THE FIRST TIME I MET JAMIE WATSON, I DIDN’T PAY HIM much attention at all. I’d spent months underwater. My summer in Sussex after my first Sherringford year had been unbearably quiet. I’d been reading about anglerfish because I was certain that I had hung some terrible inadvertent lantern over my head that had drawn Lee Dobson in. Like the anglerfish, I had sizable teeth, but I was coming to learn I used them poorly in a crisis.
Reading took me away from myself, so I tried to be reading all the time. When I wasn’t, I found myself doing small things I’d never done before. Imagining some noise when there was none. Scratching my right knee, only the right knee, until I finally broke the skin. Standing up at dinner while my father was speaking because I was certain I was about to start screaming. My father was starting to look old. My father had stopped looking at me at all.
I spent that summer getting myself clean. As clean as I could. This had, as you’d imagine, suboptimal results, but I was working with what I had. I was realizing I had hardly enough of myself to keep for myself, and then at Sherringford in the fall when Watson came up to me on the quad, all I thought was, Here is someone else who wants something from me that I am unable to give.
Watson followed up on his rather ridiculous overture of friendship by punching Lee Dobson in the face. If anyone was going to punch Dobson in the face, it was going to be me. Not some moony half-American boy who thought, like my father, that our names meant we should be something other than we are.
I’ve never been a good detective. I am far too impatient for that. What I actually am is another matter.
In the past few months, I’ve had enough time to consider the question. Here is my working theory: I am a girl who came to the world rather late. I didn’t know how to care about someone else because I had no one to care for (save my cat Mouse, who did not need all that much from me, considering) and no real training on the subject. I learned quickly, if somewhat painfully. I never wanted someone like Watson to be my test subject.
Good intentions, road to hell, et cetera.
FROM THE LOOSE LEAVES ON THE SIDEWALK AND THE wreath on the door, I thought at first that perhaps I’d taken down the wrong address. It was clearly a floral shop, though the sign above just said JUST SO OCCASIONS, obnoxiously vague. If I were to name a shop I’d name it for the proprietor and the purpose. MORIARTY SABOTEURS, for example. It was good to be clear for your customers’ sake.
Just So Occasions “did” flowers, though they’d taken them in against the cold. They did framing, too, of family snaps like the sort they had hanging in their window and the paintings spotlit on the back wall. And they were hedging their bets against both of those things, because they were hosting some kind of Art and Wine afternoon patronized by kind-looking forty-something women who had two or three children in school and a husband who wouldn’t help with the wash.
The woman in the window had just been laid off from her secretarial job. You could tell from the short nails on her right hand, by her smart but well-worn shoes, and, most obviously, from the cardboard box under her table holding three picture frames, a lamp, and a jar full of pens. She was looking for an escape before she had to face her new reality, and this place, with its comforts and warmth and the nice blond man wandering the room refilling glasses, provided that.
I felt rather badly for her.
Part of me had thought perhaps I’d arrive and plow through the front door, guns blazing. It was what I would have done last year. That fact alone meant it was a terrible idea, and anyway I rather wanted to see what her finished painting would look like. Right now it looked a bit like a gold-plated skeleton.
There was an alley to the right of the shop. I’d known this already, from studying the satellite map. As I’d surmised, this was where the delivery truck waited, hazard lights on, until it was ready to go off on its run.
I set off down the alley purposefully, as though I were taking a familiar shortcut home. Once I made it to the driver’s side door, I cast a quick look toward the street and then let myself in. It was unlocked. The fact that it was unlocked gave me momentary pause, but whether or not this was a trap didn’t ultimately matter. I had three minutes at most. I would make good use of them.
I pulled on my gloves and got to work.
At first glance the cab was empty except for a half-full bottle of soda. There would be prints on that; I quickly emptied it out the side and stuffed it into my bag. Then I flipped down the sun visors; clipped to the passenger side was a manifest. I assumed the list of goods being delivered was incorrect. It would hardly say hazardous materials or items that would subtly but irrevocably injure James Watson Jr. I didn’t bother scanning it now; instead, I confirmed the address at the top—yes, there it was, Sherringford School—photographed it, and put it back precisely where I found it. With my phone, I took a quick shot of the odometer and the radio preset stations. I searched the seat for hair that I could take away with me, found a stray on the seat, and put it into a jar with a pair of tweezers.
Watson used to watch me do this with bated breath, imagining that every last action I made had a specific end. It didn’t. Not always. Much like when I solved a math problem, I had an order of operations that I followed, a series of things I searched for ranked by importance. This way if I were interrupted, I had accomplished the most essential tasks first. This strand of hair, for instance, was likely useless, but on the off chance it wasn’t—
Three minutes had passed. I cocked my head to listen (nothing), and then I stepped lightly out of the cab and circled to the back of the truck.
DI Green had told me not to look, and it had been a relief to hear it at the time. Intel only, Charlotte, she’d said.
But the truck was going to Watson’s school, and so I was looking now.
The lock keeping the rolling door shut had a standard-order padlock. The street was empty, but I didn’t doubt that Just So Occasions had a number of security cameras pointed at this exact spot. And I had thought to come as myself, to prove a point. Even this deciding moment was long enough for the security cameras to get a good shot of my face.
Professor Demarchelier’s voice in my head: Idiot girl.
I snarled. Then I pulled out my phone to check the weather, rifling in my knapsack with my free hand for the pack of chewing gum I kept for this precise occasion. I pulled out the gum, then dropped my bag. Then dropped the gum as well. There was no one around to see or to offer help; that was necessary. Grumbling out loud, I sat on the edge of the truck, inches from the padlock, and began putting my spilled belongings away. When I was halfway finished, I patted down my pockets, ostensibly for my phone—I looked behind me, then under the truck, then in my pockets, and then I put my bag on top of the padlock, hunched over its open mouth, and, with the cover it provided, quickly put my pins into the lock and took it apart.
That was my cue to triumphantly pull out my phone, stuff everything back into my knapsack, shake my head, and take off down the street at speed.
A good fifty percent of my work was mimicry. Twenty percent, as Watson would say, was magician’s tricks, and the rest was forensics and dumb, dumb luck. Except for the one percent that was entirely reliant on the ubiquity of Starbucks locations and their public restrooms.
I didn’t even have to wonder; there was one at the end of the street. I ducked into the women’s. Changed into a dress, but kept the Kevlar; put my coat and shirt and pants into neat rolls at the bottom of my knapsack. The store was empty and the barista might notice if I changed something as obvious as my hair, so I moved my wig to the top of my bag. I would put it on at the next blind corner. Bless America and its lack of CCTV cameras; there would be no footage of my transformation.
Within ten minutes I was back at the truck as a different girl altogether.
In another century, Holmes, Watson had said, you would have been burned as a witch.
“Let them try,” I said aloud, and rolled the delivery door up and open.
It wasn’t the right look to be unloading a truck—fashion vloggers rarely made deliveries—but one had to make do with what one had. I hopped in, then pulled the door back down far enough to hide all but my feet.
With the flashlight on my mobile, I scanned my surroundings. Boxes, yes, but the kind you’d put around a painting or at the very least a frame. Experimentally I prodded the center of the one beside me, then the edges. Frames and canvases, then, for sure. There were professional handling services that moved valuable art, but this had been deemed unimportant enough to flop around in the sort of truck you used to deliver to grocery stores.
I needed my box-cutter. It was at the bottom of my increasingly full bag; I pushed aside coat, lockpicks, pipette case, soda bottle, silencer, vlogging camera—there.
The rolling door flung up and open.
The nice blond man wasn’t holding a wine bottle anymore. He was holding a bowie knife instead. The Kevlar, then, had been a miscalculation.
“Hello. I’m here to make a delivery,” I said, because at heart, I was a bit of an asshole.
“Charlotte Holmes,” Hadrian Moriarty said. His eyes raked over me in a vicious sweep. “What is it that you want?”
“I like your shop,” I said, because I did. It was confused and a bit crowded, but even through the half-open front door I could tell it smelled like roses. I was fond of roses.
It was often in my best interest in these situations to think abstractly instead of whether or not my quarry was about to kill me.
“No costume?” he snarled. “No stupid little glasses?”
“Doesn’t the wig count?”
“No sidekick?”
“No,” I said. “You took care of that.”
We regarded each other. His eyes narrowed. He put one heavy foot on the lip of the truck, then the other, and then he was muscling me to the back, up by the cab, past the boxes and out of sight.
“Where’s Phillipa?” I asked. “Or was she not given her very own passport and allowed to skip along out of the country, too? Are only the boys allowed to hopscotch the pond?”
“There it is,” he said. “That cheeky mouth. I was wondering where that girl had gone to.”
“I’m not here about your sister. I’m here about Connecticut.”
I was, I realized, on guard for more than just straightforward assault. Hadrian had that sort of low, hungry stare I associated with men like Lee Dobson. Sex, it seemed, was never about sex. It was about power and about subjugation, and Hadrian had been on the losing side of both those dynamics for quite some time.
That said, I was currently sober, and I had stopped scratching my right knee months ago, and even if everything inside of me was screaming, I was still holding my box-cutter and would not hesitate to carve out both his eyes if he laid a single finger on me.
Distantly, I remembered that this man had made out with my uncle. I would have to have a word with Leander about that, if we ever spoke again.
“Connecticut,” Hadrian was saying. “Forget Connecticut. Let’s talk about Sussex for a second, shall we? How about, your mother drugged Leander and sent him off to hospital to blame it on me and my sister? Tidy, wasn’t it. Brother-sister forgers with a cursed last name poisoning one of your sainted Holmeses. You must have loved that.”
“Lucien had been blackmailing my parents. He sent a ‘home nurse’ to poison my mother. Turnabout is fair play.”
“Is it, now? Is that why Milo killed August? Fair play?”
I had been waiting for this question. “No,” I said, as coldly as I could. “He thought August was you. He thought you were trying to hurt me.”
We regarded each other.
“Kid,” Hadrian said, and there was the smallest touch of humor in his eyes, “you’ve opened quite the can of worms, haven’t you.”
“You could say that.” Someone was walking quickly by the truck; he and I both fell silent. “You don’t seem to have a bad setup here,” I said finally.
“No. It could be worse.” His sister, Phillipa, was languishing under house arrest for poisoning my uncle—one of the few crimes she hadn’t in fact committed. His brother August was dead. His brother Lucien was still by all accounts pursuing a vendetta that would bring the rest of us to our knees.
Working in a floral-stroke-frame shop in Brooklyn was not a bad deal, all considered.
Hadrian saw my mood soften. He smiled, toothily.
“Connecticut,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “It isn’t worth it. I don’t care what it is you’re actually delivering. Stop while you’re ahead.”
“I have my orders,” he said.
“From your brother. Your brother orders you around,” I said, and watched that one land. “Do you actually want to get back into this game after you’ve escaped it? What, your brother gave you a passport, so now he owns you? Please. You’re better than that. Get out from under his thumb.”
Hadrian set his jaw. “Don’t tell me who I’m beholden to.”
“I’m telling you what’s in your best interest.”
“And what’s that?”
I stared at him, gauging the size of the bluff I was about to make. Despite our shared history I didn’t know him well enough to read a change in his tells or his behavior from the last time I’d seen him. All I knew was that once, he had been a talk show guest all over Britain, discussing art and antiquities with a sort of smart charisma that I saw no sign of now.
The forged paintings that he and Phillipa had sold, the ones that fetched the highest prices, were ones that he had painted himself. He still was painting now. Any child could have told you that from the pigment beneath his fingernails. Through the shop window I’d seen the canvases hung against the back wall—darkly romantic portraits, done as though in a series. The Last of August, I thought. The Thought of a Pocketwatch. August had said that art was his brother’s only passion.
I reached out a hand for Hadrian to shake. He took it. My fingers were dwarfed in his.
“Don’t make the delivery,” I said. He stared at me. “Don’t make it. I don’t care if they’re going to exhibit your paintings. It isn’t worth it.”
Hadrian jerked his hand away, and I knew then for sure what was in the boxes at my feet.
“They’re not worth it, the students there,” I said. I believed what I was saying; it would be pearls before swine. These particular pearls were also made by swine, though that wasn’t the issue at hand.
“I thought you’d be here to get some revenge for that Watson boy.” Hadrian cleared his throat. “You don’t seem here for that.”
I looked at him.
I had brought a small revolver. I had worn a Kevlar vest in case it came to a scuffle over the gun. I had come as myself so he could know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was my doing, if I had in fact decided to kill him.
I had thought about it for months. Hadrian, Phillipa, Lucien. Remove them as though they were rats that had gotten into the walls of my home. Remove the threat, and then I would let the matter rest. Let my former friend get on with his life, as he so obviously—and wisely—wanted nothing to do with me. I would perhaps go to prison. Prison didn’t scare me; I understood how to handle monotony interspersed with the occasional deadly interlude, and anyway I’d always thought I’d end up there eventually. Perhaps I wouldn’t. I was tidy in my methods, and I might walk away from it all. Perhaps I would finish my formal schooling and take a position in a lab somewhere. Do graduate work in chemistry. I’d have to find a specific topic to pursue, instead of dabbling, but there could be pleasure in specialization. I’d certainly interacted enough with poisons to want to know more about antidotes, and perhaps . . . perhaps I could change my name—a symbolic gesture, but one that might allow for appropriate mental gymnastics. No one had expectations for Charlotte Something. No one directed her Saturdays but her. I thought about it: an apartment overlooking something appropriately scenic, some rain or fog or smog. I could compose again on my violin. I hadn’t written a melody since I was a child. I could, after refining it, of course, perhaps play it for—
For myself. I would play it for myself. It was what I’d always done, after all, and if I was lonely, I could cry myself to bloody sleep.
You need to feel the blood underneath all that reason, DI Green had said. Looking at Hadrian Moriarty, I didn’t feel angry. I felt very, very tired.
I knew, then, that I didn’t want to kill the three of them after all.
“Leave Watson alone,” I said, “and I’ll leave you alone.”
To his credit, he considered it. “If I don’t?”
“Then I’ll see you again soon.” With that, I jumped down from the truck.
I wasn’t a sentimental fool. I didn’t plan on forgiving him, but neither would I gun him down. I had the manifest, the delivery confirmation, the bottle and the hair and the radio presets and my seven-hundred-dollar Kevlar vest, intact. I had seen a moment of doubt in Hadrian Moriarty. It had been a productive afternoon.
As I passed the women in the shop, I saw that they were all painting the Eiffel Tower. The woman I’d been watching had turned her skeleton into a tall, elegant structure. She’d depicted it at night, lit up and twinkling.
Perhaps she hadn’t been fired. Perhaps she’d quit her job, instead, to take a trip to Paris. The evidence didn’t quite suggest it, but perhaps, this time, I’d give her the benefit of the doubt.
I had been to Paris before. I had been to Berlin and Copenhagen and Prague and Lucerne and most of Western Europe, in the name of an education or in pursuit of a crime, and I had seen nothing of what made the world worth looking at.
That was a pity, now that I thought about it.
At the subway stop, I checked the weather again. Then my email. Then my bank account balance, and when I saw the number, I swore out loud. I had to refill my coffers.
I made three calls and got on the train, my nerves already shot. My day had taken a turn.
I would have to spend the next few hours reading celebrity gossip blogs.