A Study in Charlotte (5 page)

I smirked. “In what? Murder?” She wrinkled her nose at me.

For those few minutes, I'd forgotten about Dobson, but the sight of the battered love seat brought it crashing back. I watched her watch me remember, and with a gust of energy, she slammed the door shut.

“It didn't happen here,” she said matter-of-factly. “It happened in Stevenson. Yes, I generally do oxy here, when I do downers, so that was an exception. Yes, it was immensely upsetting; yes, I do get upset. No, I'd rather not tell you the details. I don't want you to
know
the details. I didn't kill him, and I didn't hire anyone to kill him. I had nothing to do with his death. As I've told you before, I can fight for myself. So stop looking at me like I'm an object for your pity.”

“I don't pity you,” I said, stunned. She turned to the wall, but I could still see her close her eyes, count backward silently from ten.

“No,” she said, without turning around. “You just choose to feel all the things that I can't, or don't. It's overwhelming. We've been friends for less than a day.” She paused. “Though I suppose we're neither of us very normal.”

No one had considered me anything
but
normal, before this. Though I was sure that hadn't been the case for her.

After a long minute, I sat down on her disgusting couch. “Here is your lunch,” I said, picking up the sandwiches from where she'd dropped them on the floor. “Normal people eat lunch, and so, for these five minutes, we are going to be normal. After that, you're free to tell me who's framing us for murder.”

She flopped down beside me. “I don't have the
who
yet,” she said. “Not enough data.”

“Normal,” I warned her. “At least try.”

I wolfed my sandwich down, even though it was pastrami and lettuce on white bread, full stop. No condiments. It was the kind of sandwich only a posh girl with a personal chef
and the appetite of a hummingbird would have made, and so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. For her part, she ate a listless bite or two, eyes fixed on the middle distance.

“What do normal people talk about?” she asked me.

“Football?” I hazarded. She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Did you see that new cop movie?”

“Fiction is a waste of time,” she said, pulling a shred of lettuce out of her sandwich and nibbling on its end. A snail. She ate like a snail. “I'm far more interested in real events.”

“Like?”

“There was a positively fascinating series of murders in Glasgow last week. Three girls, each garroted with her own hair.” She smiled to herself. “Clever. Honestly, I didn't even leave the lab as it unfolded, I was so taken with it. I called in some tips to my contact at Scotland Yard, and she wanted to fly me out to investigate. Then this happened.”

“How inconvenient,” I said.

She, of course, ignored the sarcasm. “It was, wasn't it?”

“Okay, normal lunch is an abject failure,” I said, “so just get on with it. Why are we being framed?”

“You're asking the wrong questions,” she said, tossing the sandwich on the floor as she stood. I picked it up and put it in the trash. “We're not on
who
,
or
why
,
Watson, we're still working out
how.
You can't theorize in advance of facts, or you'll waste everyone's time.”

“I don't understand,” I said, because I didn't.

I swear, she nearly stamped an impatient foot. “Fact one: Lee Dobson tormented me for an entire year before assaulting
me on September 26. Fact two: you and Dobson got into an altercation on October 3. Fact three: Dobson was murdered on Tuesday, October 11, close enough to both incidents to link them all together. When his toxicology reports come back, they'll prove that Dobson was a victim of gradual arsenic poisoning, that it began the night you first punched him, and that the doses increased in amount until the night he died. I'm sure that his roommate and the infirmary will testify to the attendant headaches, nausea, and so on.”

“Jesus Christ.” I stared at her. “Arsenic
?
Don't tell me you have access to arsenic.”

“Watson,” she said patiently, “we're in the sciences building, and I have the keys.”

I put my head in my hands.

“He was holding a copy of your great-great-great-grandfather's
stories. They'll also find that, last night, Dobson was the victim of a rattlesnake bite, perhaps even shortly postmortem while the blood was still warm. Remember the scale that I found on Dobson's floor?” Stooping, she pulled a book from the bottom of her bookshelf and tossed it to me. I was startled to see it was
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
“No? How about the glass of milk on his bedside table? Or the vent above his bed? Come on, Watson, think!”

I blinked down at the book in my hands, not quite believing what she was implying. “You can't be serious.”

“Oh, I'm quite serious. They're re-creating ‘The Speckled Band.'”

“The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is one of my
great-great-great-grandfather's most well-known stories; it's definitely the most frightening, and also the most riddled with factual errors. As so many of his tales do, “The Speckled Band” opens in 221B Baker Street, with a shaken woman asking for help. Her sister had died two years before in the middle of the night under mysterious circumstances, and now Helen Stoner, Holmes's client, has been moved by her patently evil stepfather into that same bedroom, weeks before her wedding. During their investigation, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find that the bed in that room is bolted to the floor. Beside it, a bellpull trails down from a vent above that opens into the stepfather's study next door. There, Holmes finds a saucer of milk, a leash, a locked safe, and, during their stakeout, an Indian swamp adder—the speckled band of the title—that Evil Stepfather is using to kill his stepdaughters, controlling the snake with a whistle and tossing it into the safe when he's finished.

John H. Watson might have been many things—a doctor, a storyteller, and by most accounts a kind and decent man—but he clearly wasn't a zoologist. There's no such thing as a swamp adder. And the idea that Sherlock Holmes deduced its existence from a saucer of milk is ridiculous—snakes have zero interest in milk. They also can't hear anything but vibrations, so they wouldn't hear a whistle. But they
do
breathe, so a snake couldn't survive in a locked safe.

When I was younger, my father and I liked to speculate about what actually happened on that case to drive Dr. Watson to that much invention. My pet theory is still that he slept late that day in Baker Street, missed both the client and the
investigation entirely, and was only half-listening when Sherlock Holmes broke it down for him later.

At least, that sounds like something I would do.

“Whoever they are, they're taunting us,” Holmes was saying, pacing the length of her lab like a caged cat. “The arsenic would have done Dobson in on its own. The snake is just a ridiculous flourish, there to send a message. Of course, our culprit couldn't find a swamp adder, because your great-great-great-grandfather made those up.” I rolled my eyes at her clear disdain. “But honestly, Watson, why would Dobson have a glass of milk? There wasn't a mini-fridge in his room; he'd have to carry it back from the dining hall after dinner. And while I suppose it's possible that Lee Dobson had discovered a passion for folk music, having a slide whistle is too strange in the context of everything else. The presence of these items is
just
plausible enough that the police wouldn't see them as significant, and so, in planting them there, the killer must have known we would make our own investigation.”

“We're being toyed with,” I said. “But why would he want us to know he's after us?”

“
Us
,
specifically.” She arched an eyebrow. “Dobson was after me all last year, and nothing happened to him. Then you show up, and all this starts. We'll begin by investigating people who arrived in the area since the summer, or those who have a particular stake in bringing the both of us down.”

Why would anyone be after me? Holmes, I understood. She was so clearly smarter than, faster than, braver than—there had to be someone on the other side of that equation
to make it work. Maybe I was just collateral damage. Maybe there had been some mistake. Because, no matter how badly I wanted my life to be interesting, it wasn't. There was no reason for anyone to target me.

But if Holmes realized how unimportant a role I actually played in all of this, she might send me packing. Back to chemistry homework and Tom's dirty jokes and all the other trappings of my American exile. Back to dreaming about her at night while she went on, unmoved, with her life. But it would be worse this time, because I'd know exactly what I was missing.

I decided to keep my mouth shut.

Holmes stopped pacing to lean against the wall for support. I remembered that she hadn't slept at all last night. I had no idea how she was still on her feet.

“The police aren't going to let us help them, not if Shepard's any indication,” she said. “Idiots. I suppose that they don't like that I tampered with their crime scene.”

“We're also their prime suspects,” I reminded her. “That sort of puts a damper on our working relationship.”

She shrugged, as if that were beside the point. “That's it, then.”

“What is?”

“That's all I have to tell you. I'll think on our next move.”

It was a dismissal. Whatever use she'd had for me had expired, and our investigation was done for the day. I got to my feet, wondering if I'd made a misjudgment in thinking that I was starting to mean something to her.

Because it seemed that Holmes had already forgotten me. She brought down her violin case from its shelf and drew from it an instrument so warm and polished that it nearly looked alive. I remembered listening to a special on BBC 4 in my kitchen that past summer, in such a profound sulk at leaving that my mother had begun a campaign to cheer me up. That day, she was making cinnamon buns by hand, rolling out the dough in long strips that dangled off the edge of our tiny countertop, and I'd crept from my room, drawn by the smell of the sugar. She looked up at me with floured hands, a brown curl stuck to the side of her face, and before either of us could speak the radio presenter announced a feature on the history of the Stradivarius. Underneath his voice played the famous recording of Sherlock Holmes performing a Mendelssohn concerto on his own Stradivarius for King Edward VII. The music was scratchy and still tremendously alive through the static. I'd drawn nearer, and my mother had pursed her lips but didn't change the station, and so we spent the afternoon that way, icing the rolls she'd made as they cooled and listening to the announcer speak of the violin's shape, the density of its wood, how Antonio Stradivari had stored his instruments under Venice's canals.

The brown-sugar color of Holmes's violin brought it all back to me in a rush, and I stood there, transfixed, watching her run through a scale before beginning to play. The bow stood out against her dark hair; her eyes were closed. The song was both familiar and alien, a folk melody punctuated by bursts of gorgeous dissonance. Though I was standing only a few feet
away, the distance between us stretched like the hundred years between Sherlock Holmes playing for the king and my hearing it—that remote, that distant.

I must have listened for a long time before she stopped playing, and I realized that I was standing frozen with my hand on the doorknob, like a fool.

“Watson,” she said, letting the violin drop to her side. “I'll see you tomorrow.” She turned away from me, and began to play again.

A
FTER
I
AVOIDED ALL MY CALLS FOR ANOTHER DAY
, M
RS.
Dunham came by my room and politely told me that if she had to speak to my panicked mother one more time, she would very publicly set herself on fire. So, that Thursday, I had to endure my mom's histrionics and my sister Shelby's thousand questions (“What happened? Are you okay? Does this mean that you can come home?”), a call that went on for hours. I told neither of them that I'd been invited to my father's house for dinner; I still hadn't decided if I would go.

Things settled down between Tom and me. Or rather, Tom's good nature won out over his suspicions, and after a day of uncomfortable silence, he came over to my desk while I was writing. I'd been scribbling down everything I could
remember since Dobson's murder—times and dates, names of poisons, those things of Dobson's that Holmes had cataloged with her hands. I was thinking of making a story of it, and when Tom peered over my shoulder, it was easy enough to try it out on him.

Or to try out the version that wouldn't get either Holmes or me expelled.

Sherringford had released a statement referring to Lee Dobson's death as an accident—an “accident with a snake,” which came off much more bizarre than terrifying. It was their attempt to reassure parents that our campus was safe, but students were still being dragged home in droves. Our hall, in particular, had an emptied-out feeling to it—for two days running, there was no line for the shower, no music blaring from behind closed doors.

Into that silence, the reporters appeared.

One day, they weren't there. The next, they were everywhere
,
crawling all over the quad with their cameras and flashbulbs and strident voices. They lay in wait after our classes, putting sympathetic hands on our shoulders and pointing the lenses into our faces. Most of the students ignored them. Some didn't. One day, during lunch, I watched the redheaded girl from my French class crying delicately into a camera. Her headshots, she sobbed, were on her website if they needed them. I guess I couldn't blame her for using the press; the press were using her, too.

That same reporter took a particular shine to me.

Following me from class to class, murmuring words of
sympathy before launching into questions like
Do you really think Lee Dobson's death was an accident?
and
Is it true you keep a snake in your dorm room?
From the logo on the cameraman's kit, I knew they were from the BBC. I would have known it anyway from the reporter's plummy accent and haughty chin, the very image of some grown-up Oxbridge wanker. He'd been sent across the pond to try to get some dirt on the Holmeses; I was sure by the way he kept turning the conversation back to Charlotte. Somehow, he'd gotten ahold of my class schedule, and for days he waited for me between classes, his cameraman always towering behind him.

The worst was the afternoon I thought I'd gotten away clean. The two of them were talking to a townie on the sciences building steps as I came out the front door. “Yeah, man,” he was telling them, “I've heard the stories too. I have a lot of, uh, friends who say Charlotte Holmes is the head of this messed-up cult and James Watson is, like, her angry little henchman—”

I hurried past them, head down, but the reporter charged after me, calling my name, reaching out to pull on my arm.

I whipped around, ready to deck him. The cameraman stepped forward eagerly, training his lens on my face.

“See what I mean!” the townie said. I got a good look at him, this time. He was around thirty years old, with mean little features and thick blond hair. Tom had pointed him out to me as the campus drug dealer—I'd seen him lurking around campus at night.

Apparently these days he had more credibility than I did.

“Back off,” I said quietly, and put my collar up. They let me
walk on alone, but we all knew they'd be back the next day.

Except they weren't. Evidently, the reporters bothered enough of us that parents had begun to complain. Sherringford officially closed our campus to the public.

When I asked Holmes if she was relieved, she smiled politely. “My brother has an arrangement with the press,” she said. “They've never bothered me.”

Morale was low, and so it wasn't a surprise that the school decided to go ahead with our homecoming weekend despite all the commotion. Our school's green and white banners streamed from the chapel and the library; the dining hall announced they would be serving steak and salmon for dinner. In the days leading up to the dance, girls walked in droves to town and returned with long dresses in tied-off plastic bags. They had ordered them months before, from New York, and Boston, and one even from Paris. That was according to Cassidy and Ashton, who gossiped relentlessly through every one of our French classes. But it wasn't just girls who were preening in preparation. Tom was taking Lena, and he must have had his parents ship him his suit from Chicago. I had no idea how else he'd get his hands on a powder-blue jacket and vest.

It might have been a waste of time and money, but for once I understood it. Better to focus on pageantry than on death.

When I told Holmes that, she threw her head back in one of her rare laughs. “For a boy, you are massively melodramatic.” I couldn't really argue with that. She had plenty of data to draw from, because I spent every spare moment I had in Sciences 442.

We had lunch there, and dinner—or rather, I ate in the ravenous way I always did while she made a series of deductions about my day.
You had Captain Crunch for breakfast,
she'd say,
and you've tried a new shaving cream you don't like,
the whole while pushing her food around her plate to disguise the fact that she wasn't eating. I bothered her about that, the way she picked at her food, and she'd eat a fry or two to appease me; ten minutes later, I'd bother her some more. One night, I mentioned that my favorite song was Nirvana's “Heart-Shaped Box,” and an hour later, messing around on her violin, she played the opening measures of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I don't think she realized she'd been doing it; when she caught my gaze, she jumped about a foot and slid directly into Bach's “Allemanda.” (I learned the names of everything she played. She liked when I asked, and I liked to listen.)

The way we were with each other wouldn't have made sense to anyone else if I'd tried to explain it. I had a habit of volleying any ridiculous statement she'd make back over the net with top spin, and we'd ramp ourselves up into fierce arguments that way about beetles and Christmas plays and the color of Dr. Watson's eyes. We bickered over possible suspects: she was sure that our murderer had a Sherringford association, but I couldn't imagine why he or she wouldn't have acted the year before. I still couldn't imagine why I'd be a target. When I found a nest of prescription bottles hidden in her violin case, we had a pitched battle over the fact that she was still using oxy. “It's none of your business,” she'd said, furious, and grew even angrier when I insisted that it, in fact, was. How could it
not be? I was her friend. Maybe that's why the worst rows we had were about nothing at all. After we had it out one night about the way she always sprawled out on the love seat, leaving me to sit on the floor, I stormed from the lab to find, the next morning, that she'd brought in a folding chair. “For you,” she said, with an idle gesture; it was all we really had room for in that small space.

But we didn't always egg each other on like that—more often, it was the opposite. Instead of yelling at her, I'd find myself sucked in by her hypnotic stare and unrelenting train of logical thought until I was letting her do something like pluck out my nose hair for an experiment. (To be fair, she did promise to do my chemistry homework for a month in exchange.) She taught me how to pick a basic lock, and after I'd finally maneuvered my pins into the right position and heard the telltale
click
and fallen back against the love seat in relief, she pulled a blindfold over my eyes and made me do it again. Later, after Holmes said she hadn't been allowed any when she was little, I bought a full-to-bursting bag of bulk candy from the union store and set it before her like an offering to a king. Deep in thought, she'd refused to try any of it, rolling her eyes at the very suggestion. When I returned from stepping out to take a call from my mother, I found her trying, very unsuccessfully, to bite into an everlasting gobstopper.

With all my time spent in Sciences 442, the outside world grew more and more strange. Sometimes, spending a day in Holmes's lab made it feel like a bunker we'd stocked against a nuclear apocalypse and moved into before it happened. When
Tom texted me to ask who I was taking to the dance, I found myself blinking hard in the lab's dim light, trying to remind myself that I could actually emerge into the unirradiated world and go.

But I didn't have a date, and told myself I didn't want one. When I thought about the dance, I kept imagining it taking place at some other Sherringford: one where spending an evening with the most fascinating girl I knew meant disco balls and shitty music, not Bunsen burners and bloodstains. One where going out into a sea of my classmates would be something other than absolute torture. There was no way to forget I was a murder suspect when people I didn't even know still stopped talking every time I walked into a classroom. Dobson's room was still roped off with yellow police tape. His former roommate Randall still tried to trip me in the hallways. My teachers all either handled me like glass or ignored me, except for whispery Mr. Wheatley, my creative writing teacher, who pulled me aside to say he was happy to listen if I ever needed an ear. I thanked him, though I didn't take him up on it. He was just offering because he was a nice guy. Even so, it felt good to have someone acknowledge, sanely, what was happening to me.

Because the truth of it was I was terrified. I kept expecting to wake up dead. Someone out there had it in for Holmes and me, and we had no idea who it was. More accurately,
I
had no idea who it was. I had the sinking feeling that Holmes did, but she sat on her suspicions with the smug languor of a cat on a pillow.

“I refuse to theorize in advance of the facts,” was her response.

“So then let's go get some facts,” I said. “Where do we start?”

She drew her bow over her violin, thinking. “The infirmary,” she said finally.

Her plan was to see if Dobson, in the throes of arsenic poisoning, had tried to get help with his symptoms before his death. At first, I was a bit surprised that this was our next move. She'd done the tests and confirmed the poison's presence herself—why did she need to dig up more evidence that it had killed him? We knew it had.

But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Detective Shepard had completely dismissed Holmes's claim that we were being framed. Every time I stepped out of the sciences building, I saw the plainclothes policeman he'd stationed by the front door. I caught him going through the Dumpster outside my dorm. Holmes told me she'd woken one morning to find a team, on a ladder, examining her dorm room's window from the outside. She was more shaken than she seemed, I could tell. From her stories, and from the phone calls she still took regularly from her contact at Scotland Yard, I knew that Holmes wasn't used to working outside the law. Though she didn't say it out loud, I knew that she wanted to maneuver us back into the police's good graces. Having the school nurse corroborate our evidence would be a good first step.

“She likes you,” Holmes said dispassionately as we walked toward the infirmary, a small, squat addition to Harris Hall,
with a few overnight beds and a dispensary. Every time I'd been there in the past (cut-up hands, busted nose), I'd been taken care of by the same nurse. I'd never thought she was anything but businesslike with me.

“She likes me fine, I guess,” I said. “So that's the plan? I fake some kind of injury, get her sympathy and her attention, and while she's busy, you go rooting around through her records?”

Holmes blinked at me. “Yes,” she said, and pushed the door open.

The waiting room was empty. The nurse was finishing a game of Sudoku at the front desk. “Can I help you?” she said, without looking up.

“I'm back,” I offered apologetically, holding up my hands. “These were hurting again, and I was kind of worried I might've broken something.”

“Poor thing.” She had a lilt to her voice that was oddly appealing. “And your girlfriend is here for moral support?”

I glanced over at Holmes, who managed a tearful smile. “I don't know if I can watch,” she whispered. “I'm just so worried
about him. I think I have to wait out here.”

The nurse put a reassuring hand on her arm. “I won't do anything horrible to him, I promise. You can't leave him now. Come, come.” She steered me and Holmes both back to the consulting room, where she poked at my hands (which did, in fact, hurt), said that they were healing just fine, handed me some Tylenol, and dismissed us. The whole visit took about five minutes.

“Well,” Holmes said, scowling at the door behind us. “That usually works a bit better than it did.”

I smirked. “You might have to work on your caring girlfriend routine. Is that it, then? No records?”

“No,” she said. “I'll break in around midnight and get what I need. It's just tedious having to dismantle the security cameras again.”

“Why didn't you just break in in the first place?”

Her smile flickered. “You seemed so eager to do something. I thought I might as well include you.”

“Um, thanks?”

“But tonight I'll go alone. You're about as stealthy as a lame elephant. See you later.” She patted me on the shoulder and took off down the path, leaving me behind, both charmed and insulted. The side effects of hanging around Charlotte Holmes.