A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  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 carin
g 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.

  When I arrived at her lab the next day after classes, Detective Shepard was stepping out of the door. I hadn’t known that he could interrogate either of us without a parent there, but he must have found a way to talk to Holmes.

  “Jamie,” he said heavily. “I’ll see you and Charlotte on Sunday night at your father’s house. We’ll talk then.” With that, he fixed me with a pitying look and took off down the hall.

  “Wait, you’re coming to that?” I called after him, but he didn’t respond.

  Inside, on the love seat, Holmes was wrapped up in an avalanche of blankets. She looked like one of those Russian nesting dolls, like she was the smallest Holmes in a series.

  Whatever words she’d exchanged with Shepard, they’d left her in a mood.

  “Why did you let him in? What was that about, exactly?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing,” I repeated. “I thought you were giving him Dobson’s infirmary records.”

  “He already had them, of course,” she said. “He chided me for breaking and entering, and left.”

  “So Dobson did go to have his symptoms treated.”

  “He went to the infirmary often,” she said. “Mostly rugby-related injuries, Shepard said. He said they’d tested his hair for arsenic and found it, and didn’t need any of my proof. Then he asked me to identify all the vials on my poisons shelf. And then he left, saying he’d see us soon, in a voice I think he thought was threatening. Amateur.”

  “Wait, back up. You let the detective in here. You let him look at your poisons shelf.”

  “Yes.”

  “Poisons.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s arsenic on that shelf?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s interrogating us again this Sunday,” I said, feeling sick.

  “Yes,” she said, drawing the word out like I was an idiot.

  I stared at her for a long minute. She had to know something she wasn’t telling me. “Right. We need to make a list of possible suspects. We need to find something we can give them. Anything to make you—us—look less guilty.”

  Turning away, I taped a sheet of butcher paper to the side of her bookcase and wrote “suspects” at the top.

  “Watson,” she said, “you don’t have any suspects.”

  I glared at her. She brought her cigarette to her lips and took a long drag. We’d reached an unspoken agreement: she’d dump the pill bottles, and I’d stop checking for them. That’s how I chose to read the new and constant presence of a lit Lucky Strike in her hand—that she was trying out a drug that wouldn’t kill her, at least not as quickly.

  But all that smoke meant the unventilated lab was starting to resemble some toxic back room of hell, edging me ever closer to my breaking point. And still Holmes sat, and smoked, and told me nothing.

  “What about the person who checked out that copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from the library? There have to be records.”

  “Correction. That particular copy was new and had never once been checked out from the library. Someone stole it off the shelf,” Holmes said. “Currently, the library database has it listed as ‘missing.’ And as the physical copy is in police possession, I have no way of examining it.”

  “What about enemies? We could list Dobson’s enemies.”

  “Go on, then. Put down every girl at the school.” Her eyes went dark. “Though I can tell you that, from the research I did last year, I know I’m the only one who had a . . . run-in with him.”

  I swallowed. “We could list our enemies, then.”

  “You haven’t got any enemies.”

  “I’ve got ex-girlfriends,” I countered. “English ones. American ones. Scottish ones. I could so see Fiona with some sort of tartan apothecary box for her poisons . . .” Although it was hard to actually imagine Fiona doing anything but dumping me in front of my entire class.

  Holmes raised an eyebrow. “No,” she said, and exhaled.

  I kept myself from pulling the cigarette from her hand and grinding it out on the floor.

  “I haven’t been sleeping,” I told her, “because I am worried that either you, or I, or some innocent lunch lady will bite it now that we’ve gotten ourselves a murderous fan club. So give me a hand, will you?”

  Her eyes narrowed in concentration. “The Marquess of Abergavenny,” she said, finally. “I set fire to his stables when I was nine.”

  “Fine,” I said, and then, in a smaller voice, “Can you spell that?”

  She ignored me. “I suppose you could add Kristof Demarchelier, the chemist. The Frenchman, not the Dane. And the Comtesse van Landingham—Tracy never liked me. She didn’t like my brother Milo either, for that matter, but then he did break her heart. Oh, and the headmistress of Innsbruck School in Lucerne, for beating her so often in chess, and the champion table tennis player Quentin Wilde. I suppose you might as well add his teammates Basil and Thom. Thom with an ‘h,’ of course. Though I can’t remember their surnames. Strange.”

  “Is that it? Or are there peers and MPs that you’re forgetting? Maybe a crowned head or two?”

  She took a puff that sent her into a coughing fit. When she regained her composure, she said, “Well, there’s August Moriarty,” as if that shouldn’t have been the first name out of her mouth.

  “What,” I asked her slowly, “were you doing picking fights with a Moriarty?”

  Professor James Moriarty was Sherlock Holmes’s greatest enemy. In some ways, he was almost as notorious as the Great Detective himself. Moriarty was the first criminal mastermind of London, who famously died after fighting Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. After that fight, Sherlock faked his own death in order to hunt down the rest of Moriarty’s agents in disguise. Even Dr. Watson thought Sherlock was gone for good. Though the official story says differently, I have it on good authority that when Holmes waltzed back into his consulting room three years later, my great-great-great-grandfather delivered one hell of a punch to his former partner’s jaw.

  Like I said before, I haven’t had the best role models.

  But then neither had Charlotte Holmes.

  She dashed her cigarette out in the ashtray with a delicate, vicious hand. “It’s irrelevant.” There was smothered hurt in her voice, but I couldn’t afford to drop the subject.

  “Professor Moriarty still has fans, Holmes. Followers. Did you know that some English serial killers still list him as their greatest inspiration? And they’ve never recovered all the art he stole. Not to mention the rest of his family actively attempting to live up to his legacy.” I drew a line under his name. August. I had never heard of an August Moriarty. “I mean, I know it’s been more than a hundred years, but—”

  “I’d prefer to think,” Holmes said, cutting me off, “that we aren’t all so mercilessly bound to our pasts.” She rose, shedding her blankets. Underneath, she wore a short pleated skirt, rolled at the waist to appear even shorter, and her white oxford was undone to the fourth button.

  Had she dressed this way for the detective? Or for something else? What was she playing at?

  I cleared my throat awkwardly. In one of her mercurial shifts of mood, she flashed me a smile and hauled a box out from underneath the love seat.

  Inside was a collection of wigs. Dozens of them, stored in soft mesh bags and arranged by co
lor. Holmes drew a hand mirror out from the box and peered at herself for half a second before smoothing her hair up into a knot.

  “So this conversation is over,” I said, but I might as well have been talking to the air. It was no use; I’d been outplayed. She didn’t want to talk about August Moriarty, and so she wouldn’t, and nothing I could say would change her mind.

  Getting to watch her transform herself helped soften the blow. She did it with all the cool efficiency of a violinist tuning her instrument. A stocking cap went over her hair, followed by the wig—long blond hair, curled at the ends—and makeup that she applied with an expert hand, balancing the small mirror between her knees. I didn’t know the terms for what she did, but the face that looked up at me was doe-eyed and glimmering, her cheeks pink, her lips smudged with sticky gloss. She spritzed herself with perfume. Then, without a hint of modesty, she pulled a pair of plastic inserts from a bag and slid them, one at a time, into her bra.

  I turned away, my cheeks burning.

  “Jamie?” asked a bright American voice as she stepped in front of me. “Are you okay?”

  She was like textbook jailbait, all curves where there used to be straight lines. I hadn’t registered before that Holmes had perfect posture, but I noticed the absence of it now, as she stood indolently in—dear God, knee socks. The blond wig and makeup lit up her gray eyes, imbuing them with a friendliness that I hadn’t thought they could have. And the look those eyes were giving me was criminal.

  “I’m Hailey,” she said, her pronunciation lazy and Californian. “I’m a prospective student? For next year? My mom’s in town but I wanted to, like, see the campus for myself. Is there a party tonight?” She touched my chest with a finger. “Do you want to take me?”