A good fifty percent of my work was mimicry. Twenty percent, as Watson would say, was magician’s tricks, and the rest was forensics and dumb, dumb luck. Except for the one percent that was entirely reliant on the ubiquity of Starbucks locations and their public restrooms.
I didn’t even have to wonder; there was one at the end of the street. I ducked into the women’s. Changed into a dress, but kept the Kevlar; put my coat and shirt and pants into neat rolls at the bottom of my knapsack. The store was empty and the barista might notice if I changed something as obvious as my hair, so I moved my wig to the top of my bag. I would put it on at the next blind corner. Bless America and its lack of CCTV cameras; there would be no footage of my transformation.
Within ten minutes I was back at the truck as a different girl altogether.
In another century, Holmes, Watson had said, you would have been burned as a witch.
“Let them try,” I said aloud, and rolled the delivery door up and open.
It wasn’t the right look to be unloading a truck—fashion vloggers rarely made deliveries—but one had to make do with what one had. I hopped in, then pulled the door back down far enough to hide all but my feet.
With the flashlight on my mobile, I scanned my surroundings. Boxes, yes, but the kind you’d put around a painting or at the very least a frame. Experimentally I prodded the center of the one beside me, then the edges. Frames and canvases, then, for sure. There were professional handling services that moved valuable art, but this had been deemed unimportant enough to flop around in the sort of truck you used to deliver to grocery stores.
I needed my box-cutter. It was at the bottom of my increasingly full bag; I pushed aside coat, lockpicks, pipette case, soda bottle, silencer, vlogging camera—there.
The rolling door flung up and open.
The nice blond man wasn’t holding a wine bottle anymore. He was holding a bowie knife instead. The Kevlar, then, had been a miscalculation.
“Hello. I’m here to make a delivery,” I said, because at heart, I was a bit of an asshole.
“Charlotte Holmes,” Hadrian Moriarty said. His eyes raked over me in a vicious sweep. “What is it that you want?”
“I like your shop,” I said, because I did. It was confused and a bit crowded, but even through the half-open front door I could tell it smelled like roses. I was fond of roses.
It was often in my best interest in these situations to think abstractly instead of whether or not my quarry was about to kill me.
“No costume?” he snarled. “No stupid little glasses?”
“Doesn’t the wig count?”
“No sidekick?”
“No,” I said. “You took care of that.”
We regarded each other. His eyes narrowed. He put one heavy foot on the lip of the truck, then the other, and then he was muscling me to the back, up by the cab, past the boxes and out of sight.
“Where’s Phillipa?” I asked. “Or was she not given her very own passport and allowed to skip along out of the country, too? Are only the boys allowed to hopscotch the pond?”
“There it is,” he said. “That cheeky mouth. I was wondering where that girl had gone to.”
“I’m not here about your sister. I’m here about Connecticut.”
I was, I realized, on guard for more than just straightforward assault. Hadrian had that sort of low, hungry stare I associated with men like Lee Dobson. Sex, it seemed, was never about sex. It was about power and about subjugation, and Hadrian had been on the losing side of both those dynamics for quite some time.
That said, I was currently sober, and I had stopped scratching my right knee months ago, and even if everything inside of me was screaming, I was still holding my box-cutter and would not hesitate to carve out both his eyes if he laid a single finger on me.
Distantly, I remembered that this man had made out with my uncle. I would have to have a word with Leander about that, if we ever spoke again.
“Connecticut,” Hadrian was saying. “Forget Connecticut. Let’s talk about Sussex for a second, shall we? How about, your mother drugged Leander and sent him off to hospital to blame it on me and my sister? Tidy, wasn’t it. Brother-sister forgers with a cursed last name poisoning one of your sainted Holmeses. You must have loved that.”
“Lucien had been blackmailing my parents. He sent a ‘home nurse’ to poison my mother. Turnabout is fair play.”
“Is it, now? Is that why Milo killed August? Fair play?”
I had been waiting for this question. “No,” I said, as coldly as I could. “He thought August was you. He thought you were trying to hurt me.”
We regarded each other.
“Kid,” Hadrian said, and there was the smallest touch of humor in his eyes, “you’ve opened quite the can of worms, haven’t you.”
“You could say that.” Someone was walking quickly by the truck; he and I both fell silent. “You don’t seem to have a bad setup here,” I said finally.
“No. It could be worse.” His sister, Phillipa, was languishing under house arrest for poisoning my uncle—one of the few crimes she hadn’t in fact committed. His brother August was dead. His brother Lucien was still by all accounts pursuing a vendetta that would bring the rest of us to our knees.
Working in a floral-stroke-frame shop in Brooklyn was not a bad deal, all considered.
Hadrian saw my mood soften. He smiled, toothily.
“Connecticut,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “It isn’t worth it. I don’t care what it is you’re actually delivering. Stop while you’re ahead.”
“I have my orders,” he said.
“From your brother. Your brother orders you around,” I said, and watched that one land. “Do you actually want to get back into this game after you’ve escaped it? What, your brother gave you a passport, so now he owns you? Please. You’re better than that. Get out from under his thumb.”
Hadrian set his jaw. “Don’t tell me who I’m beholden to.”
“I’m telling you what’s in your best interest.”
“And what’s that?”
I stared at him, gauging the size of the bluff I was about to make. Despite our shared history I didn’t know him well enough to read a change in his tells or his behavior from the last time I’d seen him. All I knew was that once, he had been a talk show guest all over Britain, discussing art and antiquities with a sort of smart charisma that I saw no sign of now.
The forged paintings that he and Phillipa had sold, the ones that fetched the highest prices, were ones that he had painted himself. He still was painting now. Any child could have told you that from the pigment beneath his fingernails. Through the shop window I’d seen the canvases hung against the back wall—darkly romantic portraits, done as though in a series. The Last of August, I thought. The Thought of a Pocketwatch. August had said that art was his brother’s only passion.
I reached out a hand for Hadrian to shake. He took it. My fingers were dwarfed in his.
“Don’t make the delivery,” I said. He stared at me. “Don’t make it. I don’t care if they’re going to exhibit your paintings. It isn’t worth it.”
Hadrian jerked his hand away, and I knew then for sure what was in the boxes at my feet.
“They’re not worth it, the students there,” I said. I believed what I was saying; it would be pearls before swine. These particular pearls were also made by swine, though that wasn’t the issue at hand.
“I thought you’d be here to get some revenge for that Watson boy.” Hadrian cleared his throat. “You don’t seem here for that.”
I looked at him.