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The Case for Jamie by Brittany Cavallaro (23)

WE ROUSED OURSELVES, FINALLY, WHEN THERE WAS A knock on the door.

“You have thirty minutes before the car arrives to take you to Sherringford,” Milo’s assistant said, handing me a bundle. She had bought dark clothing in our sizes and then had it pressed. It was far nicer than anything I’d been able to purchase myself this past year; the shoes, in particular, were things of beauty. I thought that I might love her. I felt very loving, just then.

Watson and I took turns showering. Back in the room, I hummed a little to myself as I did up the buttons of my shirt. He laced up his new black boots. He was smiling—he had always wanted a pair like mine.

“How are you feeling?” he asked when he’d finished.

For me, anything done in a bed with a boy was a fraught prospect. I didn’t know how long that would be true, if it would be true forever. Several times tonight we had had to stop ourselves, talk through what we were doing and how we felt about it. It sounded like a tedious exercise, and perhaps in some ways it was. I didn’t care.

How was I feeling? Like one of my Aunt Araminta’s beehives, buzzing, like I had a city inside of me. With Watson I had always been made better. I had spent the last year mourning our friendship, but knowing too it was better to be away. And now—

Now I’d have to keep on mourning our friendship, I supposed. He and I had been here once before, in a hotel in Prague, but before we could reconfigure what we were to one another, everything had disintegrated around us. Tonight, his dark, tousled hair was half dry, and he smelled the same as I did, as we’d used the same shampoo. He’d done the half cuffs on his trousers because they were, like all his other pairs, a bit too long, and there was nothing new about his shoulders, but an hour before I had mapped them anyway with my fingers. I loved them, his shoulders. He’d watched me, wondering, while I touched his wrists, his palms. What are you remembering? I fitted his hand against my hip and told him the three other times he’d put it just there (a bookshop in South London, by accident; on the flight back to England, to take my phone from my pocket; while brushing our teeth in the same bathroom in Sussex, because he needed to open a drawer and I’d been in the way). I was unmarked by what had happened tonight, but his torso was darkening with bruises where that bastard had driven in his fist and there was still a bit of blood under his fingernails and there was a look to him that was altogether new, wary and alert and impossibly sad, even now, especially now, one I’d first seen when I’d barged in on him beating the life out of Lucien Moriarty. I’d thought I’d come in to save him, but Watson had needed a partner, not an avenging angel.

He had a lovely left hook. He had a nick on his jaw where he’d cut himself shaving. How had I just seen it now? I wanted to examine it with my fingers, to put my lips there, and so I did.

He made a sound deep in his throat. He pulled me down onto his lap, his breath coming fast and warm and when the knock came I tried not to snarl at it.

“Hide the knives,” Watson said, laughing at my expression, his hands caught up in my hair.

“Mr. Watson and Miss Holmes,” the assistant said through the door. “Your car is here.”

Nothing cut the feeling of it—not the dash out the door to the car, not the rain that had started to break up the snow, not the not-knowing of what would be waiting there for us at Sherringford. I had the pieces of a plan. Watson helped me rearrange them to my satisfaction, or something approximating it. So much of what we’d needed to know this past year had been in our separate hands—Anna Morgan-Vilk, for one. Had I stayed at school I would have known her for what she was. I could have done my work without leaving school, without leaving Watson, and if I told myself I’d gone away only to track down Lucien Moriarty, I knew it for a half-truth. Had I stayed I would have had to face the mess I’d made. Had I stayed, Watson would not have been wearing that scarf when I’d met him. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, the idea that some kind, resourceful girl had been kissing him. Because I knew Watson well enough to know that in my absence, there would be another girl beside him. He wouldn’t pine forever. Why should he? The thought gave me comfort. It made me furious. It made me reach out and take his hand more forcefully than I’d meant to. He raised an eyebrow, then intertwined his fingers with mine.

What was wrong with me? It was, as they say, the question. The lovely, buzzing feeling I’d had wasn’t gone, but it was shifting into something else.

In Sherringford Town, all was seeming quiet. I counted three police cars lingering on side streets, their engines on and their lights off. No doubt Lucien Moriarty had mentioned that Watson would perhaps try to return to school. Still, our black car cut quietly through the night, and the cruisers stayed where they were. Getting through the school gates would be another matter.

“Would you please find an alley to pull over into?” I asked the driver as we drove through downtown. “We’ll need to climb into the trunk.”

It was an ignominious return to Sherringford, to be sure, but I found I didn’t mind it. We folded ourselves in quickly, and Watson put a hand on that spot on my hip (the fourth time in a car boot in Connecticut, I thought), and when the car was stopped at the Sherringford entrance by the police, the driver said something muffled about being a teacher returning to use the copier, provided his fake ID, and we trundled slowly up to the sciences building parking lot.

The car stopped. Watson tensed but didn’t move as the driver rounded to pop the trunk. He leaned over us, unseeing—the zipper on his jacket was close enough to swing into my hair—and took his briefcase from behind Watson’s head. I had a moment to see where he’d parked: the corner of the lot that I’d directed him to, one I remembered having a cluster of thick bushes.

He put the bag over his shoulder. Then he shut the trunk, gently. It didn’t latch.

Footsteps. “Evening, officer,” I heard him say. “Just here to use the copier.”

“I’ll let you into the building,” the cop said, her voice stern. “Do you know how long you’ll be?”

“I’m doing class prep. Won’t be more than an hour.” As he kept talking—about the quiz he was writing—I heard them make their way to the entrance. His voice, then hers, began to fade.

This was our chance, while their backs were turned to the lot. Our driver hadn’t said “midnight,” our code word for policemen lingering in the area. We were in the clear.

By the time the officer returned, Watson and I were in the bushes; by the time she returned to her car, we’d made it to the Carter Hall tunnel entrance.

“Elizabeth texted me the key code earlier,” he whispered, pressed up against the door. “57482.”

“You’re much quieter than you used to be.” I punched in the code.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ve been practicing,” and when the door clicked open, we crept down the stairs.

We were a half hour early for Watson’s rendezvous with Elizabeth. The way time had passed tonight reminded me of an accordion, of all things: as we went on, it expanded here, contracted there. Our time in the safe house had felt like mere minutes; our mad rush to Connecticut, hours. And now we would wait for Watson’s ex-girlfriend to tell us information about Anna Morgan-Vilk I most likely knew, while Lucien Moriarty mobilized the police force to haul us in for assaulting him.

I hadn’t been in the access tunnels in more than a year, but I remembered their layout. The Carter Hall entrance put us by the academic buildings and the chapel, far from Watson’s dorm. Hopefully, any searchers would be stationed there and not down by us. Any detective worth their salt would know to search these tunnels for a missing Sherringford student, but then, only Shepard really seemed particularly salty, and I supposed we had him on our side. Besides, the tunnel access code hadn’t been changed since Elizabeth had texted him. That could mean everything; that could mean nothing.

That left the obvious fact that the access tunnels, which were customarily lit day in, day out, were tonight in total darkness.

Watson’s hand in mine. A murmur: “Should I turn on my phone’s flashlight?”

I waited for my eyes to adjust, but the darkness was too complete. “No,” I told him, running a hand against the wall. “Follow me, and stay silent.” I heard him slip off his boots and tuck them under his arm.

We moved slowly. Three doors on the left, before the hallway turned—a generator, a water heater, an empty room that had once been used by snowbound nuns for prayer. The latter would work for our purposes (all I wanted was a room to hide in while we finalized our plan), but the door was locked. My kit had been strapped to my leg below my dress, but when I’d changed, I’d thrown a few picks into my useless little purse and left the rest. I only had my snake and my variable tension wrench—quick and dirty tools. One-size-fits-all tools. I could break the lock if I made a mistake.

I hadn’t picked a lock in the dark in some time. I hadn’t attempted a lock I didn’t have the specific picks for in years.

The night was looking up.

As I positioned my picks, Watson shifted behind me. He was always so impatient. Moving his weight around, cracking his knuckles, visibly counting ceiling tiles. The world was immensely interesting to him, but only the parts of it he wasn’t supposed to be studying. He didn’t have the sort of laser focus that a delicate art like this demanded, and yes, there it was, the lock giving under my fingers—

“Holmes,” he was whispering. “Holmes.” When I didn’t reply, he reached out and physically removed my hands from the door. “Do you hear that?”

I had been too focused on my work, on listening to my fingers, to hear the girls around the corner. They had to be girls, or slim boys wearing very smart shoes: the hard tap-tap-shuffle-tap gave it away. Two of them, moving slowly through the dark without speaking.

Watson and I put our backs to the cinder block wall. It was only luck that they didn’t have on their phone flashlights, that we were wearing all black, that the Exit sign above the Carter Hall door had been turned out with the rest of the power. That we were for all intents and purposes invisible.

They stopped just feet from us.

“You’re meeting them here,” one whispered. “When?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Do you know what you’ll say?”

“Anna, we’ve gone over this a million times,” Elizabeth said. “Of course I know what to say.”

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