The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(26)

Their loss.

Deleting my physics presentation? It happened in the thirty minutes between my leaving the dorm and coming back. My father had dropped me in front of my building, so it’s possible that someone clocked my arrival—but they would have had to then watch for me to leave again, and to know I wasn’t going to creative writing club as usual. Mrs. Dunham had seen me enter and leave, but she hadn’t known when I’d return. Sure, maybe she’d immediately broken into my room and deleted my files, but—

My stomach curdled. Mrs. Dunham. I refused to believe it.

And anyway, it was beyond belief to imagine that she would have emailed Elizabeth and told her to come to my room, much less sneak in herself and sabotage my laptop while I was sleeping. It took someone with brass balls to do something like that, and while I didn’t doubt Mrs. Dunham had courage—she was the house mother to a hundred teenage boys; I was sure she’d seen some of the grossest scenes imaginable—I couldn’t imagine her being so stonehearted or so cruel. Not even for Lucien Moriarty’s money.

Because that’s what it came down to, wasn’t it? Who could be bribed. Unless we had another fanatic on our hands like Bryony Downs, made from Holmes’s bad behavior, the culprit had to be someone being paid off by the Moriartys. It made it impersonal. Gross. It maybe made it easier to solve.

Notes, then. A plan.

I would start by apologizing to Elizabeth. She deserved it. It was just dumb luck that she’d shown up while I was having that nightmare; no one could have counted on that. More likely they had snuck in to ruin my laptop, found me sleeping, and then sent Elizabeth that email, urging her over to take the blame. Muddy my understanding of the situation.

I had no illusions about my own importance. In the end, this was a person who was after Charlotte Holmes, and I was the means to that end. That had to be my working assumption, right? Me being the collateral damage.

Either that, or I’d made some brand-new enemies at Sherringford without even knowing.

I rubbed at my eyes for a minute.

Right. I had to toss my room for bugs. It only took ten minutes; the room was small, and last year I’d learned the most effective way to dismantle my dorm furniture. I slit the mattress, felt down the closet, checked the shelves, looked behind the mirror. I didn’t find anything.

Why on earth had they called in Elizabeth? Had they known I would flip out and blame her? It was more likely that they’d just hidden the bug well. I put a pin in that for now.

The next question was how they got in, and when. I could check the keycard records for the dorms. We each had one, a heightened security measure after Dobson’s death that allowed the school to track who entered every building and when. You beeped in. The problem was, you didn’t need to beep out. Someone could have been waiting in the dorm all day, waiting. There were security cameras, though. Holmes would know how to tell if the footage had been tampered with. And would someone go through all the trouble to do that? Wasn’t there an easier way to strike at Holmes? What was their motive, bringing me into this? You don’t need to know the motive, Holmes would say. You need the method. You need a pair of eyes. What you need is to get out of your head, Watson—

I shut my notebook.

I was thinking about it—her—like we were in this together. We weren’t. This was just blowback from last year. From my former life. I’d solve this, and be done. Still, it wouldn’t happen tonight. I had homework to do, and I didn’t even know what it was, thanks to my ill-advised, relationship-ending nap.

Lena was in my AP English class. It was a place to start.

Homework? I texted her. Slept through class.

Her response was instantaneous. Not talking to you you made a butt of yourself to Elizabeth and you didn’t apologize?? Jesus Jamie.

Elizabeth. Who I’d blamed for all of this. Who I was too ashamed to think about right now.

I’ll talk to her tomorrow. Giving her time to cool down.

It was a lie, and Lena knew it. You’re a coward. I’m not doing you any favors, she texted back.

It was fair. Still, I rolled my eyes. Elizabeth was the only sophomore in upperclassman housing, and she lived in Lena’s dorm. Carter Hall housed the school-wide security team on the ground floor. Elizabeth’s room shared a wall with them. Living there was the only way her parents would let her come back to school after last year, and who could blame them?

I knew that if I went to Lena’s, I wouldn’t be leaving until she (and probably a squad of security guards) personally supervised my apology to my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend?

Oh, God. I’d fucked up.

Experimentally, I pulled the laptop out of its rice bath. It made a sloshing sound. I stuck it back in.

My phone buzzed. I’m throwing a party tonight and if you bartend and apologize to Elizabeth and suck generally less I will give you the assignment. There was a pause. Then she sent a knife emoji.

Today was not going as planned. I’d might as well just roll with it.

THAT WAS HOW I FOUND MYSELF AT AN UTTERLY DEBAUCHED party in the access tunnels on a Tuesday night.

The tunnels that ran below Sherringford were built back when the school was a convent, and nuns needed a way to walk to prayers in the freezing months without freezing themselves. When the school purchased the property back in the early nineteenth century, they’d walled the tunnels off. It was only in the last fifty years or so that they’d put them back into use. Now they were used by the maintenance staff.