DETECTIVE SHEPARD HAD GONE THROUGH LENA’S PHONE while she stood there, arms crossed, rolling her eyes. “I thought you actually, like, wanted to make a call.”
He scrolled again through her texts, her missed and received call log, her contacts, and then he tossed her mobile back. Because she was Lena, she caught it neatly with one hand. “Just was a little too good to be true,” he said. “You disappeared. Then immediately, Ms. Williamson got that phone call from the gallery with a confession.”
“Serendipity,” she said, and wound up her scarf. “It’s an SAT word. Look, since it’s a school night and everything, I should go home. Jamie, text me or something tomorrow, okay?” She waved good-bye and left.
Everyone else had left too. My father was warming up the car in the parking lot. The detective zipped up his parka, looking out over the snowy quad. “I’m not going to say it’s good to see you again,” he said.
I shivered. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t really want to be in this mess either. I am happy, though, that you’re working the case.” I meant it. I had always liked Detective Shepard; he was smart, and determined, and flexible enough to work with me and Holmes. I just wished I wasn’t always the person he was investigating.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “You’ve made some real enemies, kid,” he said. “Or she has. Charlotte. I don’t know. I hope it’s all been worth it. I’ll call you in the morning. Don’t leave town.”
I told him I wouldn’t, then got in my father’s car.
You didn’t make that call? I asked Lena.
She wrote back instantly. Told you I was useful. You don’t need to be a dealer to keep a burner phone in your bag. He didn’t ask me for that one haha night Jamie xoxo.
I laughed to myself. It was late, late enough that we were the only car on the road back to his house out in the country. It had been where I’d grown up, out here, playing tag in the yard with my father, eating dinner outside together in the summer, my sister and I locking each other in the closet below the stairs. My father lived there now with my stepmother, Abigail, and my half brothers, Malcolm and Robbie. They’d set aside a room for me, what had been the stuffy old guest room before. I hadn’t decorated it, and I didn’t sleep there much, but it was good to know it was there anyway. I kept enough clothes there, a razor, some shoes. I wouldn’t have to go back to the dorm for my things.
When we walked in the door, Abigail was waiting up for us in the living room. She’d had a fire going, but it had faded down to embers.
“Jamie,” she said, and pulled me into a tight hug. “You’re okay. Thank God. And you—”
My father said, “Hello to you too.”
“Will you tell me next time? Instead of leaving me a note saying, J in trouble, be home late, and then not answering any of my texts?”
“I’m sorry, things moved very fast.” There wasn’t a lot of apology in his apology. “Can we talk about this tomorrow? I don’t want to wake up the kids.”
“It’s fine, they haven’t seen you in days anyway.” Abigail tugged on her nightgown. “Sorry, Jamie, I’m exhausted, and this—anyway. Go to bed. We’ll figure it out.”
“Your mum’s coming in,” he said to me. “I spoke to her earlier. She changed her tickets, she and Shelby—we’ll figure out lodgings. Maybe you on the couch? We can talk more about it tomorrow.”
“You talked to Grace tonight and not me?” Abigail said.
I took that as my cue to go upstairs.
They kept on quarreling quietly, the sound creeping up the stairs as I got myself ready for bed. My father wasn’t an award-winning parent, to be sure, but I’d thought he’d grown out of some of his shittier habits. No matter how much I’d fantasized as a kid that he would give up Abigail and America and come back to us in London, it wasn’t anything I wanted from him now. I’d wondered a little how he was keeping up with his work or the house or his two little kids, what with all the traipsing around with Leander, but my father was an adult, and as far as I knew, adults worked those things out.
I guess my father hadn’t.
I fell into an uneasy sleep, and when I woke, it was late morning, the day half-started already. A kettle was whistling downstairs and the door to my room was open. In the kitchen, Abigail was nowhere to be found. Malcolm, my toddler brother, was missing too, and my father, and Robbie, who was school-aged. Was it a school day? I was too tired to remember.
In lieu of any members of my family, Leander was perched at the counter, scrolling through a news site on his tablet. His dress shirt was pressed, and he was freshly shaved. “Good morning, troublemaker,” he said.
“Please tell me that’s not going to be my nickname.” He’d switched off the whistling kettle, but the water was still hot. I made myself a cup of tea. “Though I guess I’m a wanted thief. And possible ‘druggist,’ if the dean has me pegged right.”
“How much of it do you think is Lucien?” Leander asked, setting down the tablet.
“The paintings, for sure. My father filled you in on that?” At his nod, I said, “I thought at first the phone call from the shop was Lucien toying with me. Like, showing how easily he could reach into my life, and how he had the power to fix it, if he were inclined to. But it turned out to be Lena Gupta instead, getting me off the hook.”
“I always liked that girl,” he said.
“Yeah, Lena’s great.” I leaned back against the counter. “As for the rest of it—my dad doesn’t know this, but the laptop sabotage? Someone emailed Elizabeth, pretending to be me, and asked her to be there for it. And for the party, too.”
Leander nodded. “Do you want to walk me through it?”
“All of it?”
“I could help.”
“And you won’t tell my dad?”
He hesitated. “No. I’ll let you do that. Deal?”
“Deal.”
He picked up his tablet again. “Let’s start with times, if you have them, and places, and where everyone was when it happened.” When I finished, he said, “My thoughts: we’ll approach the problem from two separate sides. If you feel comfortable asking questions around your school, I’ll keep on with my investigation in the city. I have an appointment today I’d like to keep.”
“Is my father coming?” I asked.
Leander looked uncomfortable. “He and Abigail are taking a day,” he said. “It’s important, especially with your family coming in, that the two of them have a moment alone to . . . recalibrate.”
“Oh.” I studied him for a moment, the man I’d come to think of as my own uncle. He had a careless sort of elegance that he wore like a cloak, and every now and then, if he let you get close enough, you saw how deliberately it had been woven, what he hid beneath it. “Has this happened before?”
Leander hadn’t ever been one to mince words with me. “With your mother, quite a few times. Never before with Abigail. If this isn’t settled soon, I’ll go back to London and try to do my part from there. I . . . might be putting some strain on the situation.”
When I called up an image of my father in my head, he was cheerfully rumpled, in his usual corduroy and blazer, and in that imagining, he was never alone. Leander Holmes was there beside him. Not my mother and not Abigail, but his best friend, one I’d only known in person now for a year. But I’d never really considered what a problem that would be for the woman my father was married to. When your life was split that way, how could you ever have everything?
Maybe some of us weren’t meant to.
I thought, like a reflex, about Holmes. My Holmes, that night in the hotel in Prague, determined and afraid and her arms around my neck, whispering words I couldn’t hear, words she maybe thought I could read from the shape her lips made against my skin, and it wasn’t something I ever let myself think about, much less in front of her uncle who was like an actual reader of minds, or after I’d just been thinking about my father, and I flushed, and then flushed again when Leander gave me a startled look—God, he was deducing things—and then I hurried away as fast as I could to pour myself more hot water.
Leander cleared his throat. “Want a ride up to campus?” he asked after a moment. His voice was very, very neutral.
“No,” I said, fanning the steam away from my face. “Nope. No, I can walk.”
It was a very long walk. In the end, Leander insisted, and I was back at Sherringford by noon.