The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(13)

Watson.

It had been a solid year since I’d seen him last.

Once I had learned his habits. Had them catalogued. Had known him down to the ground. The boy standing in front of me was a stranger, a house rebuilt exactly but from parts that were strange to me.

“Dad?” he called. “Are you ready?”

“Coming down,” James said. Footsteps on stairs.

I had missed the end of their interrogation.

Watson looked down at the floor. His eyes traveled over the mailbox, the dingy wreath, the bicycles, the bins—all the evidence that Peter Morgan-Vilk was a man who would pay the money to rent a bad apartment in an expensive part of town. It would be easy to theorize, from there, that he himself had negotiated the loan of his identity to Lucien for a substantial payout, that his father had nothing to do with it. If Lucien’s fake IDs were confiscated, this then would be his backup: entry into America without any repercussions, for three months at a time, as a man who actually existed.

And Peter taking money from the man whose misbehavior brought down the father he despised? That was a fair motive on its own.

I had arrived here with those theories, but I had, as I’d said before, learned my lesson. I was done beginning at conclusions; this time I would begin at the beginning, and I had planned to interrogate Peter myself. And still, despite this planning, I had missed obtaining the information I needed, and barely, and all because the only friend I’d ever had was standing so close I could see the crease in the corner of his mouth.

Perhaps I made some sort of sound. A whisper of disappointment.

Watson’s gaze sharpened; he was staring at the bins in front of me. Slowly, he took a step forward. Another.

I couldn’t breathe. I wouldn’t have been able to, even if I dared.

“Come on.” James thundered down the last of the stairs, Leander at his heels. “We’ll get dinner, get you home.” Watson looked again up the landing, at Peter Morgan-Vilk’s shut door. Then he shrugged, and followed James and Leander out.

I stayed in that stairwell a very long time.





Five


Jamie


“I STILL MAINTAIN THAT WE COULD HAVE JUST PHONED him, and saved ourselves the trip,” Leander said as we pulled through Sherringford’s main gates. “Especially since Jamie won’t even let us stay in Manhattan for dinner.”

I sighed. “I told you, I have—”

“A presentation,” the two of them said together.

“Well, I wasn’t sure you were listening. I’m sorry if I didn’t want to get designer grilled cheese—”

My father sighed. “It looked lovely, didn’t it? Through the window?”

I tried not to snap at him. We were approaching my dorm, and I had missed the dining hall’s dinner hours because of the traffic back into Connecticut, and I was starving. I was always a jerk when I was starving. Holmes used to—no. No matter what I thought I’d seen, I wasn’t allowing myself to go down that road.

“I don’t know why you took me with you,” I said patiently. “I thought I’d made it really clear. I like spending time with you guys, and I know you’re headed back to England soon, Leander, but next time, can’t we just, like . . . go to the movies? In town? I don’t want to do this . . . this playacting anymore. I think I’ve grown out of it. And anyway, if I need to study, that should take priority.”

It felt good to say that. Final. Adult.

“Priority,” my father echoed. He and Leander exchanged a look, and then Leander turned back to me.

“Jamie,” he said. “You will get into school somewhere lovely, I assure you. You can study literature, and read on the weekends, and go punting or whatever they do at Oxford—”

“Hush, you went punting,” my father said, pulling up to the curb. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what punting is.”

“Well, then, your son can punt too, the rivers there are lovely for boating.”

“Punting?” I asked. “Also, who just, like, gets into Oxford?”

Leander cleared his throat. “Listen, Jamie—you can behave yourself. You can play by the rules. And I’m sure after that you’ll get a job working for some newspaper, or writing your novel in a little turret room somewhere, just like you’ve always talked about. Of course, in those lives, you wouldn’t possibly need any of the investigative skills we’re offering to teach you now. None of the learning to read people, or to understand them, or sort through their motives—”

“Oh, come on—”

My father nodded. “No, it’s not at all useful to learn to catalog the world and then winnow it down to the most important details. Especially for a writer. Can’t have that.”

“You’re not asking me to do that, though,” I said, a bit desperately. “This isn’t solving puzzles or logic problems, this isn’t a second stain under the carpet or some ginger encyclopedia league, this is Moriarty shit, and Leander, I was there on that lawn, too, in Sussex. I heard what you said. I heard it. You said you were done. So why are you out here, looking for Charlotte?”

His eyes darkened. “We’re looking for Lucien.”

“Dad,” I said. “Please.”

Silence, heavy like the shadows in the late-January light.