A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Holmes,” I said. “That’s your handwriting.”

  “I know.” Through the cloth of her dress, she lifted a T-shirt from the pile of clothes on the bare mattress on the floor. I realized that I recognized it; she recognized it too.

  “That’s yours,” I said.

  She nodded. “It’s a duplicate of one I own.”

  “Is this your . . . your . . .”

  “My lair?” She still held the shirt between her pinched fingers. “Someone certainly wants you to think so, don’t they.”

  I had questions for her. Questions I didn’t really want an answer to. Questions I’d have to ask later, because as we stood there, the police were kicking down doors all up and down the hall. In a minute, they’d find us.

  All the while, they were shouting Holmes’s name.

  WE WERE HAULED DOWN TO THE STATION, WITH SHERRINGFORD’S explicit blessing.

  “So much for their protecting minors. But I imagine finding a television-styled murder den changes things,” Holmes said next to me in the back of the police cruiser. She wore her handcuffs with a kind of elegant disdain, bringing both hands up to tuck her hair behind her ear. “We’re going to be fine, Watson. Do you trust me?”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to lie.

  Detective Shepard cleared his throat in the front seat. “I usually don’t warn people about this after I’ve read them their rights, but you’re kids, so. You two don’t want to say anything that incriminates you.” A pause. “Not like either of you listen to me.”

  When we got to the station, Shepard separated us. I was put into a poorly lit interrogation room, with a mirror that I knew from the movies was actually one-way glass. There was a chair, a glass of water, and a piece of paper and pencil. For my confession, I imagined.

  Really, it was all just like the movies, except in the movies, they don’t show you the waiting. And there was so much waiting. For almost two hours, I sat in my desperately uncomfortable chair, jerking in and out of sleep, waiting for someone to come in and ask me to talk about what happened.

  What would I even tell them? Well, officer. First, this asshole died after I punched him, but not because I punched him. He was poisoned, and also a snake got him. A snake that apparently appeared from thin air, because no one on the eastern seaboard is missing a snake. Then a drug dealer followed us to the diner and ran from us in the woods. I went to a dance, and thought about kissing my best friend, but didn’t, and another girl wanted me to dance with her and maybe kiss her instead, but someone shoved a plastic diamond down her throat, so nobody kissed anyone, except maybe her and Randall. In a room underneath the school, I found a whole bunch of evidence that my best friend, who I didn’t kiss, is a psycho killer. And now I guess you’re questioning me about all these crazy crimes that I haven’t committed, but someone wants you to think I’ve committed, and they’ve done such a good job of it that I almost believe I committed them too.

  That’s good, I thought blearily, and started writing it down.

  Above my head, a speaker crackled to life. I blinked up at the pair holstered high up in the corner. I’d missed them. I couldn’t now: they were speaking with Holmes’s voice.

  “All last year, I bought from a senior named Aaron Davis,” she was saying.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “There’s something wrong with your sound system!”

  No reply. Nothing but Holmes’s voice droning on.

  “He delivered in packages to my dorm, and I’d put the money in his mailbox. It was all very straightforward like that, when it was pills. But last May, I wanted something harder, and he took me down to that room to—to use in front of him. To make sure I wasn’t just buying to rat him out.”

  Shepard’s voice, then. “So that dealer, the one you took it on yourself to chase—”

  “I’ve never even seen him before. In fact, I still haven’t even seen his face clearly, and for that reason alone, I thought he worked for—” I heard her about to say Milo, or my brother, or maybe even Moriarty. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought.” Not your best save, I thought with a wince, and then remembered I wasn’t on her side. Not tonight.

  “We found your prints there, Charlotte.”

  “Aaron used to deal out of that room. Why aren’t you listening to me? If you found my prints there, anywhere, I’m sure it was on the inside of the door or on the wall, not actually on any of the fake-serial-killer things pinned to it, and that they’re at least several months old.”

  “So is that why you were down there? Trying to destroy the things you forgot to touch with your gloves on? Innocent people usually don’t give as many excuses as you do.”

  “You’re asking why you found me in the room I went directly to, knowing you were following me—the room that only the most wretched Sherringford students have reason to know about. The room that I decided to style like a network television art director. So that I could destroy paper records that I left there in my own handwriting.” She snorted. “I won’t insult your intelligence, Detective Shepard, by reminding you who my family is. Not to trade on my blood, but on my training. I am not an idiot. And I didn’t kill Lee Dobson, or attack Elizabeth Hartwell. I’m sure that when she’s fit to speak, she will tell you exactly that.”

  “She’s suffered a traumatic brain injury,” Shepard said gravely. “We don’t know yet how much she remembers. But with all your training, I’m sure you knew that would be the result when you clobbered her with that tree branch.”

  “Fine. Call my parents. Call Scotland Yard. I have contacts there. They’ll tell you that I help people.”

  “You should have called us, Charlotte.” The sound of a chair scraping back. And then a final blow. “By the way, what was Jamie Watson’s part in all this? Your accomplice? He’s clearly not the brains of the operation.”

  “Hey!” I yelled again. I did not want to hear this. “Hey! Anybody!”

  “Don’t cater to my vanity,” she snapped. “You’ll find I do that well enough on my own.”

  “Your accomplice,” he said again, louder, “until you needed a fall guy. Someone to stay and swing for all of this when your rich mommy and daddy smuggle you out of the country on a private plane.”

  At that moment, I was in the awful position of thinking something that I desperately didn’t want to believe.

  Thought: The police set this up, this weird, “accidental” eavesdropping, so that when Holmes admits she’s been using me all this time, I’ll flip out and confess to her doing everything. I’d seen Law & Order. I knew how this worked, how they divided suspects, got them to tell on each other. But they were wrong. There was nothing to tell.

  Except.

  What if the police were right?

  What if she actually did kill Lee fucking Dobson and decided, for a lark, to drag me along, pretending to solve the crime that she committed? What if Holmes was so unnerved by someone calling her a murderer because she was, in fact, a murderer? What if, in the time between stomping away from me and Mr. Wheatley at the punch table and when I found her on the bench, she clobbered Elizabeth Hartwell on the head and stuffed that plastic jewel down her throat? What if she really did elaborately off Dobson in an act of cold-blooded revenge? What if—oh God—what if our friendship was just a sick footnote in her sick reenactment of these stories? Holmes and Watson, together again, playing out “The Blue Carbuncle” on the dark Sherringford quad. Only, instead of hiding the stolen gem in a goose’s craw, we stuffed it down a girl’s throat to make her choke to death.

  “Jamie Watson,” Holmes said evenly, “is far smarter than you think. He isn’t my accomplice. He’s no one’s accomplice. And he isn’t guilty of anything.”

  He isn’t, she said. Not the both of us.

  I didn’t feel any better. Not even when the door swung open to let in my haggard father, who took one look at my face and said, “Right, we’re going home.”

  ON THE WAY OUT, MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT NEITHER Holmes nor I were being charged w
ith a crime. The police didn’t have enough evidence to hold us; everything they had right now was circumstantial, so the best they could do was question us. “It’s good they didn’t get around to you,” he said, then looked at me hard and told me, like he was imparting great wisdom, to always remember to request a lawyer.

  Usually, I hated that my father didn’t act like a father. Most days, I would’ve traded him and his enthusiasms for the most boring authority figure on the block, but tonight, I was just happy to be spared a lecture and tears.

  My father is picking me up from the police station in the middle of the night, I thought, and he mostly just seems kind of excited.

  “I’ll pull around the car,” he said at the entrance. “Once we get home, you’ll need to sleep. I could only get you a day’s reprieve. They want you back for more questioning after dinner. Shepard’s keeping his Sunday-night appointment.”

  I swayed a little on my feet, not thinking much of anything. Not until I felt her creep up behind me on cat feet. I refused to turn around.

  When my father pulled the car up, Holmes opened the passenger door and climbed in without a word. Fuming, I got into the backseat, pushing aside a small avalanche of toys and snack wrappers that belonged, no doubt, to the half brothers I’d never met. I tried to fight the feeling that I was a guest star in my own life.

  As we drove, my father kept up a steady stream of chatter that Holmes replied to in monosyllables. I couldn’t manage any response at all. My brain had roared back to furious, nervous life. When he stopped at a Shell station outside town, I tipped my head against the cold window and tried to steady my breathing. In a few hours, I’d be arrested for a crime I hadn’t committed. I wished I’d never come back to America. That I had killed Dobson, just so I’d have something to confess to. A way to get this all to end. I thought again about my pathetic fantasy, the two of us on that runaway train. Maybe this was the sensation of it crashing.

  Without a word, Holmes reached back, fumbling for my hand, and when she found it, she grasped it firmly in hers. I thought about taking it back. I reminded myself that I was maybe holding the hand of a killer, but I decided I was too tired to care. The three of us drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Really I’d been so distracted by what had happened at the station that I’d forgotten to dread the rest of it. Then it came into sight, my childhood house in the country, and I remembered all at once learning to ride a bike down this street, my father holding on to the seat even after I told him he could let go. He did, finally, with a great laugh like a shout, and I went a full three feet before I hit a bump and flew head over handlebars.

  Today, despite the cold weather, there was a bike fallen on its side in the yard. It wasn’t mine. I watched my father notice it, how his eyes flickered to me in the backseat. I noted the worry there, his own dose of dread. It was the first time I ever felt sorry for my father.

  “Abbie and the boys are at her mother’s for the weekend,” he said with false cheer as we pulled into the garage. “So we’ll have the place to ourselves. I made a steak pie that I’ll put in the oven for dinner. But right now, you two need to get some rest.”

  Holmes stumbled into the house and over to the living room couch. Without taking off her shoes, without saying a word to either of us, she stretched out in her homecoming dress and went immediately to sleep.

  “There’s a guest room,” my father said as I folded myself up into the armchair beside her.

  “I know,” I said to him. “I used to live here.”

  He didn’t have anything to say to that.

  The truth was that, for many varied, contradictory reasons, I didn’t want Holmes out of my sight. Even as I fell into a dreamless sleep, I kept an ear open. Listening in case she ran, and left me there alone.

  WHEN I WOKE, IT WAS DARK AGAIN, THAT SORT OF FALL-EVENING gloom. The clock on the wall said 6:07. I’d slept the whole day, and from the state of the couch, so had Holmes.

  There was a rustling in the kitchen. Inside, it was as well lit as I remembered, and the table and chairs were the same. But the dark cabinets had been given a coat of white, the walls painted a farmhouse blue. A ceramic rooster presided over the sink. Abigail’s additions, I was sure. When my father offered, I turned down a tour of the rest of the house.

  Holmes had hoisted herself up onto one of the stools at the counter, and she sat there, swinging her legs while her eyes roved around the room. I watched her put together the story of this house, of my childhood, the way a soldier assembles a gun in the dark. At least one of us knew how to behave normally—though for the record, this may have been the first time it was her, and not me.

  “Hi,” I said to her.

  “Hi,” she said back. “Did you sleep well?”

  “I slept fine.”

  We avoided each other’s eyes.

  “Well,” my father said as the oven heated up. “Let’s get down to it. That Shepard fellow arrives in”—he consulted his watch—“an hour. What have you got for him? To clear yourselves?”

  “Nothing,” Holmes said. “Well. The fact that we didn’t kill anyone, for starters.”

  “You haven’t killed anyone,” I repeated. It was the first time she’d admitted it.

  She lifted an eyebrow. “We haven’t attacked a single person at this school. We’ve never killed anyone.”

  She was choosing her words carefully, I could tell.

  “And that—that serial killer den wasn’t yours.”

  “That serial killer den wasn’t mine.” Unexpectedly, she grinned at me. “It wasn’t yours, was it? It’s a bit rude not to share.”

  I wrinkled my nose at her, and she hit me in the arm. God help me. I couldn’t stay mad at her, even if she did turn out to be a cold-blooded killer. I was in way, way too deep.

  “Right,” my father said, confused. “I had sort of thought all of that was a given. Do you have any actual proof that clears you?”

  “Enough witnesses to prove that we weren’t the people who attacked Elizabeth. Elizabeth herself, when she wakes up. But that’s moot, anyway. In about an hour and fifteen minutes, I’ll have the leverage we need to clear our names and get Shepard to involve us in his investigation.”

  I didn’t know anything about this. “What?”

  She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, and said nothing. Across from us, I swear my father’s eyes were sparkling.

  I stared at him. “Shouldn’t you be, you know, worried?”

  But he was already pulling a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator. “A toast is in order, I think. A little glass couldn’t hurt at this point.”

  The cork popped, and steam fizzed out. Holmes and I exchanged a startled glance. She hadn’t expected him to believe her. Very few people had the ability to surprise her, but apparently my father was one of them. I didn’t care. I had a glass of champagne, possibly my last as a free man. I slurped the foam off the top of my glass.

  Holmes, being Holmes, looked at my father and decided to investigate. “Oh, this is lovely, thanks much. But tell us why we’re celebrating! You can’t trust me that much. There has to be something more to it.” She leaned on one hand, drawing on the vast reserves of charm she kept hidden away for just this purpose. “That pie smells tremendous,” she added. “Can’t think of the last time I had good comfort food.”

  If my father noticed the show—and really, how couldn’t he?—he didn’t mind it. “It’s Jamie’s grandmother’s recipe. I haven’t had a chance to make it in a long time.” He beamed. “I’m happy this worked out for you two. I’d worried it wouldn’t.”

  “What worked out?” Wherever this was headed, I was sure it was a bad, bad place. “If you’re about to tell me you killed off Dobson to get me some detective practice, I swear to God—”

  With a wave, he cut me off. “Jamie, don’t be so melodramatic. Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” Holmes said, under her breath. The machinery in her head was whirring to life. “It began before that.�
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  “Yes,” my father said, delighted. “Go on.”

  She looked me over the way you might do a horse. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “And sport. It has to do with rugby.”

  “Excellent.” He lifted his glass to her. “I’m sorry, Jamie, but I still can’t believe you bought it. A rugby scholarship? Yes, you’re a perfectly adequate player, no doubt, and certainly good enough for their team, but you have to admit that the idea was a bit far-fetched.” He took a meditative sip. “No, it was all something that we plotted up in our cups, last summer.”

  “We?”

  “You and my uncle,” Holmes said to my father, bypassing me entirely.

  “What?” I said faintly. I was still trying to process the fact that I wasn’t, in fact, a genius rugger, and that no one had told our poor captain. “Wait. You’re going to solve this mystery. Not the Dobson-Elizabeth-drug dealer mystery. This one. And you’re going to solve it now.” I stifled a semi-hysterical laugh. “When I didn’t even know there was a mystery. God, what could I possibly have done in a past life to get stuck with someone like you?”

  “Go on,” my father was saying happily. It was good that one of us was enjoying himself. “Tell me how you know.”

  She ticked the deductions off on her fingers. “You were born in Edinburgh like the rest of your family, but you have an Oxbridge spin on your words. When you opened your cupboard to fetch these flutes, I saw a mug, top shelf, with the Balliol College blazon on. Oxford, then.”

  My father spread his hands, waiting for her to continue.

  “You hugged me with a surprising amount of familiarity when we met, but you didn’t hug your son. Even with your difficult relationship”—my father’s smile faltered for a moment—“if you were so prone to hugs, you would have made an attempt on him anyway. No, you felt you knew me. You must have heard of me, then, and not in the papers—or there would have been polite pity and no hug—but from someone who spoke highly of me, and with warmth. The first rules out my parents; the second, most of my relatives. My brother, Milo, doesn’t believe in friends, and anyway, you’d have no reason to chat to a pudgy, secretive computer genius who leaves his Berlin flat only under extreme duress. My aunt Araminta is nice enough, which means she’s glacial by society’s standards. Cousin Margaret is twelve, and Great-Aunt Agatha is dead, and that’s the tour de monde of the effusive members of my family.