The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(44)

“Oh.” I studied him for a moment, the man I’d come to think of as my own uncle. He had a careless sort of elegance that he wore like a cloak, and every now and then, if he let you get close enough, you saw how deliberately it had been woven, what he hid beneath it. “Has this happened before?”

Leander hadn’t ever been one to mince words with me. “With your mother, quite a few times. Never before with Abigail. If this isn’t settled soon, I’ll go back to London and try to do my part from there. I . . . might be putting some strain on the situation.”

When I called up an image of my father in my head, he was cheerfully rumpled, in his usual corduroy and blazer, and in that imagining, he was never alone. Leander Holmes was there beside him. Not my mother and not Abigail, but his best friend, one I’d only known in person now for a year. But I’d never really considered what a problem that would be for the woman my father was married to. When your life was split that way, how could you ever have everything?

Maybe some of us weren’t meant to.

I thought, like a reflex, about Holmes. My Holmes, that night in the hotel in Prague, determined and afraid and her arms around my neck, whispering words I couldn’t hear, words she maybe thought I could read from the shape her lips made against my skin, and it wasn’t something I ever let myself think about, much less in front of her uncle who was like an actual reader of minds, or after I’d just been thinking about my father, and I flushed, and then flushed again when Leander gave me a startled look—God, he was deducing things—and then I hurried away as fast as I could to pour myself more hot water.

Leander cleared his throat. “Want a ride up to campus?” he asked after a moment. His voice was very, very neutral.

“No,” I said, fanning the steam away from my face. “Nope. No, I can walk.”

It was a very long walk. In the end, Leander insisted, and I was back at Sherringford by noon.





Fourteen


Charlotte


STARWAY AIRLINES WAS ONE OF THE OLDEST IN THE BUSINESS. They’d been one of the few not to go bankrupt in the early years of the new century, and they had responded by doubling down on their luxury offerings (leather seats, free checked bags, a steam room in the airport lounge) while the other airlines cut their costs. They specialized in long-haul flights, nonstop to Dubai and Melbourne and Kyoto, trips that took days and were expensive to begin with, and they decked out those planes with beds and masseuses.

Which is to say, one couldn’t look cheap for an interview to work as a Starway gate agent, not if one wanted to represent their brand. I slicked my hair back into a high bun and put on false eyelashes. I put on the skirt suit I’d pressed and prepared for the occasion. In short, I looked the part. There was pleasure in that.

At the airport, I gave my credentials at the Starway information desk.

“The recruiter will come and walk you there in about fifteen minutes,” the kind-eyed clerk said.

I asked him the exact time, and then where the toilets were, scrubbing out my accent into the Queen’s English. For whatever reason, Americans love the English. The clerk smiled and pointed the way, and now I knew he would remember both me and exactly when we’d met.

I had spent some time with the airport map these last few weeks. Starway had the smallest presence of any airline at this airport; their desk was at the far end of the terminal, and there was no one in line for the kiosks or for an agent, not at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday for an airline that had so few commuter flights. I waited until the only agent on duty stepped off for a break, and then, in my skirt suit and pumps, I stepped behind the counter and up to their monitor.

Thankfully, the agent had left himself signed in. I didn’t have to try the clearance code I’d watched an agent enter at Heathrow; it had been the weak point in my plan, and I was relieved to dispense with it.

Once in, I needed a moment to get myself oriented. The screen was black, with scrolling white text, and the only way to navigate was with keyboard shortcuts. It took several false starts before I even got myself into the right system. Above me, cheerful pop music was playing, and I tapped my foot along with it to steady myself.

There. Future reservations.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the desk agent approaching, hands in his pockets, looking out the giant windows at the end of the terminal. And then he focused his gaze on his destination. He saw me at the monitor, and he began to walk faster.

I’d assumed this would happen. I’d styled my clothes as closely as I could to the existing Starway employees so that, from a distance, any employee would have a moment of doubt that would keep them from immediately calling in the police. I knew I had about two minutes.

But I only had one hand to type with now, because with the other, I was pressing the desk phone up to my face and crying.

Reservations. I ran Michael Hartwell, then Peter Morgan-Vilk. Quickly I put the names into the system, and the results began to scroll downward. I’d watched hours of tutorials online, but there were a number of keyboard shortcuts I hadn’t quite mastered. When I pressed what I thought was the Page Down button, the screen went blank. I pressed it again, and the screen returned. Quickly with my index finger I punched in the three-key sequence to bring me back several pages, and I put the names back in again with that same finger, the phone against my face, my face itself in tears, my body angled away from the screen to make it seem as though I was a harmless young professional girl who couldn’t possibly be hacking into their system.