“No. Maybe. No. No, we’re not.” I knew it wasn’t a good answer. I thought about saying something like I can only solve one mystery at a time, and then cringed. What was it that Elizabeth had said? Being aware of it didn’t excuse your crappy behavior?
My father didn’t say anything else until we’d made it out of Sherringford Town and into the cold, white fields beyond. “It isn’t nice to leave people in the dark,” he said, finally, with an odd vehemence.
I looked at him. “Am I leaving you in the dark about something?”
“Elizabeth,” he said, gripping the wheel. “That poor girl. She has expectations, you know, and I don’t want you jerking her around. It’s not very nice. I don’t like to see that kind of behavior in you.”
I didn’t like it in me either, but it was sort of beside the point—my father never came down on me like this for anything. “Are you all right? Is everything okay with Abbie?”
“You don’t need to get yourself involved in that.”
“Okay,” I said, unsettled. I’d groused a lot over the years about my father’s relentless good humor, but I was discovering I didn’t know what to do when it wasn’t there.
The night got darker, streetlights winking out as we drove further into the countryside. It wasn’t proper farmland, with farms and turbines and hay for miles and miles; instead, the road wandered through little towns, none of them any bigger than a gas station and a couple of bars, surrounded by ancient farmhouses. During the day it was unremarkable, but at night, with the snow turning into sleet, those old houses were strange and sad.
“Then again,” my father said, out of nowhere, “it isn’t fair for her to expect things from you that you can’t give her. Has she even said anything to you about it?”
I blinked. “Yes?”
“Well, that’s good. Good. Good for her. That’s better than—than just wanting things and never saying anything about it and hanging around, feeling tortured, instead of communicating your feelings like an actual adult.”
We were definitely not talking about Elizabeth. “Dad.” I swallowed, then said, “Is everything okay with Leander?”
He almost swerved off the road. “What are you talking about?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about,” I said, not unkindly.
More silence. More farmhouses, standing like sentinels in the dark. My father pounded his hand against the wheel once, twice, three times. “Your stepmother doesn’t like Leander hanging around so much, looking at her like—she says, and I quote—‘like he’s just waiting for James to realize how much more he likes him than me.’”
“He’s been at the house a lot, I take it.”
“He’s renting a place down the road,” my father said. “I haven’t gotten to see him this much in ten years! We’ll usually put together a few weekends in the summer—run around Edinburgh like we used to, tidy up the ends of some case he’s solving—but you know, it was never enough. It was the best when he lived so close to us, in London, but that of course made your mother furious. I—ah. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Abbie is different, you know. More adventurous. We have a lot of fun.” He nodded, as if talking himself into something. “She thinks he’s in love with me.”
There it was. “Is he?” I asked.
“No.” He sounded almost relieved that the conversation had made its way here, as though this had been the end point all along. “No! No. No, he’s not. Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he’s in love with his straight best friend. I hate when people insinuate that. You know, that’s insulting to both of us, and anyway, I’m just—he’s brilliant, you know? Leander is the life of every room, and he’s obviously a good-looking man. He could have anyone he wanted, he’s not just hanging around pining after me. Of all people! That would be absurd. That would be . . .”
He trailed off.
“It would be really sad for him,” I said, looking down at my hands.
“Oh, God,” my father said.
The sleet was coming down harder. Little dots and dashes of hail were bouncing off of the windshield.
“Yeah.” I paused. “He’s your favorite person?”
Mechanically, he put on the wipers. “I’ve never—I’m not attracted to men. He’s not an exception to that.”
“But he’s—”
“He’s my favorite person.” He was talking almost as if to himself. “Don’t you wish sometimes that who you—you spent your life with was determined just by that? Wouldn’t that make it less complicated?”
I was seventeen years old. I was dating-or-not-dating another girl who was right now questioning the campus dealer about a crime I hadn’t committed, and I was in love with my best friend, who I hadn’t seen for a year but who lived on in my day-to-day like a splinter in my goddamn heart. I thought about the rest of my life a lot more than I’d like to admit.
“I don’t think that makes it less complicated,” I said.
Our house came into view. Despite the weather, the garage was open and lit up, and inside it, figures were hauling in suitcases from a rental car.
“Your mother’s here,” my father said happily as we pulled up into the drive. He was doing that adult thing that I hated, where he pretended an uncomfortable conversation hadn’t happened. “Go in through the front, will you, and make sure the cat hasn’t gotten out? And see if your stepmother needs help.”
I grabbed my backpack and a few of the grocery bags, trying not to look inside them (my stomach still wanted to pretend that food didn’t exist), and fought my way through the sleet through the front door.
Abbie wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Neither was the cat. I was checking inside the pantry, looking for it, when my phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”
“Jamie, it’s me.”
“Shelby?” I said, moving around some bags of potatoes. No cat. “Where are you? Aren’t you here? Are you okay?”
“Are you alone?” Her voice was urgent, ragged.
I grabbed the pantry door and shut it. “I am now. What’s wrong?”
“Jamie, everything is seriously so messed up, I don’t even know where to begin, and I think I only have a minute—”
My heart was racing. “What’s happening, Shel?”
“That school? In Connecticut? It’s not a school, Jamie, it’s like some kind of rehab, and I have no idea why I’m here but I’m here, I’m in the infirmary because I fainted, I guess, when I figured out what was going on, and I’m using the phone here because they took mine, but the doctor might be back, and Jamie, you have to do something, you have to come get me—”
“Rehab?” I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “What was their justification? What the hell is going on?”
“It was Mum. I don’t even understand it. She’s super furious about the stuff going down with you, still, which is weird, first of all, because usually she, like, rages but then gets over it, and then she was going through my things and she found a bottle of vodka in my drawer, but it wasn’t mine, I swear, I’d never seen it before!”
“I believe you—”
“And Ted tried to talk her down and then— Footsteps. I hear footsteps. Wait.”
I stood there in the dark pantry, clutching the phone to my face, listening to my sister’s frightened breathing. I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
“They’re gone,” she whispered. “I don’t know when they’re coming back. But the school—I can’t. It’s like a wilderness camp, and there are horses, but it’s like survivalist, they put you in the woods for days, there’s no school at all, and Mum insisted—and she and Ted got married—”
“What?”
“It was supposed to be a surprise.” Shelby had been talking so quickly I could only half-understand her. “In the middle of the day yesterday. In London, at the courthouse. So like . . . meet your new stepdad?”
“Are you serious—”
A rustle, a man’s voice. “No no,” she was saying, and then the line went dead.
The nausea hit me again, full force, this vertiginous feeling like I was crashing, and I was sure now that all of it was panic.
I made myself breathe. Be logical, I thought. Be a grown-up. Shelby could be lying about the vodka, it could have been hers. The school could just be more severe than she was used to. It could be homesickness. Ted could be a nice guy.