“I’m sure,” I said. He was hiding the cover with his hands.
He thumbed it open, flipped to the back of the book. “‘It is with a heavy heart,’” he said, “‘that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished,’” and that was how I came to know August Moriarty: his slow, steady voice reading The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes to me, as though I was his younger sister, or his beloved, or both.
He wouldn’t ever do that again.
I realized then I was crying.
That was how Leander found me, on the bottom step of a brownstone, my arms around my knees.
“You came,” I said, and then I cried a bit harder.
He got me upstairs and into the apartment. Sat me on the overstuffed sofa, put a blanket around my shoulders, and left me there to cry. Moments later I heard him running water for a bath.
“Up,” he said, “come along,” and led me to it by the hand, as though I were a child.
“It has bubbles,” I said, numbly. “Pink bubbles.” They were foaming up out of the water. They smelled like roses.
“It does,” he said. “Go sit in that for a while. At least twenty minutes. Understood?”
I nodded.
“Okay then,” he said, and pushed me inside and shut the door.
I sat in the bath, as instructed. I pulled the pins out of my hair and laid them out in a row. I took off my makeup with a cloth and put my head under the water for a long, warm moment, and when I surfaced, I realized I hadn’t had a bath in ages. I didn’t like the waiting of it, the patience needed for the tub to fill.
Leander had gone out. I heard the front door open again now, and his particular footfalls as he returned. He was exaggerating them on purpose so I knew it was him. My breath started coming faster—perhaps Lucien had tracked me here; perhaps Lucien knew Leander and me both well enough to know how Leander walked and—
But then he started singing. He never sang, but he was singing now, some Irish folk song about a man named Danny. It was unmistakably my uncle, sweet and resonant and sad, and I wanted to cry again. Whatever is making me like this is wretched, I thought, and ends now, and I got up and toweled off my hair and put myself into a robe.
I realized then that I had spent the last hour in emotional turmoil and not once thought about the pills stashed away in my coat.
“You have a terrible singing voice,” I told Leander in the kitchen.
On the kitchen island, he had laid out a paper bag of giant pastries, a pair of salads, and a well-polished sawed-off shotgun.
“I can’t be completely perfect,” he said, and offered me a cronut.
We ate. It would be more honest to say that Leander bolted his food and then watched me eat. I made it through a pastry in my usual way, slow bites and sips of water and tearing the thing into pieces to give my stomach time to settle as I went.
“It’s still like that for you?” Leander asked.
“Yes,” I said. As a child, mealtimes had been difficult. I didn’t like food then. I didn’t now. Verbum sap. “What is that shotgun for?”
He inched the salad toward me. “One bite for one answer.”
“I’m not a toddler. I don’t need to be bribed.”
“Really.” He opened the lid. “It’s a salmon salad. From Dean and DeLuca. And if you eat it, I’ll get you oysters for dinner.”
I smiled a little, despite myself. “Fine. Hand me a fork.”
Leander talked at length. He paced as he spoke about the past twelve months, up and down the narrow aisle between the kitchen island and the sink. What he told me about Watson I had largely already known (though I obediently ate a forkful for each fact), but he filled me in on what he’d learned from his research into Peter Morgan-Vilk, after his and James Watson’s interview with him in the stairwell.
“Morgan-Vilk’s father, the one Lucien left in the lurch during his political campaign, isn’t hiding out in Europe with his mistress. Not anymore. Merrick Morgan-Vilk is back in New York.” Leander gestured at my salad, and I took a bite. “He’s putting together an exploratory team for political office—though which office, or why a British politician is doing so in the States, I don’t know. What I do know is that he hates Lucien Moriarty, and he has a fair deal of money and influence, and you owe me at least two bites for that.”
I took my time with them, thinking. “Do you think Merrick Morgan-Vilk knows Lucien is working with his son? Peter?”
“Probably not. And Lucien has his son’s passport for a reason. Peter Morgan-Vilk might just think he’s gotten a good deal—he gets to piss off the father he hates while making a paycheck, and all he has to do is stay in America—but Lucien has to have a plan, and I doubt it has anything to do with foreign travel. If you have someone’s passport, you can steal their identity. Take their money. There are even cases of people’s houses being stolen.”
I laughed. Then I realized he was serious. “I’m sorry?”
“I dealt with a case last year,” he said, fishing out another pastry. “It’s absurdly simple. The con downloads a transfer of property form, makes copies of the stolen passport and forges the signature, and signs the house over to his actual name. A woman I worked for paid her mortgage for months, not realizing she was lining someone else’s pocket. I found the thief in Vancouver, after a long search, and . . . persuaded him to come back to the States with me. I’m not saying this is exactly what Lucien has planned. But you can do quite a lot with someone else’s identity, and I imagine that he plans to.”
“And he has Merrick Morgan-Vilk’s son involved. Merrick, who has no love for Lucien Moriarty.” I thought for a moment. “Do you think we should approach him directly for help? The father?”
Leander laughed, surprised. “Not unless you want to announce our presence with a bullhorn. I’m sure Lucien knows about Morgan-Vilk’s current political plans—it isn’t public, but it isn’t on lockdown, either, and he’ll have eyes on the campaign. No, I think we have to convince Morgan-Vilk more indirectly.”
“Put that on hold for now,” I said. “I had an idea for this afternoon. You know about the Virtuoso School?”
“I do. Spent any time on their website recently?”
“Why would I? I’ve been reading New York’s private school forums.”
Leander began to smile. “And?”
“Hartwell,” I said. He wasn’t listed on the official website, or on any of the provisional pages I could find online. The only connection of his name that I found with the Virtuoso School had been a man named MHartwell43 asking a question about paid vacation leave. He was a new employee, too new to be officially listed, and already he was looking to switch jobs.
But he hadn’t yet.
“Hartwell.” His mouth quirked up. “Good work.”
As we’d been talking, I found myself warming from the inside. Perhaps it was simply the bath, or the food, or the presence of an adult I admired. But there was more than that. I had that feeling of being known, of having all my dark corners illuminated. It wasn’t a new feeling. I’d had it in the past, with Leander and Watson and once even with my mother. But it had been a very long time.
“I’ve been—” I struggled with saying it. “I think I’ve been impossibly awful to you. I won’t be again.”
Leander nodded. His eyes were bright.
“Thank you for sharing what you know, and for trusting me. I know I don’t deserve it.” The words were coming easier now. The dam door blown open.
“Darling girl,” my uncle said, a bit hoarsely, “of course you deserve it. How would you like yourself a partner?”