The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(46)

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.”