A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Excepting, of course, my dear old uncle Leander, Balliol College ’89, who gave me my violin, and is the first Holmes in known memory to host a party of his own free will. Of course you’re friends.” She peered at him for a second. “Oh. And flatmates. For at least a year, no more than three.”

  I poured another glass of champagne and drank it straight down.

  My father, smartly, put the bottle away. “You’re as clever as he is, Charlotte, and a great deal quicker. Though Leander, bless him, is lazy enough to solve a crime and forget to tell his client for months.

  “He came to your seventh birthday party,” my father told me. “Don’t you remember?” My seventh birthday party had been held at one of those roadside amusement parks with a go-kart track and a half-dozen arcade games. “He brought you a rabbit as a gift. Giant thing. Big floppy ears. Your mother, being your mother, sent it immediately to a nice home in the country.”

  “Harold,” I said, piecing it together. That had been the rabbit’s name. I had an impression of a towering man with slicked-back hair and a lazy smile.

  “I roomed with him back before I met your mother,” he said. “Bachelor days, before I was lured away to London. Leander had set up as a private detective, and I was . . . well, I was very bored. We were introduced at an alumni event at a pub; I’m sure you’ve noticed how keen everyone is to introduce a Holmes to a Watson. He was chatting up the bartender. I think he brought him home in the end. Could turn on the charm, Leander, when the situation called for it.” He raised an eyebrow at Holmes, who didn’t blush but looked like she might’ve liked to.

  “And you’re still friends?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” my father said. “The two of us, we’re the best kind of disaster. Apples and oranges. Well, more like apples and machetes.” He studied my face for a moment. “I thought you could use a little shaking up, Jamie. That school in London was too expensive for what a bloody toff factory it was, and even with what I could contribute, we couldn’t afford to keep you there. I told Leander about my frustrations, and he mentioned that Charlotte here had just been deposited, friendless and alone, only an hour from my house. Did you really think this was a coincidence—the two of you winding up here, in America, at the same boarding school?”

  I was fed up with all these ridiculous bombshells and rhetorical questions. “Yes,” I said pointedly. “Also, your pie smells like it’s burning.”

  Holmes sniffed the air. “It smells quite good, actually,” she said, and took it out to cool. I scowled at her. She made a helpless gesture.

  “The tuition . . . well, Leander offered to pay it. When I said no, he told me that otherwise he’d just buy another Stradivarius. I tried telling him that he’d have to put an entire town through Sherringford to come close to the price of a Strad, but he held firm. I gave in. And so Leander arranged some sleight-of-hand with the board of trustees and offered you a ‘scholarship.’ You didn’t wonder why you didn’t lose your scholarship when you were suspended from the rugby team?” He grinned. “That’s why. The whole thing was quite fun. I think he enjoyed it immensely.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking of all my violent resentment at being sent away, of having to leave London, my friends, my kid sister. “Fun.”

  “Well then.” My father clapped his hands together. “You’ve met! You’re friends! You’ve found yourselves a murder! I couldn’t have asked for more. Come, let’s eat before the detective arrives.”

  Holmes’s phone buzzed. “I have to take this, excuse me.” She stepped out the back door, and I watched her through the glass as she paced in her dress, speaking rapidly to someone.

  “Who could possibly be calling her?” I wondered aloud. “It must be her brother.”

  My father kept slicing the pie. “I hope you’re not terribly mad at me.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m furious.”

  “It seemed to have worked out rather well, though, you have to give me that.” He handed me a heaping plate. I wished, badly, that I wasn’t starving.

  “Well? This worked out well?” I choked. “God, I don’t have to give you anything.”

  “Jamie. Please don’t be like this.” He was avoiding my eyes. “Aren’t you happy you met Charlotte? She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

  “Will you please stop side-stepping the point? This isn’t about Holmes, it’s about the strings you pulled to get me here. God, you don’t even know me! I hadn’t seen you for years! How can you not understand that being bored isn’t an excuse to reach in and fuck with my life for fun?”

  “Language,” my father warned.

  “You don’t get to do that.” I heard myself getting loud. “You don’t get to deflect every response you don’t like. I’m in a horrible mess that you, for whatever reason, have decided to find charming.”

  With shaking hands, he set down the knife. I was shocked to see his eyes glossed in tears. “You’re right, Jamie. I don’t know you anymore. God help me for wanting that to change.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “He’s early,” my father said, and hurriedly plated some pie for Holmes. “I’ll get it.”

  When he left the room, I let out a ragged breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

  Holmes slipped back into the house. “Well, that looked rather brutal,” she said, eyeing me. It was an observation, not an attempt at sympathy, and so I didn’t have to respond to it.

  “Sit,” I said instead, pulling out a stool. “Who called you?”

  My father walked in, Detective Shepard behind him. Holmes read something in their faces that I didn’t, because her posture, always impeccable, went ramrod-straight.

  “Jamie. Charlotte.” I noticed that Shepard had dark circles under his eyes. “I’d like to get you back down to the station. Now.”

  “What are you charging us with?” I asked him.

  “I’d like to get you back down to the station,” he repeated, a patented non-answer.

  “You’ll need to wait for my lawyer,” Holmes said coolly. “He’ll be representing both of us, but as his office is in New York, it could be several hours until he arrives. Do you mind if I phone him?”

  The detective nodded, and she placed the call right there.

  I felt a rush of relief. The worst possible outcome was happening. I could finally, finally stop dreading it.

  My father, being my father, chose that moment to begin to worry.

  “Do you mind if they eat in the meantime?” he asked, a plea in his voice. “I don’t know how long they’ll be down at—at the station, and dinner’s on the table. You’re welcome to join us, of course.”

  Shepard hesitated. He took in Holmes’s too-thin frame, the steaming plate in front of me, and I watched him give in. “Fine. They can eat, since we’ll have to wait for their lawyer anyway. But be quick about it.” He set his bag down, and took a seat.

  I made an effort with the pie, though I pushed it aside after a few bites. Shepard’s scrutiny made me too uncomfortable to eat. For her part, Holmes decided to develop an appetite. Slowly, fastidiously, she picked the carrots from the crust one by one. Once removed, she sliced them into quarters and then halved them again. After spearing each piece with her fork, she dipped it into the mashed potato and transferred it to her mouth. She chewed each morsel seventeen times. And then she repeated the process. Across the table, my father watched her, one hand gripping the table hard.

  I wondered if he was still enjoying himself.

  Silence reigned. After twenty minutes, Holmes hadn’t even gotten to the steak, and the detective began to shift unhappily in his chair. I took the chance to catalog him, to try to draw some Holmesian deductions. He was in his late thirties, I decided. Clean-shaven, but in rumpled clothes. He clearly hadn’t gotten home to change or shower since interrogating Holmes last night. There was a wedding band on his left hand. I couldn’t tell if he had kids of his own, but his decision to let us eat dinner made me think he did. What I couldn’t account for was the reluctance t
hat radiated off him, the way he projected unease in his posture, in his frown, his furrowed brow. Like my father, he’d lost his eagerness.

  “I understand why you did it. To Dobson,” he said quietly, watching Holmes eat. She didn’t look up. “Every account I get says that kid was a bastard, and he was fixated on you. But what I don’t get is why you didn’t just tell the school about his abuse and get it to stop. And I don’t get why the two of you would attack Elizabeth Hartwell. Bryony Downs, the Sherringford nurse, told me that you, Charlotte, had been behaving erratically at the dance all night—”

  “Way to make friends,” I said to her.

  “—and then the two of you chase some other guy down into these underground tunnels I’ve never even heard of, where we find you in a room straight out of a TV procedural, just waiting for us. I found these in there.” He dug a pair of trousers and a black shirt out of the bag, and shook them out for her inspection. “Yours?”

  The clothes from the mattress.

  She looked up uninterestedly. “Yes,” she said. “Though if you’ve examined them, you’ll see that they’ve never been worn.”

  Shepard nodded. She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. “I examined them, Charlotte. I made a lot of calls this morning. One of those was to your mother.”

  My father leaned forward. “And?”

  Shepard rubbed at his temple, thinking, and then he pulled a binder out of his bag, laying it open on the table. “Jamie, do you mind pointing this purported drug dealer out to me?”

  I pushed my plate away. The twelve men in front of me were uniformly blond and ugly. They ranged in age from a few years older than me to forty. One sported an eyebrow scar. Another smiled, missing teeth. The third one from the top looked the closest to what I’d remembered. I racked my memory.

  “Him,” I said, sounding slightly more confident than I felt.

  “That man turned himself in this morning,” he said, tapping the photo. “Said that Charlotte has been dealing for him for years. Gave me a record, in her handwriting, of transactions he said she’d done for him. Said he was sorry, that he’d seen the error of his ways, that he just wanted the kids to be safe, now, from her.” Shepard shut his eyes for a pained moment. “The records are immaculate, you know. They perfectly match the sample of your handwriting, Charlotte, that I got from your biology teacher.”

  “What’s his name?” Holmes asked, showing a glimmer of interest.

  Shepard raised an eyebrow. “He gave it as John Smith.”

  Wordlessly, Holmes left the room, returning a second later with the little red notebook. She flipped through it there at the table until she reached a page near the end. CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER, it read, in her own spiky hand. “Believe me or don’t,” she said, “but we found this in John Smith’s car.” She went back to her dinner.

  “We’re going to follow up with the students that Charlotte sold to,” the detective told us. “We’ll find out the truth of it then.”

  “He forged those records,” I said, looking at her. “All of them. The ones in that room—”

  “Look,” Shepard said, interrupting. “One of my calls this morning was to Scotland Yard. Everyone there vouches for you, Charlotte. Okay, some of them might not like you much, and they weren’t surprised that you were mixed up in a crime, but to a man, they swore up and down you wouldn’t hurt anyone. Annoy them to death, maybe.”

  One corner of Holmes’s mouth turned up, but she stayed silent. The detective rubbed his eyes. “I was also reassured that if you did do it, I wouldn’t have you on my list of suspects at all.” He turned to my father. “Apparently she’s that good. Then I talked to Philly PD about Aaron Davis, Sherringford’s last dealer, and apparently the kid is doing time down there for dealing oxy at UPenn. I have a buddy down there who owes me a favor, asked Aaron some questions. He remembers Charlotte. Confirmed her story, that he sold to her down in that room last year. He also said she didn’t have enough friends or enough patience to ever deal on her own. We’ll follow up, like I said. Aaron’s a con, so his word isn’t golden, but . . .” Shepard shrugged expressively. “But a kid’s dead. Another is in the hospital. You two just look too good for it. Charlotte has a private chemistry lab where she keeps a whole bunch of poisons. And you”—he pointed at me—“you could easily get into Lee Dobson’s room at night. You were flirting with Elizabeth Hartwell. It looks, for all the world, like the two of you are in some kind of lovers’ pact gone wrong. Someone might be doing their best to set you up, might be throwing absolutely everything at the wall to try to find something to stick, but the much more rational answer is that Charlotte Holmes isn’t half as good as everyone thinks she is. I might not like it, but until I have a better answer—”

  Holmes looked up, and a beat later, Shepard’s phone rang.

  “Hold on.” He put it to his ear. “Shepard. Slow down. She what? No. No, that’s fine. Yeah. Is she—good. Yeah, I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Glancing over at us with something like relief, he said, “I just need to finish up something here.”

  “This pie is delicious,” Holmes said to my father. He looked back at her helplessly. “Is there any more?”

  SOMEONE HAD TRIED TO KILL LENA.

  That’s how Shepard put it to us. Unbothered by Holmes’s absence, Lena had spent the day after homecoming holed up in bed, reading magazines and working her way through a care package of cookies from home. She’d been playing music loud enough that when there was a knock at her door, she wasn’t sure, at first, if she’d imagined it. But when she finally got up to check, there it was on the threshold: a parcel, and inside the parcel, a sliding ivory jewelry box.

  Though she unwrapped the paper, Lena didn’t open the box. With the roommate she had, she’d gotten used to seeing some weird things, and in the past, when mysterious packages had arrived, they’d always been for Holmes. (“I do a lot of online shopping,” Holmes told Detective Shepard without batting an eye.) So she’d set it on her roommate’s desk and taken a nap.

  She woke up twenty minutes later to a man in a ski mask looming over her, one hand at her throat, as if he were about to check her pulse or strangle her. Lena screamed. The man ran. And she immediately called the police, surrendering the mysterious box to their custody. As we spoke, they were examining it at the station.

  Something about all this was naggingly familiar, but I couldn’t put a finger on what.

  “When did this happen?” Holmes demanded, hands shaking. I hadn’t realized that she’d cared about Lena so much. “Just now? I spoke with her not twenty minutes ago.”

  The detective took out a notepad and paper. “What about?”

  Holmes’s mouth twitched. “She’d spilled punch on me at homecoming and wanted to know if I was still angry. I told her I was over it, and we’d get my dress to the cleaners. No harm, no foul.”

  So it had been Lena on the phone, earlier. I’d never seen Holmes take one of her roommate’s calls before. She always sent them, and everyone else’s, straight to voicemail to screen at her leisure.

  “Does she know that you went down to the station? Did she know where you were today?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “The only person I really talk to is Jamie. I doubt anyone at the school knows I’m gone, unless they saw you haul us away in the cruiser. But it was dark.”

  My father was taking notes in a chair in the corner. “Dark,” he muttered to himself.

  “But Lena’s okay?” Holmes asked. Her lower lip trembled. “I’m sorry, I just—this sounds awful, but I really do think that man was there to hurt me, not Lena. And that weird box . . . Jamie, doesn’t it ring a bell for you too?”

  She wasn’t acting like herself. She was acting normal. Like she’d have any reaction other than swift and extreme mobilization at hearing that that she’d missed a crime in her own dorm room. Like she wasn’t . . .

  I put it together in a flash.

  Oh, she was brilliant. Like a hurtling comet you couldn’t look at d
ead on without burning your retinas right off. Like a bioluminescent lake. She was a sixteen-year-old detective-savant who could tell your life story from a look, who retrofitted little carved boxes with surprise poison springs early on a Saturday morning when everyone else, including me, was asleep in their beds.

  She’d set herself up to be the target of a fake crime to get us off the hook for the real one. And she’d used Lena, and some mysterious guy, to do it.

  “Culverton Smith,” I said, piecing it together aloud for Shepard’s sake. “It’s from a Holmes story. We’re being set up. Jesus Christ, tell your policemen to wear gloves when handling that box. Thick ones.”

  To his credit, he took me seriously. “Making a call. But I want an explanation as soon as I’m back.” He stepped outside.

  “You,” I said to her, “are a genius.”

  Across the table, Holmes slipped from false concern into very real satisfaction. “It’s quite a good story, you know. ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective.’ Pity that Dr. Watson smothered what should have been an exercise in logic in all that sentimental garbage about his partner.”

  “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” for me, has always been the hardest of the Sherlock Holmes stories to read, and not because it isn’t brilliantly done. It’s 1890. Dr. Watson, who’s living with his wife away from Baker Street, is urgently called to Sherlock Holmes’s bedside. The detective has caught a rare, highly contagious disease that, as he tells Dr. Watson, can only be cured by Culverton Smith, a specialist in tropical illnesses living nearby. The catch: Smith hates Holmes because he correctly accused Smith of murder. His victim was infected with, and died of, this same disease. But Holmes insists that Watson bring Smith anyway, that Smith is their only hope. While Holmes rattles off a series of ridiculous-sounding orders on how Watson is to go about fetching this specialist, Watson idly picks up a small ivory box that’s been resting on the table. Out of nowhere, Holmes insists that Watson put it down and not touch it again.