The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(37)

“Druggie?” my father supplied. “I think ‘druggist’ is actually the word for pharmacist. Or perhaps you meant dealer?” He stopped short. I had clamped my fingers around his arm.

“Dealer,” the dean said. “Yes. Fine. Can we please go home.”

“One moment. Send Bill in, please,” the headmistress said to Harry-the-assistant, who was still helpfully holding the door open.

Bill the curator turned out to be a harried-looking man with white hair and a pair of assistants who looked like Harry’s fraternal twins. The two of them were dragging along giant framed portraits with such carelessness that I was shocked; one smacked his against the doorframe, swore, and kept on going.

The headmistress, to her credit, didn’t look surprised. “I assume these are the portraits we had commissioned for the Sherringford centennial? And that something awful has rendered them un-showable, since you’re treating Headmaster Emeritus Blakely’s face like that?”

The blond assistant blinked rapidly. He had the painting turned in to face him so that Headmaster Emeritus Blakely’s face was resting against his crotch. “I’d left my glasses—I’d been wearing my contacts to work, but I had my glasses back at the museum and it was late, and I needed them because of the eye strain, and I went back and someone had defaced these.”

Bill raised a bushy eyebrow. “A bit confused, but that’s the long and short of it. These were delivered this afternoon from New York. I’d expected professional art handlers, but they had come in a truck, in a stack. I hadn’t unwrapped them yet. My assistant here came in tonight to find the wrappings everywhere, like some art raccoons or something had gotten in, and the portraits looking like this. I brought the most, er, eloquent ones along here to show you. Didn’t figure we’d have to handle them gently anymore.”

The other assistant turned his portrait around. It was Headmistress Joanne Williamson, cut large and magisterial, beautiful shadows on her face and neck, and in her arms a bound copy of the Sherringford honor code. It had a certain mood to it—windswept, romantic, a bit melancholy. It was a terrific portrait. It looked, in fact, just like the Langenberg forgeries we were hunting down in Berlin.

Except that someone had scratched out her eyes and written in hot-pink spray paint WATSON WUZ HERE.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lena said, abruptly, and left.

“Seriously?” The words flew out of me. “Are you serious? Are you actually, totally serious?”

My father looked faintly worried. “Jamie,” he said.

“‘Wuz.’ They spelled it ‘wuz.’ ‘Wuz’! I’m in AP English! I read a lot! I read books. Big fucking books! I read Tolstoy, and Faulkner, and—‘wuz’?”

Detective Shepard bit his lip. “You haven’t been anywhere near the museum?” he asked, busying himself with his notebook. “Recently?”

“I didn’t even know we had a museum!” I was sounding sort of shrill. “Why on earth do we have a museum?”

Bill the curator looked nonplussed. “We have a rotating historical exhibit, normally. This being the centennial—”

“Right,” I said. I’d had it. I was in some kind of farce. Any moment now, I’d be handed a rubber chicken and a knife and told to dance. “Well, I’m sure if you go back to my room right now, you’ll find that someone has left fifty-three cans of hot pink spray paint on my floor and, like, a grammar book open to ‘to be’ conjugations. I don’t care. I didn’t do it! I didn’t do any of it, but that obviously doesn’t matter, because I’m being framed, and pink spray paint? Hot pink? Are you kidding me—”

Harry stuck his head back in. “Ms. Williamson? There’s a call for you. From a place called Just So Occasions.” He adjusted his glasses. “Do they know how late it is?”

“We hired our artist through them,” Bill said. “I’d gone to them for some framing work and mentioned the project, and they’d recommended Mr. Jones’s portraiture skills to us. Very reasonable rates.”

“Put them through,” the headmistress said, rounding the desk to her phone. “Hello? Yes. Yes, this is highly irregular. Midnight? Oh—oh. I see.” She frowned and scratched something down. “Yes. Yes. Well, thank you. I do appreciate it.”

“Well?” the dean asked, after she hung up.

The headmistress sighed. “Apparently Just So has caught their clerk vandalizing outgoing deliveries, and wanted to warn us. Former clerk, I should say; apparently this vandalism was in retaliation for his termination. His name was Frank Watson. He defaced their store, as well. This sounds like a case of mistaken identity on our parts.”

The detective gave me a hard look. I smiled at him as blandly as I could, but my pulse had picked up the second Ms. Williamson had answered the phone.

“The owner had discovered it and thought to leave us a message, in case he’d done the same to our delivery.” The headmistress sat down heavily in her chair. “I think she was surprised to actually reach someone, this late. Gentlemen, ladies, I am so very tired. Mr. Watson, why don’t you take five days to get yourself and your . . . affairs straightened out?”

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Frank Watson.” The headmistress stared at me. “Frank Watson. It . . . well. I suppose it adds up. I’m sorry to drag you into this.”