A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  I scratched the last name off our list. “So maybe we should start calling the zoos—”

  “This is unbearably tedious,” Holmes snapped. “Do you know, if I had my Yard resources I’d have this case solved. God, in England, even my name would be opening us doors. Instead, I’m sitting here while you try to determine down the phone if these small-minded idiots with pet jaguars are lying to you, which you’re not at all equipped to do.” She flung herself down on the love seat, cradling her violin to her chest like a teddy bear.

  “Right, then,” I said, standing. “What was that thing you pulled out of that car last night? The thing you wouldn’t show me?”

  She stared at me evenly.

  I threw up my hands. “Fine. I’ll just go pack my things. You know. For jail.”

  When she realized I was waiting for her to reply, she picked up her bow and began sawing out a Dvorˇák concerto so savagely that it quite literally drove me out the door. We had no leads, no real information, and tomorrow we’d have to account for whatever Detective Shepard had dug up to indict us with.

  And if I wasn’t arrested, I still had homework.

  Which left me in my room, with my blank journal page. I tried to push the rest of it from my mind and get to work. Our assignment for Mr. Wheatley’s Monday class was to compose a poem that was difficult for us to write. The prompt didn’t help me much, since all poems were difficult for me to write. They were like mirrors you held up to a black hole, or surrealist paintings. I liked things that made sense. Stories. Cause and effect. After an hour or two of agonizing cross-outs, I dropped my head down onto my desk.

  There was a rap at the door. “Jamie?” I heard Mrs. Dunham say. “I brought you a cup of tea. And some cookies.”

  I let her in. She looked a bit dotty, as usual, with her crooked glasses and frizzy hair, but the cookies were chocolate chip and still warm.

  “You’re the only one in the dorm that stayed in tonight,” she said, handing me the steaming mug. “I thought I’d come say hi. I know things have been hard for you lately.”

  “Thanks,” I said, embarrassed. “I needed to finish some homework. Writing a poem.”

  She made a sympathetic noise. “Any luck?”

  “Nope.” She’d brought me English breakfast, and the steam fogged up my glasses. Right then, I wasn’t sure who was more of a cliché, me or her. “Any advice?”

  She hummed, thinking. “I’ve always liked that Galway Kinnell poem. ‘Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now?’” She had a fine voice for reciting poetry, deep-timbered and slow. “Doesn’t that just make everything better?”

  “It does,” I said, and wished it were true.

  Behind her, in the doorway, a girl appeared.

  “Are you ready, Watson?” It was her strange, fantastic voice, even smokier than usual, and Holmes stepped into my room.

  I blinked rapidly. She’d done something with her hair. Instead of its usual glossy fall, it was tousled, in unfinished-looking ringlets. Her dress looked nothing like I imagined. It looked, in fact, like the night sky. I could see why Lena had coveted it: the cut of it brought my eye to certain places I’d tried to avoid looking at.

  “You look very nice,” I said. It was true. She also looked disturbingly like a girl. Hailey had been made from plastic and wet dreams, and everyday Holmes was all exact angles, but this . . . whatever this was, it was something else entirely. I wasn’t sure if I liked it. From the way she shifted her weight from one heel to the other, it seemed Holmes wasn’t sure either. What plot was she brewing?

  “Hi, Charlotte,” Mrs. Dunham said. “Jamie didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  “Yes, I’m sure he forgot,” she said. “We’re in a bit of a hurry. The dance is nearly halfway done.”

  “We are, and I—ah—” I was wearing my glasses and a pair of Highcombe sweatpants.

  With an expressive sigh, Holmes began rifling through my drawers. “Braces,” she muttered. “Or as they say here, suspenders. I know you own the ridiculous things. Here.” She tossed them to me, and kept looking.

  “So you want me to wear them? Or you don’t?”

  “Oh, do, it’s your thing, with the leather jacket and the—yes, here we go, a skinny black tie, and your nice shirt, and the trousers you wore on the fourth day of school but that haven’t reappeared since then. Dark wash. There. Socks, and your oxfords.” Mrs. Dunham scurried out of the way as Holmes buried me in a pile of my own clothing.

  I looked down. “You’re trying to make me into a hipster.”

  “I don’t have to try.” Holmes tapped her wrist where the watch would go. “Time, Watson.”

  “You really can’t be here while he’s changing,” Mrs. Dunham said.

  Holmes put a hand over her eyes. “I am counting down from one hundred.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” I said, sorting through the clothes she’d given me.

  “Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight.”

  We were out the door with three counts to go.

  From across the quad, I could see the union all lit up for the dance. Each time the doors opened, I heard a bit of a song I couldn’t quite place. On a bench sat a boy and girl holding hands; he was whispering in her ear. Nearby, a cluster of shivering girls admired each other’s dresses.

  “Are you going to tell me why we’re here?” I asked Holmes, holding the door open for her.

  She paused on the threshold. “Not yet,” she said, and went in.

  Sherringford was a small enough school that we could all fit into the union’s alumni ballroom. (Apparently, the school went bigger and fancier for prom. Tom was sure that this year’s would be on a yacht.) The theme had something to do with Vegas; the first thing I saw as we entered was a string of blackjack tables, manned by real casino dealers in green-and-white livery. Holmes sidled over, only to make an affronted noise when she saw they were playing with Monopoly money. I was more interested in the chocolate fountain that burbled in the corner, crowded by people holding out skewered marshmallows. Otherwise, there were all the usual trappings: a punch table, strobe lights, a DJ. Bored-looking teachers were “chaperoning,” which meant they mostly chatted together in pairs. Out on the dance floor, girls swayed in dresses the colors of Christmas ornaments. We’d won the football game earlier, so the mood was victorious. As I took it all in, Cassidy and Ashton from my French class brushed past us. Cassidy looked lovely, and Ashton looked exactly like one of the Thundercats. I’d never seen such a radioactive-looking tan.

  What I noticed most of all was how many students had been pulled home. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred of us on the dance floor. Still, everyone seemed like they were having fun—no one thinking of the murder, or their safety, or anything except for the ABBA song that had just begun.

  It felt, disconcertingly, as though I stood with one foot in a novel and one foot in a shopping mall. I might’ve belonged here, but Holmes very much didn’t. I turned to ask exactly what her plan was, when I caught her mouthing the words to “Dancing Queen.”

  “Oh my God,” I said as she startled. “Oh my God. You just wanted to come here to—”

  “There are excellent opportunities for observation and deduction here,” she said hurriedly. “Look at the specimen pool! Everyone with their guard down, probably a good few drinking—the girl next to you has a flask of peach schnapps in that little bag of hers—and perhaps that dealer is here, somewhere, and—”

  “—to dance.” I was trying very hard not to laugh. “Would you like to?”

  “Yes,” she said, and fairly dragged me out onto the floor.

  Holmes, for all her strange and myriad skills, proved to be a terrible dancer. But what she lacked in skill she made up for in absolute abandon. Under the kaleidoscope lights, her hair went blue, then red, then blue again, the music so loud that my head throbbed in time, and she flung her arms straight up as the chorus came, throwing her head back to
mouth the words. She knew the words to the next one, too, and the song after that, and she sang them all with her eyes shut, shuffling her feet like a grandfather. For a glorious twelve minutes, I orbited her, and when she grabbed my hand and said, “Twirl me,” I spun her around as she laughed.

  A slow song came on, some treacly number by an English boy band my little sister liked. All around us, people slipped into each other’s arms. Across the room, I saw Tom, resplendent in his ridiculous suit, dip Lena while she giggled.

  Holmes and I stood there, in the middle of the floor, trying not to look at each other.

  I struggled to hide my panic. From the corner of my eye, I could see that Holmes’s cheeks were still pinked from dancing.

  “Um,” I said.

  There was a tap on my shoulder. The wispy blond girl that had asked me to the dance stood there, her dress a dramatic red. “Hi,” she said shyly. “I thought you weren’t allowed to come.”

  I watched Holmes rapidly catalog my reaction. After a moment, the girl turned to look at her, too.

  “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. I’m in your way.” A little line appeared between her eyebrows, and I thought, for a moment, that she was going to cry. I was sure Holmes noted that too. Her brain was like a bear trap: nothing escaped alive.

  This had to be a nightmare. I’d look down, and I’d be naked, and the dance floor would become my math classroom, and then I’d wake up.

  I didn’t.

  “We’re not— I’m not— I need something to drink,” I managed, and darted away like the coward I was.

  The thing was, I didn’t know if I wanted to slow dance with her. Holmes. Or maybe I could just imagine it a bit too readily, how it would feel to have my hands on the small of her back, to have her uncertain breath hot on my neck. Her soft laughter as the boy band sang I wanna kiss you, girl. How I’d drop my hands to her waist, pull her even closer to me.

  But if I squinted, I could see that blond girl in my arms just as easily. Honestly, it wasn’t very fair to any of us. I knew myself pretty well; I could be so easily taken in by the now, not thinking much about the after. But with Holmes, all I could think about was the after. Silent drives at dawn, wildfire conversations, sneaking into locked rooms to steal away evidence to our little lab—I wanted those things. I wanted the two of us to be complicated together, to be difficult and engrossing and blindingly brilliant. Sex was a commonplace kind of complicated. And nothing about Charlotte Holmes was commonplace.

  Even the way she filled out her dress.

  No. I wasn’t going to think about that. Our track record proved that we were too volatile to survive that sort of shake-up. Just this morning, she’d chased me from her lab, wielding her violin like a weapon. Tomorrow night we might be sharing a cell. Tonight?

  Tonight, I was getting punch.

  Mr. Wheatley, my creative writing teacher, was manning the refreshments table with a pretty-ish woman around his age. He looked deathly bored, but brightened a bit when I made it to the front of the line. It wasn’t long. Not many of us were too lame to have someone to slow dance with.

  “Jamie,” Mr. Wheatley said, though I could hardly hear his voice above the music. “What’ll it be?”

  “How’s the punch?” I asked.

  “Horrible.” He leaned in to the woman next to him. “This is one of my best students,” he said, pointing to me. “Jamie, this is my friend Penelope. She’s keeping me company tonight.”

  I didn’t know that Mr. Wheatley had even liked my writing. Everything I’d turned in, my poems especially, came back to me in a mess of green ink. But I’d been working hard to revise them into something better, and it was nice to know my work was paying off.

  “It’s lovely to meet you.” I shook hands with Penelope. She had a sort of standard art teacher look to her, with her curly hair and loose-fitting dress. A nice counterweight for Mr. Wheatley, I thought, who always buttoned his shirts up to his collar.

  “She’s a writer friend from New Haven,” he said. “A poet. She teaches at Yale. Jamie might be someone you’d want in your freshman workshop, in the not-too-distant future.”

  “Oh, is this the one you were telling me about?” she asked Mr. Wheatley, who went a bit pale. “The murder investigation? Dr. Watson’s descendant? So, do you write mysteries too, Jamie?”

  “Not really,” I lied, as I processed the rest of what she’d said. She’d heard about the police’s suspicions about me. “You’ve been watching the news coverage?”

  Mr. Wheatley pulled at his collar.

  “Oh, the media’s moved on by now,” she said. “But Ted’s on top of it. He knows details they haven’t even released to the press!”

  While I was trying to make sense of this, Holmes appeared, proffering a pair of chocolate-covered marshmallows on a fondue stick. An olive branch, I thought. She seemed to have forgiven me my awkwardness, so I took mine with a thank-you smile.

  “Hello,” she said to the adults. I made a round of introductions.

  “Penelope was just saying that Mr. Wheatley’s in the know about all that Dobson stuff,” I said, a bit obviously. I wished we’d set up hand signals for this kind of situation, or that she was actually telepathic. There was a good chance that she could have deduced my suspicions just by looking at me, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

  “Oh?” she asked, her face perfectly blank.

  “Yes, ah”—Mr. Wheatley cleared his throat—“I should do another walk around the room. Penelope?” She smiled politely at us, her interest already elsewhere, and the two of them glided away.

  “Well, you cocked that up rather badly.” Holmes drifted back onto the dance floor. So much for an olive branch. I pulled the second marshmallow off the stick and bit into it hatefully.

  I WANDERED THE BALLROOM FOR A WHILE, FLOPPING DOWN finally at an empty table. The dance was coming to a close, and the DJ had put together a long set of slow songs to end the night. The floor was thick with couples that would be social-media official by the morning. I was surprised, and then less surprised, to see Cassidy and Ashton swaying together, so close their foreheads touched. Randall, Dobson’s roommate, danced the whole set with the little blond freshman. He kept his hands low, grabbing at the fabric of her red dress. In his giant arms, she looked as small and inconsequential as a snack cake.

  I felt vaguely sick.

  “Okay.” Lena plopped down next to me. “Jamie. You look, like, super pathetic.”

  “Where’s Tom?”

  “Playing poker.” She pursed her lips. “Go talk to her.”

  “She’s dancing with Randall,” I said, being difficult on purpose.

  “Jesus, come on. Charlotte’s sitting outside, alone. You guys are just sad without each other. There’s like this obvious empty space next to you.” It was poetic, for Lena. She stood and offered me a hand.

  “Are you asking me to dance?” I asked.

  She cocked an eyebrow. I let her haul me to my feet. And she dragged me all the way across the ballroom and out the front door, where she gave me an unceremonious shove into the night air.

  “Bye,” Lena trilled, and disappeared.

  Holmes sat on a bench by the entrance, staring out across the dark quad at a particular copse of trees. It was where I’d faced down Dobson, I realized. It was the last time we’d talked before he died.

  She was shivering. I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders.

  “Thank you,” she said, not looking at me.

  A little notebook was open on her lap, her fingers splayed across its pages.

  “Is that the thing you took from the sedan last night?”

  Holmes nodded.

  “And you brought it with you?” I sat down next to her cautiously, the way you’d sit next to a bomb. I had questions. I didn’t want her to hide the notebook away before I got a chance to ask them.

  To my surprise, she didn’t. “I didn’t think I’d get to it,” she said, and went on, her voice strange (was Holmes nervous?), “I play
ed a few rounds of poker, but it wasn’t sufficiently distracting. It was me and Tom and one of the chaperones—the school nurse. Tom spent the entire game staring at Lena’s butt across the room. So obvious. Everyone is so obvious. For example, that school nurse? She wishes she were a doctor. She misses her boyfriend, who has blond hair and an earring, whom she’s been with since high school, and who doesn’t like her as much as she likes him.”

  “How could you—”

  Holmes smiled a relieved sort of smile. Better to be making deductions, I supposed, then answering my questions. “She couldn’t take her eyes off the dance floor. Her eyes teared up when ‘I Luv U Girl’ came on. Why would anyone react like that? Especially to that song? Nostalgia is the only answer. She’s attractive enough, but not a knockout—that is to say, not so attractive to have been popular enough in high school that she pines to be back there. And every time a tall blond boy walked by, her eyes trailed after creepily. She’s wearing an ugly tennis bracelet on her left wrist that could only have been chosen by a man, but not one who cares enough to pay attention to her actual taste. And she wishes she were a doctor because she tried to diagnose the cause of my shaking hands three separate times over the course of our game.”

  “Why were your hands shaking?”

  “Exhaustion. I haven’t slept since that nap you woke me from. She thought it was pneumonia at first, and then she implied it was from mental illness, the cow. And the whole time I had to pretend to like her just in case we need to question her again. So I cleaned her out. It was satisfying, even if it was Monopoly money.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “You’re a terrible person.”

  It derailed her completely.

  She stiffened and put her hands up to her mouth. I looked down reflexively at where they’d been, covering the pages of the notebook.

  I got it, then. Why she was nervous.

  In her lap was a madman’s journal. Its pages were thick with handwriting, the same five words scrawled again and again. Each time they were written in a markedly different style, as though a group of schoolboys had each been made to copy down a line from the chalkboard all into the same notebook. Here, the stark black capitals of a military general. Here, the rounded letters of a high school girl. Here, the elegantly dashed scrawl of a Victorian gentleman.