A Study in Charlotte(93)

“You whore. I’d been with Augie since we were kids. He’d gone to Eton, and then early to Oxford, while I went to the village school, but all the while he’d always loved me. Me, do you understand? I went over to the Moriartys’ for every Sunday dinner. They came to my flute recitals, when my own mother was too drunk to scrape herself off the sofa. And when I was seventeen and my mother died, and my father couldn’t be fucked to take me in, do you know who did? Oh, that’s right. Professor Moriarty and his wife. I don’t care what they did on the side—they were saints, do you understand? If they asked me to slit my own throat, I would have, for them.”

“I thought you came to the States when you were sixteen,” Holmes whispered.

Bryony smiled. “Do you think my name was the only part of my employment records I had falsified? No, I was never sent away across an ocean. No one wanted to be rid of me that badly. You see, I was to marry Augie as soon as I finished at uni. His parents paid for me to attend the University of London, and his family had already bought a flat for us to live in as husband and wife. I was to be a doctor. I’m very smart, you know. Though you Holmeses all think that there’s no one as bloody brilliant as you, Augie could run circles around you with his eyes shut, and I was going to be a doctor.

“And then Augie took that horrible job.” She ground her teeth so hard that I could hear it, the enamel and bone. “At your house.

“His parents warned him against it. His brother Lucien did too. They thought he was mad, going into a den of vipers like that. Your bitch of a mother and your homicidal brother and you, the enfant terrible, as his student? God, the games the Moriartys play are small compared to yours. But Augie believed the best of people. He believed the best from you, baby Charlotte. That was his downfall.”

That was when I realized that she was talking about him as if he were dead. Holmes noticed, too—her eyes finally drifted up from Bryony’s boots to her cruelly smiling face. But Holmes kept her immaculate poker face. Either this wasn’t a surprise, or her composure was even better than I’d thought.

“The last time I saw Augie alive,” Bryony said, “was the day before the drugs bust. He’d come up to London for a few days, to visit me. It was beautiful. He took me to this gorgeous restaurant. White tablecloths. We talked about our wedding. It was going to be small, intimate. In his family’s backyard, wildflowers, his mother’s wedding dress. We were so happy. We didn’t need anything but each other.” She lost her dreamy look, then. “He went back to your house the next day. I reckon you could smell me all over him. Made you crazy with jealousy. Just a little girl, but with such big-girl appetites. He told me all about your crush, you know. He thought it was adorable.”

So much for composure. Holmes flinched, as if she’d been hit across the face.

“The day after, you called the law down on him. After the police left, after they found Lucien and dragged him away to jail—oh, you look so surprised, what the hell did you think happened to him?—I drove all over creation, looking for him. The police couldn’t find him; he’d made his confession and run. Oxford had expelled him. No other school would have him, not with that record. He’d panicked. Gone home. And he’d taken his father’s pistol into his childhood bedroom, and he shot himself in the face.”

I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand at all—I’d thought August had been hauled away to jail, and when he’d been paroled, had gotten a job at Greystone working for Milo. I racked my memory as best as I could. What had Holmes said, exactly, when she was telling me the story?

August stayed to take the blame, as I suspected he would . . . he got a job, finally. Works for my brother in Germany.

There wasn’t anything about what happened in between.

Even in my feverish haze, I began filling in the blanks.

August Moriarty had faked his death, most likely with his parents’ help. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before: he’d confessed to selling hard drugs to a minor, and the sentence for that would have been much longer than the timeline Holmes had laid out for me between his crime and his new life. His parents had given him up, Holmes had said. They would have had to cut off all public contact to maintain the fiction of his death. But they’d buried the news of it, too. I hadn’t found any obituaries when I was researching him, any mention of a funeral. It was as if August Moriarty had simply stopped existing. Frozen in time as a wonder boy, working on the intricate mathematical patterns in the Arctic Circle, his thick blond Disney hair blowing in the frigid wind.