I had never been interested in where Lucien Moriarty was going to. I wasn’t even interested in where he was coming from. That would come later. I wanted to know on which days he chose to return, and why.
From there things grew very technical, and I spent some time lurking in customs officials’ neighborhood Starbucks, taking temp jobs at their offices, interviewing them for my “high school newspaper.” I learned who he had bribed in England, and from there I made a plan to learn who he was bribing in America.
Why on earth wasn’t he traveling under his own name?
Why he was in America was never a question, not to me. Lucien Moriarty was a British political consultant. He was a fixer, a man who made scandals disappear. And yet for the last year, his client list had grown unwieldy and unpredictable. A Manhattan prep school. A large posh hospital in D.C.
And perhaps most disturbingly, a wilderness rehabilitation facility for teenagers in Connecticut.
He handled their public crises. He helped them build a brand. He kept a base in England, and he flew back and forth weekly, and still he made no move on me, none at all. But Lucien Moriarty had an idée fixe, and I wished it was something as simple as conceit to know that it was me.
Enough. My navel wasn’t growing any more interesting for all my gazing. Besides, the more I allowed myself abstract thought about this case, the more I found myself wandering to thoughts of what life could be like after. Seafood, perhaps, in a nice restaurant, in my own clothes, with my own face on. Uninterrupted sleep, and making a real go at getting myself off of cigarettes. And after . . . I had a storefront in mind, something in Cheapside, and I had hopes it would still be available once I had finished with the prison sentence I would likely serve when all this was over.
In the meantime, I had a plan.
Contact Scotland Yard, provide report.
Contact source at Sherringford, receive report.
Purchase new bulletproof vest. One with moisture wicking, this time. (I was tired of emerging from Kevlar a sweaty mess.)
In bulletproof vest, shake loose information from a certain shop in Greenpoint.
Begin running down remaining specs on Michael Hartwell identity.
Confirm interview with Starway Airlines.
Arrange CPR certification for candy-striping credential.
Text DI Green a photograph of my untaken pills.
Go ten minutes without thinking about Jamie Watson unwinding his girlfriend’s scarf.
Five minutes. Three. Any time at all.
Seven
Jamie
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I SAT THERE IN MY DESK CHAIR, making myself breathe in and out.
Finally, I stopped to look at my phone. The text was from my father: Leander wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.
The worst thing about my life so far? I wasn’t stupid. It would be so much easier if I was. But we’d been in New York City today, chasing after Moriartys, and I’d come back to an instance of casual sabotage. Even now, I saw the big red circle I’d made on my physics syllabus—individual presentations, 40% of your grade. It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t a kidnapping. It was small, and insidious, and I knew the way things would work now. I could recognize a pattern.
It would only get worse. But I was tired of giving in.
Someone was punishing Charlotte by punishing me.
It was either that, or my girlfriend was really mad at me for skipping writing club.
“Fine,” I said out loud. “Fine,” and I stayed up until dawn to get the damn thing redone.
THE NEXT DAY I HAD FRENCH CLASS FIRST THING. ELIZABETH walked me there, her hand in the crook of my arm. She was telling a story about her roommate leaving piles of orange peels underneath their bunk beds, how they smelled amazing until they began to rot. They’d argued last night about what point they’d need to sweep them out from underneath the bed—four days? Five? Should they leave them there at all? Despite my exhaustion, I was interested by the story’s strange poetry, Elizabeth’s gestures, her laugh. The normalcy of it all.
“So the oranges feels like a metaphor for something,” she concluded, outside the steps up to the languages building. “I don’t know what.”
“I have that feeling a lot,” I said.
“I missed you last night. Writing club was stupid, as usual. More poems about people’s dead grandmothers. You know, you don’t look like you slept at all.” She hadn’t touched her own tea, though I’d drained mine, and she pressed her paper cup into my hands. “Were you thinking about . . .” She trailed off, but I could hear the end of the sentence: about last year, or about Charlotte Holmes.
“No, I had some work to do still for today. I left it until the last minute.” I hadn’t told her about my ruined physics presentation; saying it out loud made it feel real. Besides, just hearing the anxiety in those four words—were you thinking about—made me hesitate to tell her. I had to keep things positive so that I could keep going. “More evidence that I shouldn’t ever run off with my father in the middle of a school day.”
“He’s a bad influence.” She kissed my cheek. “But you should go with him more often, it makes you happy. Try to stay awake. Monsieur Cann already has it in for you.”
He did, but only because I’d skipped French III so many times last fall in favor of Sciences 442. How could I blame him for hating me? Today, I fumbled through his class so badly that Tom texted me under the table, are you okay? and I had to wave him off. Through AP Euro, I kept pinching my own arm until I gave myself bruises, and in Physics I read as carefully as I could from my presentation on the screen, trying not to sway on my feet, and the second it was over I made the executive decision to bail on the only class I knew I had an unshakeable A in—AP English—to get some sleep. On the way back to my dorm I passed Lena, bright like a robin in her red uniform blazer. She looked so awake it made me want to cry.
“Jamie,” she said, grabbing my arm. “What’s going on? You like . . . you look like hell.”
“Didn’t sleep,” I said, and forced a smile. I was so exhausted I could barely get back to my dorm.
In the hall outside my room, I made myself listen. Just in case someone was inside, waiting for me behind the door with a club. But I guess that was never the Moriartys’ way of doing things.
That was more Charlotte Holmes’s style.
I gritted my teeth and let myself in.
Inside, I pushed back against the urge to catalog my things, just in case my presentation-ruining fairy had paid another visit. What was the point? It was the sort of thing that would make you feel crazy—was I the one who left my planner on the chair, when I’d always put it instead on my bookshelf? Had I been the one to leave the window open? The window was open now, I noticed, and who knew if I’d been the one to prop it open—
A wave of panic. Despite my sharp, sleepless nausea and the scraped-out feeling in my head, I wasn’t at all tired anymore. But it was too late now to trek it to English.
I sat on the bed with my phone in my hands. What I wanted was to speak to someone who knew me. A conversation that would tie me back down to the knowable ground. It was dinnertime in England, I realized. My sister would be home from school, and if last night’s email was any indication, she was in desperate need of someone to complain to. I rang her on videochat, and she answered almost instantly.
“Hi,” she said, harried. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
“Probably,” I said.
She shook her head. “Here, let me shut my door. Not like Mum is paying any attention to what I do anyway.”
“Still wrapped up in Dreamy Ted?”
Shelby shrugged. “I don’t know how dreamy he is. He’s bald, but not in that hot-guy way. His only hot-guy selling point is that he’s a little younger than she is. Rawr.”
“But Mum’s happy?”