The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(27)

I leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Is this the part where we share information? Because I know how you came up with the Old Metropolitan. It’s just something you’ve overheard back in Sussex. No magic there.”

She glanced up at me. “It’s all magic, Simon,” she said, “if I’m to believe what you write about me.”

“He’s your biographer?” August asked. “Like Dr. Watson? Jesus, that’s ador—”

“It is not adorable.” I pulled us to a stop at the pool’s edge. Beside me, Holmes squinted across the room. The light from the water was freckling her cheeks, and I resisted the urge to touch her face, to see if I could make them scatter. “Of course I know it isn’t magic. I’ll prove it. Do you want me to tell you what you’ll do next?”

She smiled, almost imperceptibly. “Go on, then.”

I gave myself a second to look around the party. Hanna had been right. Here and there someone broke the mold, but really there were two kinds of people here: college-age girls and men who gleamed with that particular sheen of money. The girls were mostly in tiny dresses, but the men were all dressed differently, some in suits and some more like artists, some in rumpled black and some neatly pressed. Some had a dancer’s build, or the anxious stare of a writer.

Next to us, a girl was flicking through what looked like slides of her work on her iPhone. “As you can see,” she was saying, “I’m an excellent candidate for your opening.”

Immediately, Holmes turned her head to listen.

Focus, I told myself, and looked around the room again. I was not going to make a fool out of myself, not with Blond Gaston over her other shoulder.

“There’s a man in the corner,” I said finally. “The one with the scarf and the round glasses. He’s the best candidate for Leander’s professor contact. What was his name? Nathaniel?”

Beside me, Holmes made a humming sound. She wasn’t looking at him; her attention was fixed on the conversation behind us. “Explain your reasoning.”

It suddenly seemed so important for me to be right. To get her to look at me, really look at me, the way I needed her to. Squinting, I considered the man in question, who was telling a story with his hands. “His body language. He seems much more relaxed than the other men here. He’s not jockeying for status or trying to get laid; he looks like he’s catching up with friends. And the people around him are at ease, too. Look at the guy next to him—he’s what, eighteen, and he just whacked Nathaniel on the arm while he was talking. Now he looks shocked, probably at his own gumption, and everyone’s laughing. They’re all comfortable with each other. He’s their authority figure, but they like him.”

With the calm electricity of a hunting dog in a field, Holmes stared down the man in the suit. The only problem was that it was a different man in a different suit.

“Plus he’s handsome,” I said desperately, trying to refocus her, “and people meet at the Old Metropolitan to walk down here on Saturday nights, and you said your uncle was involved with someone here, someone in this scene. Does Leander like redheads?”

Holmes grimaced at the mention of her uncle’s sex life. “Yes, yes, fine, except we’re not in a position to approach him, so it doesn’t matter. None of us are done up like art dealers and you’re a little too spot-on to play a prospective art student. You look like you just came from central casting. A disconnected undercut, Watson? Really?”

August smiled to himself.

“Marie-Helene buys it,” I said, setting my jaw.

“That’s because she thinks you’re handsome.”

“And you don’t?”

Nathaniel was looking over at us now. I’d been staring. Quickly, Holmes turned to me, adjusting my collar. “You look ridiculous,” she said. Her hands were warm. “I like you much better as yourself.”

There was a trace of something in the air, sickly sweet and familiar. Forever Ever Cotton Candy. The Japanese perfume that August had given her years ago.

“You look good, Simon,” he was saying, reaching past her to clap me on the shoulder. “And really nice work, with the deductions.” It came out unnatural, like he’d learned how to compliment people from an instruction manual.

“Anyway,” Holmes said, pulling away from me. “We’ll deal with him later. Big fish first.”

“What big fish?”

There was a look on August’s face, something strange and drawn, but when I glanced again it was gone. “Charlotte, we’re going to go play pool,” he said.

“We’re playing pool? Don’t you mean in the pool?” I paused. “Why the hell would we play in the pool?”

“Go off, then,” she said, coiling a strand of hair around a limpid finger. She was already slipping back into character. “I imagine I’ll work faster on my own, anyway.”

Holmes and not-Holmes. Businesslike words in a porn star voice.

“I’m sure you will, Tabitha,” August told her, annoyed, and steered me away. Past the bar, past a circle of overstuffed chairs, past a group of men in suits all smoking and checking their phones while a girl in a skirt served them drinks. I wondered if she was one of the art students who lived here, too. If that was part of the deal. I felt sick.

There was a pool table in the corner. Unlike the heavy, ancient ones in Holmes’s house, this one was made of acrylic. You could see straight through its legs to the wall. Only the felt surface was an opaque white.