The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(49)

“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. What did he have in mind? A calculus textbook? That seemed difficult. “I can try to find—”

“Ah.” His finger had stopped. “How about this?” he asked, pulling a volume from the shelf.

“I can’t see it, so I can’t offer an opinion.”

“Hush,” he said, but kindly. “I’ll just sit in this chair, then, and we can begin here. You’ll find it illuminating, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure,” I said. He was hiding the cover with his hands.

He thumbed it open, flipped to the back of the book. “‘It is with a heavy heart,’” he said, “‘that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished,’” and that was how I came to know August Moriarty: his slow, steady voice reading The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes to me, as though I was his younger sister, or his beloved, or both.

He wouldn’t ever do that again.

I realized then I was crying.

That was how Leander found me, on the bottom step of a brownstone, my arms around my knees.

“You came,” I said, and then I cried a bit harder.

He got me upstairs and into the apartment. Sat me on the overstuffed sofa, put a blanket around my shoulders, and left me there to cry. Moments later I heard him running water for a bath.

“Up,” he said, “come along,” and led me to it by the hand, as though I were a child.

“It has bubbles,” I said, numbly. “Pink bubbles.” They were foaming up out of the water. They smelled like roses.

“It does,” he said. “Go sit in that for a while. At least twenty minutes. Understood?”

I nodded.

“Okay then,” he said, and pushed me inside and shut the door.

I sat in the bath, as instructed. I pulled the pins out of my hair and laid them out in a row. I took off my makeup with a cloth and put my head under the water for a long, warm moment, and when I surfaced, I realized I hadn’t had a bath in ages. I didn’t like the waiting of it, the patience needed for the tub to fill.

Leander had gone out. I heard the front door open again now, and his particular footfalls as he returned. He was exaggerating them on purpose so I knew it was him. My breath started coming faster—perhaps Lucien had tracked me here; perhaps Lucien knew Leander and me both well enough to know how Leander walked and—

But then he started singing. He never sang, but he was singing now, some Irish folk song about a man named Danny. It was unmistakably my uncle, sweet and resonant and sad, and I wanted to cry again. Whatever is making me like this is wretched, I thought, and ends now, and I got up and toweled off my hair and put myself into a robe.

I realized then that I had spent the last hour in emotional turmoil and not once thought about the pills stashed away in my coat.

“You have a terrible singing voice,” I told Leander in the kitchen.

On the kitchen island, he had laid out a paper bag of giant pastries, a pair of salads, and a well-polished sawed-off shotgun.

“I can’t be completely perfect,” he said, and offered me a cronut.

We ate. It would be more honest to say that Leander bolted his food and then watched me eat. I made it through a pastry in my usual way, slow bites and sips of water and tearing the thing into pieces to give my stomach time to settle as I went.

“It’s still like that for you?” Leander asked.

“Yes,” I said. As a child, mealtimes had been difficult. I didn’t like food then. I didn’t now. Verbum sap. “What is that shotgun for?”

He inched the salad toward me. “One bite for one answer.”

“I’m not a toddler. I don’t need to be bribed.”

“Really.” He opened the lid. “It’s a salmon salad. From Dean and DeLuca. And if you eat it, I’ll get you oysters for dinner.”

I smiled a little, despite myself. “Fine. Hand me a fork.”

Leander talked at length. He paced as he spoke about the past twelve months, up and down the narrow aisle between the kitchen island and the sink. What he told me about Watson I had largely already known (though I obediently ate a forkful for each fact), but he filled me in on what he’d learned from his research into Peter Morgan-Vilk, after his and James Watson’s interview with him in the stairwell.

“Morgan-Vilk’s father, the one Lucien left in the lurch during his political campaign, isn’t hiding out in Europe with his mistress. Not anymore. Merrick Morgan-Vilk is back in New York.” Leander gestured at my salad, and I took a bite. “He’s putting together an exploratory team for political office—though which office, or why a British politician is doing so in the States, I don’t know. What I do know is that he hates Lucien Moriarty, and he has a fair deal of money and influence, and you owe me at least two bites for that.”

I took my time with them, thinking. “Do you think Merrick Morgan-Vilk knows Lucien is working with his son? Peter?”

“Probably not. And Lucien has his son’s passport for a reason. Peter Morgan-Vilk might just think he’s gotten a good deal—he gets to piss off the father he hates while making a paycheck, and all he has to do is stay in America—but Lucien has to have a plan, and I doubt it has anything to do with foreign travel. If you have someone’s passport, you can steal their identity. Take their money. There are even cases of people’s houses being stolen.”