A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “That’s heartless,” I said, stung. All this time, had I been nothing more to her than someone to carry her bag?

  “I said, I try to avoid it, do keep up.” She shut her book and fixed her lantern eyes on me. “Trust me, if Milo were involved in a murder plot, I’d find it very difficult to assist him. It’s not heartlessness if it saves lives.”

  She was spoiling for a fight, but I made myself back down. I thought of the Cadbury Flake on my desk, the time she leaned over to straighten my glasses in the middle of a conversation. She was either much better or much worse at this whole caring business than she thought. “Wheatley’s getting information about the two of us somewhere, and he’s definitely watching you closely.”

  “That surprises you?” she asked.

  I bit back a remark about her being the center of the universe.

  “Well, yes. No. I don’t know. He also seems genuinely afraid of snakes,” I said, wanting to defend him. “And genuinely concerned with what’s happening to me.”

  “I’d suspect him less if he seemed indifferent,” Holmes pointed out. “Did he try to dig into your oh-so-compelling trauma?”

  “No.” I paused. “Well, a little. He referred me to a therapist.”

  “Psychology.” She snorted. “All the same.”

  I threw up my hands. “What about the other names on the suspects list? You know, the ones who aren’t Romanian royalty or pop stars. The Moriartys. What about August? Is he really dead?”

  “Nothing to report.” Holmes drew on her cigarette, her eyes narrowing. “Honestly, sod all this, none of this is correct. We have the data and the access but we’ve made no progress, and I’ve smoked at least twenty of these horrible things today and I am developing a wretched dependency, just you watch, we’ll be out in the middle of some sodding field watching a perfectly captivating murder take place firsthand, and I’ll have to run off in the middle because I need to have a Lucky Strike right then or I’ll be the one doing the killing.” She stabbed out her cigarette against the love seat’s arm, and in the same gesture, lit another. I’d heard her run off on tangents before, but none this frustrated or angry.

  “Then stop. Smoking.”

  “Do you really want me to revert to the alternative?” she snapped.

  “Maybe we should take the night off,” I said. “Go get pancakes, plan for tomorrow.”

  I could have blamed myself for having wound her up in the first place, but Holmes had been itching for a confrontation from the moment I walked through the door. The look she gave me then was the one you saved for cockroaches, shoe in hand. “This is what I do. You want me to stop? You think you can talk about it like it’s a game?”

  The acid in her tone ate away the last of my patience. “I’m saying that you should take a night off, not that you should abandon it completely.”

  “You can’t handle the pace, then.”

  “No! God, if we’re so stuck, why won’t we just call in your parents—”

  “I refuse to have them involved—”

  “Don’t you think that getting your head on straight can take priority, for once, to proving yourself to your family?”

  She pulled herself up, as proud and straight as an ancient queen. Her face was a perfect blank. The only glimmer of Holmes I could see was in the anger darkening her eyes.

  “Yes,” she said in a flat voice. “I hadn’t thought of that. I, of course, have no personal stake in this matter. Since this is all an exercise to please my parents.”

  “Holmes—”

  “So yes, take the night off. In the meantime, I’ll be tracking down the person who murdered my rapist and tried to murder your little girlfriend and then almost had us arrested for it. It might even move faster without you, as you’ve proven yourself so extraordinarily useless.”

  It was the first time she’d ever said anything that cruel to me. The word useless hung between us, like a millstone on a piece of thread.

  “How can I help you,” I snarled, “when you keep so much information to yourself? There’s a Moriarty plastered all over that wall that you refuse to talk about. You’ve told me nothing about your relationship with him.”

  “With him? Don’t you mean to him?” she asked. “Is this about the case, or your jealousy?”

  Her hand flew up to her mouth as if to stop the words from coming out. But it was too late.

  “Okay, then.” There was nothing else to say. I put my coat on, not sure where I was headed but knowing that it was somewhere the hell away from here.

  “Watson.” Holmes got to her feet.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I know I can be perfectly beastly—”

  “You can,” I said. “And why don’t you just call me Jamie, like everyone else, since I’m too useless to be your Watson.”

  Holmes’s mouth opened and snapped shut. I slammed the door hard enough that, behind me, I heard the satisfying crash of a beaker shattering on the floor.

  eight

  I PACED OUTSIDE OF MICHENER HALL, BLOWING ON MY hands to keep them warm. By the time I banged through the front door, I was mostly in control of myself again. Mrs. Dunham was manning the front desk—did she ever go home?—but I walked straight past her without a word, not wanting to test my hard-won composure.

  Usually, my room was empty the hour before dinner, but that day Tom was watching a video on his computer, eating a chocolate bar. On the screen, a girl performed a burlesque routine to a song sung in French. I recognized a few of the words: leave it, leave it all. Biting her lip, she lowered one strap, the other.

  “Are you okay?” Tom asked, hitting Pause. The girl in the video froze obediently.

  “Fine,” I said. “Bad day.”

  “You don’t seem to have a lot of good ones,” he observed. There was a smear of chocolate on his argyle sweater-vest, and I realized the wrapper on his desk was from the Flake bar Holmes had given me. It shouldn’t have been a big deal—Tom and I had standing permission to raid each other’s food stashes, within reason—but I took it like a blow to the gut.

  “I don’t see why that’s shocking, considering,” I said, and willed him to go away.

  Ever since I’d come to Sherringford, I’d existed in a state of constant loneliness without ever actually being alone. Privacy was an illusion at boarding school. There was always another body in the room, and if there wasn’t, one could enter at any moment. Being Holmes’s friend might have taken the edge off that loneliness, but it didn’t dissipate entirely. At best, our friendship made me feel as though I was a part of something larger, something grander; that, with her, I’d been given access to a world whose unseen currents ran parallel to ours. But at our friendship’s worst, I wasn’t sure I was her friend at all. Maybe some human echo chamber or a conductor for her brilliant light.

  I hadn’t realized I was thinking out loud until Tom cleared his throat.

  “I had a friend like that once,” he said.

  “Oh?” I said, uninterested. But Tom had a thoughtful expression on, and I didn’t want to be cruel.

  “Andrew,” he said. “He was the only person I really kept in touch with after I left for Sherringford, and last summer, we hung out all the time. He’s this all-state football star, and he always gets perfect grades, and I swear he could get away with murder because of it. Because ninety percent of the time, he was so good, he could stay out all night downtown, partying, and he’d come in at dawn and his parents would just buy that he was out late studying. I felt . . . invincible when I was around him.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Cops caught us drinking down by the lake, and he pinned the whole thing on me.” Tom flashed a self-deprecating smile. “His family is like a big deal—they have all this money, and we don’t, not anymore—so they got the charges dropped. But I was in the doghouse for months. The worst part of it was that he stopped talking to me. If anything, I should’ve been the one who got to tell him to eat shit.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was ha
rd to imagine Tom being on anyone’s bad side. He was the guy who could wear a baby-blue suit to homecoming and still have one of the hottest girls in school as his date.

  “It’s not worth it being the sidekick,” he said. “I bet she just uses you to do her dirty work. Andrew used to do that to me.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, hiding how close to the bone that cut.

  He gave me a knowing look. “So she doesn’t even let you do that.”

  “No,” I snapped. “She trusted me to sniff out Mr. Wheatley. And I went out and got a fucking concussion because no one would investigate the school nurse. I don’t call that doing nothing.”

  Tom looked like I’d hit him. “You what?”

  “All right, it was stupid, and I couldn’t have planned it exactly—maybe I would’ve broken my arm, or twisted my ankle—but I couldn’t exactly fake having to stay in the infirmary all day, could I? How else could Holmes have snuck in there without breaking in? The door’s alarmed, they keep everyone’s medicine in there.”

  “No—I—”

  He was casting around for words, but none were coming. Did he really think that I was so useless I couldn’t help her out at all?

  “I didn’t know you were that stupid,” he said finally.

  “Thanks, you twat.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. “Look, I’m meeting Lena for dinner, so I gotta go. I’m doing some work at the library after that, but we can talk more about your life choices tonight, if you want to.”

  Tom and Lena. Mine and Holmes’s shadow-selves. Or maybe we were the shadows, and they the happy, well-adjusted versions. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  After throwing some books in his bag, he took off. He must’ve bumped the keyboard as he went, though, because the video he’d been playing unpaused. The girl on the screen began shimmying out of her clothes again. I plunked down in Tom’s chair and closed the window, then sat there for a minute, staring at the notes Tom had pinned above his desk, the tiny mirror he’d put there.

  That’s when I noticed it.

  His desk and mine were across from each other, meaning that most nights we did our homework back to back. The only mirror in our room had been clumsily hung to the right of where I sat, its bottom half obscured by my desk. If I sat up in the middle of the night, I’d catch a glimpse of my reflection and panic that we had an intruder. That was, more or less, all that mirror was good for.

  I didn’t mind that much. I cared a bit about what I wore on the weekend, but our school uniform was exactly that, a uniform, and so the way I looked in it didn’t change. Tom, on the other hand, wore all kinds of product in his hair, and rather than lean awkwardly over my desk to apply it, or do it in the bathroom (which he claimed was “embarrassing,” as if he’d be dispelling some notion that his boy-band mop grew in that way), he’d tacked up a locker-sized mirror above his desk.

  All this is to say that, when I looked up into Tom’s mirror, I was at the precise angle to see that there was a gap between my own mirror and the wall. A small gap. A centimeter.

  In that centimeter’s worth of dark, I could see the glimmer of a reflection.

  Something was back there.

  I walked over, got down on my knees, made blinkers with my hands to block the overhead light. Still I couldn’t make out what was behind it. After straightening a wire hanger from my closet, I rattled it in the gap in an attempt to dislodge whatever was back there. I hit on nothing, even when I ran it from top to bottom. When I looked again, I could still see the glimmer of light reflecting off something.

  Was it a lens?

  I took a deep breath and tried to gather my thoughts. On the bed, my phone buzzed, and I seized it, thinking it might be Holmes. It would be a relief. We’d both been horrible to each other, we’d both been keyed up, and defeated, and lost—I couldn’t imagine what being lost felt like for someone as whip-smart as Charlotte Holmes—and I refused to believe that she’d meant what she’d said. It had to be her. She’d come right over. Everything would be fine.

  But the text was from my mother, asking if I’d forgotten our weekly call. She’d try again later tonight, she said, and signed it with kisses.

  I looked back into the gap. The light was still shining.

  Someone had been in here. Someone had put this thing in my room.

  In a sudden, towering wave of rage, I jerked the desk away from the wall, scattering my textbooks in the process. Standing in the space I’d cleared, I braced both my hands against the mirror and pulled. It refused to give. I planted my feet, trying to remember what Coach Q had taught us about taking down a bigger opponent, and pulled, harder. Harder. There was a faint cracking sound—probably its bolts beginning to pull from the plaster—but it still refused to move. Panting, I stared at my reflection. My eyes were all pupil, my face sweaty and red. I looked how I did at the end of a rugby match. Like a Neanderthal.

  Fine. I’d be a Neanderthal. With a grunt, I picked up my chemistry text from the desk and slammed it into the mirror.

  It didn’t give on the first try, or the second. Around the tenth, I stopped counting and instead watched the webbed crack grow from the middle of the mirror to its edges. Outside, in the hall, someone yelled What the hell is going on, but I ignored them; it wasn’t hard to. The mirror may have been sturdily constructed, but like all things made of glass, it eventually gave. There was a great loud splintering crack as it broke, and I spun away, throwing the textbook up to shield my face. It hadn’t shattered out so much as down, but some pieces had flown out and stuck into the flesh of my hands. I was in such a fury that I couldn’t feel them there.

  Because when I turned to look, I saw a small, circular lens, the size of my thumbnail, with a cord that ran into a wireless device. It’d been adhered to the wall with a bit of tape.

  But how could the camera capture anything through the mirror? I bent and gingerly picked up one of its larger pieces—I’m not sure why I bothered; my hands were already bleeding—and turned it front to back. Both sides appeared to be glass. A two-way mirror.

  What came next I can only describe as a fugue state. I’d understood what it was to lose myself in the past, when I’d been in a rage, but this time the feeling was coupled with crippling fear and violation. Someone had seen me get dressed. Someone had seen me sleep. And though I couldn’t find a microphone on the camera, I was sure that this someone had also recorded every word I’d said.

  So there had to be an audio recording device, as well.

  I tore the books off my shelf, dumped out my desk drawers, went through every pocket of every pair of trousers hanging in my closet. I took my Swiss Army knife and cut open my mattress, not caring about the fine I’d have to pay, and searched every inch of it with my bleeding fingers. I got on my hands and knees and pulled up the carpet in our room inch by inch, using the knife to help me along. I cut open the curtains, then looked down the hollow rod that held them up. And I adamantly ignored the noise in the hall that had now increased to a fever pitch—a fist was pounding on the door, and a voice that sounded like Mrs. Dunham’s shouted Jamie, Jamie, I know you’re in there, but I’d already shoved Tom’s desk chair under the doorknob and thrown the deadbolt. It was easy to turn the volume for the outside world all the way down, what with the screaming panic in my head.

  When all was said and done, I’d come up with two electronic bugs, each the size and shape of my thumbnail. One had been affixed to the wall-facing side of my headboard. The other I found on the bottom of my desk chair. I held them in my cupped hands, striping them with blood. Their data must have been sent to the transmitter wirelessly, because they weren’t attached to anything with any cords that I could see. I set them down on my desk in a neat line, along with the camera, which I’d yanked the cord from. Then I threw them into a pillowcase. If they were still transmitting, the spy on the other end would be looking into a black screen.

  I heard a buzzing sound. Was it from blood loss? Not unlikely. My room looked a
s if some howling, wounded beast had ripped it up with its claws. Everything I owned was on the floor, a good deal of it tracked red from my hands, and I hadn’t even searched through Tom’s things yet. I’d been able to control myself that much, to wait until he returned, but there was still the problem of the bugs. What to do with them? I thought, woozily, that I should call the detective. I should call Holmes. Come to think of it, there was still shouting in the hall. Was I imagining it?

  My name: Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.

  “Go away,” I hollered, and eased myself down into the chair. I was beginning to feel the cuts on my hands, the glass that I’d pushed still further into the skin with each new thing I’d rifled through or discarded. I should go to the infirmary, I thought, but I didn’t want to tip off anyone—anyone who hadn’t already heard the commotion, that is—and Nurse Bryony was still sharing space with Mr. Wheatley on my no-fly list.

  I hunted through my shaving kit for a pair of tweezers, put a T-shirt between my teeth, and got down to the business of pulling out the glass. It wasn’t sanitary, God knows, but it also hadn’t been a good day for making decisions. You don’t seem to have a lot of good ones, Tom had said. He wasn’t wrong. I nearly bit through the cloth trying not to scream, but I didn’t manage to keep myself from crying. It wasn’t so much from sadness or pain as acceptance of the impossible, a great well of this is wrong bubbling up all at once. I wondered absently if the transmitters on my desk were picking up the sound. One more shameful thing in with all the rest. I resisted the urge to smash the audio bugs like the insects they were—I’d need them as evidence, after all.

  What I didn’t understand was why they’d bugged my room. Who was I, anyway? I wasn’t the extraordinary one. I was Jamie Watson, would-be writer, subpar rugger, keeper of the most boring journal in at least five states. I couldn’t even get people to call me by my full first name. If I was important, it was only as a conduit. Holmes’s only access point.