A surge of relief. Leander Holmes was one of the only people I could be around when I was like this, all shaky and strange. I knew as well as my father did that he’d played his trump card, and that I’d lost this round. I packed up my things, ignoring Lena’s stage-wink across the table.
“See you tonight,” Elizabeth said, already back in her book. But then, she was used to this by now.
“I actually do have a presentation in physics tomorrow, you know,” I told my father as we left the cafeteria.
He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Of course you do. But that’s hardly important, is it?”
Two
Charlotte
WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, I CONVINCED MYSELF I WAS psychic.
It wasn’t a wild conjecture. My father had always said to build only on fact, and the facts were there. For a solid week, I’d been having dreams about going to London. These dreams were based on fact. My aunt Araminta had to go to settle some financial affairs, and she’d offered to take my brother and me along and after, to a national history museum to see an exhibit on dinosaurs. Milo was mad for the stegosaurus.
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.