The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(52)

Hartwell, I noticed, was shaking; perhaps it was an aftershock from his tears. “Yes.”

“What does Moriarty have on you?”

“Nothing,” Hartwell said, “nothing.”

I cleared my throat. “Then what is he offering you? He’s using your passport to get into the country. Why isn’t he just using a dead man’s identity?” I wanted to hear what his answer would be.

Hartwell looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. I didn’t think this show of emotion was for my music. I think the music had reminded him of something. Someone. His daughter, by the way his eyes kept straying to the photo on his desk of her in a blue dress, holding her guitar. The frame said MY MUSICAL GIRL.

“It’s a deal,” he said slowly. “I have—I have connections. I know people, at Washington Mercy, at— I know people, okay? He wants me to use those connections to arrange something for him. And if I don’t, he’s going to . . . I can’t talk to you about this. I have children. I have a family to protect.”

A posh hospital in D.C. A wilderness rehab in Connecticut. A prep school in New York.

Hartwell turned to Leander. “If you’re really her uncle, you’ll get her far away from this. As quickly as you can. Okay? Pack your bags. Get on a flight, go somewhere inaccessible. I don’t even know if this office is bugged—”

Leander took a step forward, his finely made hands in his pockets. “When’s the last time you swept it?”

“Swept it?” Hartwell stared at him. “I’m a psychologist. I— Mr. Holmes, I’m not like you. Any of you. I don’t know how to sweep an office for bugs.”

A helicopter buzzed the roof. The sound came on like a swarm of bees.

“Is there a helipad nearby?” I asked, tracking it.

“It’s not—he doesn’t—he isn’t here,” he managed to say. “Not yet. So go. Leave town. And if you don’t, I can’t be held responsible for what happens.”

There was nothing else to be said. We bundled up our things quickly and ran outside, my violin case banging clumsily against my leg. It was wretched outside, the rain turned to sleet, and we held on to each other, pulling ourselves up the block step by sleety step.

“You called me Charlotte,” I said to him at the corner, as we waited for the light to change. “You outed us. Why?”

“What are the markers of a good man?” he asked me.

“I’m sorry?”

“The markers,” he said. “Of a good man. How can you tell if a man is someone you can trust?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t trust—well. I trust you.”

I thought, strangely, that Leander was going to laugh, and that it was a laugh that I didn’t want to see. His hair was slicked back off his face, and he was hatless, and the sleet was beading on him like pearls. His greatcoat was beautifully tailored. His boots were a soft brown and quietly handsome. And he had a look on his face so wolflike he would have driven any sheep back to pasture.

He could be terrifying. I realized it now.

As I watched him, Leander carefully put his expression away, as though he were folding it up like a jacket. The light changed. He was benign again, a benevolent gentleman, a lamb.

“You’ll learn,” he said. “But not yet. I don’t want you to trust anyone again until this is over.”

“Even you?”

He looked at me. “Perhaps,” he said.

I put my hand in the crook of his arm and said nothing. Someone was close behind us, slipping on the snow to overtake us, and I took a breath, and Leander steeled his shoulders, and then he was passing us, an older man with a cane who wished us a good afternoon and disappeared into the fading light.

Even now, Lucien Moriarty could be playing back our conversation with Michael Hartwell.

New York was a trap, I thought, and we’d walked right into it.

Leander was nodding as though he could hear my thoughts. “When we get home, you’re packing. We’re leaving. Tonight.”





Seventeen


Jamie


THE RUGBY PLAYERS I KNEW WERE MASTERS AT A CERTAIN kind of intimidation. It had everything to do with their bodies—drawing their shoulders back to call attention to their size, or yelling and hollering with their friends until the veins in their neck stood out. Licking a guy’s forehead to make him squeal “like a girl”; pissing in a guy’s shoes to see if you could make him step in them and scream “like a girl”; coughing up shit from their lungs and spitting it, breathing heavy in each other’s faces, then howling; pushing each other over on the field between plays, all to see if their macho macho-ness would break someone down into what they saw as feminine weakness.

Being a girl was their worst fear, and they chalked up all kinds of behavior to “girliness,” things that didn’t make sense. I don’t know why they were so specifically afraid of it. From what I could tell, most of them liked girls, had them for friends, wanted so badly to date them or screw them that it was all they could talk about after practice. But when we were all in a pack together, practicing a game where we tackled each other into the ground like beasts, there were the guys who liked the game, and then there were those who lusted for it, the hard takedown, the feeling of pushing someone else down into the mud. It bubbled up outside of practice in physical ways. Not all my teammates were like that. Barely half, if I had to count. But it was more than enough for me. I’d learned to go stoic and invisible when this kind of shit started so that I didn’t become its target. It was a strategy Kittredge took too.