The Case for Jamie, Page 2

  In the dream I’d been having, we stepped off the train into a smoky station. My aunt bought us both a pretzel. We had to wait a very long time in a marble lobby, and Milo pulled my hair, which was in curls. My hair was never in curls; it was impractical to take that much time on one’s grooming. At his teasing, I cried—this was an oddity, I did not ever cry—and we did not go to the museum.

  When the day finally came, everything went off as I’d dreamt. My mother had wound my wet hair up into a bun before we’d left, and in our compartment, when I pulled the hair elastic out, my hair had dried into a mess of ringlets. We were bought pretzels at the stand in the station. At the bank, my aunt conducted her affairs in an office with frosted-glass windows, while we were made to wait in the marble lobby. For a very long time. I could not stop fidgeting, and since we were not allowed to fidget, Milo reached out and yanked one of my curls. It hurt, but I did not yell. We were not allowed to make noise. We were not allowed to do much of anything at all, except notice everything about where we were and remember it for later, and we had been four hours in that lobby, and I had to use the toilet very badly. I had a horror of wetting my pants. I could not imagine what would happen to me if I did.

  At that thought, I started to cry. I had never done so in public before, not since I was old enough to remember, and Milo reached out to pull my hair again, a warning—Milo was twelve, old enough to want to keep me from experiencing the consequences of these things, but not old enough to express himself in a rational manner—just as Aunt Araminta came out of the office to find that tableau. Me weeping. Milo prodding me. “Children,” she said, in a voice like cold water, and at that, I couldn’t hold it anymore.

  We didn’t go to the museum. We took the next train home.

  Hours later, before bed, I rapped on my father’s study door. I intended to apologize briefly for my actions before telling him what I had deduced about my being psychic. He would be proud, I thought.

  My father listened while I laid out my case. He did not smile. But then, he rarely did.

  “Your logic is flawed,” he said, when I had finished. “Correlation isn’t causation, Lottie. Your mother bathes you in the morning at seven o’clock. Araminta was fetching you at half past. It makes absolute sense your mother wouldn’t have time to do your hair, and that she would put it up, as she always does on such occasions. You knew about the pretzel stand at the station, that Araminta could be persuaded to buy you a treat. As for the bank, you knew you would have to wait, perhaps long enough that you wouldn’t have time to make your special trip to the museum. You ensured that possibility with your behavior.”

  “But the dreams—”

  “—cannot predict the future, and you know that.” He frowned at me, hands folded. “The only thing that can is the reasoning of the waking human mind. As for the situation with the toilet, I trust that won’t happen again.”

  I kept my hands behind my back so he couldn’t see me fidget. “Aunt asked me to wait.”

  “Yes.” A muscle above his eye jumped. “You are only to follow rules that are reasonable. It is reasonable to stand up, inquire about the nearest bathroom, and use it before returning to your seat. It is not reasonable to create a mess for others to clean up.”

  This made sense to me. “Yes, Father.”

  “It’s time for bed,” he said, his frown loosening a bit. “Professor Demarchelier arrives at eight tomorrow to go over your equations. I can see from your fingernails that you haven’t finished your homework yet. Now, tell me how I knew.”

  I stood up slightly straighter, and did.

  ONLY FOLLOW RULES THAT ARE REASONABLE.

  The issue with this axiom is that very few rules are reasonable when examined closely.

  Case in point: there are laws that forbid locking someone in a closet against their will. On the whole, this seems sound—violation of someone’s personal autonomy, potential damage to the closet itself—and yet I had at least seven reasonable reasons for keeping this particular bullyboy locked away until I acquired the information I was looking for.

  Not that he was much of a bully or a boy. He was a passport office worker, and we were in his building after hours. There is nothing efficient about that description: passport office worker. It said nothing about his ruddy face, or his New Jersey accent, or how easily I’d been able to corner him here, on this Sunday night, to make my demands.

  Sometimes language ultimately fails us. It would be most accurate to refer to him as my mark.

  “I’ll tell the police,” he threatened. He was rather hoarse at this point from all the threatening.

  “That’s an interesting decision,” I told him, because it was. I was sitting with my back to the closet door, examining an unfortunate scuff on the toe of my boot. To clean them, I would have to purchase mink oil again, and though minks are vicious, they are also small and fragile-seeming. (I realize I am a hypocrite here—my shoes are made of leather; leather comes from cows; cows should not be thusly punished for being less adorable, but regrettably, here we are. The world is cold and bitter, and I continue to wear my wing-tip boots.)

  He was talking again. “Interesting?”

  “Interesting because you’d have to explain to NSY all the falsified documents I found in your office.” From my pocket I pulled a photocopy example (EU passport, expiration 2018, name TRACEY POLNITZ) and slid it, folded, under the closet door.

  A rustling as he opened it. “That’s not a fake, you stupid little girl—”

  “The original didn’t have an RFID chip. It failed a UV test. The watermarks and microembossing didn’t hold up to basic flashlight analysis—”

  “Who are you?” I couldn’t hear him run a hand over his sweaty face, but I knew he did it just the same.

  Irrelevant question. “I want any documentation you’ve forged for Lucien Moriarty.”

  “I don’t have anything by that name—”

  “Of course it wouldn’t be under his name. I understand that you’re familiar with his aliases; when he flies to America, and he does so frequently, he always touches down at Dulles here in D.C., no matter the expense. I’ve tracked his flights for the last six months. Do you think that there’s a reason that he only arrives on Wednesday?”

  Silence.

  “Let’s try this. How long has your mistress been working Wednesday nights? Convenient that she’s a customs officer, isn’t it. Convenient that her RFID reader always reads positive, even when the passport’s chip isn’t there.”

  Silence, and then the sound of a fist striking the door.

  At that point I’d finished examining my boot. That scuff was a simple fix, really, and once I was no longer dressed as this near-version of myself (black clothes, blond wig) and instead as someone so far afield from me as to be a kind of personal moon (Hailey, a confection made entirely for the male gaze), I would go have them shined. I was only mostly-myself tonight because the man in the closet had seen me in every other disguise I had at my disposal, and I wanted my appearance at his work this evening to be a stealthy one.

  I digress. My shoes, as I said, would be fine, so I instead picked up my hammer.

  “This is how the next five minutes will happen,” I said, lofting it. The dull metal looked black in the late-evening light. That was a detail that Watson would notice, and at that realization I heard my voice grow harder. “Either you give me every last one of Lucien Moriarty’s aliases and their corresponding passports, or I’ll return to your house and let myself into your son’s bedroom. I’ll make sure he’s sleeping. Then I’ll smash this directly into his throat.”

  My father had taught me to always wait a second for emphasis, so I did. Then I drove the point home—in this case, I swung the hammer into the closet door at speed.

  The man inside yelped.

  “I can be there and gone in the time it takes you to crawl out of your miserable little hole. Or we can bypass that whole tedious process, and you can provide me with the information I’ve requested. Out of respec
t for your emotional turmoil, I’ll give you thirty seconds to consider my offer.”

  “You’re Genna,” he said wonderingly. “You were Danny’s girlfriend. The one that he met at the dog park—”

  It was out before I could stop myself, in Genna’s please-please-like-me voice. “Oh wow, Mr. B, your terrier is adorable. What’s her name? I always wanted one, but my parents never let me. She is so lucky to have a family that loves her this much! Look at her little tail!”

  He didn’t respond for long enough that I had the fleeting fear that I may have given him a stroke. Then I recognized the scrap of sound coming underneath the door for what it was—he was crying.

  I looked down at the hammer in my hands.

  I HAD, LATELY, BEEN COMING TO TERMS WITH THE KNOWLEDGE that I could be cruel.

  Given the facts at hand about these past few years (thanks, again, to Watson), this might sound like a facetious revelation. I wasn’t a prize on the best of days, but I hadn’t ever parsed out why.

  I simply was what I was—a girl who had forged herself into a statue. I’d believed it best to look for the cracks and flaws in others, to chart them, to exploit them, to smooth my own flaws over until I gleamed like marble. I needed to be impervious. I told myself I was until I believed it. Unfortunately, what followed was a series of explosions. It’s a fine thing to be a stately marble column in a city. It’s something else entirely to find yourself in pieces while that city burns.

  It felt like that city had been burning for a very long time.

  Every night before I slept, I shut my eyes and remembered what had happened the last time I’d properly lost my head. I thought about August. August, who believed in fighting your worst instincts, in hope and in the police and probably in puppies and Christmas, who had loved me like I had been his own impossible shadow. August, who had only been in Sussex because I’d wanted to watch him suffer.

  It was too much for me to think of it as a story. I had to pull it apart into disparate facts, hold them up one by one in the light.

  Lucien, after his failure to string me up on false murder charges in Sherringford, had come up with a new plan.

  Blackmail, aimed at Alistair and Emma Holmes, my parents, and my favorite uncle, Leander.

  The terms: either they keep Leander out of the picture, and away from the forgery ring supporting his siblings, Hadrian and Phillipa, or

  Lucien would alert the government to the existence of my father’s only assets, a series of offshore bank accounts lined with Russian money.

  When they initially refused, Lucien ordered my mother’s home care nurse—a woman under his employ—to poison her.

  My parents told me none of this.

  Instead they ordered me away to my brother Milo’s offices in Germany, where August Moriarty was working in his employ. There, they imagined, I would be safe.

  In the meantime, my mother gained the upper hand on her home care nurse while our house’s security system was off, dressed the nurse as herself, then drugged her. Then staged the scene to appear as though their positions hadn’t been flipped.

  This involved wigs and costumes, and in that way (and only that way), it was after my own heart.

  Leander hid in their basement while my parents debated their next move.

  To reiterate: I knew none of this.

  For a long time I used that fact to absolve myself of guilt.

  Nota bene: Lucien Moriarty was orchestrating these schemes from abroad, untouchable, unreachable, and soon enough he disappeared from even my brother’s surveilling eye.

  In a sick sort of way I admired him for that.

  All I had figured, all I had learned, was that Lucien was poisoning my mother, that my family’s finances were in trouble, and that my parents were holding my uncle in their basement. I assumed they had been keeping him captive to demand he hand over his share of the inheritance, thus smoothing over their financial issues.

  You see, I’d been given few reasons over the years to believe that my parents could have good intentions.

  And still I felt the need to protect them from the consequences of my own mistakes. With the additional bonus of locking up Lucien Moriarty and throwing away the key.

  My plan was simple: I would take apart the Moriartys’ forgery ring, then bring back the perpetrators, Hadrian and Phillipa, to our family’s house in England. There, I would frame them for my uncle’s disappearance, freeing my parents from blame. This action would flush Lucien out of hiding, as he would never let his family take the fall for a Holmes’s actions.

  My mother’s plan was simple: my uncle Leander would agree to take a nonlethal dose of the same poison Lucien had given to her, then go to the hospital and claim that Hadrian and Phillipa Moriarty had poisoned him. Which would flush Lucien out of hiding. As he would never let his family take the fall for a Holmes’s actions.

  You would think, perhaps, from this information, that these two plans would dovetail beautifully.

  You would be wrong.

  With everything in motion, I dragged Watson back to England with me, and when we all gathered on the lawn outside my house, every two-bit player in this drama—Hadrian and Phillipa loose, having shaken their guard; my father furious at my interference, at my presumption of his and my mother’s guilt; Leander horrified and beaten-down and ill, so ill; and August. His hands up. Pleading for a cease-fire.

  When my brother, Milo, arrived rather later than he expected, mistook August Moriarty from a distance for his brother, and from a distance, with a sniper rifle, shot him dead.

  Those are the facts.

  As far as I understood them. If I understood anything at all.

  You see, I had become so used to trusting no one. Being the only one with any kind of plan.

  Where did that leave me? It left me left. Leander gone. Milo a murderer. August dead on the snowy lawn, and Watson there, knowing it was my fault, and that was as far as I could go with it, that was as much as I could take.

  It was a forced remembering. A penance. It wasn’t meant to dull the ache, but instead to keep the ache alive. It had been so easy for me to isolate that part of myself that felt that I had begun to believe it was natural. I had been wrong. I was unlearning.

  You need to feel the blood underneath all that reason, Detective Inspector Green had said. You need to feel it, and not apologize for feeling. Or else, every now and then, it’ll happen anyway, and you’ll be so overwhelmed that you’ll act only on that instinct, and you’ll continue to do very stupid things.

  I had disliked the implication that I was stupid, but even if I hadn’t, I knew for myself that my methods had stopped working. Also I was nothing if not a good student. So I set myself to “feeling things” as often as I could. To let my control go, to let whatever small nasty thing that lived in the space behind my heart go free.

  I imagine DI Green thought I would begin to make amends with my family, with Watson, with myself, that I would take “advantage” of this opportunity she had granted me. That I would perhaps break down in tears on her sofa picturesquely while she made me a picturesque cup of chamomile tea. How could one blame her for that?

  I didn’t blame her. I didn’t cry. I took my fury with me, and fled. I had, as they say, bigger fish to fry.

  HENCE, THIS BIT OF CASUAL CRUELTY ON MY SIDE OF THE closet door. The petty kind, the girl you let into your house for two straight weeks was building a case against you for the government kind, unnecessary to the case I was solving, a string of words specifically engineered to pour salt into an open wound. And yet it was human to feel it, to know that this awful man had been aiding and abetting an even more awful man for money, and to want to make him understand the full weight of his stupidity.

  He had looked at a girl, his teenage son’s girlfriend, and seen a Shirley Temple where he should have seen poison.

  “My God,” he was saying. “You’re disgusting. How old are you? What have you been doing with my boy?”

  “Ten seconds.” I slammed th
e hammer again into the closet door. The wood was beginning to divot. “Nine. Eight.”

  I felt badly about his son in an abstract way that was, still, an improvement on not feeling at all. Danny had been an easy mark—lost-looking, sweaty even in the cold, a boy whose tiny dog made him look comically large. He had been too scared to try anything physical with me, which suited me just fine. Mostly we played with Button, his terrier, in the family’s backyard. Button was a runner, and when she escaped through the board in a fence (a board I had of course pried loose myself), I let Danny tear after her while I took myself to his father’s office to find the documentation I needed. The photos on the fireplace were nearly enough: Danny and his father on a catamaran; Danny and his father beneath the Sagrada Familia in Spain; Danny and his father on safari, the vague blur of Danny’s mother behind them in the Jeep. I knew then how Lucien Moriarty’s blood money was being spent. All I’d needed was the proof.

  Button escaped every day for a week. Enterprising dog.

  I had no actual plan to hurt Danny. His father didn’t need to know that. “Three,” I said, “two, one,” and on cue, the man in the closet drew in a shaky breath.

  By the time the sun had finished setting, I had everything I needed.

  “What do I tell my son?” he asked as I packed up my kit.

  I didn’t answer. It wasn’t any of my business, after all.

  IT TOOK ME THE USUAL FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TO WALK THE five blocks to my lodgings. Twice I thought I was being followed, and once, I knew I was—no one carries a copy of the local paper under their arm in such a manner, much less puts it up to hide their face when you pass the shop window they’re spying from. I doubled back, ducked into a Starbucks toilet to change my disguise (wig, yoga pants, trainers), then waited until a group of girls in athletic wear jogged by and, keeping a safe distance, joined them.