A Study in Charlotte (24 page)

“Your life. Your
life
,
and mine. Are they really worth you being right in this?”

“I would never let you die,” she said, her breath coming fast and shallow.

“But what about you? What's going to happen to you?” I could hear my voice breaking as I pictured it. Her on the concrete, the blood a halo around her dark hair. Her under a slab of granite in her lab. On a slab in the morgue. In a bath of shattered glass, or poisoned in the night. Her curled up under the goddamn porch to die, her stone-blank eyes staring up at me, Jesus . . . it could happen to either of us, but if my being there meant she had any more of a chance of staying alive
,
then I would be there. Full stop. I was saying it to her out loud, now, pleading. “I know you don't need me, any fool could see that, but we are in this together
.
I will be here, right here, until it's over. You . . . you're the most important thing to me, and I can't imagine being without you, but if the moment it's over, you want to send me away, I will, I'll go—”

“You should.” It tumbled out of her in a rush. “You don't see it—that I'm not a good person. That I spend every minute of every day trying not to be the person I know I
could
be, if I let myself slip. And I'll bring you down with me. I have. Look at us. Look at where we are.”

“That's impossible.”

“Is it?” she asked dully. I was losing her again. “Are you blind?”

“You can't be a bad person,” I told her, “because you're a robot, remember?”

It really was the lamest, most halfhearted joke I think I'd ever made. But there wasn't anything else that I could say. I'd betrayed her trust; she'd kept things from me I'd needed to know. She'd endangered our lives; I'd endangered our
friendship. I had no idea what was next. All I wanted was for her to look at me the way she used to, with that wry half-twist of her mouth, and make some deduction about the sandwich I'd had for lunch.

I realized then that Holmes was laughing.

I looked at her askance, in case she was also bleeding from the head. But there it was: her low chuckle, a hand thrown up to hide it. When our eyes met, there was a kind of confused electricity there, like we'd broken up and simultaneously exchanged vows. It brought back that hallucinatory fear I'd had that night in the infirmary, that Nurse Bryony would just as soon kiss me as smother me with a pillow. I didn't understand girls at all.

Bryony.

Bryony.

“Holmes,” I said urgently, “what did you say August's fiancée's name was?”

“I didn't.” Her eyes went vague. “I didn't know her at all, only that they were engaged, and that he left her in the wake of . . . Jesus
Christ
,
Watson,” and she shoved past me in her haste to get out from under the porch.

“Where are you going?” I called.

“Milo,” she replied. I snatched up her shoes and crawled out after her. The two of us together burst through the door, covered in clumps of mud, shivering from the cold—we must've looked like we'd come up from some arctic hell. In a way, I guessed we had.

My father was standing with his arms crossed in the
middle of the kitchen. “Jamie,” he said, a warning in his voice, as the detective stood up from the table. We pushed past them and ran straight up the stairs. “Where the hell did you two go?” he yelled at our backs.

“Five minutes,” I said, spinning around, “just give us five more minutes.”

In the guest room, Holmes practically fell on her phone. “Milo,” she said into it, and I froze. The text I'd sent. If he ratted me out, this could get ugly all over again. “Where are you? A tarmac? I'm only catching every other word.” Her voice went dangerous. “You're coming to New York. Tell me why. No, that's a lie. That is too. Fine, tell me the last time you left your apartment. Before this. No, don't give me that, you were the one who had them
put it in your office building
. Yes—no, I'm not on drugs. No. Yes, fine, I am, don't hang up. Of course I want to see you while you're here, you ass.”

He was coming. He was coming, and he wasn't going to tell her that I'd asked him to. I said a silent prayer to the saint of deranged best friends' deranged older brothers.

Holmes paced, tracking bits of frozen mud into the carpet. “No, don't hang up, I have a question.” She paused. “What was August's fiancée's name? I don't care. It's important—no, it's not what you think—no I'm not—did you just call me a cow, you whale? Milo—
damn it.
”

She whipped around to face me. “He hung up. The idiot thinks I want her name so I can find her and kill her.”

“There's some deep irony there,” I said, smiling.

Startled, she smiled back. Just for a second. And then her
phone chirped with a message. I peered over her shoulder.

Bryony Davis. Don't eat her. See you soon.

Bryony Downs. Bryony Davis. She'd barely covered her tracks.

Holmes and I stared at each other. My heart was pounding.

Shepard opened the bedroom door. “So?” he said, his brows knit. “I've examined the note. I've spoken to your father. And I appreciate your passing along Bryony Downs to me for a more, ah, official interrogation. But what is all this”—he gestured to Holmes's muddy pants and my damp hair—“about, exactly? Something I should know?”

She threw me a glance. I caught it.

“Um, well, we're dating now,” she said, a hand creeping up to touch her hair. “We just made it official, and—oh God, Jamie, this is kind of embarrassing.”

I tugged her hand down into mine. “It's not embarrassing,” I said. “I mean, it's been such a long time coming. But I guess I was, um, blind to my own feelings.”

Holmes beamed at me, and I pulled her to me, tucking her under my arm. The detective made a small, involuntary noise, like he was choking.

“We were outside in the snow—well, okay, I ran out there because I got mad because I thought he didn't like me, but it turned out he
did
like me, he was just shy, so he ran out there to find me, and—” She smiled at him, and it was strange to see how fatigue made that fake expression real. “I mean, do you want to hear what he said? It was so romantic.”

Shepard put up his hands. “I have so much to do,” he said,
backing out into the hallway. “You know how it is. All back at the station. Where I should go.”

“We'll talk more later,” Holmes assured him, with what I could tell were the frayed ends of her composure.

He smiled tightly. “Right. Yes,” he said, shutting the door, and from the hall, we heard him mutter, “God, I hate teenagers
.
”

T
HE NEXT MORNING WAS FOREVER IN COMING
,
AND STILL
, when it finally arrived, I wasn't ready. How could I have been? We didn't have a plan. Or if we did, I wasn't in on it.

To top it all off, I was exhausted. I'd spent the night before taking care of Holmes while she came down. It'd happened right after Shepard left, her falling on the bed like her strings had been cut. She'd insisted she didn't want anything—no surprise there—but I'd forced water on her, and crackers one at a time from a package my father had left outside the door. It was just the two of us, silent, in that dark little floral-sheeted island. She stared at the ceiling fan, her arm thrown over her face. She didn't say a word until I stood to go tell my father what we'd figured out about the school nurse.

“No,” Holmes said, grabbing my arm without looking at me. “Stay here.”

“You've solved it,” I told her. “You don't need to haul her in. Let the police do that.”

“I still have more work to do. I need to figure out what part she plays in this. How the Moriartys have been using her.” She held on tighter. “This isn't some jewel robbery. This is the woman who's killed one person and tried to kill another. Not
to mention trying to ruin our lives, if not end those too. So yes, I will bloody well haul her in.”

I should have pressed my case. I should have insisted. But I was exhausted, and she was exhausted, and so I didn't try.

Jamie Watson. He didn't.

I sat back down on the floor and put my head against the mattress. The hours passed that way, day slipping into night, until I fell asleep kneeling by her bedside like a pilgrim before some entombed saint.

There wasn't the barest hint of sun coming through the window when Holmes shook me awake, hustled me into my clothes and down to my father's car. I hadn't spoken a word. “Tea,” she said, pressing a mug into my hands from the passenger seat. “Now drive, before anyone realizes we've gone.”

As I blearily gripped the steering wheel, reminding myself that I needed to be on the right side of the road, not the left, that this wasn't England, Holmes kept up a low unending monologue, sorting the last few months through this lens of Bryony's guilt. Well. Probable guilt. If it turned out that an entirely different English Bryony was our school nurse, I'd be the first to pack it in and just go home.

“She's only gotten more desperate as she's gone along. She's dropped the conceit of hanging us with our own history, which, personally speaking, was the only part of her campaign that I found at all
interesting.
Come on. Explosions, really”—at this point I was parking the car—“there is nothing interesting about explosions. She ruined a perfectly good lab that I had painstakingly assembled, bit by bit, from
things I'd taken from Mr. Lamarr's biology room—oh, don't look at me like that, I've seen you toast marshmallows on those burners, you're just as guilty as I am—and really the only thing I'll miss were my copies of your great-great-great-grandfather's stories. Categorically worthless.” She led me down Sherringford's main drag to the side street that held Bryony's flat. “Honestly, I think they're being given away for free on Kindle, but I did love them. And she has footage of you
naked
,
most likely, which I can't even begin to unravel the child pornography laws on that one—”

I was having trouble understanding Holmes's relentlessly chipper mood. We'd spent the day before in hell. And, okay, we were about to engage in a little breaking and entering (which, honestly, I was pretty excited for too), but we hadn't even acknowledged anything that had happened the day before. No apologies, on either side. No real conclusion to the fight. No acknowledgment of whatever it was that had passed between us under the porch. And here she was, arm tucked in my elbow like the day—it felt like years ago—I first introduced her to my father.

I turned to say something, I don't know what, and I saw her face. Relief. She was relieved. Somewhere, deep, deep down, she had suspected August Moriarty; she'd been too well trained to ignore it. And now she had good reason to pull her focus away from him and put his fiancée in her crosshairs instead.

I quickly debated with myself how I should react to this realization—jealousy? disapproval?—and decided I was tired
of feeling like shit. I might as well cheer up too. Maybe she'd let me pick the lock.

“Holmes,” I said. We were standing on the corner of Market and Greene, peering down the block at Bryony's flat above the flower store. It was all very picturesque, with its painted window boxes and iron scrollwork. It didn't look like the flat of someone who had killed a boy in cold blood. “Were you going to tell me why we're here so early? Her interview at the station isn't until ten, and it's just eight now.”

“Bryony will be out the door by eight thirty, hair all done, looking like a starlet. She'll stop by the Starbucks outside town. She'll maybe go shopping. She thinks this is a routine set of questions, not an all-day event. Anyone who uses a vanity font on a death threat is far too confident to think they're under suspicion.” She was almost bouncing on her heels. “I got into the police database this morning and got the make and model of her car. Registered to Bryony Downs, one black 2009 Toyota RAV4, license 223 APK. Or, that car right there.” It was parked on the street outside her flat. “In the meantime, we are going to sit very inconspicuously in the café here until she leaves, and if all goes well, we'll have you to your ten-thirty appointment to collect your things, because those jeans are beginning to smell a bit ripe.”

I wasn't sure I could survive cheerful Holmes any more than I could her junkie alter ego. All the same, I let her drag me by the arm into the café, where she set us up with two teas by the window.

It all happened as she'd predicted. Bryony emerged, in
red lipstick and sunglasses like an old movie star. Holmes told me not to be so obvious, but I couldn't help but stare at her as she drove past—that shining blond hair, the way she was singing along to the radio. I almost could have believed she wasn't guilty, then, because it was clear the consequences of her actions hadn't made the slightest impression. She'd put an innocent girl in the hospital. She'd taken Dobson's life. Even someone as disgusting as Dobson deserved the chance to grow up and become a better person. Bryony Downs should be lying on her bathroom floor, racked with guilt, and instead she'd decided she was the star of her own romantic comedy.

Holmes held us back another ten minutes. “Patience is a virtue, Watson,” she said. “Besides, she might have forgotten something.”

When the coast remained clear, it only took us moments to get to the front door, leading up to both Bryony's flat and the one above it. It was unlocked. As we crept up the steps, I said a quiet
thank you
for not having to pick her locked door right there on the street. When we reached it (#2, like the mailbox by her door, printed
BRYONY DOWNS
) I went down on one knee to inspect the lock. “It's a Yale,” I said casually, “like the ones I practiced on with you. Do you think I could—”