I cleared my throat. “Then what is he offering you? He’s using your passport to get into the country. Why isn’t he just using a dead man’s identity?” I wanted to hear what his answer would be.
Hartwell looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. I didn’t think this show of emotion was for my music. I think the music had reminded him of something. Someone. His daughter, by the way his eyes kept straying to the photo on his desk of her in a blue dress, holding her guitar. The frame said MY MUSICAL GIRL.
“It’s a deal,” he said slowly. “I have—I have connections. I know people, at Washington Mercy, at— I know people, okay? He wants me to use those connections to arrange something for him. And if I don’t, he’s going to . . . I can’t talk to you about this. I have children. I have a family to protect.”
A posh hospital in D.C. A wilderness rehab in Connecticut. A prep school in New York.
Hartwell turned to Leander. “If you’re really her uncle, you’ll get her far away from this. As quickly as you can. Okay? Pack your bags. Get on a flight, go somewhere inaccessible. I don’t even know if this office is bugged—”
Leander took a step forward, his finely made hands in his pockets. “When’s the last time you swept it?”
“Swept it?” Hartwell stared at him. “I’m a psychologist. I— Mr. Holmes, I’m not like you. Any of you. I don’t know how to sweep an office for bugs.”
A helicopter buzzed the roof. The sound came on like a swarm of bees.
“Is there a helipad nearby?” I asked, tracking it.
“It’s not—he doesn’t—he isn’t here,” he managed to say. “Not yet. So go. Leave town. And if you don’t, I can’t be held responsible for what happens.”
There was nothing else to be said. We bundled up our things quickly and ran outside, my violin case banging clumsily against my leg. It was wretched outside, the rain turned to sleet, and we held on to each other, pulling ourselves up the block step by sleety step.
“You called me Charlotte,” I said to him at the corner, as we waited for the light to change. “You outed us. Why?”
“What are the markers of a good man?” he asked me.
“I’m sorry?”
“The markers,” he said. “Of a good man. How can you tell if a man is someone you can trust?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t trust—well. I trust you.”
I thought, strangely, that Leander was going to laugh, and that it was a laugh that I didn’t want to see. His hair was slicked back off his face, and he was hatless, and the sleet was beading on him like pearls. His greatcoat was beautifully tailored. His boots were a soft brown and quietly handsome. And he had a look on his face so wolflike he would have driven any sheep back to pasture.
He could be terrifying. I realized it now.
As I watched him, Leander carefully put his expression away, as though he were folding it up like a jacket. The light changed. He was benign again, a benevolent gentleman, a lamb.
“You’ll learn,” he said. “But not yet. I don’t want you to trust anyone again until this is over.”
“Even you?”
He looked at me. “Perhaps,” he said.
I put my hand in the crook of his arm and said nothing. Someone was close behind us, slipping on the snow to overtake us, and I took a breath, and Leander steeled his shoulders, and then he was passing us, an older man with a cane who wished us a good afternoon and disappeared into the fading light.
Even now, Lucien Moriarty could be playing back our conversation with Michael Hartwell.
New York was a trap, I thought, and we’d walked right into it.
Leander was nodding as though he could hear my thoughts. “When we get home, you’re packing. We’re leaving. Tonight.”
Seventeen
Jamie
THE RUGBY PLAYERS I KNEW WERE MASTERS AT A CERTAIN kind of intimidation. It had everything to do with their bodies—drawing their shoulders back to call attention to their size, or yelling and hollering with their friends until the veins in their neck stood out. Licking a guy’s forehead to make him squeal “like a girl”; pissing in a guy’s shoes to see if you could make him step in them and scream “like a girl”; coughing up shit from their lungs and spitting it, breathing heavy in each other’s faces, then howling; pushing each other over on the field between plays, all to see if their macho macho-ness would break someone down into what they saw as feminine weakness.
Being a girl was their worst fear, and they chalked up all kinds of behavior to “girliness,” things that didn’t make sense. I don’t know why they were so specifically afraid of it. From what I could tell, most of them liked girls, had them for friends, wanted so badly to date them or screw them that it was all they could talk about after practice. But when we were all in a pack together, practicing a game where we tackled each other into the ground like beasts, there were the guys who liked the game, and then there were those who lusted for it, the hard takedown, the feeling of pushing someone else down into the mud. It bubbled up outside of practice in physical ways. Not all my teammates were like that. Barely half, if I had to count. But it was more than enough for me. I’d learned to go stoic and invisible when this kind of shit started so that I didn’t become its target. It was a strategy Kittredge took too.
Not today.
I turned in my chair. “You have things to say to me? Say them.”
He licked his lips. “You’re trying to blame this on me,” he said. “Marta told me. She told me everything.”
“Blame what on you, exactly? What are you being blamed for?” All I did was berate people, anymore. I might as well be my ex–best friend. “I don’t see you being threatened with suspension, or anyone pointing their finger at you for a thousand goddamn dollars. So what? Because Elizabeth and I asked questions about who Anna talked to last night, I’m suddenly putting your ass to the fire? I don’t think so.”
Kittredge shook his head. “I didn’t take her money,” he said.
“Her alleged money—”
“Stop saying that,” he interrupted. I had taken this strategy from Holmes, and it rarely failed—people could always be provoked to correct you. “You act like you know what happened, but you don’t. I saw it. She had this fat wad of bills in her pocket, she took it out to show me.”
“She did? Why?”
He looked around carefully, but the library stacks were empty except for us. “Because she said someone gave it to her. She was laughing, like, in disbelief—it’s not like she needed the money, she said. But she was giddy about it. I couldn’t tell if it was the MDMA. I don’t do that shit, so I don’t know.”
“I don’t either.”
“Listen.” He spread his hand on the table, then balled it up. “If I were you, I’d be talking to Beckett Lexington. He sold her those pills. Maybe he was giving her a cash advance on some sales she was going to do for him. He does that, sometimes—Randall was telling me.”
It was a better working theory than anything I had. My estimation of Kittredge went up a notch. “I will,” I said.
Kittredge stood. “We didn’t talk about this. Okay?”
“You don’t want Anna to find out,” I said.
“No.” He eyed me cautiously. “But I also don’t want someone suspended for shit they didn’t do. Beckett works at the school radio station. Start there.”
He stuck out his hand. I clasped it, and just like that we weren’t animals anymore.
“Let’s just get out of Sherringford before it eats us alive,” Kittredge said.
But Beckett Lexington wasn’t easy to find. I checked the radio station, a poky little warren in the basement of Weaver Hall, and found the system on autoplay, records scattered across the floor. The cafeteria wasn’t open for another hour, so I couldn’t corner him at dinner. Finally I looked up his room in the online directory. Apparently he lived on the first floor of my dorm. But I hesitated at the steps up to Michener. Mrs. Dunham would be at the front desk, and she would have heard about my forced leave of absence. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk being thrown off campus, especially by someone I respected.
My phone buzzed. Your mother’s getting in tonight, my dad had texted. What time do you want me to pick you up?