Bill the curator looked nonplussed. “We have a rotating historical exhibit, normally. This being the centennial—”
“Right,” I said. I’d had it. I was in some kind of farce. Any moment now, I’d be handed a rubber chicken and a knife and told to dance. “Well, I’m sure if you go back to my room right now, you’ll find that someone has left fifty-three cans of hot pink spray paint on my floor and, like, a grammar book open to ‘to be’ conjugations. I don’t care. I didn’t do it! I didn’t do any of it, but that obviously doesn’t matter, because I’m being framed, and pink spray paint? Hot pink? Are you kidding me—”
Harry stuck his head back in. “Ms. Williamson? There’s a call for you. From a place called Just So Occasions.” He adjusted his glasses. “Do they know how late it is?”
“We hired our artist through them,” Bill said. “I’d gone to them for some framing work and mentioned the project, and they’d recommended Mr. Jones’s portraiture skills to us. Very reasonable rates.”
“Put them through,” the headmistress said, rounding the desk to her phone. “Hello? Yes. Yes, this is highly irregular. Midnight? Oh—oh. I see.” She frowned and scratched something down. “Yes. Yes. Well, thank you. I do appreciate it.”
“Well?” the dean asked, after she hung up.
The headmistress sighed. “Apparently Just So has caught their clerk vandalizing outgoing deliveries, and wanted to warn us. Former clerk, I should say; apparently this vandalism was in retaliation for his termination. His name was Frank Watson. He defaced their store, as well. This sounds like a case of mistaken identity on our parts.”
The detective gave me a hard look. I smiled at him as blandly as I could, but my pulse had picked up the second Ms. Williamson had answered the phone.
“The owner had discovered it and thought to leave us a message, in case he’d done the same to our delivery.” The headmistress sat down heavily in her chair. “I think she was surprised to actually reach someone, this late. Gentlemen, ladies, I am so very tired. Mr. Watson, why don’t you take five days to get yourself and your . . . affairs straightened out?”
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Frank Watson.” The headmistress stared at me. “Frank Watson. It . . . well. I suppose it adds up. I’m sorry to drag you into this.”
“So I’m not suspended, then?”
She sighed. “I don’t know yet. We’ll see what the police say in the next few days about this supposed theft. And about these drugs, apparently. Take five days off campus. Stay with your father. If your name is cleared, we’ll call it a leave of absence, for health reasons. You’re clearly not doing well—it’s hardly a stretch. And if you are found culpable . . . then yes, it’ll be a suspension, and we’ll have to notify those colleges you’ve applied to of this new development.”
Five days.
It was a challenge. And I was already making my plan.
I’d speak to Anna. Bargain with her. Get her to talk. I’d corner Kittredge and Randall, find out if either of them were holding a grudge, if someone on my hall had been hurting for money or hanging around Mrs. Dunham’s desk too often, by the locked drawer where she kept the master keys. Mrs. Dunham could tell me who’d she seen come in and out of the dorm, midday, faculty or students or maintenance staff. Elizabeth could tell me if she saw anyone fleeing the scene once she’d gotten topside at Carter Hall.
And Lena could give me the invitation list to the party, as soon as she’d finished pretending to be the clerk from Just So Occasions on her phone in the bathroom.
“It’s suitable,” the dean said, already halfway out the door. “I’m done here. Headmistress, until tomorrow.”
“Yes, goodnight, and my apologies. Bill, why don’t you . . . honestly, I don’t know what to do with those paintings. I think they look sort of avant-garde, don’t they? Keep them. Maybe the performing arts elective will want to shoot them out of cannons or something. Detective, I imagine we can pick this up tomorrow? And Jamie—”
I was still reeling from all of it—the party, the emails, the exploded soda can, the brocade of the sofa scratching against the back of my neck, the defaced paintings, the parade of friends calling me out, the way Shepard was x-raying me with his eyes. There was so much to dread, and God knows I’d been a master of it these twelve months. I’d tangled myself so much up in the what-went-wrong to forget why I’d gotten involved with Holmes in the first place. There was danger here, loads of it, and my future at stake.
There was a case to be solved.
God help me, I was excited.
“Moriarty?” the headmistress was saying. “Do I know that name from somewhere?”
Just then, Lena slipped back in the door, face flushed and nakedly triumphant. “What did I miss? Anything good?”
“Miss Gupta,” Shepard said. “Do you mind if I use your phone?”
Twelve
Charlotte
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN I DECIDED I WAS DONE. FUCK IT. My mother was ineffectual, my father pathetic. I was the idiot child who thought I could mold myself into their image, that it was a worthwhile endeavor.
I had taken them sporadically at first. The pills. When all the white crushing nothing got to be too much. When a new book or a game of chess with my brother couldn’t take me from myself. I had a sort of dread all the time, a feeling that an ax was going to fall, and if I could hide myself behind a buffer, why wouldn’t I do that? I halved them. To be safe, I told myself, but I knew really it was to make them last, and when my mother slipped at work and fractured her leg, I knew they’d send her home with more, and it was lifting those from her bathroom cabinet that finally got me caught.
“Caught” is a prosaic way of saying it. Really I was sent to rehab. The nuclear option, my father had said, the man who’d taught me to spot a lie and clean a gun and make myself into another person because I myself was never quite right, would never be. Better then to be another girl. He always was so disappointed that I was still his daughter underneath the disguise.
At Paragon Girls San Marcos I learned how to play five-card stud underneath the bolted-in television playing Days of Our Lives. I developed an interest in Days of Our Lives. At night, discussing Days of Our Lives with my current roommate, Macy, we taught ourselves how to fill a syringe and then how to flick it to expel the excess air. The syringes themselves were from the married orderly who was sleeping with the team’s lead psychologist (unbuttoned fly, ten minutes late from lunch; I cheerfully blackmailed him for months); the contents were from my former roommate, Jessa (a hole cut into the heel of her boot, a trick I soon adopted myself) who visited us every Sunday when not filming the detergent commercials that were her bread and butter. This arrangement lasted for four rather transcendent weeks. They weren’t friends—to make friends, one had to share oneself and one’s past, and I would do neither. Conspirators worked with you in the moment. We were conspirators, and good ones.
Then Macy ratted us out and was rewarded with a single room. Jessa was readmitted. I was summarily thrown out, and I took my habits with me.