The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(22)

Elizabeth’s eyes welled. “What did that girl do to make you like this?”

With that, it was like our fight jerked into a higher gear.

“What she did? Or hey, how about if I was just this way all along?” There were certain things I didn’t want Elizabeth to touch. Not ever. This was one of them.

Nobody knew the whole of it. Nobody except me and Holmes and Scotland Yard, and I wanted to keep it that way. How else could I possibly move on, if everyone looked at me and knew how much of a fool I’d been?

“So what, you’ve just been an asshole from the start?” Elizabeth was crying. “Why are you talking to me like this?”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. Did I mean my accusation? Had she really gone into our club meeting last night, or had she beaten me back to my dorm to delete my project? No. It was impossible. She wasn’t any part of this. I wasn’t so selfish to drag her back into this mirror world where Moriartys had gemstones shoved down girls’ throats.

I was selfish in other ways.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I had.

“Fine. Say nothing. Fine,” she said again, and she turned on her heel and marched out into the hall.

Noise out there. Doors opening, closing.

“No, Randall,” I heard her say. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Don’t talk to him. I’ll do it myself, when I’m ready.”

He stuck his meaty head into my room. Before he could say a word, I slammed the door in his face.

Then I picked up my phone, pulled up my father’s message. Leander wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.

The whole bloody world wanted me to go find Holmes? Fine. I’d go find Holmes. I’d find her and show her exactly how much damage she’d done.

I have, I wrote back. Pick me up in ten.





Eight


Charlotte


THE SUMMER AFTER THE INCIDENT WITH MY TUMBLING teacher and the Adderall and Professor Demarchelier, my family took our yearly retreat to Lucerne.

We spent a fair amount of time in Switzerland in those years. Milo was attending boarding school there, at a place that, even at twelve, I knew our family could hardly afford. The winter instruction took place at a ski lodge in Austria, in Innsbruck (hence the name of the place, the Innsbruck School), and during the spring and fall, Milo took his classes with the sons of prime ministers and kings in Lucerne.

“I don’t want to go back,” he’d said at the end of spring break, in a rare moment of dissent. My brother took his orders from our father unflinchingly, as though our family unit were a military operation. “I know enough already to start my own business. That’s all we’ve—I’ve—ever wanted to do, anyway. Plenty of people finish school at eighteen.”

We were at the dinner table. It was the only guaranteed time during the day for the four of us to be together. Consequently, it was my own personal hell. I pushed my plate away, watching my father closely.

He tilted his head to the side. “Why do you think that you attend your school?” I studied his hands on the table. They were still.

Milo considered the question, chewing. He never seemed to feel the reflexive dread I did when our father considered us like that, like prey. “For the connections?”

“Not for the skiing?” I asked under my breath. In those days, I had less control over myself.

Luckily, my father didn’t hear. My mother reached out one viselike hand under the table and captured my knee. She wanted me to shut my mouth. This was because she loved me.

“The connections,” my father said. “A bit baldly stated, but yes, good. Now, as you noted, you are eighteen. How useful is it for you to know the Belgian prime minister?”

“For me to know the prime minister?” Milo said, slowly. “But I go to school with the prime minister’s son.”

“And?” my father asked. On the table, he curled and uncurled his hands. This was a warning. If one lay flat on the table, it meant a punishment was forthcoming, and whether it would be directed at Milo or me was a coin toss.

In the silence, our housekeeper came around and refilled our water glasses. The sound was soothing, and—and I couldn’t focus. I kept staring at my father’s hands, thinking, I will not throw up. It would make too much noise. My father would hear and there would be consequences, perhaps he would comfort me or perhaps he would be mad, I never did know and there was no way I could control it then so I would control it now, my panic, and I would not throw up.

I was twelve. I wanted to make him proud. I swallowed.

Milo was watching our father’s hands as well. “It isn’t important for me to know the Belgian prime minister. Except that I could introduce you to him. Through his son.”

My father’s fingers were curling around his fork. They were spearing a piece of meat and bringing it to his lips.

“Then you understand why you’ll stay at Innsbruck,” my father said, and “Charlotte, eat your veal,” and that was that, and I did not throw up. Not that night.

Our trip to Lucerne coincided with Milo’s return to school. We took a guesthouse outside the town, small and “sweetly Scandinavian” and full of tatty, comfortable furniture. We would be there for his orientation week.

It was not economical for both of us to attend boarding school, my father had told me, and unlike me, Milo had already learned everything that Alistair Holmes had to teach him. He needed an advanced education. But I was taken along on these trips because I still had my uses. I knew how to listen. I knew how to remember, and how to report back the important parts to my father in digest. I was left to play with the children, to glean what I could about their parents.