That’s what Leander had discovered in Lucerne, when he’d gone to check in with Charlotte’s mother, and when he couldn’t find his niece—when Emma had refused to tell him where she was (For her own safety, Leander, don’t you know that Lucien Moriarty is still in the wind)—he had spent weeks tracing her through France, to Paris, to the Eurostar train to London. There, the trail ended. He was hoping to pick it up through his contacts at Heathrow Airport.
Leander took me out for burgers, waited until I had my mouth full, then dumped this out on the table like an upended salt shaker.
I don’t want to know, I’d told him, furiously chewing. I’m done, Milo’s done—we’re all finished with this. I thought you were too.
I’m not bailing her out of her mess, he’d said.
I’d swallowed. So why are you telling me this? Actually why? Before he’d been able to answer, I’d said, Don’t, and that was that.
But here we were again. New York City’s skyline was bearing down on us like a bullet train. “Dad. I thought you were just dragging me to another weird lunch with the Sherlock Holmes club. What is this about Charlotte—”
“Wait.” Leander roused himself slightly. “You took him to Sherlock’s birthday weekend celebration? The one in January? I’ve been refusing to go to that for years.”
“Oh, come now. Buffet lunch, limericks about the year in Holmesiana—”
“You might feel differently,” Leander said, “if the subject in question was Watsoniana, and all anyone wanted to do was put you in a top hat and have you say things like ‘Brilliant, Holmes!’”
“I have to say it often enough in my normal life,” my father muttered.
“You never do. I’ve never once heard you say it.”
“I can hear the moments where you want me to say it. It’s unnecessary. You’re supplying it yourself.”
“Just once I’d like to hear you—”
“The Sherlockians were very nice to us,” my father said, clearing his throat. “The food is very good. Yorkshire pudding. And every year, I win at trivia—they call me the Sherlockian Shark. Anyway, Abbie won’t go with me to these things, ever, she says I behave like a Civil War reenactor, so can you blame me for bringing my son—”
The sound from the front seat was like a car starting up after a long cold winter in the garage. It was Leander, laughing. Without taking his eyes off the road, my father reached out and gripped his shoulder.
I don’t know why watching the two of them made me so incredibly sad.
“Neither of you,” I pointed out, “have actually told me what we’re doing here. So this isn’t Sherlock club, or whatever. This isn’t you springing me from last period to go see Les Miserables, or to go get bacon donuts, or listen to your police scanner in the Walmart parking lot. What was the rest of that? A rehearsal? Tell me what’s going on.”
“I thought you didn’t care,” my father said to me, mildly. “That when it came to Charlotte, you didn’t want to know.”
We might have had years now to work on our relationship, weekend lunches and dinners at home and the occasional bizarre trip to Broadway on a Wednesday night, but one word from my father in that smug, self-satisfied voice, and everything inside of me rebelled. I was this close to saying, Fine, I’ll just wait in the car. Maybe I’ll call Mom to talk about her new boyfriend just to see the look on his face.
Thankfully, I wasn’t a child anymore.
“You’re right,” I settled for saying, as carelessly as I could. “I don’t.”
“Wait in the car, then,” Leander snapped, and though I wasn’t a child, I felt like one then.
SO I WAITED IN THE CAR.
We were in SoHo, I thought. I liked New York, the bits I’d seen of it, but it was hard for me to tell where exactly I was. I knew that the stately avenues of Upper Manhattan turned into the winding, almost-lovely streets of the Lower East Side, but from what I’d heard, I couldn’t afford to live in this borough at all. I’d decided against applying to college in Manhattan, though I’d looked at Brooklyn College. Reading through the application, I kept picturing artisanal rice pudding, hipster bowling alleys, people who wore hats with brims and actually pulled them off. I doubted I’d fit in there, and so I’d scratched it off my list.
Of course, I’d never been to Brooklyn, so any sense of it I had was artificial.
That was one of the things that I’d realized, running around with Charlotte Holmes—all my ideas about the greater world weren’t actually my ideas. It’s difficult to solve a series of copycat crimes without taking a long, hard look at the source material, and Holmes and I had been childish enough to play at being Sherlock and his doctor. (My father and Leander never seemed to have grown out of it at all.) Behaving like you were someone you only knew from literature was one thing, but my tendency to romanticize didn’t stop there. When I looked around my boarding school, the place itself warred with what I remembered from films like Dead Poets Society, books like A Separate Peace. Fiction layered over reality. I was somebody who only wanted to see the world through paintings, never a photograph.
It seeped into everything, my tendency to assume, imagine, judge. Last fall, Elizabeth had told me off-handedly that she liked that I wasn’t a “romantic” boyfriend. It makes me uncomfortable, romance. Flowers and stuff, I hate that, she’d said, but with a wistfulness that made me think that she wanted me to disagree. I’d never been a bad boyfriend before, not really, anyway, and so I decided to clean up my act. I took her on a picnic in the woods. Pretend it isn’t romantic, if you have to, I’d told her, and she’d laughed, and we drank the wine we’d stolen from one of Lena’s sister’s booze packages, and it all would have been terribly romantic had I not realized halfway through that I’d jacked the idea wholesale from an L.A.D. music video.
And now I was realizing that how I felt about New York came from movies that weren’t even set there. Today, while the snow fell halfheartedly around my father’s car, I kept thinking of a film I’d seen late at night, years ago, where a boy and girl wandered a city all night long, talking and falling a little bit in love. They’d been in Europe. They’d agreed to meet again the next year if they still felt the same about each other. People came to cities for things like that, I thought—possibility, chance. A girl putting her face into the cloth of your coat, breathing you in like you were something that mattered.
That was the other ghost that was drifting through SoHo today. I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge it. These girls, dozens of them, in black coats with the collars turned up, in smart black boots with their hats pulled down over their ears. Girls with determined walks and straight dark hair. Charlotte Holmeses, all of them.
Pale imitations.
Wait here, my father had said, and before the door swung shut, I’d heard Leander say something about “Morgan’s son.” Morganson? They’d gone into the flat above the patisserie. 191 Spring Street, Apartment 5. If nothing else, I’d learned how to pay attention. While he and Leander did something interesting upstairs, something that probably didn’t even have to do with my ex-best friend, I was watching her walk by the car over and over again.
I kept waiting for one of them to pause. Cock her head. Slowly turn to peer into the window, eyes shrouded by the steamed-up glass like some horror movie villain made especially for me. Maybe they were just dark-haired girls on their way to work or school, dressed for the weather. It didn’t matter. I was falling back into my old habits, dreaming myself up a different world, seeing things that weren’t there.
I wasn’t pining for Holmes. I wasn’t looking for her. I wasn’t hoping she’d come back to deduce my stalker from my phone, to solve my small mystery, to ruin me all over again.
I’m not, I told myself, and got out of the car. Locked it. Went up to ring the buzzer.
Four
Charlotte
TRACEY POLNITZ. MICHAEL HARTWELL. PETER MORGAN-Vilk.