But that was a different girl. That was a different me beside her.
“All I know,” Elizabeth was saying slowly, “is if they want us at this party, then we need to get the hell out of here, now.”
We made it all the way to the door to Carter Hall before the panic started.
Ten
Charlotte
THE FIRST TIME I MET JAMIE WATSON, I DIDN’T PAY HIM much attention at all. I’d spent months underwater. My summer in Sussex after my first Sherringford year had been unbearably quiet. I’d been reading about anglerfish because I was certain that I had hung some terrible inadvertent lantern over my head that had drawn Lee Dobson in. Like the anglerfish, I had sizable teeth, but I was coming to learn I used them poorly in a crisis.
Reading took me away from myself, so I tried to be reading all the time. When I wasn’t, I found myself doing small things I’d never done before. Imagining some noise when there was none. Scratching my right knee, only the right knee, until I finally broke the skin. Standing up at dinner while my father was speaking because I was certain I was about to start screaming. My father was starting to look old. My father had stopped looking at me at all.
I spent that summer getting myself clean. As clean as I could. This had, as you’d imagine, suboptimal results, but I was working with what I had. I was realizing I had hardly enough of myself to keep for myself, and then at Sherringford in the fall when Watson came up to me on the quad, all I thought was, Here is someone else who wants something from me that I am unable to give.
Watson followed up on his rather ridiculous overture of friendship by punching Lee Dobson in the face. If anyone was going to punch Dobson in the face, it was going to be me. Not some moony half-American boy who thought, like my father, that our names meant we should be something other than we are.
I’ve never been a good detective. I am far too impatient for that. What I actually am is another matter.
In the past few months, I’ve had enough time to consider the question. Here is my working theory: I am a girl who came to the world rather late. I didn’t know how to care about someone else because I had no one to care for (save my cat Mouse, who did not need all that much from me, considering) and no real training on the subject. I learned quickly, if somewhat painfully. I never wanted someone like Watson to be my test subject.
Good intentions, road to hell, et cetera.
FROM THE LOOSE LEAVES ON THE SIDEWALK AND THE wreath on the door, I thought at first that perhaps I’d taken down the wrong address. It was clearly a floral shop, though the sign above just said JUST SO OCCASIONS, obnoxiously vague. If I were to name a shop I’d name it for the proprietor and the purpose. MORIARTY SABOTEURS, for example. It was good to be clear for your customers’ sake.
Just So Occasions “did” flowers, though they’d taken them in against the cold. They did framing, too, of family snaps like the sort they had hanging in their window and the paintings spotlit on the back wall. And they were hedging their bets against both of those things, because they were hosting some kind of Art and Wine afternoon patronized by kind-looking forty-something women who had two or three children in school and a husband who wouldn’t help with the wash.
The woman in the window had just been laid off from her secretarial job. You could tell from the short nails on her right hand, by her smart but well-worn shoes, and, most obviously, from the cardboard box under her table holding three picture frames, a lamp, and a jar full of pens. She was looking for an escape before she had to face her new reality, and this place, with its comforts and warmth and the nice blond man wandering the room refilling glasses, provided that.
I felt rather badly for her.
Part of me had thought perhaps I’d arrive and plow through the front door, guns blazing. It was what I would have done last year. That fact alone meant it was a terrible idea, and anyway I rather wanted to see what her finished painting would look like. Right now it looked a bit like a gold-plated skeleton.
There was an alley to the right of the shop. I’d known this already, from studying the satellite map. As I’d surmised, this was where the delivery truck waited, hazard lights on, until it was ready to go off on its run.
I set off down the alley purposefully, as though I were taking a familiar shortcut home. Once I made it to the driver’s side door, I cast a quick look toward the street and then let myself in. It was unlocked. The fact that it was unlocked gave me momentary pause, but whether or not this was a trap didn’t ultimately matter. I had three minutes at most. I would make good use of them.
I pulled on my gloves and got to work.
At first glance the cab was empty except for a half-full bottle of soda. There would be prints on that; I quickly emptied it out the side and stuffed it into my bag. Then I flipped down the sun visors; clipped to the passenger side was a manifest. I assumed the list of goods being delivered was incorrect. It would hardly say hazardous materials or items that would subtly but irrevocably injure James Watson Jr. I didn’t bother scanning it now; instead, I confirmed the address at the top—yes, there it was, Sherringford School—photographed it, and put it back precisely where I found it. With my phone, I took a quick shot of the odometer and the radio preset stations. I searched the seat for hair that I could take away with me, found a stray on the seat, and put it into a jar with a pair of tweezers.
Watson used to watch me do this with bated breath, imagining that every last action I made had a specific end. It didn’t. Not always. Much like when I solved a math problem, I had an order of operations that I followed, a series of things I searched for ranked by importance. This way if I were interrupted, I had accomplished the most essential tasks first. This strand of hair, for instance, was likely useless, but on the off chance it wasn’t—
Three minutes had passed. I cocked my head to listen (nothing), and then I stepped lightly out of the cab and circled to the back of the truck.
DI Green had told me not to look, and it had been a relief to hear it at the time. Intel only, Charlotte, she’d said.
But the truck was going to Watson’s school, and so I was looking now.
The lock keeping the rolling door shut had a standard-order padlock. The street was empty, but I didn’t doubt that Just So Occasions had a number of security cameras pointed at this exact spot. And I had thought to come as myself, to prove a point. Even this deciding moment was long enough for the security cameras to get a good shot of my face.
Professor Demarchelier’s voice in my head: Idiot girl.
I snarled. Then I pulled out my phone to check the weather, rifling in my knapsack with my free hand for the pack of chewing gum I kept for this precise occasion. I pulled out the gum, then dropped my bag. Then dropped the gum as well. There was no one around to see or to offer help; that was necessary. Grumbling out loud, I sat on the edge of the truck, inches from the padlock, and began putting my spilled belongings away. When I was halfway finished, I patted down my pockets, ostensibly for my phone—I looked behind me, then under the truck, then in my pockets, and then I put my bag on top of the padlock, hunched over its open mouth, and, with the cover it provided, quickly put my pins into the lock and took it apart.
That was my cue to triumphantly pull out my phone, stuff everything back into my knapsack, shake my head, and take off down the street at speed.