The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(64)

The waitstaff began tidying around us, making room for the cake. I helped them make a stack of dirty plates to take away, more to avoid my mother’s sad eyes than anything else. Lucien had dropped his napkin on the floor when he’d gotten up, and I pulled back his chair to replace it.

There. On his seat. My phone.

How had it gotten there, on his seat? I hadn’t seen him take it. I hadn’t seen him look at it.

How much did he know?

I had it in my hand and up my sleeve before my mother could see it. “You know, I should use the restroom too. It’s a long trip back home.”

My mum wasn’t looking at me. “Do you want any dessert?” she asked, quietly.

“No,” I said, standing up. “Thanks, though.”

Inside, I locked myself in the restroom stall and hurriedly turned my phone on. I couldn’t tell if he’d gone through my texts, my emails, if he’d slipped something in there to track my messages and calls. I tried to remember what Holmes had told me. A tiny earpiece? I peered into the receiver, but saw nothing.

And my phone was pinging, over and over, with messages. A long text from Elizabeth: Lexington has been selling to Anna since he got here, but he didn’t front her the thousand dollars. She was flashing it to him too; he said she said something about some kind of daddy. Sugar daddy? Is that what it’s called? Disgusting. I got all of this out of him by telling him I would do his English homework for the rest of the semester. I’m not writing a word.

Then: Lena says that she thinks she has a lead on where the money ended up. I’m meeting with her in a minute, I’ll report back.

Then: The money’s real. The crime is real—Lena says that Anna is doubling down on her story. She’s scared of something. She must need the money back.

Then: Jamie? Are you there? Can we meet tonight after bed check?

Then, twenty minutes ago, four words from Holmes. We’re on our way.

Her and Leander, I imagined. So that had been his errand in the city today. I wasn’t surprised.

I’ll meet you on campus at midnight, I wrote Elizabeth. Inside the Carter Hall tunnel entrance. And to Holmes, I wrote: Where are you?

The door opened. Someone came in and started washing their hands.

I’m here, Holmes wrote, and I stood and deleted all of the messages I had, row by row, person by person, painstakingly, and when I opened the stall door Lucien Moriarty grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me through it.





Twenty-Two


Charlotte


WE DIDN’T TAKE THE SHOTGUN. WE TOOK TWO PISTOLS instead. I had mine in my purse; it was the only thing that would fit in there, other than a lipstick. I didn’t bring a lipstick. I brought my lockpick kit, belted to my upper thigh, and I put in my hair clips that could be used as a Phillips-head screwdriver if I needed one, and I thought for a moment about bringing a duffel bag along with us so I could in fact bring the shotgun—it was sawed off expertly, it was a thing of beauty—but that seemed like it would perhaps draw attention.

It was clear that Leander thought I was taking a ridiculous series of precautions. I hoped very much that he was right.

The restaurant was crowded when we walked in. I imagined it was always crowded; it was the sort of place where no one wore their wealth ostentatiously, but wore it all the same. Cashmere. Driving gloves on the table. That sort of thing. Leander pointed the way to a series of small private rooms, off past the bar where James Watson was drinking, alone.

“You go on,” he said. “I’ll say good-bye to James, and you can go talk to Jamie, and we can leave. Ten minutes, yes? There’s a flight leaving LaGuardia at eleven. I mean to be on it.”

I watched him as he walked toward James. It was voyeuristic to do so. But I thought I might learn something, maybe, about myself.

He approached silently—that wasn’t hard to do in a restaurant this crowded, I deducted points—and sat down beside James all at once, as though he’d stepped through an imaginary door. It was the sort of thing that would usually get me a delighted smile, I thought. The show of effort, the neatness of it.

James Watson looked up at Leander, and then he put a hand over his eyes. Was he weeping? The trick wasn’t that good.

Oh, I thought. I should not be watching this.

But I didn’t go to the table, either. It was a fit of vanity more than anything else that led me to the restroom instead. I’d told myself I wanted to make sure my lockpicking kit wasn’t showing beneath my dress. Wasn’t it interesting, the interplay between our verbal thoughts and the currents that ran beneath them? In actual fact I wanted to assure myself that I looked pretty before I saw Jamie Watson for the last time, and I knew that was why I was going. (Good-byes are difficult; let me have this one thing; qui multum habet, plus cupit, et cetera.) I looked passable for someone who suspected that the man trying to kill her was in the same restaurant.

Fine. I bent to wash my hands.

Noise from the other side of the bathroom wall, like someone beating a wet sack with their fists. More accurately, like someone was trying to kill someone else in the men’s.

Watson.

I didn’t stop to think about it. To consider the decision. It only took a moment to take the gun out of my evening bag.





Twenty-Three


Jamie


LUCIEN MORIARTY HAD NO INTENTION OF KILLING ME. I knew, because he was telling me that verbatim.