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?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. What did he have in mind? A calculus textbook? That seemed difficult. “I can try to find—”
“Ah.” His finger had stopped. “How about this?” he asked, pulling a volume from the shelf.
“I can’t see it, so I can’t offer an opinion.”
“Hush,” he said, but kindly. “I’ll just sit in this chair, then, and we can begin here. You’ll find it illuminating, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure,” I said. He was hiding the cover with his hands.
He thumbed it open, flipped to the back of the book. “‘It is with a heavy heart,’” he said, “‘that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished,’” and that was how I came to know August Moriarty: his slow, steady voice reading The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes to me, as though I was his younger sister, or his beloved, or both.
He wouldn’t ever do that again.
I realized then I was crying.
That was how Leander found me, on the bottom step of a brownstone, my arms around my knees.
“You came,” I said, and then I cried a bit harder.
He got me upstairs and into the apartment. Sat me on the overstuffed sofa, put a blanket around my shoulders, and left me there to cry. Moments later I heard him running water for a bath.
“Up,” he said, “come along,” and led me to it by the hand, as though I were a child.
“It has bubbles,” I said, numbly. “Pink bubbles.” They were foaming up out of the water. They smelled like roses.
“It does,” he said. “Go sit in that for a while. At least twenty minutes. Understood?”
I nodded.
“Okay then,” he said, and pushed me inside and shut the door.
I sat in the bath, as instructed. I pulled the pins out of my hair and laid them out in a row. I took off my makeup with a cloth and put my head under the water for a long, warm moment, and when I surfaced, I realized I hadn’t had a bath in ages. I didn’t like the waiting of it, the patience needed for the tub to fill.
Leander had gone out. I heard the front door open again now, and his particular footfalls as he returned. He was exaggerating them on purpose so I knew it was him. My breath started coming faster—perhaps Lucien had tracked me here; perhaps Lucien knew Leander and me both well enough to know how Leander walked and—
But then he started singing. He never sang, but he was singing now, some Irish folk song about a man named Danny. It was unmistakably my uncle, sweet and resonant and sad, and I wanted to cry again. Whatever is making me like this is wretched, I thought, and ends now, and I got up and toweled off my hair and put myself into a robe.
I realized then that I had spent the last hour in emotional turmoil and not once thought about the pills stashed away in my coat.
“You have a terrible singing voice,” I told Leander in the kitchen.
On the kitchen island, he had laid out a paper bag of giant pastries, a pair of salads, and a well-polished sawed-off shotgun.
“I can’t be completely perfect,” he said, and offered me a cronut.
We ate. It would be more honest to say that Leander bolted his food and then watched me eat. I made it through a pastry in my usual way, slow bites and sips of water and tearing the thing into pieces to give my stomach time to settle as I went.
“It’s still like that for you?” Leander asked.
“Yes,” I said. As a child, mealtimes had been difficult. I didn’t like food then. I didn’t now. Verbum sap. “What is that shotgun for?”
He inched the salad toward me. “One bite for one answer.”
“I’m not a toddler. I don’t need to be bribed.”
“Really.” He opened the lid. “It’s a salmon salad. From Dean and DeLuca. And if you eat it, I’ll get you oysters for dinner.”
I smiled a little, despite myself. “Fine. Hand me a fork.”
Leander talked at length. He paced as he spoke about the past twelve months, up and down the narrow aisle between the kitchen island and the sink. What he told me about Watson I had largely already known (though I obediently ate a forkful for each fact), but he filled me in on what he’d learned from his research into Peter Morgan-Vilk, after his and James Watson’s interview with him in the stairwell.
“Morgan-Vilk’s father, the one Lucien left in the lurch during his political campaign, isn’t hiding out in Europe with his mistress. Not anymore. Merrick Morgan-Vilk is back in New York.” Leander gestured at my salad, and I took a bite. “He’s putting together an exploratory team for political office—though which office, or why a British politician is doing so in the States, I don’t know. What I do know is that he hates Lucien Moriarty, and he has a fair deal of money and influence, and you owe me at least two bites for that.”
I took my time with them, thinking. “Do you think Merrick Morgan-Vilk knows Lucien is working with his son? Peter?”
“Probably not. And Lucien has his son’s passport for a reason. Peter Morgan-Vilk might just think he’s gotten a good deal—he gets to piss off the father he hates while making a paycheck, and all he has to do is stay in America—but Lucien has to have a plan, and I doubt it has anything to do with foreign travel. If you have someone’s passport, you can steal their identity. Take their money. There are even cases of people’s houses being stolen.”
I laughed. Then I realized he was serious. “I’m sorry?”
“I dealt with a case last year,” he said, fishing out another pastry. “It’s absurdly simple. The con downloads a transfer of property form, makes copies of the stolen passport and forges the signature, and signs the house over to his actual name. A woman I worked for paid her mortgage for months, not realizing she was lining someone else’s pocket. I found the thief in Vancouver, after a long search, and . . . persuaded him to come back to the States with me. I’m not saying this is exactly what Lucien has planned. But you can do quite a lot with someone else’s identity, and I imagine that he plans to.”
“And he has Merrick Morgan-Vilk’s son involved. Merrick, who has no love for Lucien Moriarty.” I thought for a moment. “Do you think we should approach him directly for help? The father?”
Leander laughed, surprised. “Not unless you want to announce our presence with a bullhorn. I’m sure Lucien knows about Morgan-Vilk’s current political plans—it isn’t public, but it isn’t on lockdown, either, and he’ll have eyes on the campaign. No, I think we have to convince Morgan-Vilk more indirectly.”
“Put that on hold for now,” I said. “I had an idea for this afternoon. You know about the Virtuoso School?”
“I do. Spent any time on their website recently?”
“Why would I? I’ve been reading New York’s private school forums.”
Leander began to smile. “And?”
“Hartwell,” I said. He wasn’t listed on the official website, or on any of the provisional pages I could find online. The only connection of his name that I found with the Virtuoso School had been a man named MHartwell43 asking a question about paid vacation leave. He was a new employee, too new to be officially listed, and already he was looking to switch jobs.
But he hadn’t yet.
“Hartwell.” His mouth quirked up. “Good work.”
As we’d been talking, I found myself warming from the inside. Perhaps it was simply the bath, or the food, or the presence of an adult I admired. But there was more than that. I had that feeling of being known, of having all my dark corners illuminated. It wasn’t a new feeling. I’d had it in the past, with Leander and Watson and once even with my mother. But it had been a very long time.
“I’ve been—” I struggled with saying it. “I think I’ve been impossibly awful to you. I won’t be again.”
Leander nodded. His eyes were bright.
“Thank you for sharing what you know, and for trusting me. I know I don’t deserve it.” The words were coming easier now. The dam door blown open.
“Darling girl,” my uncle said, a bit hoarsely, “of course you deserve it. How would you like yourself a partner?”
THE VIRTUOSO SCHOOL WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF MANHATTAN, on a surprisingly serene street in Chelsea. We weren’t far from Peter Morgan-Vilk’s apartment, in fact, and I put my umbrella up against the rain, not out of worry for my hair or clothes, but because I wanted a shield ready against recognition if I needed one.
The school itself was quiet, furnished in the spare style my mother had always liked, and yet there was a hominess to it I hadn’t expected. Natural light. Wooden rafters. A pair of girls holding hands, running late to class. It made me nostalgic for a school life I’d never had. Somewhere in the background a girl was playing her cello, but I didn’t recognize the piece. It might have been of her own devising.
We were shown to the admissions suite, where we were greeted, to our disappointment, by a girl in a smart dress who had us fill out a dossier. “I thought Hartwell worked Wednesdays,” I whispered to my uncle, but he shook his head imperceptibly.
“Don’t worry,” he said at normal volume. “We’ll get you in, you belong here,” and the man walking into the suite laughed a bit to himself.
“I admire your confidence,” he said.
Leander stuck out his hand. “Walter Simpson.”
“Michael Hartwell,” he said. “Why don’t you come into my office and tell me a bit more about your daughter?”
“My niece,” Leander said, with his thousand-watt smile, and this time when he reached out to guide me into the room, my hesitation was all pretend.
“This is such a gorgeous place,” I said, sitting down and smoothing out my skirt. “I keep hearing music! It’s wonderful.”
“I know it’s late in the year for a transfer,” Leander said.
“Of her senior year. Miss Simpson will have already applied to colleges, by now, yes? I don’t know how much we can help her.” Hartwell flipped through my file again, then shut it. He gave me a sympathetic smile. “May I ask why you’re looking to change schools now?”
I stared down at the shiny tops of my Mary Janes. “My tutor died,” I said. “Unexpectedly. My parents thought I should come be with my uncle in the States for a change of scenery. And besides, I didn’t apply to conservatory yet. I thought I’d perhaps take a gap year.”
“Her tutor’s loss has been quite the blow. They’d worked together for a long time.” Leander stole a look at me. “She’s going to hate me for this, but—”
I colored. “No, don’t! You promised you wouldn’t!”
“You should play for him.” He reached into his bag and pulled out my violin case.
“Uncle,” I protested.
“No. Show him what you’re made of. Show him why you’re a good fit for this school.” Leander turned to the counselor. “That’s the idea, right? She’ll be able to pursue professional opportunities, and she’ll have the finest instruction. Play for him!”
Hartwell sat back in his leather chair. “I’m no judge. She’d have to play for the music faculty, at auditions.” Then the corners of his mouth turned up indulgently. “Is she any good?”
I drew my instrument up to me like the living thing it was. It hadn’t been in my hands now for so long—an extravagance and a danger, lugging it around with me, a hobby of mine that I couldn’t hide. I could almost feel it breathing there under my fingers.
“That’s a Stradivarius.” Hartwell’s eyes glittered. “Interesting.”
I put it up under my chin, arranged my fingering. I always thought a little about the sky when I held my violin. A bird wheeling. The sun. That sort of thing. It was difficult to explain.
A very, very cursory Google search had found that Michael Hartwell was a significant donor to both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Hence, the violin.
Leander gave me a moment to settle. Then he said, “Mr. Hartwell, I think she’ll make you weep. Play him an original, Charlotte?”
Had my eyes not already been closed, I would have startled like a hare. This hadn’t been in the design at all, which already skewed far closer to the truth than I wanted it to. I had proposed that Leander play my father. We’d be Americans recently returned from abroad. We would say that I wrote songs on my guitar about our quaint life in Surrey and how I missed it so. I would ask Hartwell to introduce me to his daughter, the songwriter; I would be a fan. He would be flattered, he would feel appreciated, perhaps be more willing to talk.
Leander had refused. Bring your violin. Be my niece. Let me take the lead.
I never let anyone else take the lead, not when I was involved. I never deviated from the plan unless I had to, and “had to” had a very narrow definition. (I could comfortably bluff my way through having a gun put to my head.) But I didn’t trust my instincts today, not with all that fear still rattling around in my chest. I’d taken a step back.
Was this willingness to give up the lead maturity, or hesitation? I didn’t know. It had been one thing with DI Green, who could give me directions but wasn’t there to see me follow (or not follow) them. This was something else.
And now Leander was calling me Charlotte when the name on my form read Harriet Heloise Simpson, and he was telling me to play a composition that I hadn’t, well, composed.
Had Hartwell noticed the name? He must have. I couldn’t risk opening my eyes to check. Whatever my uncle was playing at . . . but more than a moment had passed now, long enough for an eighteen-year-old girl to believably compose herself, but anything longer, and—
I began to play, pulling from a folk tune I remembered from a village concert as a child. My parents had never taken us. There wasn’t much art in their blood. But I had been eight and obsessed with my fiddle and Milo had been home for the summer, and when our housekeeper told us about the festival, he’d seen the longing in my face.
“You’re indulging her?” my father had asked. Not judging, not surprised.
Milo shrugged. “She wants to hear the band,” he said, the only time I could remember him pushing back against my father, and he hoisted me onto his skinny shoulders and took me into town.
We didn’t have much down there—a Tesco, a wine bar, a few nebulously purposed shops that sold “gifts,” the usual lineup for a tourist haunt by the sea. But that night, we had a gazebo on the village green, and a quartet playing folk airs, and my brother kept me on his shoulders as we watched. People weren’t used to us being out, as a family. We Holmeses were the vampires up the hill. But I clapped my hands along to the music, and my brother bounced me in time to the beat, and soon an elderly gentleman approached and asked me if I wanted to dance with him. Milo heaved me down and watched, bemused, as I was spun and spun and spun in my dress and then sat dizzy onto the ground.
“Did you like that?” he said, when it was over. The old man had bought me a taffy apple at the stand, and I held it out on the walk back to our land, too afraid to eat it.
“Yes,” I remember saying. “I liked how sad it was.”
Because the day had ended. There would be no more days just like it. If I ate the apple, it too would be gone, and soon enough Milo would be back at the school that was changing him.
My brother didn’t press me to explain.
I took that day and laid it under this one. I spun those two parallel moments into a song and then played it, and I played for some time.
When I opened my eyes, Michael Hartwell was weeping.
“Charlotte,” he said, and the hair on my neck stood up. “That was beautiful. I’m so—I’m so sorry.”
I set down my violin on my lap. Then I said, “You know who I am, then.”
Hartwell said, “I’ve been shown photos of you, yes.”
“But not me,” Leander said, standing.
“No. Only the girl. Charlotte.”
My uncle put himself more fully between me and Michael Hartwell. “You’re here,” he said, as Hartwell wiped his eyes, “but you did your residency at Washington Mercy in psychology. Is that right?”
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.”