MY FATHER PLAYED MADONNA ALL THE WAY TO NEW YORK City.
Not the hits, the stuff you’d generally hear on the radio, but deep cuts. Weird stuff. My father was more of a Bob Dylan guy, so I’d already raised an eyebrow at his choices, but this was weirdness squared. Especially since he apparently knew all the words to “This Used To Be My Playground.”
I didn’t usually give much thought to my father’s weirdnesses (there weren’t enough hours in the day), but it was either wonder about that or why Leander had been so distant when I’d gotten into the car. He hadn’t said a real hello, just nodded, miles away from the front seat of my father’s Camry.
Leander never greeted me, or anyone, like that. He was my honorary uncle, Holmes’s actual one, and from what I’d seen, by far and away the most humane member of her extended family. He called his friends on Christmas, smiled at you when you came into a room, threw parties for my father’s birthday. You know. Human things.
But it was more than that. Last year, in the weeks after my father had fetched us home from Britain, when Leander was still wasted from sickness and I was so battered and heartbroken that no one, especially not my family, wanted me to be alone . . . well. After days hovering over us, my father had finally left to make a trip to the grocery store. My stepmother was at work, my half brothers at school.
Which left me in the guest room, staring up at the ceiling fan, as I had been whenever I wasn’t sleeping. I was sleeping most of the time—mornings, the hours before dinner or just after the sun went down. Anytime but at night, when I lay still and quiet, counting my breaths, watching the hours shed themselves until, finally, I got up to wander the halls, unable to shake the thought of August sprawled out in the snow.
We hadn’t been good friends, August and I, but he was decent, thoroughly decent, and he’d paid a price for that decency. Once I’d thought that I could live in this world of Holmes’s. That I could grab knives by their blades, punch my hands through glass, could survive the violence that followed her around like a shadow. But I knew now that I couldn’t, that there was nothing there for someone like me.
That day my father finally left us alone, I realized I hadn’t spoken in what felt like forever. My broken nose had healed, but it still hurt when I opened my mouth, and anyway I wasn’t sure what I could say. I’ve just realized that I’m a coward. I fold under pressure. I make house fires into conflagrations. It didn’t matter. I’d go back to sleep. There was still another week until classes began; I didn’t have to be a human just yet.
Leander had other plans. From downstairs, he called me down into the kitchen—to persuade me to eat, I imagined, though I’d forced down some broth that morning. I took the stairs slowly and stood there in front of him, light-headed from lying down so long.
He stared at me. For a long time. Then he leaned across the table, cleared his throat, and said, hoarsely, “Jamie, did you know your new haircut makes you look like Donkey Kong?”
I’d laughed. I’d laughed until I couldn’t breathe, until I had to sit down, until I was crying, Leander’s hand on my shoulder, until I finally, stammeringly, began to talk about what had happened.
All of that was to say that Leander didn’t usually indulge in the same black moods his family did. But now he seemed like he was going through something, and though my instinct was to try to help, I reminded myself that was the old Jamie’s tactics. The one who fought other people’s battles for them, who made things worse. I was trying to be normal, now. Normal meant letting adults deal with their own problems. (Besides, I was too busy checking my phone. So far, no more texts from Weird Threatening Number.)
My father, the adult, was dealing with his adult best friend’s melancholy by singing “Material Girl” at the top of his lungs. He had, at least, switched to the singles.
“Dad,” I said. “Dad.” We were still forty minutes from Manhattan.
He had one hand on the steering wheel and the other in the cup holder, rooting around for change. “We’re liv-ing in a material world, and I am a material—”
“Please stop.” I watched as a muscle in Leander’s jaw began to jump. “Dad.”
“I need quart-ers for the very next toll—”
“Dad—”
“James,” Leander said, without turning to look. “Do you mind turning that down?”
“We used to play this back in Edinburgh,” my father said. “When we threw our summer solstice parties. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes. Please turn it down.”
My father didn’t touch the radio. “We don’t need to talk about this, you know.”
“You’ve taken your son out of school,” he said. The music played tinnily under his words. “We’re driving into the city. I imagine we have to talk about it.”
We approached the toll plaza. My father rolled down the window, and with a viciousness I didn’t expect, hurled the coins into the basket.
If I’d learned anything over the last few years with Charlotte, it was to let a scene like this play out without interruption. One wrong word, and your Holmes would change the subject, leave it behind you in the road.
Finally my father spoke again. “He’s graduating this spring. He’s doing well in his classes. He has that little girlfriend—”
“I don’t understand how any of that matters,” Leander said, soft but insistent. Sometimes I could hear it when he spoke, an echo of Charlotte in his inflection. She would have used fewer words. Irrelevant, she would have said, or Watson, stop, but the impatience would have been the same.
My father glanced up to the rearview mirror. “Jamie,” he said, meeting my eyes. “For the past year—well, you know that Leander has been keeping tabs on Charlotte. Her whereabouts. What she’s gotten into. That sort of thing. However wise that decision is—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leander snapped. “I’m not there to approve, I’m there to keep tabs. Someone had to make sure she’s alive. Her brother certainly isn’t.”
Milo Holmes had taken a leave of absence from leading Greystone to deal with the small matter of his murder charge. I say “his” murder charge as he was the one who pulled the trigger, but as far as the world (and the court system) knew, he was innocent. One of Milo’s mercenaries had been set up to take the fall instead, I’m sure for a handsome payout after he was on the other side of a prison cell.
Still, a Holmes employee shooting a Moriarty? Milo had always had the kind of power that could scrub a media story clean, but this one was beyond his control to suppress. It was sensational. It was everywhere. I was doing everything I could to ignore it.
As far as we could tell, Milo had kept his promise: he’d washed his hands clean of his sister and her problems. He wasn’t the only one.
What had happened on that lawn in Sussex? I’d realized how little I’d known.
I had been watching Holmes so closely, trying to understand her behavior, that I hadn’t taken the two steps back I’d needed to see the whole picture. She had decided from the beginning that her father was keeping Leander captive. That he had been blackmailed to do so by Lucien Moriarty, that it had something to do with her family’s finances. And instead of confronting any of this head on, instead of accepting that the parents who treated her so terribly could in fact be terrible people, she had dragged me along on some wish-fulfillment mission to pin the blame on someone else.
It didn’t end well. To put it mildly.
In the wake of Leander’s kidnapping and the murder on their front lawn, Emma and Alistair Holmes separated. Who knows how much romance had been left between them, anyway. None that I could see. As far as the press knew, Emma had taken their daughter to a retreat in Switzerland to ride out the media storm circling her son. Alistair stayed, stoic and alone, in their Sussex house by the sea. It was up for sale. He couldn’t afford it anymore.
That was the official story,
Last July, while I was staying with my mother over summer break, Leander took me out to lunch. He was in London to “settle some affairs,” he’d said, and then it became clear those affairs had to do with his niece. I know you don’t like talking about this, Jamie, but—
Charlotte Holmes wasn’t in Switzerland. She wasn’t in Sussex, either. She had turned seventeen, and petitioned early access to the trust fund she was meant to receive when she was twenty-one. She’d been denied. That was the last official record of her.
That’s what Leander had discovered in Lucerne, when he’d gone to check in with Charlotte’s mother, and when he couldn’t find his niece—when Emma had refused to tell him where she was (For her own safety, Leander, don’t you know that Lucien Moriarty is still in the wind)—he had spent weeks tracing her through France, to Paris, to the Eurostar train to London. There, the trail ended. He was hoping to pick it up through his contacts at Heathrow Airport.
Leander took me out for burgers, waited until I had my mouth full, then dumped this out on the table like an upended salt shaker.
I don’t want to know, I’d told him, furiously chewing. I’m done, Milo’s done—we’re all finished with this. I thought you were too.
I’m not bailing her out of her mess, he’d said.
I’d swallowed. So why are you telling me this? Actually why? Before he’d been able to answer, I’d said, Don’t, and that was that.
But here we were again. New York City’s skyline was bearing down on us like a bullet train. “Dad. I thought you were just dragging me to another weird lunch with the Sherlock Holmes club. What is this about Charlotte—”
“Wait.” Leander roused himself slightly. “You took him to Sherlock’s birthday weekend celebration? The one in January? I’ve been refusing to go to that for years.”
“Oh, come now. Buffet lunch, limericks about the year in Holmesiana—”
“You might feel differently,” Leander said, “if the subject in question was Watsoniana, and all anyone wanted to do was put you in a top hat and have you say things like ‘Brilliant, Holmes!’”
“I have to say it often enough in my normal life,” my father muttered.
“You never do. I’ve never once heard you say it.”
“I can hear the moments where you want me to say it. It’s unnecessary. You’re supplying it yourself.”
“Just once I’d like to hear you—”
“The Sherlockians were very nice to us,” my father said, clearing his throat. “The food is very good. Yorkshire pudding. And every year, I win at trivia—they call me the Sherlockian Shark. Anyway, Abbie won’t go with me to these things, ever, she says I behave like a Civil War reenactor, so can you blame me for bringing my son—”
The sound from the front seat was like a car starting up after a long cold winter in the garage. It was Leander, laughing. Without taking his eyes off the road, my father reached out and gripped his shoulder.
I don’t know why watching the two of them made me so incredibly sad.
“Neither of you,” I pointed out, “have actually told me what we’re doing here. So this isn’t Sherlock club, or whatever. This isn’t you springing me from last period to go see Les Miserables, or to go get bacon donuts, or listen to your police scanner in the Walmart parking lot. What was the rest of that? A rehearsal? Tell me what’s going on.”
“I thought you didn’t care,” my father said to me, mildly. “That when it came to Charlotte, you didn’t want to know.”
We might have had years now to work on our relationship, weekend lunches and dinners at home and the occasional bizarre trip to Broadway on a Wednesday night, but one word from my father in that smug, self-satisfied voice, and everything inside of me rebelled. I was this close to saying, Fine, I’ll just wait in the car. Maybe I’ll call Mom to talk about her new boyfriend just to see the look on his face.
Thankfully, I wasn’t a child anymore.
“You’re right,” I settled for saying, as carelessly as I could. “I don’t.”
“Wait in the car, then,” Leander snapped, and though I wasn’t a child, I felt like one then.
SO I WAITED IN THE CAR.
We were in SoHo, I thought. I liked New York, the bits I’d seen of it, but it was hard for me to tell where exactly I was. I knew that the stately avenues of Upper Manhattan turned into the winding, almost-lovely streets of the Lower East Side, but from what I’d heard, I couldn’t afford to live in this borough at all. I’d decided against applying to college in Manhattan, though I’d looked at Brooklyn College. Reading through the application, I kept picturing artisanal rice pudding, hipster bowling alleys, people who wore hats with brims and actually pulled them off. I doubted I’d fit in there, and so I’d scratched it off my list.
Of course, I’d never been to Brooklyn, so any sense of it I had was artificial.
That was one of the things that I’d realized, running around with Charlotte Holmes—all my ideas about the greater world weren’t actually my ideas. It’s difficult to solve a series of copycat crimes without taking a long, hard look at the source material, and Holmes and I had been childish enough to play at being Sherlock and his doctor. (My father and Leander never seemed to have grown out of it at all.) Behaving like you were someone you only knew from literature was one thing, but my tendency to romanticize didn’t stop there. When I looked around my boarding school, the place itself warred with what I remembered from films like Dead Poets Society, books like A Separate Peace. Fiction layered over reality. I was somebody who only wanted to see the world through paintings, never a photograph.
It seeped into everything, my tendency to assume, imagine, judge. Last fall, Elizabeth had told me off-handedly that she liked that I wasn’t a “romantic” boyfriend. It makes me uncomfortable, romance. Flowers and stuff, I hate that, she’d said, but with a wistfulness that made me think that she wanted me to disagree. I’d never been a bad boyfriend before, not really, anyway, and so I decided to clean up my act. I took her on a picnic in the woods. Pretend it isn’t romantic, if you have to, I’d told her, and she’d laughed, and we drank the wine we’d stolen from one of Lena’s sister’s booze packages, and it all would have been terribly romantic had I not realized halfway through that I’d jacked the idea wholesale from an L.A.D. music video.
And now I was realizing that how I felt about New York came from movies that weren’t even set there. Today, while the snow fell halfheartedly around my father’s car, I kept thinking of a film I’d seen late at night, years ago, where a boy and girl wandered a city all night long, talking and falling a little bit in love. They’d been in Europe. They’d agreed to meet again the next year if they still felt the same about each other. People came to cities for things like that, I thought—possibility, chance. A girl putting her face into the cloth of your coat, breathing you in like you were something that mattered.
That was the other ghost that was drifting through SoHo today. I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge it. These girls, dozens of them, in black coats with the collars turned up, in smart black boots with their hats pulled down over their ears. Girls with determined walks and straight dark hair. Charlotte Holmeses, all of them.
Pale imitations.
Wait here, my father had said, and before the door swung shut, I’d heard Leander say something about “Morgan’s son.” Morganson? They’d gone into the flat above the patisserie. 191 Spring Street, Apartment 5. If nothing else, I’d learned how to pay attention. While he and Leander did something interesting upstairs, something that probably didn’t even have to do with my ex-best friend, I was watching her walk by the car over and over again.
I kept waiting for one of them to pause. Cock her head. Slowly turn to peer into the window, eyes shrouded by the steamed-up glass like some horror movie villain made especially for me. Maybe they were just dark-haired girls on their way to work or school, dressed for the weather. It didn’t matter. I was falling back into my old habits, dreaming myself up a different world, seeing things that weren’t there.
I wasn’t pining for Holmes. I wasn’t looking for her. I wasn’t hoping she’d come back to deduce my stalker from my phone, to solve my small mystery, to ruin me all over again.
I’m not, I told myself, and got out of the car. Locked it. Went up to ring the buzzer.