A Study in Charlotte (22 page)

“Are you all right?” she asked. I was beginning to sweat.

“I feel terrible.” The truth. “I need to go lie down.” Also the truth.

“Go,” she said, waving me away. “I'll wait for the detective. And maybe I'll go through the note with your father again. He can't follow my reasoning.”

I ran into my father at the foot of the stairs. “Can I see that file?” I asked him in a whisper.

He looked at me sadly. “In my study, upstairs. In the second drawer.” He had a kind face, my father. I'd remembered a lot of things about him when we moved to England: his dorky enthusiasms and plaid ties, the stupid nicknames he had for Shelby, the way my mother used to shout at him as he slumped at the kitchen table, head buried in his hands. But I'd forgotten how kind he was. How much he'd always trusted me.

“I'll give you some space,” he said, and after I found his study, I locked the door behind me.

I
PUT THE FILE ON THE DESK.

My father had clipped things from newspapers, printed articles off the internet. It went chronologically: the oldest information was at the front. I resisted the urge to flip to the back.

No. I'd ease myself into it. Into betraying my best friend.

It started with the usual sorts of things. Sherlockian societies and book clubs. Fan sites for my great-great-great-grandfather's stories, but far more for the film and television adaptations. Flipping through the pages, I found printouts from some of the fan sites that tracked the movements of the Holmes clan. They were intensely secretive, Holmes's family, and so gathering kernels of information had become something
of a sport for the greater world.

I folded out a taped-together family tree, one in my father's own handwriting. Watsons, always the record-keepers. At the top, he'd placed Sherlock. Then came Henry, the son he'd had so late in life, categorically refusing to name the mother. I traced through Henry's sons down to Holmes's father, Alistair, and his siblings: Leander, Araminta, and Julian. A small line connected Alistair to Emma, Holmes's mother; below that was a fork each for Milo and Charlotte Holmes.

I browsed through the articles about Holmes's first case, when she tracked down the Jameson diamonds. In a photograph with her parents at the Met's press conference, she stood pale and solemn-faced between her parents. On one side stood her father, looking at the camera with hooded eyes. Her mother had blond hair and a dark-red smile, one possessive hand on her daughter's shoulder.

Enough of what I already knew. I flipped through to the last page and worked backward. Information on Leander Holmes's charity. The page before it was a clipping from a Yard fund-raiser. And the one before that, like a lump of pyrite nestled into all that gold, was from the
Daily Mail
.

It was a single paragraph, down at the very end of a long stream of gossip, squeezed between a bit on the Royal Family and another about Shelby's favorite band:

Remember how the oh-so-secretive Holmeses made a big splash last year inviting boy-genius heartthrob (and DPhil student)
August Moriarty, 20
, to be a live-in tutor for
their daughter
Charlotte, 14
? The two families have had bad blood between them for more than a hundred years now, and daddy
Alistair
wanted to make a very public peace offering. Well, it looks like things at Casa Holmes took a turn this past week.
August
was escorted out by the police, and not for diddling with the children! Our source tells us that he got caught feeding
Charlotte's
dirty little drugs habit. Oxford's already expelled him, the Moriarty family's disowned him: what's next for the former future professor? As for Miss Charlotte Honoria Holmes, we hear it's boarding school or bust.

So her middle name was Honoria.

I had to read it again. A third time. A fourth. And then I made myself read between the lines. Was I feeling
bad
for August Moriarty? Was that what this was? Anyone else would look at the age disparity there and think,
Oh, that asshole took advantage of an innocent young girl,
but Charlotte Holmes wasn't innocent. She was imperious, and demanding, with a self-destructive streak that ran as wide as the Atlantic. I thought about the way she'd run roughshod over Detective Shepard when she'd wanted in on this case. About how she'd convinced me of my own worthlessness when she'd wanted to be alone with her homemade bomb. Her blackmailing a math tutor into buying her drugs was only a hop, skip, and a jump away.

The worst part? I'd almost known. I'd made an educated guess, that night in the diner, and she'd let me believe it was
the whole story—that she was sent to America because of her drug problem. Never mind the Moriarty at the center of it all.

If any of this was true, August would have a million reasons to want to bring Holmes down. I racked my brain to remember what Lena had said that night at poker. If she was right that Holmes was upset about August her freshman year, it was further proof that she did actually have a heart, and a conscience, despite her protests. (Honestly, if I were Holmes, I'd be worried he was living on a street corner somewhere.) Milo had come to visit and said . . . what? That he'd take care of things. But Lena hadn't known
how
, only that Holmes had been happier after Milo left. At the time, I'd thought, oh, drone hit. And now I just wanted to know how much it had set Milo back to pay August off. I hoped August had been given a sizable check, maybe a little house by the sea. A book-lined study where the poor bastard could continue doing his math on his own terms.

It would've been one thing for a Holmes to fall in love with a Moriarty, I thought bitterly. In fact, it'd be sweepingly, crushingly romantic—and on cue, my imagination began to color it in. Charlotte and August, our star-crossed lovers, locked in a constant battle of deductive wills. Missile codes swapped via elaborate games of footsie. Having veal cutlets in the garden while debating whether to annex France. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

The thing was, Charlotte Holmes didn't fall in love.

And even if, somehow, she had (my stomach roiled again), she'd fucked him over in the end. Jesus, Holmes had screwed a
Moriarty.
A whole family of art forgers and philosophers and blue-blooded assassins sitting in their ivory towers, connected
to the lowest reaches of the underworld by the gleaming strands of their ambition. Sure, they weren't all bad, but enough of them were, and after this business with August, every last one would have reason to be out for Charlotte's blood.

I tried to yank myself back from the brink. I could be doing that same thing I did in the diner—seeing ninety percent of the story, but missing the ten percent that actually mattered. Maybe I was all wrong. For one thing, the
Daily Mail
wasn't exactly known for their journalistic integrity. And maybe August really had encouraged her habits—maybe she was the innocent one.

Then why was he trying to kill her?

Well, I thought, as long as I was being awful, I might as well go ahead and be petty with it. I opened my father's computer and, half-covering my eyes, put Moriarty's name into an image search. He was a dork, I told myself, a math nerd; he probably had gelled hair and an overbite.

The page loaded slowly. The pictures came up, one by one.

He looked like a Disney prince.

I shut the laptop hard.

F
OR ANOTHER HOUR
I
SAT THERE
,
PARALYZED IN MY DELIBERATIONS
. When I finally reached a decision, I didn't feel any better. I spent an hour on Google, trying to dig up what I needed—but as I suspected, it was nowhere to be found.

All right, then. This had to get even more personal.

As silently as I could, I unlocked the study door and crept into the hall. All was still. Downstairs, I heard the lonely,
spectral sound of Holmes's violin; she was safely occupied. In the guest room, her dirty clothes were gone from the edge of the bed, but her phone was sitting out in plain view.

A few weeks back, she'd decided to give me the passcode—for emergencies, she'd said. Her eyes had glittered as she rattled it off.

“I thought it was supposed to be a random string of numbers,” I'd protested. It was a weak protest: I'd been thrilled. Birthday, snow day, Christmas Day thrilled.

Holmes had graced me with her half-second smile. “If someone can get their hands on my mobile, I'm either dead, or close to it. In any case, you're the only other person I'd want to use it. So I thought I should choose a key code you can remember. Surely you can remember this.”

I typed it in quickly, hoping it was still the same, hoping it wasn't.

0707. July 7.

My birthday.

With a heavy sigh, I scrolled through her contacts. There were only four of us on the list: home, Lena, me. And Milo.

“One of the most powerful men in the world,” she'd told me. And the only person she'd listen to, if she wouldn't listen to me.

I stabbed out the text one letter at a time.
Milo, this is James Watson.

“I've been solving crimes ever since I was a child. I do it well,”
she'd said to me. “I take pride in how well I do it. Do you understand?”

Your sister is making a massive mistake, one that might cost her life. I need your family's help.

“They don't believe I can do it anymore.”

Come if it's convenient. Even if it's not . . . just get here.

I sent it. Then I deleted any evidence that I'd sent it. It was a futile gesture: God knew it would be a moment's work for Holmes to sniff out my betrayal. I debated trying to make good on my original lie, to get some sleep. But I didn't see how I could. We weren't simply being framed anymore. We were being hunted. If we weren't going to be thrown in jail, August and his accomplice would make sure we'd die instead.

And who was to say he wouldn't make an attempt on our lives while we were here? I froze. How hadn't I thought of that before?

Malcolm and Robbie
, I panicked, and dashed down the stairs to find my father.

He was at the front entrance, waving to Abbie and his boys as the minivan backed down the driveway.

“Oh,” I said.

“They're going back to her mother's for a few days,” he told me, shutting the door. “Charlotte made quite the compelling case for it, and now I feel remiss in not already having sent them away myself.” He sighed. “Detective Shepard's in the kitchen, if you'd like to speak to him. Did you find what you needed?”

“Is that Jamie?” Shepard called. “Ask him what the hell Forever Ever Laffy Taffy is.”

But Holmes's violin was still crooning. I followed the
sound as if in a dream. There, in the family room. Dressed again in her usual clothes, all the way down to her trim black boots. Against the bright window, she was like a shadow gone abstract, the instrument tucked under her chin. She moved the bow with exquisite slowness. A high note, and then a languorous descent.

She paused, midnote, like some beautiful statue. It wrecked me, watching her.

“Watson?” she asked without turning.

I plodded forward as if I'd been summoned to the judge for sentencing.

“I just spent a good hour telling the detective about the explosion. As if I knew anything he didn't. Oh, and your father said that your assigned time to get your things from the dorm is at ten thirty tomorrow. So I might toss Nurse Bryony's place alone.” She held the Strad up to examine its strings and plucked one, listening. “Is that all right?”

“I'd rather go with you,” I said, in as normal a tone as I could manage.

She whirled to look at me, her eyes gone dark as a storm. Rapidly, she took in my face, my posture, my bare feet on the carpet, and when she reached her conclusion, she reared back as if I'd struck her.

“You said you wouldn't,” she whispered.

“I need to hear it from you,” I said. There was no use now in pretending. “What happened between you and August Moriarty?”

“You don't—”

“I do, I need to know.”

“Watson, please
—
”

“Tell me,” I insisted. God, I was terrified. I hadn't known that
please
was in her vocabulary. “Just—will you tell me.”

Tightly, disbelievingly, she shook her head, like I was a man on the street who'd made the mistake of demanding her wallet and PIN number and ten minutes with her in an alley. Like I hadn't seen the knife she'd been carrying in plain view. In that moment, I invented and discarded a hundred things I could have said to her—platitudes, reassurances, accusations—only to have her walk past me and straight out the front door, the tap of her boots the only sound in the silence.

In the kitchen, Shepard said to my father, “Sororities? Hot cocoa? Um. Can you walk me through it again?”

I
DIDN
'
T TELL MY FATHER OR THE DETECTIVE SHE
'
D LEFT
,
FOR
the simple reason that I didn't want them to stage a search. She had every reason to want to disappear, I thought, even with our bomber on the loose, but the last thing I wanted was for her to come face-to-face with them right now. Even if I didn't have any doubts about who would win.

It did nothing to stop the sinking feeling in my stomach. Because this wasn't a superhero film (swelling music and inevitable triumph, the enemy at her feet in a tasteful amount of his own blood). This wasn't one of my great-great-great-grandfather's stories (her with hat and cane and pocket watch, dashing out to haul the villain in, me waiting by the fire for the great reveal to be brought safely home). This wasn't even
an item on my father's endless list, an anecdote to be summed up in some tasteful, mannered way. I didn't even know how that could be done.
128. When you betray Holmes's trust, _______. 129. When you realize she's cared about someone who isn't you, you selfish bastard, _______. 130. When the direct result of emotions she claims she's incapable of feeling is one dead misogynist creep, one innocent girl choked to almost-death, your every private moment filmed, and Holmes nearly blown up into bloody pieces, _______.

She'll understand, I told myself after a good hour of stewing. She'll understand why I did it. And, for now, I'll respect her need for distance—I can do that much—and when she's back, I'll apologize, and we can get on with the business of not getting ourselves killed.

That was when I remembered rules 1 and 2.

Search often for opiates and dispose of as needed.

Begin with the hollowed-out heels of Holmes's boots.

Maybe we weren't so divorced from the past as I wanted to believe. I thought,
Oh, I am one stupid son of a bitch,
and I hardly remembered to grab my coat as I flew out the door.