A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  I didn’t bother to ask how she knew. She was a Holmes. But I must’ve looked surprised enough for her to fill in the gaps. “Look, Tom texted Lena, and Lena texted me. Relatively straightforward. Unfortunately, I was wearing this when I heard”—she indicated her outfit with a frustrated hand—“and so I decided to stay away from the dorm so that nobody would see me. It’s bad form to be dressed as a burglar on the night of anyone’s murder, much less that of someone you hate.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What were you actually burgling?”

  A quicksilver smile flitted across her face. “Pipettes,” she said. “I went to go work in my lab after night check.”

  “You absolute nerd,” I said, laughing, and her smile came back, and stayed. Incredible. “You have a lab? Wait, no. Later. Because Dobson’s dead, and we’re easily the prime suspects, and we’re laughing.”

  “I know.” She scrubbed at her eyes with her hands. “Do you know, at first I thought you came here to accuse me of it.”

  My eyebrows must’ve shot up into my hair. “Absolutely not—”

  “I know,” she said, cutting me off with a searching look. I felt as if she were X-raying me. Her eyes flickered from my face, to my fingers, to my beaten-up Chucks. “But I told him I would kill him. I should have been your primary suspect. And I’m not.”

  There were a lot of answers to that not-question: I’m a Watson, it’s genetically impossible for me to suspect you or, In my imagination, you weren’t ever a villain, you were always the hero, but everything I came up with sounded flip or cute or melodramatic. “Like you said, you can take care of yourself,” I told her, finally. “If you’d murdered him, I bet there would be twenty witnesses who saw him put the gun to his own head.”

  Holmes shrugged but she was clearly pleased. We sat there for a minute; in the distance, birds started calling to each other.

  “You know,” she said, “that bastard has hit on me in every disgusting way since the day I arrived. Shouted at me, left notes under my door. He slapped my ass in the breakfast line the weekend my brother was visiting.” She shook her head. “It took some persuasion on my part, but Dobson wasn’t immediately napalmed. Or made the target of a drone hit. Actually, Milo quite wanted to play the long game, wait a few years and then just disappear him from his bed, make it look like aliens. Or so he said. He was trying to cheer me up. . . .” She trailed off; it was clear she’d said more than she meant to. “I should still be mad at you.”

  “But you aren’t.”

  “And we shouldn’t be talking about Dobson like this.” She got to her feet, and after a second’s hesitation, offered me a hand up.

  “I didn’t think you’d be so respectful of the dead,” I told her. “Just a few hours ago, he was alive and kicking, and practically begging to be napalmed.”

  The sun was rising in the distance, pulled up by its lazy, invisible string, and the sky was shot through with color. Her hair was washed in gold, her cheeks, in gold, and her eyes were as knowing as a psychic’s.

  In that moment, I would’ve followed her anywhere.

  “We shouldn’t be talking about Dobson,” she said, starting off across the quad, “because we should be examining his room.”

  I stopped short. “I’m sorry, what?”

  IT WAS ALREADY TEN PAST SEVEN, AND OUR HALLWAY IN Michener was on the second floor. I had no idea how we’d sneak by Mrs. Dunham at the front desk, not to mention the hordes of junior boys emerging from their rooms to shower before breakfast. I watched Holmes consider it for a moment, frowning, before she slid around to the side of the ivy-covered building.

  She told me to stand back, then flung herself down on the ground, examining it inch by inch. For footprints, I realized. If we’d thought of accessing Dobson’s room this way, someone else probably had too. Nervously, I looked around to see if we were being watched, but we were shrouded by a cluster of ash trees. Thank God Sherringford was so damn picturesque.

  “Four girls went by here last night in a group,” she said finally, getting to her feet. “You can tell by the stampede of Ugg boots. But no solo travelers, not even to smoke. Strange, this seems like a good spot for it.” She methodically brushed the dirt and grass from her clothes. “They must have entered through the front doors. Michener isn’t connected to the access tunnels, the way Stevenson and Harris are.”

  “Access tunnels?” I said.

  “You really should explore more. We’ll remedy that, but not now.” Holmes glanced at the first floor’s thick stone windowsills, at the windowsills above those, and bent down to untie her shoes. “Stuff these in my bag, will you,” she said, putting a socked foot up on the sill. “Yours too. And put your gloves on. We can’t leave prints of any kind. Come on, quickly, they might open their blinds at any moment. At least his roommate is away on that rugby tourney.”

  “Don’t you need to find out which room is theirs?” I asked.

  She tossed me a look, like I had asked her if the earth went around the sun. “Watson, just give me a lift.”

  I cradled my hands for her to step into, and in seconds she had climbed up the ivy to Dobson’s second-floor window. Clinging to the sill with one hand, she used the other to pull a length of wire from her pocket, and bent one end into a hook with her teeth. I couldn’t see what she did next, but I could hear her humming. It sounded like a Sousa march.

  “Right,” I whispered. “When I found you, you were just going to your lab.”

  “Shut up, Watson.” With a slight hiss and crack, the window opened. Holmes eased herself inside, as delicate as a dancer.

  Her head reappeared. “Aren’t you coming?”

  I swore. Loudly.

  Thankfully, all that rugby I’d been playing meant I was in passable shape. I had a good six inches on her too, so I didn’t need a leg up to reach the hanging ivy. When I scrambled into Dobson’s room, she patted me on the shoulder absently; she was already surveying her surroundings.

  Dobson’s was the sort of room I’d seen all over Michener: he had that black-and-white poster of two girls kissing, and the floor was thick with crumpled clothing. Randall’s side wasn’t any cleaner, but at least his bed was made. Dobson’s sheets were a mess, kicked down to the end of his mattress. The coroner must’ve already removed the body.

  There was a framed photo of him and what looked like his sister on the bedside table. The two of them were squinting into the lens, big smiles on. I felt an unexpected pang of guilt.

  Holmes had no such hesitation. “Hold my bag,” she said, and immediately fell to her hands and knees. I jumped back about a foot. From what seemed like thin air, she produced a penlight in one hand, a pair of tweezers in the other.

  “Did you order some sort of spy kit online?” I asked, irritated. I’d had barely an hour of sleep, and, to be honest, I was trying hard not to give in to a lurking sort of terror. Anyone could come in at any moment and catch us tampering with the crime scene for a murder I’d sort of wanted to commit.

  And then there was Holmes. While I stood there, shaking with fear, she was efficient, cool-headed, working swiftly to get us absolved. I thought once more about the two of us racing through a runaway train and smothered a laugh. In reality, she’d make a clean escape while I’d trip over my own feet and get hauled away for waterboarding.

  “Be quiet,” she whispered back. “And pull one of those specimen jars from my bag, I’ve found something.”

  I took a small glass bottle from her backpack and undid the stopper, then crouched so she could tip the tweezers in. Through the glass, the sample looked like a sliver of onion skin; as I examined it, she added another piece, and a third. She pulled up a bit of the carpet and tucked that into another jar, and used her piece of wire to poke around under the bed, dislodging a number of pens, an old toothbrush, some odds and ends. She inspected a glass of milk by his bed and the old-fashioned slide whistle beside it. With one gloved finger, she traced an invisible line from a high vent down the wall to Dobson’s pillow. Then she looke
d up, sharply, at the ceiling, and I heard her counting—why, I wasn’t sure. Every small noise sounded to me like our inevitable imprisonment, and my heart hammered in my ears.

  She bent to examine Dobson’s pillow and gestured me over. The indentation that his head had made was still visible. “Is that spit?” I whispered, pointing.

  “Excellent.” She scraped at it with the edge of her tweezers. I’d said it just to make her laugh, but I warmed at the compliment anyway. “Jar,” she said, and I handed her one.

  “I don’t see any blood,” I said, and she shook her head. There wasn’t any to see, not anywhere.

  Outside the door, I heard footsteps—more than one set—and people talking. To my horror, I heard the edges of my name, of Dobson’s. Above the din, a grizzled voice said, “Is this the boy’s room?”

  “We need to go,” I told Holmes, and for a second she looked like she was about to protest. “Now,” I said, pulling her to the window—I swear I saw the doorknob begin to turn. Without waiting, I lowered myself down the outside of the building, then jumped the rest of the way.

  The second my feet hit the ground, my fear broke open into exhilaration.

  I heard the window shut with a snap. Holmes landed behind me, and I spun her around by the arm.

  “Were you seen?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Of course not.”

  “Holmes,” I said, “that was brilliant.”

  That flicker of a smile again. “It was, wasn’t it. Especially for a first effort.”

  “A first—you hadn’t done that before.”

  She shrugged, but her eyes were gleaming.

  “You had us break into a crime scene to steal evidence—something that could make us look even more guilty than we do already—and you’ve never done that before?” If I sounded a bit shrill, it was because I felt a bit shrill.

  Holmes had already moved on. “We need to get to my lab,” she said, pulling her shoes from her bag, “without arousing any suspicion for why we’re together. Do you want to split up and meet there in twenty? Sciences, room 442.” She tossed my sneakers to me in an elegant, underhand lob. “And take the long way, will you? I want to get there first.”

  SCIENCES 442 WAS A SUPPLY CLOSET.

  A big one, but still.

  When I walked in, Holmes was already bent over her chemistry set. It was the real deal, the kind I’d only seen in movies—tall beakers, and big fat ones, smoke coming off of the strange green substances inside. Bunsen burners all lit like a row of stage lights. This setup had pride of place in the middle of the room, and she’d lashed a pair of desk lamps to a neighboring bookshelf for light. That bookshelf was filled with a collection of battered-looking textbooks, everything from Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Gray’s Anatomy to huge tomes with names like The History of Dirt and Baritsu and You. There was an entire shelf just on poisons. At the bottom, I spied the famous biography of Dr. Watson, the one my mother had told me was too scandalous to read. (Which meant I had read it immediately. Apparently, he was really, really . . . popular with girls.)

  Next to it was the only fiction in the entire bookcase: a handsome leather-bound set of Dr. Watson’s Sherlock Holmes tales. The whole series, from A Study in Scarlet to His Last Bow. Their spines were all broken like they’d been read a million times.

  If I was harboring any doubts about my part in this investigation—and to be honest, I’d had some Titanic-sized ones ever since we broke into Dobson’s room—seeing those well-thumbed books made me feel better. I belonged here, I thought, with her, as surely as anyone belonged anywhere.

  As weird as here was.

  Because there was just so much else crammed in that space, and any one part of it would have made her Prime Suspect #1 in Every Murder Ever. One wall was plastered with diagrams of handguns, obscured by a hanging set of giant bird skeletons. (A vulture peered knowingly at me, its eyehole bullet-black.) The tatty love seat against one wall was spattered in what had to be blood, dripped, most likely, from the riding crops hung above it. There were sagging shelves filled with soil samples, blood samples, what looked like a jar of teeth. Beside the jar was a violin case, a lone bastion of sanity.

  I fervently hoped that I was the only visitor she’d ever had to this lab. Or else she was most definitely going to jail.

  “Watson,” she said, gesturing to the love seat with a set of tongs, “sit.” I grimaced. “The blood’s all dried,” she added, as if that helped.

  It was a measure of how tired I was that I obeyed her. “How goes—whatever you’re doing? What did you find, anyway?”

  “Twelve minutes,” she said, and busied herself with her chemistry table.

  I waited. Impatiently.

  “I don’t like to hypothesize in advance of the facts,” she said finally. “But what I have found suggests that our killer wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He used at least two methods of poison, maybe three.”

  “Poison?” I asked, unable to hide the relief in my voice. I knew nothing about poison; there was no way I could be accused of killing Dobson.

  But Holmes could.

  I swallowed. “I thought you were a sophomore. You haven’t had chemistry yet.”

  “Not here,” she said, holding a pipette to the light. “But I was privately tutored when I was younger.”

  Of course she was. I thought again of what my mother had said, that the Holmeses drilled their children from birth in the deductive arts. I wondered what else Holmes had learned up there in their vast, lonely Sussex manor.

  She cleared her throat. “How to defend myself. How to move silently through a room, how to locate every possible exit within seconds of entering a space. Entire city plans, beginning with London, including the names of every business on every street, and the fastest way to get to any of them. How, in short, to be always aware of what everyone is doing and thinking. From there, you can reason to why they do the things they do.” For a moment, her eyes went dark, but her face cleared so quickly I decided I had imagined it. “And I was taught all the other subjects one learns in school, of course. Is that enough of an answer?”

  I had no idea how to handle these conversations, where the questions were picked right out of my head. “It sounds incredible,” I said honestly, “but I don’t know if I’d want to always know what other people are thinking. Where they come from, what they want. Where’s the mystery in that?”

  She shrugged her shoulders with a nonchalance I didn’t quite believe. “I suppose few people hold up to the scrutiny. But my family’s business was never in maintaining mysteries. It’s in unraveling them.”

  I wanted to ask her more questions, but I was exhausted. I caught myself smothering a yawn. “What time is it?”

  “Eight,” she said, and eye-dropped a clear substance onto a slide. “Any minute now, there’ll be a campus-wide text saying that classes are off because of the murder. We can skip the optional counseling, I’m sure.”

  “Wake me up in two hours.” I had to curl up small to fit on the sofa. As I pulled my jacket up to my chin, I caught Holmes’s pale, considering eyes for the briefest moment before she looked away.

  I WOKE UP TO A STALE TASTE IN MY MOUTH, SWEAT COOLING on my forehead. In my pocket, my phone let out the three-note sigh that meant that it was dying. For a horrible second I had no idea where I was. I looked up into the pleated ends of Holmes’s riding crops, and remembered. It shouldn’t have been as comforting as it was.

  “That’s been going off now for an hour,” Holmes said from across the chemistry set. She was more undone than she’d been before: her jacket was rucked up to her elbows, and her hair was a spider web of frizz from the heat in our cramped quarters.

  “And you didn’t wake me up? What time is it?”

  “You’re wearing a watch.”

  “What time is it, Holmes?”

  She looked blankly at me. “Seven?”

  I swore, fumbling my phone out of my pocket. It was five till noon. I had a text from the school saying
that classes were canceled and that grief counseling would be available in the infirmary. I also had thirteen missed calls. Ten of them were from my father, at least two were from England—Unavailable, read the caller ID—and one was a local number that I didn’t recognize. I played the message on my voicemail.

  “This is Detective Shepard, calling for James Watson. . . .”

  At her chemistry set, Holmes peered into the bottom of an Erlenmeyer flask. “Yellow precipitate,” she announced, more to herself than for my benefit. “Excellent. Absolutely perfect.” Humming tunelessly, she poured the solution into a test tube and stoppered it, sliding it into her pocket.

  I listened to the end of Shepard’s message with a sinking stomach. “Is there a bathroom nearby?” I asked her blearily. “I need to wash my face.”

  She pointed wordlessly to the laundry sink in the corner, and I splashed myself with cold water. “According to the detective,” I said, “they’ve all spoken to each other, and apparently my father is afraid I’ve hung myself from a tree branch, and we’re all meeting in my room in thirty minutes. What am I going to say to him?”

  It was a rhetorical question, and a confused one, at that, but she walked over to perch on the love seat’s battered arm. “Your father?” she asked, and I nodded. She twisted her hands in her lap, and I noticed that the soft inside of one elbow was puckered with scars. I heard it was going into her arm, the redhead had said.

  “I haven’t seen him since I was twelve.”

  “Do you want to tell me why?” she asked. It was clear that she knew that this was what friends did—showed interest in each other’s lives, offered a willing ear when the other was upset—and that she was doing her best to mimic it. It was also clear that she’d rather be pouring a gallon of water onto a live wire.

  Then again, maybe she did that for fun, anyway. Who the hell knew.

  “You could tell me,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve already come to some deductions. Read some invisible bits of my past in my pinky finger.”