A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  I looked at her, so thin and angular and sad, so surprised at herself every time that she laughed, and I wondered what it would have actually been like to grow up in the Holmes household. Long velvet curtains, I thought, and libraries filled with rare books. A hushed fight always happening the next room over. Charlotte and her brother made to wander around the house in blindfolds, listening at doors for practice, scolded for any emotional attachments except to each other. It sounded like a movie, but it must’ve been hell to live it.

  “Eat,” I said, pushing her plate at her. To appease me, she took a single bite of bacon. “Did you even want to be a detective?”

  “That was never the question. I’ve been solving crimes ever since I was a child. I do it well. I take pride in how well I do it, do you understand?” I nodded quickly. There was a fire in her eyes. “But I was the second child. Milo has always done everything they’ve ever wanted him to. I can’t say it hasn’t paid off—he’s one of the most powerful men in the world, and he’s twenty-four years old. But I . . .” She smiled a secret, pleased sort of smile. “I’m not interested in doing anything I don’t want to do.”

  “And so they sent you to America to cool your heels.”

  Holmes shrugged. “The Mail had a field day with all that. Will you look it up?”

  “No,” I said, and it was true. I’d always been afraid to shatter my fantasies of her by researching the real thing. “Unless—do you want me to?”

  “There’s no point. Milo had every word of the scandal scrubbed from the web. And I don’t want you to know all about it. Not yet.” Her smile faded. “Anyway, it was awful. They printed my middle name.”

  She was trying to change the subject, so I let her. “Regina? Mildred? Hulga?”

  “None of the above. And to answer your original question, I’ve got to solve this mess myself. I’m sure that if I rang my family up and said, Look, I’m about to be chucked in jail, will you help, they would. Because they don’t believe I can do it without them, anymore.”

  “I believe you can,” I said. “Though that might just be a necessary delusion. Otherwise, I’m forced to believe that this Sunday, Detective Shepard will say that after a thorough investigation, it’s clear that we are the guiltiest guilty murderers in the world.”

  “That’s not what he’s going to say.” She took another bite. “How did you know I wanted bacon? Did you deduce that as well?”

  “I guessed,” I said, and watched the smile come back to her face. “Try the pancakes. They’re good. My father used to bring me here when I was in grade school.”

  “I know,” she said. “You ordered without looking at your menu.”

  We sat in companionable silence for a long time. I’d long since finished my own food, so I watched Holmes cut her pancakes into tiny slivers, dropping each one in a bath of maple syrup before putting it in her mouth. It was nice to linger somewhere. I hadn’t been comfortable anywhere at Sherringford outside of Holmes’s lab. Still, we were closing in on three in the morning by the time she’d finished eating.

  “What’s our next move?” I asked. “If we’ve ruled out the new male students, that’s at least a start.”

  “Exotic animal licenses,” she said. “Private owners first, then the zoos. You can begin digging in the morning to see who around here keeps deadly snakes. Surely one has to have been stolen. There’s no doubt the police have already looked, but then, I’m able to see things they can’t. And everyone’s falling over themselves to prepare for homecoming tomorrow, so we should be relatively free to move around.”

  It was good to have a concrete plan. I felt myself relax a little bit further.

  Holmes cleared her throat. “Watson,” she said in a funny voice, “you weren’t going to ask me to the dance, were you?”

  “No,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. I tried to imagine Holmes under a disco ball, jumping around to some Top 40 song. It was easier to imagine a whale dancing, or Gandhi. Then I imagined some slow song, one that wasn’t complete shit, and the lights down low, and what it’d be like to have her in my arms, and I drank down my glass of water in one go. “Did you want me to? Because I had the impression you didn’t.”

  “Watson,” she said again. I didn’t know if she meant it as a warning or an endearment. But then, I never knew, with her.

  This was a subject I didn’t want to touch without full body armor and a ten-foot pole. She’d warned me away from it the first time we ever spoke.

  “Right,” I said, picking up Lena’s keys, “we should go before your hall mother wakes from her thousand-year nap.”

  I held the door open for her. The parking lot was almost empty. I squinted, waiting for my eyes to adjust, and just then, at the far end of the parking lot, a black sedan started up.

  It kept its lights off as it peeled out of the parking lot.

  “Holmes?” I said, frozen. “Did that just happen because he saw us?”

  But she was already running for Lena’s car. “Come on,” she barked.

  I fumbled to unlock the car, to back out of the space, to maneuver us out of the lot. Holmes was almost cross-eyed with impatience, but to my relief, she didn’t say anything. I hadn’t exactly done a lot of driving back in London. I mean, I’d driven my mum’s car through a parking lot. Once.

  But my life dictated that the first night I was on the road, I’d end up in a car chase. It wasn’t like the movies, I thought grimly, as we pulled out onto the empty street. The sedan was only a pair of lights in the distance, speeding toward town. It was almost impossible to stay on its tail. The dark was stripped away by a series of streetlights, and ahead of us, the sedan burned through one red light and then another, leading us away from Sherringford and toward the coast.

  Holmes had pulled a pair of folding binoculars from God knows where. She leaned forward, peering through the windshield. “The driver’s alone. He has a black coat and a black hat down over his ears. Blond hair under it. I can’t see his face. There’s—there’s a case in his front seat, the kind my old dealer used to carry his—”

  “Dealer?” I asked tersely.

  She shot me a look from behind the binoculars. “Yes.”

  I thought about the pinched-face man talking to the BBC reporter. Charlotte Holmes is the head of this messed-up cult and James Watson is, like, her angry little henchman. “I think I know who it is. But if he’s a dealer, why the hell is he running from us?”

  “Watson,” she said, in a warning tone, as I bore down on him. We cleared seventy miles an hour. Eighty.

  “You’re not going to tell me to slow down, are you?” I asked, clutching the wheel.

  “No.” I heard the smile in her voice. “I was going to tell you to go faster.”

  We blew past dark farmland and stands of trees, past hints of civilization—a bait shop, a crappy motel. My brain was racing as fast as the car. If the police pulled us over and hauled us back to school, we’d be expelled for sneaking out after hours. If the car in front of us braked or even slowed down—

  We’d be dead.

  My hands tightened on the wheel. I wasn’t going to let up, not this close to finally learning something concrete. Give us a clue, I thought, a real one. Let us get just a little bit closer.

  At the next intersection, he jerked into a hard right turn, trying to take us by surprise. Which is when he lost control. Under the bright streetlights, his car spun out down the center of the road, finally beaching itself on a curb outside a shuttered gas station.

  I slammed on the brakes, and we fishtailed after him. Holmes’s binoculars flew out of her hands and into the windshield with a sharp crack.

  We shuddered to a stop two feet from the sedan.

  If I didn’t know it before this, I knew it now. I wasn’t like Charlotte Holmes. I wouldn’t ever be. Because while I was still unbuckling my seat belt with shaking fingers, trying to remember how to breathe, she’d freed herself, cleared our car, and was wrenching open the door of the black sedan.

  Wh
ile he was escaping through the passenger side.

  “Holmes,” I yelled, stumbling outside. “Holmes!”

  We were in the middle of nowhere. Trees crowded the two-lane road, dense with underbrush, and I watched her crash after him into the pitch-black wood, shouting for him to stop.

  I took off after them.

  It was like a nightmare. Branches lashed back at me as I ran, leaving stinging welts across my face, my arms. More than once, my foot caught on a tree root and sent me sprawling, and when I picked myself up, they were that much farther away. I remembered, suddenly, being a kid in a wood like this one, playing a game of ghost tag in the dark. I’d hidden myself in a burned-out tree trunk, and I remembered the hand reaching in to tag me, a white flash in all that darkness. I’d screamed myself hoarse.

  Tonight didn’t feel all that much different.

  Holmes pulled farther and farther ahead of me. She didn’t trip. She didn’t fall. She moved like a cat through the night.

  And then I couldn’t see her anymore.

  “Come back!” I shouted, finally skidding to a stop. “Give it up!” I could hear him, faintly, still crashing through the bushes. We weren’t going to catch him. Besides, what would we do with him if we did? I didn’t have any weapons. I didn’t know how to threaten someone with anything but my fist.

  In the far distance, I heard sirens.

  “Holmes!” I shouted again. “Someone called the police!”

  “Jesus, Watson,” her voice said a little bit ahead of me. “I’m right here.”

  She’d stopped to catch her breath. In the dim light, she looked as terrible as I felt, scratched and grim, but I saw her eyes gleaming with the thrill of the hunt.

  “We have to get back to the car,” I said. “Now.”

  When we got back to the road, the cops were still out of sight, though the sirens were getting louder. We were a long way from anything, out here.

  As I started Lena’s car, Holmes quickly rummaged through the dealer’s sedan, taking pictures with her cell phone, touching everything through the cloth of her shirt. Careful, I knew, not to leave fingerprints.

  “Come on,” I hissed.

  As she climbed back in, she tucked something small into her pocket. “Pull around to the back of the petrol station. Park next to the owner’s truck, turn it off, and duck down.”

  I did as she said, and not a moment too soon. Red-and-blue lights flooded in through the rear window. I held my breath as the cop car circled the gas station, slowing down behind us. A door opened, closed. Footsteps padded up to our back window.

  If he shone a flashlight in—if he even glanced in—he’d see us. I thought I might throw up.

  And then a sound of something big thunking onto metal, as if he’d dropped his bag onto the trunk of our car.

  “I need to get my gloves out,” the cop said, his voice muffled. “I know they’re in here somewhere.”

  “Well, hurry up,” the other cop replied.

  “My hands are ass-cold, man. Give me a second.”

  “We’ve got a single-car crash and a drunk wandering somewhere in these woods, Taylor. We better get to it.”

  Taylor must’ve found his gloves, because there were footsteps again. Retreating. The cruiser ambling back out to the road, and the officers getting out to look again at the sedan.

  Holmes turned to me with a look of morbid satisfaction. She had been right. We hadn’t been found. Crouched below the steering wheel, I rubbed my face with my hands. One way or another, this year was going to kill me.

  I could hear the pair of officers talking as they examined the black car, though I couldn’t make out their words. An endless hour passed while they dickered about something. Their lights kept flashing; I fought to keep my eyes open. Holmes had folded herself down to the foot of her seat, still alert, somehow. Our wild chase hadn’t exactly been subtle, and if someone had called it in to the police, they would know there was another car. What if they came back around again, searching for us? I dug my hands into the seat, trying to steady my nerves.

  Then finally, finally, we heard it. The unmistakable groan of a tow truck as the sedan was hauled away. The cop car following after.

  When I shut my eyes, I could still see the flashing lights pulsing against the darkness.

  It was another half hour before Holmes gave the all clear. “We should wait longer,” she said, her voice even hoarser than usual, “but the petrol station will be open any minute now, and I don’t want us to get caught back here.”

  Every joint in my body cracked as I climbed back into the driver’s seat. I caught a glimpse of my face in the rearview mirror, scored here and there by the sharp fingers of branches.

  “Jesus,” I said, with feeling. Holmes cracked her neck. “All that for the campus dealer. Some paranoid freak who probably just ran because we were chasing him.”

  “Not a dealer,” she said. “Something worse.”

  My heart hammered in my chest. “Like what?”

  “It doesn’t add up. If he’s sampling his wares, as it seems from the powder spilled on the driver’s side seat, why is he in such terrific shape? Why was he was wearing four-hundred-dollar shoes and running like an Olympic sprinter? If he’s a dealer, he’s unlike any I’ve had contact with. I’d be shocked if he was Lucas, the townie who deals on campus.”

  “Why?”

  Holmes’s face twisted. “He ran like one of my brother’s men.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then how—no, wait. Your brother has men?”

  “Several thousand, at last count. It’s the most rational explanation. He has a tail or two on me most of the time. I imagine we ran into one, and he panicked.”

  I let that sink in. “All that was because your brother was trying to check up on you? Your brother. Who’s a good guy. It doesn’t add up.”

  “It’s likely that Milo wanted to assess you. Find out where your loyalties really lie. My friends . . . well, I haven’t ever really had one before.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She considered me for a moment, her eyes bloodshot. “I don’t want my brother on your tail. You don’t deserve that. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “And you have,” I said softly. My vices got in the way of my studies.

  We looked at each other. She bit her lip, took a breath—she was on the cusp of saying something—and then she turned away.

  “What did you find?” I asked, finally. “What was that thing you put in your pocket?”

  She didn’t look at me. “Let’s get back,” she said. I tried not to look at the square outline of the thing in her jacket, and started the car.

  We didn’t talk. Instead, I turned on the radio as Holmes peered silently out the window. The passing streetlights washed her face blank and bright.

  I couldn’t tell you what was in her head. I couldn’t even guess. But I was beginning to realize I liked that, the not knowing. I could trust her despite it. If she was a place unto herself, I might have been lost, blindfolded, and cursing my bad directions, but I think I saw more of it than anyone else, all the same.

  five

  I SPENT THE NIGHT OF THE DANCE CATCHING UP ON HOMEWORK.

  After Tom finished telling me how appalled he was at my decision—this took several hours—he got ready. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him preen in the mirror. He managed to pull off his baby-blue suit from sheer force of will; I think it would have made me look like Buddy Holly’s deranged cousin. After asking me one more time if I wanted to go (“Mariella doesn’t have a date, and she doesn’t even think you’re a murderer!”), he finally cleared out to go pick up Lena, leaving me to write a poem for Mr. Wheatley’s class. I traded my contacts for my horn-rimmed glasses in an attempt to get myself in the proper mood.

  Pen hovering over the page, I wondered, not for the first time, what I was doing.

  For one thing, I used to like dances. That is, I liked taking girls to danc
es. Well. I supposed I just liked girls. I liked getting shy looks from them in class, and the way their hair smelled like flowers, and how it felt to walk along the Thames on an overcast afternoon, talking about which teachers they hated and what they were reading and what they’d do after we finished school. But in my head, all those memories had begun to run together. I couldn’t tell you if it was me and Kate at the chip shop the night it snowed, or Fiona; if Anna was allergic to strawberries; if Maisie was the one my sister Shelby had adored. Even Rose Milton, the girl of my daydreams, with her softly curling hair and endless string of awful boyfriends . . . I can’t say that I would have left my room, that night at Sherringford, even if she’d asked me to be her date.

  Even if Holmes had asked me to be her date.

  I wondered if her misanthropy was beginning to wear off on me.

  I’d left her in Sciences 442, after a long, trying day. The spectacularly bitchy text war she pitched with her brother wasn’t even the worst of it. She didn’t show me the original message she sent him, but I saw the ones he’d returned. No, you didn’t find my spy, he insisted. He’s obviously still at large. For instance, I can tell you right now that you’re wearing all black, and that Jamie Watson is annoyed with you. I have eyes watching you right now.

  THAT IS NOT SPYING THAT IS SHODDY AMATEUR DEDUCTION AND IT IS INCORRECT, she replied furiously.

  She was, of course, wearing all black.

  “Can we do some actual research, please?” I finally asked, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.

  We’d spent an unsuccessful afternoon running down rattlesnake owners in Connecticut. Even after we extended our search to Massachusetts, and then to Rhode Island, we drew a blank. No one was missing their pet snake—at least, no one who would admit it to me, in the guise of a chipper cub reporter researching a book on deadly animals and the owners who, goshdarnit, loved them anyway.

  Holmes, still fuming from her conversation with her brother, sat and watched me work.