Leander never greeted me, or anyone, like that. He was my honorary uncle, Holmes’s actual one, and from what I’d seen, by far and away the most humane member of her extended family. He called his friends on Christmas, smiled at you when you came into a room, threw parties for my father’s birthday. You know. Human things.
But it was more than that. Last year, in the weeks after my father had fetched us home from Britain, when Leander was still wasted from sickness and I was so battered and heartbroken that no one, especially not my family, wanted me to be alone . . . well. After days hovering over us, my father had finally left to make a trip to the grocery store. My stepmother was at work, my half brothers at school.
Which left me in the guest room, staring up at the ceiling fan, as I had been whenever I wasn’t sleeping. I was sleeping most of the time—mornings, the hours before dinner or just after the sun went down. Anytime but at night, when I lay still and quiet, counting my breaths, watching the hours shed themselves until, finally, I got up to wander the halls, unable to shake the thought of August sprawled out in the snow.
We hadn’t been good friends, August and I, but he was decent, thoroughly decent, and he’d paid a price for that decency. Once I’d thought that I could live in this world of Holmes’s. That I could grab knives by their blades, punch my hands through glass, could survive the violence that followed her around like a shadow. But I knew now that I couldn’t, that there was nothing there for someone like me.
That day my father finally left us alone, I realized I hadn’t spoken in what felt like forever. My broken nose had healed, but it still hurt when I opened my mouth, and anyway I wasn’t sure what I could say. I’ve just realized that I’m a coward. I fold under pressure. I make house fires into conflagrations. It didn’t matter. I’d go back to sleep. There was still another week until classes began; I didn’t have to be a human just yet.
Leander had other plans. From downstairs, he called me down into the kitchen—to persuade me to eat, I imagined, though I’d forced down some broth that morning. I took the stairs slowly and stood there in front of him, light-headed from lying down so long.
He stared at me. For a long time. Then he leaned across the table, cleared his throat, and said, hoarsely, “Jamie, did you know your new haircut makes you look like Donkey Kong?”
I’d laughed. I’d laughed until I couldn’t breathe, until I had to sit down, until I was crying, Leander’s hand on my shoulder, until I finally, stammeringly, began to talk about what had happened.
All of that was to say that Leander didn’t usually indulge in the same black moods his family did. But now he seemed like he was going through something, and though my instinct was to try to help, I reminded myself that was the old Jamie’s tactics. The one who fought other people’s battles for them, who made things worse. I was trying to be normal, now. Normal meant letting adults deal with their own problems. (Besides, I was too busy checking my phone. So far, no more texts from Weird Threatening Number.)
My father, the adult, was dealing with his adult best friend’s melancholy by singing “Material Girl” at the top of his lungs. He had, at least, switched to the singles.
“Dad,” I said. “Dad.” We were still forty minutes from Manhattan.
He had one hand on the steering wheel and the other in the cup holder, rooting around for change. “We’re liv-ing in a material world, and I am a material—”
“Please stop.” I watched as a muscle in Leander’s jaw began to jump. “Dad.”
“I need quart-ers for the very next toll—”
“Dad—”
“James,” Leander said, without turning to look. “Do you mind turning that down?”
“We used to play this back in Edinburgh,” my father said. “When we threw our summer solstice parties. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes. Please turn it down.”
My father didn’t touch the radio. “We don’t need to talk about this, you know.”
“You’ve taken your son out of school,” he said. The music played tinnily under his words. “We’re driving into the city. I imagine we have to talk about it.”
We approached the toll plaza. My father rolled down the window, and with a viciousness I didn’t expect, hurled the coins into the basket.
If I’d learned anything over the last few years with Charlotte, it was to let a scene like this play out without interruption. One wrong word, and your Holmes would change the subject, leave it behind you in the road.
Finally my father spoke again. “He’s graduating this spring. He’s doing well in his classes. He has that little girlfriend—”
“I don’t understand how any of that matters,” Leander said, soft but insistent. Sometimes I could hear it when he spoke, an echo of Charlotte in his inflection. She would have used fewer words. Irrelevant, she would have said, or Watson, stop, but the impatience would have been the same.
My father glanced up to the rearview mirror. “Jamie,” he said, meeting my eyes. “For the past year—well, you know that Leander has been keeping tabs on Charlotte. Her whereabouts. What she’s gotten into. That sort of thing. However wise that decision is—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leander snapped. “I’m not there to approve, I’m there to keep tabs. Someone had to make sure she’s alive. Her brother certainly isn’t.”
Milo Holmes had taken a leave of absence from leading Greystone to deal with the small matter of his murder charge. I say “his” murder charge as he was the one who pulled the trigger, but as far as the world (and the court system) knew, he was innocent. One of Milo’s mercenaries had been set up to take the fall instead, I’m sure for a handsome payout after he was on the other side of a prison cell.
Still, a Holmes employee shooting a Moriarty? Milo had always had the kind of power that could scrub a media story clean, but this one was beyond his control to suppress. It was sensational. It was everywhere. I was doing everything I could to ignore it.
As far as we could tell, Milo had kept his promise: he’d washed his hands clean of his sister and her problems. He wasn’t the only one.
What had happened on that lawn in Sussex? I’d realized how little I’d known.
I had been watching Holmes so closely, trying to understand her behavior, that I hadn’t taken the two steps back I’d needed to see the whole picture. She had decided from the beginning that her father was keeping Leander captive. That he had been blackmailed to do so by Lucien Moriarty, that it had something to do with her family’s finances. And instead of confronting any of this head on, instead of accepting that the parents who treated her so terribly could in fact be terrible people, she had dragged me along on some wish-fulfillment mission to pin the blame on someone else.
It didn’t end well. To put it mildly.
In the wake of Leander’s kidnapping and the murder on their front lawn, Emma and Alistair Holmes separated. Who knows how much romance had been left between them, anyway. None that I could see. As far as the press knew, Emma had taken their daughter to a retreat in Switzerland to ride out the media storm circling her son. Alistair stayed, stoic and alone, in their Sussex house by the sea. It was up for sale. He couldn’t afford it anymore.
That was the official story,
Last July, while I was staying with my mother over summer break, Leander took me out to lunch. He was in London to “settle some affairs,” he’d said, and then it became clear those affairs had to do with his niece. I know you don’t like talking about this, Jamie, but—
Charlotte Holmes wasn’t in Switzerland. She wasn’t in Sussex, either. She had turned seventeen, and petitioned early access to the trust fund she was meant to receive when she was twenty-one. She’d been denied. That was the last official record of her.