A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  I had to employ rule #9 (sometimes for your own sake you must leave Holmes to his own devices, even if you return to find he’s set himself on fire) when real life began to creep in. The rugby team had asked for permission for me to rejoin in what should have been the last week of my suspension, and gotten it from the school. Holmes had insisted that I go. A number of Dobson’s friends were on the squad, and she’d decided I should ask them, in a roundabout manner, about his last weeks alive. If he was seeing anyone unusual, leaving campus at late hours, taking strange calls. If some blond man had sold him any drugs, and what he’d said. That sort of thing. I’d figured that I could manage well enough.

  Holmes disagreed. “You’re a terrible liar,” she said, perched on her lab table. I stood before her, like a schoolboy about to recite his lessons. “More specifically, I can read your thoughts as if they were printed in block letters on your forehead. Really, sometimes you think so loudly that I can hear you in the next room. There’s no way you can approach your teammates in an innocent manner. We need to fix that.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your unfortunate telepathy,” I snapped.

  “See, just there? You’re frustrated, and think I’m being rude.”

  “Oh, well done,” I told her. “Really fine detective work. Why are we doing this now?”

  She ran a hand through her hair. “Watson,” she said, “we’ve hit a brick wall. We’ve come up with nothing new. Just let’s get you into shape, okay?”

  “Okay.” I deflated at the pleading note in her voice.

  She smiled. “Let’s start with the basics. How to recognize when others are lying to you, so you can begin to police your own habits.”

  She walked me through it—where someone looks when they’re recalling a memory, and when they’re fabricating one; how an honest man stands, and a lying one, how they hold their shoulders (slumped), their hands (behind their back, to hide fidgeting), if they’d prefer to stand or sit (to stand, probably with nervous feet). All of it she rattled off as though reading from a book.

  “How young did you learn all this?”

  “Five,” she said. “My mum was cross with Milo for teasing me. He kept telling me Santa Claus was real.”

  “I’m sorry,” I asked, “was? Don’t you mean wasn’t?”

  “No.” She ran her finger down the agenda in her lap and sighed. “Right, so it’s eight o’clock already and you’re tetchy because you have history homework for tomorrow—I can tell by your feet, stop shuffling—so do a practice run or two and then we’ll be finished.”

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets to keep myself from fidgeting. “Do you want me to try to lie to you?”

  At that, I watched Holmes fight back a laugh. “God, no, that would be pointless. No, I’ll make a series of statements and you can tell me which are true. Thumb up for truth, thumb down for a lie.”

  “I’m pretty good at reading you, you know,” I told her.

  “That might be true,” she said gamely. “But did you know that my father worked for the M.O.D. for fourteen years before the Kremlin got wind of a scheme of his and tried to have him assassinated? Or that, growing up, I had a cat called Mouse? She’s white and black and very fussy, and once the neighbor boy tried to drown her in a bucket. My mother hates her. Milo joined up with MI5 at age seventeen. No, that’s false, Milo runs the world’s largest private security company. Or no, actually, he’s an enfant terrible preparing a hostile takeover of Google. He’s unemployed. He’s a complete tosser. For years he was my favorite person in the world.”

  I held my hand out rather stupidly between us; my thumb hadn’t moved. I’d spent too much time imagining what her life was like, before me, so I drank in all these facts—even the contrary ones—as if they were water.

  “Pay attention to my face, Watson. Not my words. Listen to my tone. How am I sitting? Where am I looking?” She snapped her fingers. “I own three dressing gowns. I dislike guns; they cheapen confrontations. I first took cocaine at age twelve, and sometimes I take oxycodone when I’m miserable. When I met you, my initial thought was that my parents had set it up. No, it was that you were dreamy.” Grinning, I put my thumb up; she pushed it back down. “No, I thought, finally what someone wants from me, I can give them. I know how to play to an audience. I liked you. I thought you were another chauvinistic bastard who thought I couldn’t take care of myself.”

  “All true,” I said, quietly, before she could continue. “All of it. At one point or another, including the business about your brother. He’s done all those things, been all those things. You thought all those things about me.”

  “Explain your method.” Holmes pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it.

  “Because, somewhere in that brain of yours, you’ve decided I should know more about you, but you don’t want to do it outright. No, it can’t be simple, you’re Charlotte Holmes. You have to do it sideways, and this is the most sideways approach you could dream up.”

  She exhaled in a long stream, head tipped to the side. I suppressed a cough. “Fine,” she said, finally, and I chanced a smile. Grudgingly, she returned it. “But none of those deductions were methodical, Watson. That was all psychology. I loathe psychology.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I hate losing at games, too.”

  The next day, she put me through another session, this time with a new test subject. I shouldn’t have been surprised that she brought in Lena.

  We met on the quad after classes, shivering and stomping our boots. Lena’s hair hung in a braid down her back, and her hat had a knit flower that drooped down over her brow. She had a date with Tom in town that night, she told us, so she couldn’t stay too late. It was odd to watch her next to Holmes in her trim black coat, hands stuffed into the fur muff strung from her neck. When the wind nipped at us, Lena huddled against her roommate with a familiarity that was almost shocking. I wondered what they talked about together. I couldn’t imagine it.

  For two hours, until the tips of my fingers were literally blue from the cold, I practiced reading Lena’s tells. (In the process, I learned her down to the ground. I really didn’t need to know that much about her sex life.) By the end of it, I was so exhausted from shivering that I wanted nothing more than to go to bed with a cup of something warm. Thankfully, when I went a full ten minutes without mislabeling one of Lena’s statements, Holmes let us call it a day. We ducked into the Stevenson Hall lobby for warmth.

  “You guys are up to secret things, I can tell. How are your secret things?” Lena asked, unwinding the scarf from her neck.

  “They’re about to go much better.” Holmes discreetly stuffed a roll of bills into Lena’s coat pocket. “Run the poker game as usual tomorrow, will you? I don’t want anyone to note a change in my behavior.”

  Lena pulled the money back out and pressed it into Holmes’s hand. “Keep it,” she said. “I kind of like being your test subject.”

  Holmes froze. “But—”

  “Ugh, don’t be weird about it. We’re friends. And I don’t, like, need the money.” Standing on her tiptoes, she kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks, Jamie. That was a lot of fun, but I want to get to ask you inappropriate questions. Maybe we could have pizza in town sometime.”

  “You’re having pizza in town with Tom tonight,” Holmes said.

  “Sure,” I said, ignoring her. “I’d like that.”

  Holmes had on the kind of scowl toddlers get when their favorite toy is stolen away. “We’re done here,” she announced, and dragged me off by my elbow.

  When I arrived at practice the next day, Kline was surveying the rugby pitch, fists on hips like a taller, dumber Napoleon. He was mad, and not without cause—their record stood so far at a predictable 0–7.

  “We’re starting in ten! Look alive!” he shouted. It was true, the team did seem dead. Our fly-half was actually sleeping, on his side, at midfield. Larson, our eight-man, trotted by and kicked him in the small of the back. Without a flicker of interest, Coach Q loo
ked up from his director’s chair and then back down at his copy of Men’s Health.

  “We’re down to fourteen players, so many students have gone home. I don’t think the school would’ve let you back on if that wasn’t the case.” Kline looked me over. “So, have you been staying in shape?”

  “Running five miles every day,” I lied. “But I’ll do whatever. I’m happy to be back on the team.” Another lie, delivered smoothly. I’d been practicing. “Where’s Randall? I haven’t talked to him since Elizabeth . . . you know . . . and I wanted to make sure we were on decent terms.”

  Kline pointed. “He’s getting ready to drill with the backs. If you want to talk to him, make it quick.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “We’re starting in five!”

  When I caught up with him, Randall was even redder-faced than usual. I wasn’t sure if it was from exertion or anger.

  “Oh hey, the jackass is back,” he said, shoving past me on his way to the bench.

  A bit of both, then.

  “Randall, wait.” He slowed down slightly and I pulled up even. “Look. I wanted to say I’m sorry about Dobson. I didn’t know him that well, but I know he was your friend.”

  “You have some issues, dude. That was fucked up. Going after him for saying what’s on his mind? He was just messing, and you jumped on him. Then he shows up dead. Fucked up,” he repeated, and dug his water bottle out from his bag.

  I counted backward from five. “Charlotte Holmes is like my sister. Okay? He said the absolute worst thing he could have said. But I didn’t kill him, I promise that.”

  “Then why do the police keep hauling you in? Why were you the one who found Elizabeth?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” he countered. “I’ve seen that detective with you like a million times. You got hauled down to the station after Lizzie got hurt. Why does he suspect you, if you’re so innocent?”

  “Same reason why you would, if you were them.” The words came out bitterly. That fear of winding up in an orange jumpsuit hadn’t entirely gone away—a bit of it lingered at the edges of everything I did, really—and I pulled from the truth of that feeling, laid it under my words.

  Randall eyed me. “I don’t know, man.”

  “Think what you want,” I told him. “But you should know I feel like shit about all of it. I’ve heard all these rumors that Dobson hung himself, and I can’t sleep, thinking I somehow drove him to it.”

  A lie, of course, but I was baiting my trap. Holmes taught me that: people would much rather correct you than answer a straightforward question. Randall wasn’t an exception to the rule.

  “Dude, you weren’t that important to him,” he said. “No, I heard that he was poisoned. I don’t know which one’s true.”

  “Poisoned? From the dining hall food?”

  “Maybe.” Randall shrugged. “But other people would probably be sick then too. I don’t know, he’d been eating these cookies his sister sent him, and they looked nasty. Maybe it was in those. Or that weird protein powder he had. That stuff was the wrong color. He said it was from Germany and expensive, but I didn’t buy it. Maybe your little friend slipped something into it.”

  “Out on the pitch,” Kline hollered.

  “All right,” Randall said, “later.” The venom was gone from his voice. I was happy about that, at least.

  “You good?” Kline asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hey, so, he said something about protein powder? Do you . . . do you know a good brand?” I bent to lace a cleat so he couldn’t see my face. I wasn’t sure I could pull that one off: I wore cable-knit jumpers and read Vonnegut novels and had a girl for a best friend. I was about as likely to build up giant biceps as to build a colony on the moon.

  “Talk to Nurse Bryony at the infirmary,” he said. “She has some prescription stuff she gets from Europe.”

  I reached in my bag, ostensibly for my water bottle, and sent Holmes an urgent text. I just hoped her phone was on this time, and not pickled in formaldehyde or in pieces across her chemistry table.

  Practice crawled by at a snail’s pace, especially once we began running plays. When Kline announced the last of them, I gritted my teeth and waited for my opportunity. Then I threw myself up for a catch in the most insane possible position, sprawling out like a diver going into water. I let myself go limp. My head bounced once, twice, three times against the frozen ground.

  No one could say I wasn’t dedicated to my game.

  I heard Kline holler, “That’s it! Watson! Watson!” and the rest of the team roaring.

  Things went black.

  When I woke, I found myself blinking up into fluorescent lights. Holmes’s tear-streaked face was hovering over mine. She seemed genuinely upset, and for a second, I thought there’d been another murder. I struggled to sit up on my elbows.

  “Oh, baby,” she sniffed, shoving me back down on the bed with a touch more force than was necessary. “I thought you’d never wake up!”

  I completely failed to catch on, at first. But then again, I had hit my head. “Where am I?” I tried to ask, but it came out more like a woof.

  Holmes burst into tears, putting a hand to her mouth. Her nails were painted a bright red, and she smelled like Forever Ever Cotton Candy. Then I noticed she was in a polka-dot sweater. With a bow in her hair.

  Apparently, she’d been working on her caring-girlfriend routine.

  I thought I was going to be sick, but then, it might’ve been the concussion; I was fairly sure I had one. Everything was out of focus, in a doubled sort of way, and the only solution I could think of was to sleep. I shut my eyes, satisfied that I’d fulfilled my end of our makeshift plan. I had an injury that was bound to keep me in the infirmary for at least a day. Enough time for Holmes to poke around.

  Somewhere across the room, a voice said, “Oh, you two are too much,” and I snapped my eyes open again. From the little supply station, Nurse Bryony beamed at us. “Do you know she hasn’t left your side for the past three hours? You blacked out for a bit, and then you were drifting between asleep and awake, and the whole time she just sat and held your hand, fretting. Poor thing.”

  The accent was American, but the cadences were faintly, unmistakably English. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. Or was it in my head? This time, if I ignored the halos I saw around all the lights and the soft little hum in my head, I could almost pay attention.

  “How long will he be here?” Holmes asked, laying her hand against my cheek. “We have dinner reservations for tomorrow in town. It’s our two-month anniversary.”

  Her fingers were cool and soft against my face, and I found myself leaning into her touch. Then I froze. “Sorry,” I whispered to her, mortified.

  “What are you apologizing for?” she asked, her voice surprisingly rough-edged. With her other hand, she brushed my hair back from my face.

  The nurse cleared her throat, cutting into my confusion. “I’ll keep a close eye on him. It’s not bad enough to send him to the hospital, but I still don’t want to take chances. You might have to reschedule your plans, just to be safe.”

  Holmes smiled down at me. She wasn’t Hailey. She was something much more insidious. Charlotte Holmes without the edges, all combed and clean, well loved and loving in return. I knew it would be gone tomorrow, all of it—the gentle way she touched me, the glitter of her undivided attention, the bows and the perfume. It would all go back into her costume box, and she would be the real Holmes again.

  Because this wasn’t real, even if she spoke to me in what sounded like her real voice. “Do you hear that? You should be fine,” she said.

  I shouldn’t have wanted it the way I did.

  I was beginning to go, I could tell, and I knew I would wake up back into our old life. The lights winked at me; they liked the secrets I told them. But silently, I reminded myself, secrets are best when kept to oneself. They began blowing out, one by one, like candles. “Good night,” I told Holmes, pulling
her hand to my chest, and then I was awash in sleep.

  “WATSON,” SHE HISSED. “WATSON, WAKE UP, I’VE GOT TO GO. Night check’s in ten minutes.”

  The room was dark, but I could see light coming in from under the door, where the nurse’s desk was. Thankfully, it seemed my head had cleared enough to form coherent sentences. “Did you find anything?” I asked. Or tried to ask. It came out cotton-mouthed.

  Holmes handed me a glass of water with an impatient look. I was right; she was herself again, and I suppressed a flare of disappointed guilt.

  After a gulp, I repeated my question.

  “She went out for a smoke, and I picked the lock on the medicine cabinet. There’s a store of protein powder in with the other prescriptions, for Gabriel Tinker, according to the tag, but the canisters were all empty. I tasted a bit of powder I found in the cabinet, and it seemed innocent enough.”

  Tinker was the rugby team’s fly-half, the one who’d been sleeping on the field. “You tasted it? Why couldn’t you take it back to your lab and examine it there?”

  She looked affronted that I should even ask. “Efficiency.”

  “Right, okay, you nut.” I pulled myself, slowly, into a sitting position. Holmes tucked a pillow behind my back. “So let’s break it down: she’s from England. That’s why we flagged her file originally, right?”

  “She was born there, but she moved here when she was a teenager. Or so she said when I pressed her, after I shed a few homesick tears. My face is still swollen. I forgot how uncomfortable this whole crying business is.”

  “No powder, no England. Two near misses, then,” I said. “Unless you somehow wronged her back when you were a toddler, if I’ve got her age right. Twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-three.” Holmes got to her feet. “If she is, in fact, our culprit, she wouldn’t be telling the truth to us anyway, so it hardly matters. As it stands, I can tell she’s hiding something, but that could just be the sort of reserve you have around students. I’ll try to track down an actual sample of that powder tomorrow, because what I tried tasted more like dust than protein.”