“Gretchen?” She shook her head. “I’m Hanna. Marie-Helene was calling us her m?dchen—her girls. Is that what you were thinking of?”

I was stumbling into some sleazy party based on something I didn’t actually hear in a bar.

Marie-Helene pulled me up the steps to the brick building’s door. “Our destination awaits,” she said, ushering us in.

The main floor was surprisingly dark and quiet, but it wasn’t our “destination.” Without turning on a light, Hanna felt around to her right until she found a doorframe. “Down these stairs,” she whispered. “Turn on your phone if you need light.”

At the bottom of the stairs was a door, and beyond that door was a cavern.

Marie-Helene and her friends made a beeline for the bar in the corner. I was left standing with one hand on my hat, taking it all in.

The cavern didn’t feel natural. The walls were lined with tile, and the ceiling had a perfect arch that meant it was man-made. A damp, sharp smell hung in the air. It took me a moment to place it as chlorine. I pushed past a knot of people and saw its source—a massive pool in the center of the room. One girl kicked her legs on an inflatable swan, holding her martini glass safely above her head. A pair of boys were dangling their feet in the water as they made out. Everywhere, a dim, fractured sort of light speckled people’s faces, speckled the walls.

Without thinking, I turned to clock Holmes’s reaction. It was what I always did in these down-the-rabbit-hole situations. It took me a minute to find her, still standing up on the now-deserted staircase, and I caught the end of a transformation—a subtle one, this time. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost the fanny pack. One hand was hastily unbuttoning her cardigan, and the other was tapping some kind of lip gloss on her mouth. The whole process took less than a minute, and when she stepped down into the party, she was wearing a little black dress and a haughty expression. In this light, her mouse-brown hair looked soft and warm. She was recognizably the same girl as she was in the Old Metropolitan, and she wasn’t at all.

On her tottering heels, she padded up between me and August. “Boys?” she asked, and on her cue, we took her elbows and led her into the party.