The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(34)

“I can’t— Lena, there’s only so many come-to-Jesus moments I can have in a single night, okay?”

“Guys?” Anna cleared her throat. “I have literally zero idea what you’re talking about.”

Lena took her ridiculous hat off her head and swept it under her arm, like we’d come to the end of a performance. “Jamie, you, like, don’t want friends, you know that? You just want to float in your little misery bubble alone. Then you walk around being all like I’m miserable, I’m so alone. Well, you do it to yourself! I’ve seen what this Lucien guy is like, okay? I was there. We would have believed you.”

The police would be here soon. There would be questions, and handcuffs, and an interrogation room, and questions from the dean, calls from parents who thought I was a thieving scholarship loser, a killer, a boy who stuffed jewels down girls’ throats, and I had put on so much speed in the last year that I had thought I’d left this all behind me. Now I’d been suddenly slammed into reverse.

And fine. Fine. If it came to that—I missed her.

God, I missed her. Especially now.

“Yeah,” I told Lena, and she was right, she was right about all of it, and it didn’t matter, because maybe I didn’t want any other friends. Maybe I didn’t want anybody but Charlotte. I couldn’t cure the poison with anything that wasn’t also poison. Missing her was sick, and pathetic, and made me a fucking fool, and maybe I hated myself so much for it that, even now, I couldn’t look Lena in the face. “Yeah, that’s totally how it went down the last time.”

THE POLICE ARRIVED, YAWNING AND BORED, AND IMMEDIATELY took Anna away with them to be questioned. Lena trailed behind them, for whatever reason; she was saying something about an ambulance. That took care of two of the uniformed officers, but left one behind to glare at me alongside my old friend Detective Shepard, who looked like he’d rather have swallowed a hive of bees than to be back on this campus again. By now he and I knew the drill; he didn’t even try to question me without my father, just left me to wallow while he examined the scene. The uniformed cop knocked a bike off its hook, and when it fell, it took down another, and another, slow and unstoppable, like a rhinoceros playing slow-motion dominoes. Then the dean of students arrived in pajamas and robe and a pair of neon trainers, and my father after that, bright-eyed and, as always, horribly bushy-tailed, and after a huddled conference amongst the adults, the whole awful parade of us walked up to the headmistress’s office in the clock tower on the hill, our shoes tracking slush and dirt into the paisley-carpeted entryway.

“Like I said, I’d rather question him at the station,” Detective Shepard said, as we stomped the snow off our feet.

The dean shook her head. “You already took away the girl. I’m lucky I got here before you vanished Mr. Watson here.”

“It’s not how it’s done—”

“They got me out of bed,” the dean said darkly. “After last year, with the Dobson boy, we’ve come up with a new way of handling these . . . situations. And that ‘new way’ hauled me out of my house at midnight on a weekday, so yes, we are handling it here. I have no idea why that child called the police. This is an internal matter.”

As everyone started up the stairs, bickering, my father hung behind. He looked as energetic as though he’d just drunk a pot of coffee and run a triathlon. I hated him a little bit right then. But I guess I had a lot of frustration to go around.

“So perhaps I should have picked you up when you asked me to,” he said.

“Probably.” I took off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets. The clock tower offices were surprisingly warm.

He lifted an eyebrow. “No ‘Dad, why aren’t you taking this more seriously’? ‘Dad, why aren’t you cursing my name and wailing over our misfortune’?”

“Honestly?” I said. “I’ve been . . . pretty shitty, lately. I’m not going to tell you what to do. Just go ahead and be your weird self.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly. “But the detective looks a bit like he wants to disembowel you”—Shepard was waiting on the landing, watching us—“so shall we go on and be our weird selves in front of the firing squad? They might appreciate some of your wailing, if you want to try it out.”

The head of school’s office took up the top floor of the tower, and we clustered inside of it, everyone waiting for their cue to sit. The headmistress herself was an imposing presence in a crowd of exhausted adults. She was scrubbed clean, perched at the edge of her desk in a suit, while her assistant poured coffee out into ceramic cups.

“Ms. Williamson,” my father said, extending a hand. “James Watson, Jamie’s father. It’s a pleasure. I only wish we could be meeting under better circumstances.”

“Yes,” she said simply. She had been head of school last year as well. I don’t know how often she actually encountered “better circumstances” when it came to dealing with me. “Please sit, all of you. Harry, hand around the coffee, then go handle the phone. We’ll have calls before tonight is over.”

“Can you update us if they find the money?” I asked, sitting down on her settee. “Once they find out what happened?”

The headmistress and Detective Shepard exchanged a look. “We’ll see,” he said, finally.