The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(9)

Finally my father spoke again. “He’s graduating this spring. He’s doing well in his classes. He has that little girlfriend—”

“I don’t understand how any of that matters,” Leander said, soft but insistent. Sometimes I could hear it when he spoke, an echo of Charlotte in his inflection. She would have used fewer words. Irrelevant, she would have said, or Watson, stop, but the impatience would have been the same.

My father glanced up to the rearview mirror. “Jamie,” he said, meeting my eyes. “For the past year—well, you know that Leander has been keeping tabs on Charlotte. Her whereabouts. What she’s gotten into. That sort of thing. However wise that decision is—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Leander snapped. “I’m not there to approve, I’m there to keep tabs. Someone had to make sure she’s alive. Her brother certainly isn’t.”

Milo Holmes had taken a leave of absence from leading Greystone to deal with the small matter of his murder charge. I say “his” murder charge as he was the one who pulled the trigger, but as far as the world (and the court system) knew, he was innocent. One of Milo’s mercenaries had been set up to take the fall instead, I’m sure for a handsome payout after he was on the other side of a prison cell.

Still, a Holmes employee shooting a Moriarty? Milo had always had the kind of power that could scrub a media story clean, but this one was beyond his control to suppress. It was sensational. It was everywhere. I was doing everything I could to ignore it.

As far as we could tell, Milo had kept his promise: he’d washed his hands clean of his sister and her problems. He wasn’t the only one.

What had happened on that lawn in Sussex? I’d realized how little I’d known.

I had been watching Holmes so closely, trying to understand her behavior, that I hadn’t taken the two steps back I’d needed to see the whole picture. She had decided from the beginning that her father was keeping Leander captive. That he had been blackmailed to do so by Lucien Moriarty, that it had something to do with her family’s finances. And instead of confronting any of this head on, instead of accepting that the parents who treated her so terribly could in fact be terrible people, she had dragged me along on some wish-fulfillment mission to pin the blame on someone else.

It didn’t end well. To put it mildly.

In the wake of Leander’s kidnapping and the murder on their front lawn, Emma and Alistair Holmes separated. Who knows how much romance had been left between them, anyway. None that I could see. As far as the press knew, Emma had taken their daughter to a retreat in Switzerland to ride out the media storm circling her son. Alistair stayed, stoic and alone, in their Sussex house by the sea. It was up for sale. He couldn’t afford it anymore.

That was the official story,

Last July, while I was staying with my mother over summer break, Leander took me out to lunch. He was in London to “settle some affairs,” he’d said, and then it became clear those affairs had to do with his niece. I know you don’t like talking about this, Jamie, but—

Charlotte Holmes wasn’t in Switzerland. She wasn’t in Sussex, either. She had turned seventeen, and petitioned early access to the trust fund she was meant to receive when she was twenty-one. She’d been denied. That was the last official record of her.

That’s what Leander had discovered in Lucerne, when he’d gone to check in with Charlotte’s mother, and when he couldn’t find his niece—when Emma had refused to tell him where she was (For her own safety, Leander, don’t you know that Lucien Moriarty is still in the wind)—he had spent weeks tracing her through France, to Paris, to the Eurostar train to London. There, the trail ended. He was hoping to pick it up through his contacts at Heathrow Airport.

Leander took me out for burgers, waited until I had my mouth full, then dumped this out on the table like an upended salt shaker.

I don’t want to know, I’d told him, furiously chewing. I’m done, Milo’s done—we’re all finished with this. I thought you were too.

I’m not bailing her out of her mess, he’d said.

I’d swallowed. So why are you telling me this? Actually why? Before he’d been able to answer, I’d said, Don’t, and that was that.

But here we were again. New York City’s skyline was bearing down on us like a bullet train. “Dad. I thought you were just dragging me to another weird lunch with the Sherlock Holmes club. What is this about Charlotte—”

“Wait.” Leander roused himself slightly. “You took him to Sherlock’s birthday weekend celebration? The one in January? I’ve been refusing to go to that for years.”

“Oh, come now. Buffet lunch, limericks about the year in Holmesiana—”

“You might feel differently,” Leander said, “if the subject in question was Watsoniana, and all anyone wanted to do was put you in a top hat and have you say things like ‘Brilliant, Holmes!’”

“I have to say it often enough in my normal life,” my father muttered.

“You never do. I’ve never once heard you say it.”

“I can hear the moments where you want me to say it. It’s unnecessary. You’re supplying it yourself.”

“Just once I’d like to hear you—”

“The Sherlockians were very nice to us,” my father said, clearing his throat. “The food is very good. Yorkshire pudding. And every year, I win at trivia—they call me the Sherlockian Shark. Anyway, Abbie won’t go with me to these things, ever, she says I behave like a Civil War reenactor, so can you blame me for bringing my son—”