Charlotte Holmes was never satisfied. Charlotte Holmes was never hungry. Charlotte Holmes was never the girl who convinced you to get a naan pizza and root beer floats from a sketchy little place in the tourist district, but that’s exactly what she wanted to do.
In the shop, we sat in the window, watching the snow fall. She picked the pepperoni off the pizza a piece at a time while I made notes on the IP addresses in my journal.
“This one, they pinpointed to Kunstschule Sieben,” I said. “So at least one of the emails Leander sent was from there. Maybe he followed Nathaniel to school. Or maybe it’s the same IP address as that faculty housing.”
Holmes nodded, making a giant stack of pepperoni with her fingers. I wasn’t sure how much she was paying attention.
“There are a number from cafés. Milo’s team sent along some names. It looks like Leander visited a Starbucks . . . do you think it’s down the street from where he was staying? The last one is from this address, here.” I pointed to it with my pencil. “It’s in a part of the city we haven’t explored.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Are you listening?”
“Uh-huh.” After considering it for a second, she popped the giant stack of pepperoni into her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said, her mouth completely full. “I didn’t think I could pull that off. My calculations were right!”
I’d never seen her act like this before. “What are you on?” I blurted.
Holmes gave me an affronted look, the brunt of which was undercut by her chipmunk cheeks. She chewed for a minute and swallowed. “We found proof. Definitive proof. Haul Nathaniel in, question him, and you’ll have your link to Hadrian Moriarty. I’m sure August has him en route to Greystone right now. We’ll find my uncle before the day is out, I’m sure of it.”
Holmes’s instincts hadn’t been wrong this fall, when she’d refused to consider August Moriarty as a suspect in Lee Dobson’s murder. But this felt different. It wasn’t sentiment, or nostalgia. It wasn’t wishful thinking, either. It felt . . .
“Too easy,” I said to her. “Isn’t this too easy? All the information you need is under the floorboards?”
Holmes rolled her eyes. “Occam’s razor, Watson. I’ve texted August and told him to bring Nathaniel back to Greystone tonight. But he said he won’t be home until late. We have some time to kill.”
She was trying to distract me, I knew she was, but the glee in her voice was contagious. “Well, what do you want to do?”
“A date,” she said.
“A date.” I blinked. “What kind of date? Are we talking, like, dancing? A movie? A soda shop?”
“Better.” Shy, suddenly, she dropped my gaze and looked out the window. “Something . . . well, something I love. Something we can only do here.”
“A German something.”
“Well, when in Rome,” she said, and that was how we ended up at the Christmas market at Charlottenburg Palace, three days before the holiday itself.
At first glance, it looked like a sea of candles bobbing in a dark pool. Tents, white tents, rows and rows of them lit from within like clouds of daylight in a line, all topped with light-up stars and wound with garlands. People were crowded around them in earmuffs and gloves, drinking from mugs and eating giant frosted cookies. It was silly, and charming, and a little bit weird, and honestly, I loved Christmas. I always had. I was missing my family something fierce, tonight, thinking of wrapping presents around the fireplace back at home.
And then there was Holmes, who was acting like she’d had a near-death experience and come back to tell me all about the light. She was relieved, I realized. Bone-crushingly relieved. When, in our last case, she’d realized August wasn’t to blame, she’d acted the same way. Talked nonstop. Ate everything.
Ate . . . everything.
“Have you had stollen?” she asked me, pulling me over to a booth staffed by a jolly old man right out of a Hallmark special. “Was kostet das?” she asked, pointing to the both of us. The man answered, and she pulled a handful of euro coins out of her pocket.
“What am I eating?” I asked her as she handed me a slice of jewel-dotted bread.
“Stollen,” she repeated impatiently. “Sort of like fruitcake, only it isn’t wretched. Milo usually ships it home for the holidays. That, and a fir candle to light up next to the artificial tree.”
Gingerly, I tried it. It wasn’t bad at all.
Cookies next, then mulled wine that smelled like cinnamon and cloves. We wandered through the stalls, eating from brown paper bags, getting our gloves covered in crumbs. We’d stopped on the way so that Holmes could retrieve her jacket from Piquant, the restaurant we’d eaten at with Phillipa, and now she flipped the collar up to keep the snow off the back of her neck. Then, with a self-conscious laugh, she reached over to do the same to mine.
“Otherwise it’ll go down the back of your shirt,” she said, her fingers brushing against my hair. “Don’t want that.”
I shivered.
This side of the market was playing Handel over its speakers, but as we wound over to the giant, light-up Ferris wheel, the music changed to American Top 40. The tail end of a song about sneakers, and then—
“Oh my God,” I said to her. “They’re playing L.A.D.”
“I think I just heard the twelve-year-old girl behind me say the same thing.”