A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Every line said the same thing.

  CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

  CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

  CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

  CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

  I snatched the notebook off her lap. She didn’t try to stop me. She watched in aching silence as I turned one page, another, another, every single one striped with those same five words.

  As I stared down uncomprehending, the doors burst open with a bang. The dance was over.

  “Holmes,” I said, my voice almost drowned out by the people streaming by, “what the hell is this?”

  “I have the same book at home,” she murmured. “Mine is green. It’s a forger’s notebook. I was made to practice in it until I could imitate nearly anyone’s handwriting. Real people’s, those of archetypes, characters I’d made up. You’re given a phrase to work with, one that represents most of the alphabet. But this . . . this one is terrible.” She reached out to touch the words. “It uses many of the same letters.”

  “It says you’re a murderer. A murderer. And that dealer had it,” I said. “He can’t work for your brother. He’s something else, some kind of maniac writing crazy things in the dark. He’s probably not a dealer at all. He has to be responsible for Dobson—for framing us—God, and we let him get away—”

  “How do we know that man wrote this? We don’t. He could have picked it up; someone could have given it to him.”

  “Why did you wait to show me this?” I demanded.

  Something snuffed out behind her eyes.

  “Holmes—”

  “Do you know that I dusted it for prints? I did, it’s clean. Do you know that Professor Moriarty carried a little red memoranda book? He did; I’ve seen it. My father keeps it in a drawer. Did you know you can buy this particular model that I’m holding from seventy-two different online shops, not to mention innumerable bookstores and gift shops? You can. I ran down the license on that black sedan. It doesn’t exist. The car itself was stolen from a Brooklyn street corner five years ago. Why does it reappear now? Watson, there’s no pattern here. I can’t figure this out. I don’t know. Do you know what it’s like to not know?”

  I did know. She was the one who kept me in the dark.

  “You still could have shown it to me,” I said, getting to my feet.

  Across the quad, a girl let loose a long, laughing scream as a boy grabbed her around the waist and lifted her over his shoulder.

  “What if it read ‘Jamie Watson is a murderer’? Would you have shown it to me?”

  She set her chin, avoiding my eyes. “You wouldn’t, for one single moment, worry that I might believe it?”

  There was an unnerving quaver in her voice. I stared down at her, at her thin shoulders, the dark lines of her dress under my jacket. Just last night, I was sure I knew her better than anyone else in the world.

  What had Charlotte Holmes really done to get herself sent to America?

  “You didn’t kill Dobson,” I said.

  “No,” she whispered. “I didn’t kill Dobson.”

  “So then—” I swallowed. “Did you—is August Moriarty still alive?”

  At that, she stood and fled into the quad.

  I picked up the notebook and followed, pushing past the clusters of shrieking girls, the boys surrounding them like black flies in their suits. Some chaperone’s voice shouted for us to get back to our dorms, that night check would be in ten minutes, but Holmes plunged through the crowd, not toward Stevenson Hall, but to the sciences building. As if it were her safe house. Her panic room.

  The place where she could hide away from me.

  I called for her, hoarsely, as she cut through the small stand of trees in the middle of the quad, and though people turned to look, she plowed straight on ahead. I put on a burst of speed and with a lunge caught her by the arm and whirled her around.

  She shook my hand off with a snap. “Don’t you ever touch me without my explicit permission.”

  “Look,” I said, “I am not saying that you killed him. I’m saying that someone wants me to think that. Wants the world to. Why can’t you just tell me if he’s dead? Is August dead?”

  “You thought it,” she said. “I watched you think it. That I killed him.”

  “Why can’t you just tell me—”

  I must’ve stepped forward; she must have stepped back. I was pressing her farther into the trees as if every step brought me that much closer to the answer. I was so caught up in finding out that I missed what was written all over her face. I was so used to her fearlessness that I couldn’t recognize her fear.

  But she was afraid. Of me.

  Dobson had loomed over her too.

  Holmes took another step backward, and stumbled over the little freshman girl’s body.

  six

  SHE’D BEEN DISCARDED LIKE AN AFTERTHOUGHT THERE IN THE dark grass. Stretched out on her back, her red dress pooled around her like blood.

  God, I thought, it’s starting again.

  I was so used to Holmes taking charge that I stopped and waited for her orders. But none came. Her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere over my shoulder, her hands shaking. Exhaustion, I remembered her saying, though I thought now that it was something else. Distress, maybe. Uncertainty. Whatever it was, she didn’t know how to master it.

  It was down to me, then.

  Gently, I knelt down beside the freshman. Her eyes were half-closed, as if she were just falling asleep. She didn’t ask for this, I thought. None of us did.

  I realized that I didn’t even know her name.

  Steeling myself for the worst, I pressed my fingers to her throat. There. A pulse.

  “She’s still alive,” I said, leaning down to hear the girl’s breath. It came in agonized rasps. “But she’s having trouble breathing. We need to get help.”

  Holmes nodded, but made no sign of moving.

  “Hey,” I said to her, gently. “I need to keep an eye on her. Can you call an ambulance?”

  She shut her eyes for a moment, collecting herself. Too long a moment. Beneath me, a shudder ripped through the girl’s body.

  I had to get someone else’s help, then. “Hey!” I shouted to some girls cutting through the quad on their way back to the dorms. “There’s been an accident! Someone’s hurt! Call 911!”

  They ran over. One girl pulled her phone out of her purse and dialed. The other saw who I was kneeling next to and began to scream.

  “Elizabeth,” she sobbed. She put herself between me and the girl on the ground as if to protect her. “That’s my roommate! Elizabeth! What did you do to her?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said, shocked. I hadn’t realized how this would look: the darkness, the body, the pair of us. “I found her like this. She was dancing with Randall and then . . . we found her here. Charlotte and I. We were . . . we were just walking.”

  We were beginning to draw a crowd. Behind me, I heard murmurs. Angry ones. The sound of feet running toward us.

  Elizabeth’s roommate turned her tear-streaked face to me. “Murderer,” she snarled. “Murderers.”

  Behind us, the murmurs built to an angry roar.

  I think it was that word that did it. How it’d been leveled at Holmes—and at me—in the weeks after Lee Dobson had died. How it was written down thousands of times in the notebook I had in my pocket, each stroke of the pen damningly precise. How, somewhere deep down, I knew there was the possibility that it was true. That Holmes had been sent here for killing a Moriarty. And she had read my thoughts from a glance.

  No matter what the reason, Holmes reacted as if she’d been hit with an electrical shock.

  She knelt down next to Elizabeth. “You need to go get an adult,” she said to the roommate, who stiffened. “Look, believe what you will about my motives, but either way, this crowd will make sure I don’t hurt your friend. Okay? So go get help and let me work. I’ve been trained for this kind of situation.”

  “CPR?” the girl asked unst
eadily.

  Holmes’s smile was mirthless. “Something like that.”

  “What do you need me to do?” I asked.

  “I need you to hold her mouth open.” She tilted Elizabeth’s head back. “Keep her steady. Do you see it there, in her throat?”

  The skin of Elizabeth’s neck was raised and ridged, the unmistakable sign of an object lodged there. With gentle hands, I pulled her chin down until her lips fell apart.

  This girl had asked me to the dance. Maybe she’d even wanted something like this: the pads of my fingers against her lips, the shallow breathing, the two of us hitched up in the dark. My stomach roiled. All this—all this was so completely wrong.

  “Her body’s in shock,” Holmes said calmly, reaching down into the hollow of Elizabeth’s throat with pincer-like fingers. I shut my eyes against it. The girl thrashed and gurgled under my hands.

  “Good girl,” Holmes murmured, “good girl,” and when I opened my eyes again, she was holding a gleaming blue diamond up against the moonlight.

  It gleamed because it was covered in Elizabeth’s blood.

  I swallowed down bile. Behind me, someone threw up into the grass.

  “It’s ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,’” Holmes murmured.

  “I know,” I said as Elizabeth took a jerking breath.

  “You.” Holmes tossed the diamond to a boy in the crowd. “Take this thing. It’s plastic, so don’t bother stealing it, but I’m sure the police will want to see it anyway, and as you’re all so keen to cast suspicion on me I’d rather not be held responsible for its safekeeping. Where’s Randall? You. Fetch him. Can’t you see that this girl has been manhandled by a rugby player? Look at those footprints. Look at her dress. I saw them dancing. Find him. I need to know if this was consensual. The sex, you idiot, not the paste diamond stuffed down her craw—yes, of course she’s had sex, or at minimum a very athletic snog. Look at the marks on the ground, are you blind? And where on earth are the chaperones? What about that bloody nurse?”

  “Here,” a harried voice said. It was the first time I’d seen Nurse Bryony outside the infirmary; her party dress fit her so tightly that it looked painted on. She smiled reassuringly at me, but I looked away. I didn’t deserve reassurances.

  “Tend to her, will you?” Holmes told the nurse, straightening. “Where is that ambulance?” She shaded her eyes against the nonexistent light.

  “Holmes.”

  “Not now, Watson.” She plucked another boy’s phone out of his hands, dialing 911 as he sputtered at her in protest. “You talk, then,” she said to him, handing it back. “Be of some use.”

  “Holmes,” I said, more urgently.

  I’d caught a glimpse, at the very edge of the crowd, of the drug dealer’s thick blond hair.

  She followed my gaze and made a startled noise. “I didn’t think we’d see him again.”

  “Well.” I got to my feet. “What now?”

  “Don’t look at him directly.” But it was too late. As she spoke, he turned in a way he must’ve thought unobtrusive, beginning to melt into the darkness.

  “We’re going to have to chase him again,” I said. God, my legs hurt at the thought.

  That quicksilver smile. “On your marks.”

  The dealer threw a glance behind him, and took off at a run.

  We bolted through the crowd. Some ducked out of our way; others tried to pull us back, thinking we were fleeing the crime scene. We were, but not in the way they thought. There: he was pelting across the flat green expanse, headed straight for Stevenson Hall. Lots of the underclassmen girls lived there—Holmes did, and Elizabeth did too, and I couldn’t think of any reason why he’d be heading there except to do more damage. Guilty people ran. He had to be guilty. I pushed myself to run harder, but I was already topped out. Sirens wailed—the soundtrack of my ridiculous life—and Holmes’s dress ahead of me caught the red-and-blue light, strangely beautiful. She was faster than me, smaller, leaner. She was just beginning to gain on him when three cruisers and an ambulance pulled off the road and onto the grassy quad beside us.

  “Some help here,” Holmes yelled as a group of policemen clambered out. The EMTs were already unloading a stretcher from the ambulance.

  “Is that Charlotte Holmes?” It sounded like Detective Shepard. I spared a look and spotted a lone man not in uniform. “Stop! What are you doing? James! Jamie Watson!”

  Neither of us slowed down in the slightest. So Shepard took off after us.

  The policemen gave confused chase behind him, cursing and breathing heavily. Up ahead, the dealer rounded the corner of Stevenson Hall and disappeared from view.

  “The access tunnels,” Holmes called. “There’s an entrance, there—it’s that half door; it has a key code—”

  I pushed the building’s tangled ivy out of the way as she tapped out the code.

  “You have about two and a half seconds,” I said, “before the police brutality begins.”

  She gave me a feral look. “I only needed one.”

  The lock clicked open. She jerked me inside. The door slammed shut behind us.

  WHEN HOLMES HAD FIRST MENTIONED THE SCHOOL’S TUNNEL system to me, I’d had trouble wrapping my head around it. A network of passages below campus, connecting Sherringford’s buildings underground? I’d done some digging to find out more.

  By digging, I mean that I’d turned around in my desk chair and asked Tom, my personal font of useless information, what the deal was.

  Legend has it the tunnels had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, back when Sherringford was still a convent school. When the grounds were under a few feet of snow, the nuns used these heated passages to get from their quarters to prayers at dawn and vespers. These days, Tom said, the tunnels were used by the maintenance workers who took care of our dorms. There were boilers down there and supply closets. Every entrance to the tunnels was only accessible via key code, and those codes changed every month. I’d told Tom about how disappointed I was that the tunnels weren’t used as Cold War bomb shelters or by moonshine smugglers or something equally interesting, and he’d grinned at me. Even better, he’d said. The codes changed so often because students were always bribing janitors for them—the access tunnels were one of the only private places to hook up on campus.

  Holmes, I knew, used the tunnels to practice her fencing.

  “They’re the only space long enough and private enough at this school,” she’d said, bright spots of color on her cheeks, “and if you continue to snicker at me, I swear that I will tell your father you want a weekly lunch date with him to talk about your feelings.”

  Tonight, the tunnel in front of us was empty. Our man was nowhere in sight. As I crept down the hall behind her, the lights above us flickered. Holmes’s shoes clicked against the floor, sounding like an insect tapping its legs together. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  “He’ll have holed up here somewhere,” she said, a breath of sound.

  “Should we start trying doors?”

  She shook her head, putting up a finger. There were footsteps ahead of us, creeping ones. We were shifting gears from a chase to a slow, deliberate stalk, and I followed her as she slunk along, her eyes fixed on the ground.

  She was following a trail he’d left on the linoleum floor, one I couldn’t make out through the dirt tracked in by that week’s workmen, the ragged lines from carts and trolleys. What was she tracing, I wondered, straining my eyes to see—and then I remembered. Why was he wearing four-hundred-dollar shoes? she’d asked the other night. Looking again, I saw the narrow tread of a dress shoe on the floor.

  Silently, we followed his trail through the labyrinthine halls. The shouting of the police outside became a dull echo. Soon, I knew, they’d get ahold of the key code, and they’d be hard on our tail. Holmes knew it too. She roved the halls like a hunting dog. We were under the quad, now. The concrete walls were spotted with damp, and there was a smell in the air I knew from rugby practices. Mud. Wet e
arth. My mind wandered back to Highcombe School and its rugby pitch, to Rose Milton’s shining hair in the stands, her hands clasped together, my cleats tearing into the grass, and the sense that just this once, I was doing what everyone wanted me to do and doing it well—

  Holmes flung a hand across my chest. “There,” she mouthed.

  The door at the end of the hall, where the footprints ended.

  Behind us, the unmistakable sound of a steel door slamming shut. The detective’s voice bellowing Holmes’s name.

  “After you,” she said, with the smile of a hunter closing in on its prey.

  She couldn’t have known what was behind that door.

  She couldn’t have.

  As I walked inside, Holmes followed on my heels. She let the door shut behind her, cutting off what little light we had. I groped for a switch, a cord, anything to help me see better, but all I found were shelves, rows of shelves, and the cool cinder block of the back wall. I pulled out my phone and clicked it on, using its dim light to sweep the room.

  We were alone.

  Somehow I’d known from the moment I stepped into the room that our man wasn’t going to be in here. Maybe I’d been unconsciously listening through the door for his breath, for some movement; maybe I knew enough about the way our luck worked. Maybe, deep down, I was relieved to not have to confront him. Whatever the case, it was only Holmes and me in there, and I was unsurprised to find us that way. Unsurprised, but not relieved. Not exactly.

  We were alone in the killer’s lair.

  Photographs of Dobson, before and after the fight we’d had—someone had taken a shot of him across the quad with one of those paparazzi cameras, so sharp that you could see the bruises I’d given him. A map of the tunnel system, blueprints for Michener Hall and Stevenson Hall. Dobson’s class schedule with classes highlighted and others crossed off, little notations written in beside them in Holmes’s crabbed, angry handwriting, and—Jesus Christ—pictures of Elizabeth laid out across the floor, a thick file with her name on it. I stooped to pick it up but stopped; Holmes had trained me too well to leave stray prints.