The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(48)

I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice Kittredge was sitting next to me until he leaned in and breathed, hot and disgusting, into my ear, “You were looking for me? Because I have a lot to say to you.”





Sixteen


Charlotte


I HAD MADE THE CALL. I WAS WAITING FOR A RESPONSE. I was receiving three text messages a minute from my Sherringford source, saying Why aren’t you responding? Where are you? Don’t you even care?

I was too anxious to go inside, too anxious to stay put. I paced up and down the steps of the building where I was staying, and I thought, Lucien could find me here, I’m only one degree removed from DI Green, he knows I work with her, I am an idiot for staying in this flat. I thought, There are places in America where no one could find me; I thought I could change my name and move out to Oklahoma. I would be safe, I thought. Safe. Safe, safe, safe. Moriarty had paid for two other plane tickets; I didn’t have their names on the reservation, I hadn’t known how to look it up. Phillipa, I thought, and perhaps another henchman, another tattooed man to hunt us through the woods like deer.

Why was I feeling all of this now? Was this what happened when you carved a door into the dam—that the water eventually blew it out, came rushing through?

I wasn’t safe. I had never wanted so badly to be safe. I had been chasing this man for so long, and now I would give anything to be in Switzerland with my mother, accepting whatever comfort my mother was capable of giving me.

But if Lucien Moriarty didn’t already know where I was staying, he would if I kept on causing a scene, in daylight, dressed as myself. I was making a spectacle of myself. Already an elderly woman had stopped to ask if I needed help. Did I need to make a call. I was fine, I assured her. I was just locked out and very badly had to pee.

That excuse had a ninety-eight percent success rate. She nodded, then walked away.

I ran through Latin declensions in my head; I started listing the bones in my legs out loud, first alphabetically and then by size; I named the stars I knew by heart. A long, unrolling scroll of data in my head. Things I knew. Things that could be put into tables, and lists, and studied. Things that you learned that wouldn’t change, no matter how the world did.

I’m changing, I thought suddenly. I had wanted to, and so I was. Last year I would never have behaved this way if I knew Lucien Moriarty was coming.

What would I have done?

Smoked, for a long time. Considered Watson’s capabilities. Thought about what I could stand to lose. I would have gambled big on a plan to snare Lucien and leave him helpless, using my brother’s money and my father’s connections, and after I saw him hung I would have washed my hands of it completely. Put him in a black box. Sunk him to the bottom of the sea.

That was, of course, before August’s death.

Again I was thinking about it. I never let myself think about it, and now, in the last twenty-four hours, I had to create a litany to keep myself in the present. What safeguards did I have left? I went back through my list. The quadratic equation. Fermi’s paradox. Numbers and letters, in concert, balanced. I thought about—

I thought about the day that August Moriarty knocked on my bedroom door the day after my fourteenth birthday.

I was in bed. I was in bed quite a lot, after that stint at rehab. I’d gone back to my old supplier the moment I’d returned home, and then tried, unsuccessfully, to cut myself off. It had been a week. The symptoms were the same as they always were. There was a strange comfort to the nausea, the burning, the accompanying black mood. I knew them like they were old friends.

“Charlotte,” he’d said, then knocked again. “Ah. Do you mind . . . coming out? So I can meet you? I realize this is rather awkward.”

I was still in bed. I was spending rather a lot of time in bed. “Yes,” I told him, and rolled my face back over into the pillow.

“Yes, you do mind? Or yes, this is awkward?”

“I’m—” What was the word I wanted? I had read it in a book once. But I was blurry. The walls were raw. The walls of my head. I was having some trouble with it, the thinking. “I’m indisposed. Come back tomorrow.”

A sound, like him putting a palm against the door. Then the door opening.

“Oh,” he said. “Do you want some light?” And before I could protest, he’d gone into a flurry of motion—flicked on the lights, pulled open the blinds, retrieved my blanket from the floor, and folded it up at the foot of my bed.

I heard all of this, rather than saw it. I still had my face pressed to the pillow.

“Charlotte.” I finally turned to look at him. He had a lock of blond hair that curled up and away from his face, like a decoration. Later I would find it beautiful. “Your parents aren’t here?”

“No,” I said, then realized that might be a lie. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“And you’re ill?”

That was a simple explanation. I took it. “Yes.”

I watched him come to a decision. “If this is to be our first day, then we’ll have a first day.” He fidgeted for a moment, looking at me (I did look back, though I’m sure I had all the affect and charm of a wall clock), and then looking around the room. Idly, with a finger, he scanned the bookcase that housed my library.

“When I was ill, I used to like to have someone read to me,” August said, quietly. Then: “Do you like to be read to?”