A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(57)

I turned my ringer off. I didn’t care. I couldn’t. I stared straight ahead with my arms wrapped around myself, and Araminta drove.

Fifteen minutes later, she found a small, well-lit petrol station on the outskirts of the city. She pulled into a parking space and turned the engine off, folded her hands in her lap.

“What do you want to know?” she asked.

“How,” I said. “I want to know how.”

She must have had her little speech prepared, because she started in right away. “I was traveling with a friend over the holidays. She’d wanted to see Blenheim Palace. I hadn’t been away in some time. Months, really.” Araminta studied the steering wheel. “We stayed far longer than we’d intended, far too late to make it back to London, where we planned to stay in Leander’s flat. He didn’t have the Oxford flat yet. It’s how I can afford to travel—your uncle owns so much real estate, and you know that I . . . well. I make a modest living from my bees. Not enough to live like he does. Like your father does, or your uncle Julian. I chose my life, I’m happy with it, but I . . .”

She was babbling. I’d never heard her babble before.

“My friend, she . . . she looked up last-minute hotel rooms on some app on her phone, and that’s how we ended up there. There was a deal. We checked in, she took a shower, and I went down for a nightcap at the bar.

“And he was there. I knew him from his photograph in the news stories, but he’d never met me. It was funny, he was this little axle on which our world turned, and we were strangers to each other. I almost left it alone. But the bar was empty, and in the end, I . . . couldn’t help myself. I asked about his life. His story. He spun some tale about growing up in the Netherlands; he spoke with a slight accent. He’d been a teacher, he said. He told me his name was . . . Felix, I think.”

I turned away.

I thought I was going to be sick.

“He didn’t know who I was, Lottie. I was sure of that. I charged the drink up to our room—it was in my friend’s name, he never saw mine. And then I went upstairs, and I called your brother.”

“Milo,” I snarled. Milo, who had shot August dead. No. Who hadn’t. Who had lied, to everyone, who had fled the country rather than go to prison, who had stared at me in a safe house in New York like I was the angel of death come for him at last. I had hated him, how he had acted out his grief. The drunkenness. The unkempt hair. The hollow eyes.

I had scrubbed him from my life.

“Milo denied it. Denied it all. Told me I was delusional, a plague . . . some other choice descriptors. And then, just when I’d given it up and decided to believe him, he spat out, ‘Don’t tell my sister,’ and he hung up the phone. I knew it then to be true.”

“So you brought me there to see August,” I said dully. “To be sure.”

“I brought you there.” She looked at me, her eyes two sunken pools. “So tell me. Is there any way that he can be alive?”

“I didn’t check for a pulse,” I whispered.

“When he was shot?”

Not trusting my voice, I nodded.

“Why not?” She asked it of me gently. “Why didn’t you look for a pulse?”

It burst out of me, a torrent of words. “There was so much happening, and I was in such disbelief . . . my brother doesn’t make mistakes like that. He’s far too careful. You don’t become the head of a mercenary company in your twenties unless you’re a master of precision, and he shot him, he had a scope and I knew he could see August’s face and he still shot him and said it was an accident, and I—” I gasped for air. “I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t make it true.

“But I—” I shook my head. “I know why they did it that way. Milo. August. I know why I wasn’t told. I ruined his life already. Twice. Why would he trust me with it again?”

“I didn’t bring you there to torment you, Lottie.”

“Why, then?” I sounded so much like a child. “Why? I don’t understand any of it.”

“Lottie—”

“Can I ask you something? When you had me to your house, before I went to America . . . it felt like you wanted to tell me something. The day I dropped the hives. Did I imagine that?”

She twisted her hands. “I thought I might be able to offer you a home with me,” she said. “You could work with the bees.”

I stared at her. “I would have loved that,” I said.

But she hadn’t offered.

“But that day you visited . . . well, I was reminded that you were still so young. And so strange. How you just stood there, as those bees filled the air . . . mesmerized. It was unnerving. I didn’t know what to do with a girl like you. And Lord knows that then, you weren’t willing to hear any advice.

“But you’ve grown up so nicely. It feels like time, perhaps, for you to come under my wing. I took you out tonight because I wanted you to feel—free. You have so much ahead of you, and if August were really alive, I thought you could finally put the past to rest.”

My kind, businesslike aunt, with her sensible face and her sensible shoes. Her sensible decisions. Her tucking herself away, safe and sound, while the rest of the world raged around her.

I came at her like a snake.

“I am fully done with other people telling me what to do with my history,” I said. “My past made me who I am. There is no way to wipe it clean. I am the evidence. If you look at me and see track marks and too-skinny arms and hands that know how to hold a gun and a brain that is sharper and faster than yours, then that is not my problem. Do you hear me? I have regrets, and I have made mistakes, but I am who I am. I’m done pretending that I’ve wholly remade myself, that I’m going to . . . to hide myself away in some lecture hall for the next four years to make you all comfortable.” She was backed up against the door, now, her arms wrapped around herself, and I didn’t care. “If you want to stop seeing it, you’ll have to stop seeing me, and I am not going to disappear.”