A rustling as he opened it. “That’s not a fake, you stupid little girl—”
“The original didn’t have an RFID chip. It failed a UV test. The watermarks and microembossing didn’t hold up to basic flashlight analysis—”
“Who are you?” I couldn’t hear him run a hand over his sweaty face, but I knew he did it just the same.
Irrelevant question. “I want any documentation you’ve forged for Lucien Moriarty.”
“I don’t have anything by that name—”
“Of course it wouldn’t be under his name. I understand that you’re familiar with his aliases; when he flies to America, and he does so frequently, he always touches down at Dulles here in D.C., no matter the expense. I’ve tracked his flights for the last six months. Do you think that there’s a reason that he only arrives on Wednesday?”
Silence.
“Let’s try this. How long has your mistress been working Wednesday nights? Convenient that she’s a customs officer, isn’t it. Convenient that her RFID reader always reads positive, even when the passport’s chip isn’t there.”
Silence, and then the sound of a fist striking the door.
At that point I’d finished examining my boot. That scuff was a simple fix, really, and once I was no longer dressed as this near-version of myself (black clothes, blond wig) and instead as someone so far afield from me as to be a kind of personal moon (Hailey, a confection made entirely for the male gaze), I would go have them shined. I was only mostly-myself tonight because the man in the closet had seen me in every other disguise I had at my disposal, and I wanted my appearance at his work this evening to be a stealthy one.
I digress. My shoes, as I said, would be fine, so I instead picked up my hammer.
“This is how the next five minutes will happen,” I said, lofting it. The dull metal looked black in the late-evening light. That was a detail that Watson would notice, and at that realization I heard my voice grow harder. “Either you give me every last one of Lucien Moriarty’s aliases and their corresponding passports, or I’ll return to your house and let myself into your son’s bedroom. I’ll make sure he’s sleeping. Then I’ll smash this directly into his throat.”
My father had taught me to always wait a second for emphasis, so I did. Then I drove the point home—in this case, I swung the hammer into the closet door at speed.
The man inside yelped.
“I can be there and gone in the time it takes you to crawl out of your miserable little hole. Or we can bypass that whole tedious process, and you can provide me with the information I’ve requested. Out of respect for your emotional turmoil, I’ll give you thirty seconds to consider my offer.”
“You’re Genna,” he said wonderingly. “You were Danny’s girlfriend. The one that he met at the dog park—”
It was out before I could stop myself, in Genna’s please-please-like-me voice. “Oh wow, Mr. B, your terrier is adorable. What’s her name? I always wanted one, but my parents never let me. She is so lucky to have a family that loves her this much! Look at her little tail!”
He didn’t respond for long enough that I had the fleeting fear that I may have given him a stroke. Then I recognized the scrap of sound coming underneath the door for what it was—he was crying.
I looked down at the hammer in my hands.
I HAD, LATELY, BEEN COMING TO TERMS WITH THE KNOWLEDGE that I could be cruel.
Given the facts at hand about these past few years (thanks, again, to Watson), this might sound like a facetious revelation. I wasn’t a prize on the best of days, but I hadn’t ever parsed out why.
I simply was what I was—a girl who had forged herself into a statue. I’d believed it best to look for the cracks and flaws in others, to chart them, to exploit them, to smooth my own flaws over until I gleamed like marble. I needed to be impervious. I told myself I was until I believed it. Unfortunately, what followed was a series of explosions. It’s a fine thing to be a stately marble column in a city. It’s something else entirely to find yourself in pieces while that city burns.
It felt like that city had been burning for a very long time.
Every night before I slept, I shut my eyes and remembered what had happened the last time I’d properly lost my head. I thought about August. August, who believed in fighting your worst instincts, in hope and in the police and probably in puppies and Christmas, who had loved me like I had been his own impossible shadow. August, who had only been in Sussex because I’d wanted to watch him suffer.
It was too much for me to think of it as a story. I had to pull it apart into disparate facts, hold them up one by one in the light.
Lucien, after his failure to string me up on false murder charges in Sherringford, had come up with a new plan.
Blackmail, aimed at Alistair and Emma Holmes, my parents, and my favorite uncle, Leander.
The terms: either they keep Leander out of the picture, and away from the forgery ring supporting his siblings, Hadrian and Phillipa, or
Lucien would alert the government to the existence of my father’s only assets, a series of offshore bank accounts lined with Russian money.
When they initially refused, Lucien ordered my mother’s home care nurse—a woman under his employ—to poison her.
My parents told me none of this.
Instead they ordered me away to my brother Milo’s offices in Germany, where August Moriarty was working in his employ. There, they imagined, I would be safe.
In the meantime, my mother gained the upper hand on her home care nurse while our house’s security system was off, dressed the nurse as herself, then drugged her. Then staged the scene to appear as though their positions hadn’t been flipped.
This involved wigs and costumes, and in that way (and only that way), it was after my own heart.
Leander hid in their basement while my parents debated their next move.
To reiterate: I knew none of this.
For a long time I used that fact to absolve myself of guilt.
Nota bene: Lucien Moriarty was orchestrating these schemes from abroad, untouchable, unreachable, and soon enough he disappeared from even my brother’s surveilling eye.
In a sick sort of way I admired him for that.
All I had figured, all I had learned, was that Lucien was poisoning my mother, that my family’s finances were in trouble, and that my parents were holding my uncle in their basement. I assumed they had been keeping him captive to demand he hand over his share of the inheritance, thus smoothing over their financial issues.
You see, I’d been given few reasons over the years to believe that my parents could have good intentions.
And still I felt the need to protect them from the consequences of my own mistakes. With the additional bonus of locking up Lucien Moriarty and throwing away the key.
My plan was simple: I would take apart the Moriartys’ forgery ring, then bring back the perpetrators, Hadrian and Phillipa, to our family’s house in England. There, I would frame them for my uncle’s disappearance, freeing my parents from blame. This action would flush Lucien out of hiding, as he would never let his family take the fall for a Holmes’s actions.
My mother’s plan was simple: my uncle Leander would agree to take a nonlethal dose of the same poison Lucien had given to her, then go to the hospital and claim that Hadrian and Phillipa Moriarty had poisoned him. Which would flush Lucien out of hiding. As he would never let his family take the fall for a Holmes’s actions.