Holmes bent her dark head over the tangle of wires on the desk. “That’s all,” she said finally, and when I left, August was at my heels.
“I’m going to call my dad,” I told him. “Can you give me a minute?”
“Do you two fight like that often?”
“No. Well . . . yes. Lately, I guess we fight like that a lot.” I shrugged. “I’m sorry you had to see it.”
“I don’t know how you two are still friends.”
“That’s kind of bizarre, coming from the aberrant Moriarty who can’t get mad at the girl who ruined his life.”
His eyes wandered over to the closed lab door. “Isn’t getting past it better than the alternative?”
“It depends what the alternative is.”
“Is there one? A sane one, I mean.” He sighed. “I don’t hate her. I’m not a terrible person.”
I watched him, the sad mask of his face, the dark clothes edged bright against the fluorescent-lit hallway. “You could be a decent person,” I told him, “and still not like her.”
“Then what am I left with?” His mouth twisted into a smile. “I’m her friend. And because I’m her friend, I’m going to go do some data mining for her. For free.”
“You’re hunting down art forgers,” I called after him as he set off down the hall. “You can be excited about it. I give you permission not to be a sad sack.”
“Sorry about your shoulder,” he said. “Just so you know.” And he was out of sight.
I wasn’t sure if he was just being very English, or if August had actually orchestrated that whole blindfolded joyride. Access to Milo’s cars? His team? Resources? I should be mad about this, I thought. He had a gun pointed at me by proxy. He told me to leave all this and go home for Christmas. He . . . well, he threatened to call my father.
No. I was crazy. He wouldn’t go that far just to prove a point. Just to get me to get safely home. Would he?
Breathe, I told myself. Friends don’t kidnap friends. If we were friends. I took a deep breath. I needed another opinion.
When I called him, my father picked up on the second ring. “Jamie,” he said, too eagerly. “News! Tell me!”
There was a commotion in the background—the crackle of a party, a child crying. “What time is it there?”
“I’m at your stepmother’s family’s Christmas brunch.”
“Oh, I don’t want to bother you,” I said. “Can I call back—”
“Yes! That’s such an interesting, complicated problem! Oh, no, Abbie, I need to go take this outside—it’ll only be a minute—no, go ahead and play without me, ha! I’m so sorry to miss another round of charades—”
“Having fun?” I asked him. For some reason, I’d never stopped to think that my father had a whole new set of in-laws. I wondered how they stacked up against my mother’s family, the Baylors. On her side, I had one cousin. He was a fifty-five-year-old accountant.
“I’m on the porch.” I heard him slide the door shut behind him. “There are so many of them, Jamie, and when they’re not burning down the kitchen, they’re giving Robbie fireworks to set off in the backyard. It’s been a hazardous holiday.”
My half brother Robbie was six. “They sound a little like you.”
“If I watched professional wrestling instead of solving crimes,” my father huffed. “Well, what have you discovered? Or are you calling to apologize for ignoring my texts?”
“I haven’t discovered anything. Milo’s doing all the work.”
“You and I both know that Milo is doing none of the work, or else Leander would have been delivered home this morning. Tell me what you’ve found.”
I filled him in on the day’s findings, including my brief kidnapping and my theory as to the perpetrator.
“Well, it certainly sounds like a ham-handed attempt at altruism,” he said. “You’re not badly hurt? Then no harm done, really. August does seem like a nice young man, from what you’ve said.”
Maybe I was mad at him, after all. August and my father. “Thanks for your support.”
He ignored that. “It’s good to hear that you’re coming up with some strategy of your own. It sounds like your poor Charlotte is distracted, and with good reason. It’s terrible to hear about her mother. Emma might be a bit of a witch, but no one deserves that.”
“You’ve met them? Holmes’s parents?”
“A few times. They were quite fun when we were younger. Emma’s a brilliant chemist, you know. Works for one of the big pharmaceutical companies. Mostly I saw her flex her skills when she made us cocktails. Molecular mixology . . . anyway, she and Alistair came to visit us in Edinburgh, when Leander and I were flatmates. Alistair would tell us wild tales about his exploits in Russia. I always thought of him being a bit like Bond. I’m sure that was the image he wanted me to have of him, anyway.”
“What happened?” They sounded nothing like the people I’d met.
“They got married. Had Milo, and then—and please don’t tell your friends this—they went through a bad patch and had Charlotte, I think, as a fix-it. People do that with children sometimes. It’s a terrible idea for everyone involved. But Alistair had gotten sacked by the M.O.D.—”
“I thought the Kremlin tried to have him assassinated,” I said, “and that the government made him retire for his own safety.”