I waited for my eyes to adjust, but the darkness was too complete. “No,” I told him, running a hand against the wall. “Follow me, and stay silent.” I heard him slip off his boots and tuck them under his arm.
We moved slowly. Three doors on the left, before the hallway turned—a generator, a water heater, an empty room that had once been used by snowbound nuns for prayer. The latter would work for our purposes (all I wanted was a room to hide in while we finalized our plan), but the door was locked. My kit had been strapped to my leg below my dress, but when I’d changed, I’d thrown a few picks into my useless little purse and left the rest. I only had my snake and my variable tension wrench—quick and dirty tools. One-size-fits-all tools. I could break the lock if I made a mistake.
I hadn’t picked a lock in the dark in some time. I hadn’t attempted a lock I didn’t have the specific picks for in years.
The night was looking up.
As I positioned my picks, Watson shifted behind me. He was always so impatient. Moving his weight around, cracking his knuckles, visibly counting ceiling tiles. The world was immensely interesting to him, but only the parts of it he wasn’t supposed to be studying. He didn’t have the sort of laser focus that a delicate art like this demanded, and yes, there it was, the lock giving under my fingers—
“Holmes,” he was whispering. “Holmes.” When I didn’t reply, he reached out and physically removed my hands from the door. “Do you hear that?”
I had been too focused on my work, on listening to my fingers, to hear the girls around the corner. They had to be girls, or slim boys wearing very smart shoes: the hard tap-tap-shuffle-tap gave it away. Two of them, moving slowly through the dark without speaking.
Watson and I put our backs to the cinder block wall. It was only luck that they didn’t have on their phone flashlights, that we were wearing all black, that the Exit sign above the Carter Hall door had been turned out with the rest of the power. That we were for all intents and purposes invisible.
They stopped just feet from us.
“You’re meeting them here,” one whispered. “When?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Do you know what you’ll say?”
“Anna, we’ve gone over this a million times,” Elizabeth said. “Of course I know what to say.”
Twenty-Seven
Jamie
I COULDN’T SEE THEM. SEE HER. I COULDN’T SEE ANYTHING in that dark. All I knew was Holmes’s arm flung across my chest, keeping me against the wall. Like I had any desire to move.
Like I’d be able to even if I wanted.
“You’ll need to go,” Elizabeth said. I knew that whisper. I’d heard it over the phone at night, her wishing me goodnight after her roommate was asleep; I’d heard it at the lunch table, when she was snarking about Tom’s new sweater-vest under her breath.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“You don’t trust me,” Elizabeth said. She wasn’t whispering now.
“I trust you,” Anna said. “My dad says I shouldn’t, you know. But I do.”
Elizabeth sighed, a pitchy sound. “Well, if your dad says it, it must be true. And sane. Completely sane.”
“He doesn’t have to be sending me to Sherringford, okay? He could have just forgotten about me like everyone else. It’s not a lot for him to ask for, that I help him out with this. Jamie and Charlotte killed his brother. Okay? The police aren’t even looking at them!”
“I know.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“Maybe I should call your dad,” Anna hissed. “Maybe I should remind him that Lucien Moriarty”—she said the name with such pride—“holds the deed to his apartment in New York. Or that one phone call can get him fired. My dad owns the Virtuoso School.”
Beside me, Holmes’s spine went stiff and straight.
“Because this is the way to make sure someone’s loyal to you,” Elizabeth said. “Make the same threats every chance you get. Gloat. This is total gloating. It’s gross.”
“Is the money gross too?”
“I’m not doing it for the money,” Elizabeth said.
“Then give it back.”
“You haven’t even given it to me yet. So how can I give it back? We came down here to get it, not to have you question my loyalty again.”
“I wasn’t the one who cut the power!”
“No. You’re just the one with the imaginary thousand dollars.”
“Screw you. Seriously.” Anna started off down the hall. “I’ll get you your money. You can have your pathetic shopping spree.”
As soon as Anna was safely down the hall, Elizabeth whipped out her phone and tapped out a message. The light from the screen illuminated her hair, her upturned nose. It cast shadows under her eyes. Had she looked up in that moment, she would have seen Holmes and I staring her down, a pair of vultures ready to pick her bones.
But she didn’t. She turned as she texted, looking down after Anna’s retreating form, and when she’d finished, she locked her phone. The screen went dark.
My ex-girlfriend might have been plotting against me, kissed me and lied to me and gaslit me in my own dorm room, but she hadn’t gotten too far into my heart. Had I known, deep down, that something had been wrong from the start? Maybe. But maybe that gave me credit for intuition I didn’t have.
Even if Elizabeth was being blackmailed, even if her actions weren’t her fault, she could have told me what was going on.
I’d been too hurt to let Elizabeth all the way in. Too lonely not to be alone. I’d been missing Holmes with a ferocity I didn’t understand I felt until she was back beside me, and maybe Elizabeth had known all that. Maybe she had been scared of how I would have reacted if she’d told me the truth about Anna. Maybe she’d thought I would have blamed her. That I would have run.
In a way, I was responsible for all of this.
“Come on,” Anna called. “If you want your money so bad. My dad will be here soon.” With a snort, Elizabeth started down the hall.
There was so little to be relieved about right now, but I let out a silent breath anyway. Beside me, Holmes relaxed.
Then the phone in her back pocket buzzed with a text.
Twenty-Eight
Charlotte
WHEN I WENT LOOKING FOR A SOURCE TO KEEP ME apprised of the goings-on at Sherringford School in my absence, I needed someone that I could rely on. My former roommate Lena would seem the obvious choice: we trusted one another; she was enterprising and resourceful; she responded to texts within seconds, even when in the shower. For a few weeks at the beginning of the school year, I had asked her for updates. But she wasn’t close enough to Watson anymore to be able to give me workable data. He’s fine I guess?? Didn’t eat much at lunch today but maybe he’s cutting now for rugby he was bulking before lol gross right. How is London girl? Heart emoji. Detective emoji. Two shopping bag emojis.
It wasn’t quite what I was looking for.
I hadn’t wanted information on his personal life, or I’d told myself I hadn’t. I only wanted to know that he was safe. I was on the cusp of writing my awful older brother for help when I’d received a call on an October afternoon. I’d answered only because it came from a blocked number—I had hoped that my uncle Leander might be calling. I always hoped, with him.
“I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Elizabeth? From last year. I got your number from his phone.” She hadn’t had to say who “he” was. “I get that this is weird, me calling. But I think he misses you a lot, and it would help him out if you got in touch. Even to tell him good-bye.”
I didn’t respond. I was sitting at a table in my favorite café by the Thames, and the water was quite loud, and I had nothing to say to this girl.
“Do you even care if he’s okay?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped.