A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “It isn’t a party trick, you know.”

  “I know,” I told her. “But it might be easier. For both of us.”

  “Easier?” Holmes sighed, and tossed me my jacket. “Come on, or we’ll be late.”

  A sharp wind cut through the quad, but the sky above was mercilessly clear. Everywhere, students huddled in clusters of two or three against the cold. Quite a few were openly crying, I noticed as we walked past; freshmen who probably didn’t even know Dobson were hugging each other.

  But when they spotted me and Holmes, everyone just . . . stopped. Stopped talking, stopped weeping, stopped telling tearful stories. One by one, they turned to glare at us, and then the whispering started.

  Holmes tucked her small white hand in the crook of my arm and powered me along. “Listen to me,” she said rapidly. “Your parents are English, but you were raised in America; I know that from what my family has said about yours. Your accent isn’t very strong, but how you stress your sentences is very specifically London. And you love London; I could tell from the look on your face when you first heard me speak, like you’d had a glimpse of home. You must have lived there, and at a particularly impressionable time in your life. Add in the fact that you said ‘bathroom,’ not ‘toilet’ earlier—and other times, you’ve shied away from using any slang at all, rather than make a decision to be English or American about it—and so you must have moved to London around age eleven or twelve. Am I correct?”

  I nodded dizzily.

  It was hard to hear Holmes talk, to learn that every one of my insignificant words and actions broadcasted my past, if one just knew how to look. But it would have been harder still to walk through the quad in silence while the rest of the school played judge, jury, and executioner. She’d known that, I thought. That’s why she’d saved her deductions for this walk: two terrible birds, one stone.

  “Your jacket wasn’t always yours. It was made in the 1970s, judging from the cut and the particularly awful brown of the leather, and while it fits you well enough, it’s a touch too big in the shoulders. I’d say you’d bought it secondhand, vintage, but everything else you’re wearing was made in the last two years. So either you inherited it, or it was a gift.” She slipped her hand into my coat pocket to pull it inside out. “Magic marker stains,” she said with satisfaction. “I saw this earlier, on the couch. I doubt you were carrying Crayolas around last winter. No, more likely that it was around your house while you were growing up, and either you or your younger sister wore it, at one point, while playing at art teacher.”

  “I didn’t tell you I had a younger sister,” I said.

  She gave me a pitying look. “You didn’t have to.”

  “Fine, so it was my father’s.” It wasn’t pleasant, being dissected. “So what?”

  “You’re wearing it,” she said. “That’s enough to tell me you don’t hate him. No, it’s not as simple as hate. This is veering into psychology, and I’m sorry, I loathe psychology, but I imagine you wear the jacket because, somewhere, deep down, you miss him. You left for London at twelve, but your father lives here. You call him that, ‘my father’; you don’t call him your ‘dad.’ The very mention of him makes you tense up, and since we’ve established he hasn’t been beating you, I can safely say that it’s dread built up from a long silence. The last piece of it, of course, is your watch.”

  We were nearly at Michener Hall, and Holmes paused, holding out her hand. I didn’t really see another option: I unfastened the clasp and handed it over.

  “It’s one of the first things I noticed when I met you,” she said, examining it. “Far more expensive than anything else you wear. A ridiculously large watch face. And the inscription on the back—yes, here we are. To Jamie, On His Sixteenth Birthday, Love JW, AW, MW and RW.” Her eyes glittered at her discovery—no, at the confirmation of what she’d deduced—and I understood then what it would be like to hate her.

  “Go on,” I said, so it would finally be over.

  She ticked it off on her fingers. “Despised childhood nickname, so he doesn’t know you anymore. Very expensive gift for a teenager? Long-standing guilt. But the key is in the names. He didn’t just give you a gift from him; he made sure you knew it was from the whole family. His new family. Your mother’s name is Grace, my aunt’s mentioned it. So A stands for . . . Anna, let’s say, and MW and RW would be your half siblings, then. Even his birthday present to you is a clumsy attempt to get you to love them. You haven’t spoken for years because, most likely, he was cheating on your mother with . . . Anna? Alice? When your parents divorced, he stayed in America to start a new family. Abandoning, at least in your eyes, you and your sister.

  “But your mother doesn’t resent him: she didn’t insist you box away a frankly ridiculous gift until you’re older. This watch is worth at least three grand. No, she let you wear it. They’re on good terms, even though they’re divorced; perhaps she’s relieved that he’s moved on, as she’d already accomplished that feat before the marriage had ended. Either way, she’d be upset that you aren’t on better terms with him—a boy needs his father, et cetera, et cetera. Your stepmother must be younger, then, but not so young that your mother disapproves.”

  “Abigail,” I said. “Her name is Abigail.”

  Holmes shrugged; it was a small point to concede. Every other detail had been spot-on, gold star, perfect.

  The cold wind chapped at my face. It blew her hair about, obscuring her eyes. “I’m sorry, you know,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her. “I don’t mean for it to . . . to hurt. It’s just what I’ve observed.”

  “I know. It was well done,” I said, and meant it. I didn’t hate her so much as I hated being reminded of what my father had done. How I couldn’t seem to get over it. And I hated the dread in my stomach as I looked at Michener Hall’s heavy wooden doors and thought about the people waiting for me inside. My father. The detective. I’m not guilty, I reminded myself.

  I wondered why I felt like I was.

  She took my arm again. “You also wear the jacket because you think it makes you look like James Dean,” she said as we walked in. “The eyes are right, but the jaw’s all wrong, and though you’re handsome, you’re no tortured artist. More of a wiry librarian.” She thought for a moment. “I suppose that’s not all bad.”

  No one else in the world would put up with this girl. “You are awful,” I said, and even then I was forgiving her.

  “I’m not.” Relief was written all over her face. “How am I awful? I want examples. Give me an itemized list.”

  “Jamie?” a hesitant voice asked behind me. “Is that you?”

  I turned to face my father.

  three

  I’D BEEN TOLD ALL MY LIFE THAT I WAS MY FATHER’S SPITTING image, and after years apart, I could see it more than ever. The dark, unruly hair—though his was beginning to gray at the temples—and dark eyes, a certain stubborn set to the jaw. Watsons might be stubborn, he’d told me when I was younger, but we temper it with a love of adventure.

  Well, here was my adventure: a dead misogynist jerk, me the prime suspect, and my estranged father waiting to sit in on my questioning. Detective Shepard hovered a few steps behind. Someone must’ve filled him in on my family history, and he’d decided to give the two of us a moment.

  In the background, Mrs. Dunham fussed noisily with an electric kettle. A series of mismatched mugs were lined up on the front desk. “I’m making tea,” she said unnecessarily. “So many English people. It seemed like the thing to do.”

  Honestly, she wasn’t far off. “Cheers,” my father and I said at the same time. Next to me, Holmes smothered a laugh.

  My father’s eyes lit on her, clearly casting around for something, anything to say. “So, Jamie, aren’t you going to introduce me to your girlfriend?”

  Her hand tightened on my arm—in horror, I assumed. I didn’t dare look over at her.

  “This is Charlotte Holmes,” I said quietly. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

&n
bsp; I’m not sure what reaction I expected. My mother would have gone thin-lipped and silent, saving up ammunition to barrage me with in private. Isn’t she a bit pale, and She seems very unfriendly, don’t you think, and, ultimately, You know, she’ll just bring you to grief in the end.

  My father was delighted.

  “Charlotte! Wonderful!” he said, and to my shock and Holmes’s, he pulled her into a bone-crushing hug. She actually squeaked. I hadn’t thought she could even make that sound. “Do you know, I sent my son all your press clippings. You did such marvelous work with the Jameson diamonds—and so young! You remember the story, right, Jamie? She’d been eavesdropping on Scotland Yard briefing her brother Milo. From behind a sofa in the library, isn’t that how it went? And then she wrote them a detailed letter, in crayon, telling them where to find the loot. Marvelous.”

  At that, he let her go, and she swayed a bit on her feet. “I never owned a set of crayons,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Clucking, Mrs. Dunham pressed a cup of tea into Holmes’s hands.

  “Wait a minute.” Detective Shepard cleared his throat. “You mean that you’re that Holmes? Which makes you—”

  “Yes, yes,” my father said, waving a hand. “That Watson. Let’s go have a sit-down and clear this whole mess up. Where’s your room, Jamie? Upstairs, I imagine.” He strode off toward the stairwell, the detective at his heels.

  “She was ten?” Shepard asked, and my father’s laugh echoed down the stairs.

  Holmes clutched her mug of tea in disbelief. “He hugged me.”

  “I know,” I said, making to follow them.

  “I think I might like him,” she said miserably.

  I went back and ushered her up the stairs. “Don’t feel bad,” I told her. “Everyone does, except for me.”

  THE FIRST THING THE DETECTIVE ESTABLISHED WAS THAT Holmes and I both had alibis for the night before, courtesy of our roommates. The second thing he established was that those alibis didn’t really matter.

  “We’re exploring a number of options,” he said, perched in my desk chair, “based on the forensic evidence. And we’re not confining our scope to last night. I want to hear the full story of what happened between you two and Lee Dobson. After that, I want to hear exactly why, despite all reports to the contrary, the two of you appear to be thick as thieves.” He looked at Holmes, then me, with narrowed eyes. “It wasn’t my plan to interrogate you two together, and I don’t think I can. Miss Holmes, since I don’t have a parent present—”

  “Check your email,” she said smoothly. “You’ll find a message from my parents giving permission for Mr. Watson here to stand in as my guardian.”

  As Shepard took out his phone, my father pulled a notebook and pen from the inner pocket of his blazer.

  “I don’t need you to take notes,” the detective said, bemused.

  “Oh, no. These are for me.” He smiled. “I have an interest in crime.”

  Shepard glanced over at me for help, and I shrugged, sitting down on the bed. I wasn’t my father’s keeper.

  It didn’t take very long at all for Holmes to tell her side of it. How she had come here as a freshman, and how Dobson had gone after her almost immediately. (Understandably, she left out the bit about him calling her a junkie, but I watched her tug at her sleeves as she detailed what he’d said to her.) She hadn’t been to school before this, and so, she told the detective, she wasn’t sure how to handle his abuse. Others had witnessed it—Lena, she said, and her brother—if Shepard wanted to corroborate her account.

  “It’s important to note that I didn’t want him dead.” There was steel in her voice. “Of course I wanted him to stop. But quite honestly, I was fine. His actions didn’t have much bearing on my life here.”

  I remembered her wariness when I first approached her on the quad. Who put you up to this? Was it Dobson? But then it was my turn to tell a few half-truths, so I guessed I couldn’t blame her.

  Yes, it was true that I’d punched Dobson because he was being disgusting about a girl, a family friend, and because no one was saying anything to stop him. Yes, there were better ways of solving my problems; yes, if I could do it again, I’d use words instead of fists. (A lie.) Holmes and I had fought, and very publicly, but I told the detective that I’d found her the next day to make sure there were no hard feelings. (A lie.)

  As I talked, I watched my father struggle to contain his beaming approval. When I described my right hook to Dobson’s chin, he took notes with a stifled grin. Really, with role models like him, it was surprising I wasn’t already in jail.

  For his part, the detective stuck to asking us simple questions and fiddling with the recorder he’d brought along; we’d given permission for him to tape our statements. After I told him that I’d snuck out of the dorm this morning to see if Holmes was okay (a half-lie) and that we’d hidden away in her lab to avoid our classmates (retroactively true), I came to the end.

  Shepard made a show of shuffling through his own notes. “I think that’s it,” he said, and I reached for my jacket.

  He held up a hand before I could stand. “Except for the part where, when we found Dobson’s body, he was clutching your school library’s copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. With one story in particular bookmarked. Or the part where you had sex with him. Dobson.” He was facing Holmes, but his eyes were fixed on me. My father stopped writing.

  Nothing could have prepared me for that.

  I went cold all over, then hot, and I thought I might retch on the carpet. So Dobson had been telling the truth. Thick-necked, grunting Dobson, who I’d once heard brag about jerking off in the communal shower. I’d kill him. I’d hunt him down and strangle him with my bare hands, even if I had to resurrect him to do it.

  Next to me, I felt Holmes go very still. “Yes, I did,” she said.

  Through that all-too-familiar blood-roar, I heard the detective say, “Is there a reason you decided to keep that fact a secret? Not just from me, either. It looks like even your friend here had no idea.”

  I shoved my fists under my knees. Was I breathing? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t care.

  “Because I was using a rather large amount of oxy at the time,” she said coolly, “and had that come to light, I would have been expelled. Your real question should be whether the sexual act was consensual. Which, considering my impaired state, it wasn’t.” She paused. “Do you have any more questions?”

  Her voice broke on the last word.

  At that, I had to leave the room.

  I STALKED UP AND DOWN THE HALL, SHAKING. IF I DIDN’T already have a reputation for being a violent dickhead, I definitely had one now: Peter opened his door in a bathrobe, shower caddy in hand, but after one glance at me punching the wall, he ducked back into his room. I heard him lock the door behind him.

  Good, I thought. The first person to look at me the wrong way would get the pounding that Dobson had deserved.

  As for Holmes . . . it hurt too much to think about her. Of course the fact that she’d done hard drugs wasn’t a huge surprise; even without the rumors, I knew about the Holmeses’ long, storied history with cocaine and rehab. According to my great-great-great-grandfather’s stories, Sherlock Holmes had always fallen back on a seven-percent solution when he was without a case. He needed the stimulation, he’d claimed, and Dr. Watson had only made cursory efforts to stop him. Oxy was just Charlotte Holmes’s particular poison. Apparently, old habits died hard in this family.

  But I kept imagining it, Holmes stretched out on that tattered love seat in her lab, one indolent arm over her face, the empty plastic pouch beside her. That image alone was enough to turn my stomach—her eyes sparkling with a false fever, the sweat on her brow. And then Dobson at the door, disgusting words on his lips. How did it unfold? Did he have to hold her down?

  I was aware, then, of my breath, as hard and fast as if I’d been running. I thought about it for another half second. Dobson’s face. The empty pouch. Then I slammed my fist again into the cin
der-block wall.

  My father stepped out into the hallway.

  “Jamie,” he said in a low voice, and it pushed me over the edge into tears.

  I don’t cry, as a rule. Nothing good comes out of fighting, I’ll give you that, but crying? For a moment, you might feel a touch of release, but for me that’s always been followed hard by waves of shame, and helplessness. I hate feeling helpless. I’ll do anything to avoid it.

  I suppose Holmes and I had that in common.

  I half-expected my father to try to hug me, the way he did her, but instead he laid a hand on my shoulder. “It’s the worst feeling, isn’t it?” he asked. “That there’s nothing at all you can do to make it better.”

  “I didn’t kill him, Dad,” I said, rubbing angrily at my face. “God, I wish I had.”

  “You mustn’t blame her for this, you know,” he said. “I imagine she’s doing a good enough job of that herself.”

  I took a step back. “I’d never blame Holmes for this. It isn’t her fault.”

  My father smiled at that, though sadly. “You’re a good man, Jamie Watson. Your mother’s raised you well.” This was territory that I couldn’t get into, not then, and he must’ve seen it on my face. I waited for him to insist that I sign off campus to go home with him—it would be a reasonable suggestion, after everything that’d happened—but he didn’t.

  “Come by for dinner next Sunday,” he said instead. “Bring Charlotte. You still like steak pie, I’m sure.” There wasn’t a question there to say no to, and before I could find a way to protest anyway, he said, “It’ll just be the three of us.” No stepfamily, he meant. I found myself nodding.

  Detective Shepard came out into the hall, ushering along an ashen Holmes. Her composure was eggshell-thin but intact. I admired her self-possession, and still, I wanted to be a million miles away.

  “Next Sunday, then,” my father said, and fixed the detective with a look that said the interview was absolutely over.

  Shepard stood there for an awkward moment. “Neither of you leave town without telling me. We’ll talk again soon.” He followed my father down the stairs.