The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(62)

I tried very hard not to stamp my foot like a child. “I’m serious.”

He sighed, and got back up to finish stuffing his bag with dry goods. “That really is the lowest excuse I think I’ve heard you use,” he said. “I don’t have time for this.”

“Leander. Look at me.” Grudgingly, he did. “Watson said he was being watched by someone. A male someone, and then he stopped responding. On the off chance that I’m right. That that is what Jamie is saying. What do we do?”

My uncle set the duffel bag aside, and hoisted up the shotgun he’d left sitting on the counter.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Any ideas?”





Twenty-One


Jamie


I COULDN’T GET MY FATHER ALONE.

We were at a fancy restaurant in SoHo, in New York City, that my mother had researched and booked the week before. All of us were there: my father, my mum, Lucien Moriarty. The whole happy gang. Abigail drove out with us too—she’d been upstairs when we’d arrived home, setting up the guest bedroom—though she’d left Malcolm and Robbie with their grandmother.

It was for the best. I didn’t know what would happen tonight, but two small children had no business being in the middle of it.

Lucien—“Ted”—kept calling the waiter over for more wine, more cocktails, more lobster, more filet mignon. He did it in a way that was unobtrusive, conspiratorial. The food arrived at his elbow like it would at a king’s, and he would smile at the rest of us, a bit sheepishly, and say, “Do you want to try this? I hear it’s very good.” They’d put us at a round table in a small private room so we could hear each other better, but Lucien was dominating the conversation.

He told my father he liked his coat, then wrote down the name of the shop where he’d bought it. He asked Abigail endless questions about Malcolm and Robbie—did they like their school? Their teachers? What scamps—what sort of trouble did they get up to? Then he pulled my mother in and asked if I had been like them as a child, and I watched as, for the first time, my mother and Abigail had a conversation that wasn’t stilted and awful and loaded with resentment. Jamie had taken that long to toilet train too, my mother was saying, and Lucien held my mother’s hand, running his thumb over the silver wedding band on her finger.

He was terrifying.

He was so much more terrifying than if he had been obviously cruel. That would have been confirmation. I would have had certainty. Would have felt justified in doing what I needed to do.

And now all I could think was, I’m going crazy.

I’d been staging an investigation into the wrongdoings against me like I was . . . Batman, or something. But I’d been having panic attacks. I’d been lashing out at Elizabeth; I’d been hiding things from my friends; I’d been accusing people of conspiring against me, as though I were so important that people would go out of their way to mess my life up.

As though they enacted some grand scheme against me, and the pièce de résistance was spraying a can of soda onto my laptop.

But what if . . . what if I had done it to myself? What if I’d deleted my physics presentation by accident? What if I’d never written it in the first place? I was sleep-deprived, on high alert, I was throwing up whenever I even thought about last year, and maybe I was doing all this to myself, I was manufacturing situations to match the panic in my head. What if I was hallucinating? Blacking out? What if my sister was just a girl at a perfectly fine new school who hated it, who wanted her brother to take her home?

I was paranoid, I had been ever since I met Charlotte Holmes, but—why on earth would Lucien Moriarty take the time to woo and marry my mother? As though I needed so badly to treat my mother’s remarriage as a personal affront to me that I’d decided her new husband was the boogeyman.

It wasn’t far-fetched. I’d treated my father’s remarriage that way.

Oh God.

What if my mum had just found a really nice guy who wanted to make her happy?

I spent the whole dinner staring at him. I couldn’t even be subtle about it. When we’d first sat down, I’d been texting Holmes under the table, when Lucien—Ted—had put a hand on my shoulder. “This is a bit embarrassing,” he was saying, “and I don’t want to boss you around, but do you mind if you put your phone in the middle of the table?”

Confirmation. Confirmation that I wasn’t losing my mind. He knew I was reaching out for help, he wanted to get my lifeline out of my hands—

Desperately, I looked up at my father. He was switching his phone to silent. Abigail was too.

“It’s a game we’ve been playing on nice occasions,” my mother said, “out with our friends. It helps us stay present. Everyone puts their phone in a stack in the center of the table, and the first person who caves to check theirs has to buy dinner.”

She and Lucien shared a conspiratorial look. “Not that I’ll make any of you pick up this tab,” he said. “But I’ve been so eager to get to know you all.”

I watched as he placed my phone at the top of the stack.

“There,” my mother said. “Isn’t that better?”

I sat next to him at dinner, this man who had orchestrated murders, told lies for politicians, blackmailed, cheated, infected me with a deadly virus and then dangled the antidote out of my reach. I refilled his wineglass. I listened to him tell my parents, at length, about how he’d gone to a wilderness school just like Shelby’s. “I’d always loved horses,” he said. “I was so happy when I found out we had that in common.”