A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Malcolm,” he said in a shy voice. “Your name is Jamie.”

  “That’s right.” I bounced him a little as we walked into the kitchen.

  “It snowed!” he yelled, pointing out the back door at the expanse of white lawn.

  I wondered what the wreckage of the sciences building looked like this morning. Our destroyed lab open to the air, all shrouded in white. With a strange pang, I wondered if Holmes’s collection of teeth survived.

  Abbie turned around from the stove where she was making pancakes. “Oh no, Mal attack! Sorry about that. I wanted to let you sleep in.”

  I shrugged, juggling Malcolm to my other arm. “It’s okay, he was just saying hi. Have you seen Holmes? I need to find her, and kill her.”

  She gave me a dubious look. “In the family room, with your father and Robbie. He’s showing her the cat.”

  “I didn’t know you had a cat,” I said, trying to make conversation. I did, in fact, know they had a cat. I was really hoping to get one of those pancakes.

  Abbie frowned and didn’t offer me one. “It’s skittish and hates everyone. Robbie spent the last hour trying to find him for her.”

  “Come along,” I singsonged to Malcolm, “we’re going to meet Miss Charlotte, who thinks that keeping Mister Jamie in the dark is a fun, fun game.”

  In the family room, my father and Holmes were examining a piece of paper they’d laid out on the coffee table. The cat—a handsome tabby—was purring on her lap.

  “But it hates me,” the small boy at her feet was saying plaintively. “Why does he like you?”

  She looked down at him, considering. “Because I have a bigger lap for him to sit on. Wait ten or so years, and then he might like you better.”

  Robbie burst into tears.

  “Right,” my father said. He took Malcolm from me and grabbed Robbie by the hand, leading him from the room as he sobbed. “Let’s see if your mother has finished with those pancakes.”

  Holmes hardly noticed. She whipped out a tiny magnifying glass and leaned over the paper. “Watson, come here and tell me what you can make of this.”

  “Is it going to explain why you kept direct communications from our stalker a secret from me, choosing instead to inflict some serious psychic damage with the end goal of getting me to leave you to deal with a bomb all by yourself?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t even look up. “Come here.”

  She’d squared the note in the middle of the table. As I approached, I saw that she’d laid a sandwich bag between it and the wood.

  Holmes handed me a pair of latex gloves. “They were in your stepmother’s first-aid kit,” she said by way of explanation. “Go on. What do you see?”

  I read it aloud.

  IF YOU KEEP DRAGGING JAMES WATSON

  INTO THIS HE WILL DIE TO

  TONIGHT

  HE DOESN’T DESERVE IT THE WAY YOU DO

  THIS WON’T STOP UNTIL YOU HAVE LEARNT YOUR LESSON

  “A grammar error,” I said. “‘To,’ instead of ‘too.’ Spellcheck wouldn’t catch that. And learned is spelled the English way. ‘Learnt.’”

  She gestured impatiently. “What else?”

  “Well, it’s a death threat. Though they seem to like me more than they like you.” Gingerly, I lifted the note by its corner. It was square, cut from regular printer paper, thin to the touch. There was a crease down the middle, probably from where Holmes had put it in her pocket. The ink was black. I held it up to the light, but I couldn’t see anything special about the rest of it.

  I told her my observations, and she nodded, pleased. Maybe I wasn’t so useless after all.

  “What did you come up with?” I asked her.

  “All the things you didn’t,” she said, and took the page from me. “Our letter-writer is most likely a woman, and she’s writing it on her own behalf. Look, she’s used one of those specialty sans-serif fonts, the kind that doesn’t come standard. You’d have to download it, and you wouldn’t put in that sort of effort if you were someone’s lackey—you’d just use Times New Roman, whatever the default was. And that would be the smarter move, too. Either she’s so up herself she feels she doesn’t need to cover her tracks, or she wrote this in an absolute hurry and that was the default font.”

  I took it back and squinted at the font. “It doesn’t look all that weird to me.”

  Holmes sighed. The cat on her lap turned its baleful eyes toward me. Apparently she’d found her spirit animal.

  I scrubbed at my face. I needed coffee. Or a sedative. “But how do you know it’s a woman?”

  She snatched the page back. “All it took was a few minutes’ research for me to find the origin of this font—it’s called Hot Chocolate, how twee—along with a few hundred others on one of those design sites. Well and fine, but that was the ninth hit on Google. The first was a website that catered to ‘sorority life,’ and I found our Hot Chocolate on the page about creating invitations for parties.”

  “So she’s a sorority girl,” I said.

  “She’s someone who looks at sorority websites,” Holmes corrected me. “But that was only one search term. After working out the algorithms, I tried one hundred and thirty-nine others, beginning, of course, with the most common syntactical search strings and moving, systematically, to the least likely”—here, my eyes began to glaze—“but each time, this website came up first. I doubt that anyone who makes a typo on their death threat looks past the first Google hit. And this website was absolutely covered in glitter.”

  “How did the note arrive?”

  “It was slipped under my door yesterday morning, like so.” She folded it back in half. “Look at that crease. It wasn’t just casually folded. That was done with a blunt object and a considerable amount of pressure—you can tell from the dimpling at the seam. Someone was upset when they wrote this and took it out on the paper.”

  Obviously. It was a death threat. The horrible weight of what Holmes had done yesterday fell back on my shoulders. “So after you received it, you chased me out, and then . . . waited for someone to come by and kill you?”

  She regarded me evenly. “It seemed a good chance to meet them, didn’t it? But I expected them to come by with a gun. Bombs are a coward’s weapon.”

  “And if you hadn’t been in the bathroom on the other side of the building, you would have died.” I bit down on a knuckle, reining in my flare of temper.

  “I know. That’s why I made you leave.” She popped the note back into the bag. “I’ll have your father give this to Detective Shepard, I’m sure he’ll want it now that we’re finished. You did very well. You just missed one thing.”

  “What?”

  Leaning over, she held the unsealed bag under my nose. “What does that smell like to you?”

  Forever Ever Cotton Candy. I coughed, waving a hand in front of my face. “Didn’t you say you could only get that off Japanese eBay?”

  “Yes.”

  “So where the hell did you even find out about it?”

  “August Moriarty gave me my first bottle for Christmas,” she said. “I’d mentioned that I liked cotton candy in passing, and he’d hunted high and low for a perfume that scent. It had only been manufactured in Japan, he told me, and discontinued in the eighties.” Her eyes went faraway. “I wore it for a few weeks, even though it’s heinous, because . . . well, no matter. It did prove to be useful, in the end.”

  I stared at her. Mom jeans and an oversized sweater—borrowed from Abbie, I could deduce that much—and her face assiduously clean. The sun dappled her hair. I had no idea what she was thinking.

  “Holmes,” I said slowly, “how is this not a warning from August Moriarty?”

  “It’s not. It’s a woman’s work, Watson, clearly.”

  “So . . .”

  “Nurse Bryony,” Holmes said, as if it was obvious. “Do you really think Phillipa is likely to be visiting a Delta Delta Delta website? More so than the woman who spent all of homecoming requesting old R. Kelly songs and tellin
g me about her sorority formal? The profile is an excellent fit.”

  “But the perfume points right back to August.”

  “She most likely wears it too.” Holmes shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Have you smelled it on her?”

  “People don’t wear the same perfume every day, Watson. I’m sure I’ll find a bottle in Bryony’s flat. It’s in Sherringford Town, and we can search through it while she’s away.”

  “Holmes. How does this explain anything about the dealer? Or the forger’s notebook? Or the guy in the morgue?”

  “Do you not trust me to have this worked out?” she said. “Because I do. They employed one agent, and that agent failed. So they hired another. There. It’s sorted.”

  “Holmes—”

  “Earlier, when I spoke to Detective Shepard, I asked him to bring Bryony in for questioning tomorrow at ten a.m. We’ll toss her flat then.” She gave me a sympathetic look. “I know the feeling. I’m always disappointed at the end of a case. But we’ll find another.”

  I was beginning to believe it, now, what she’d said about the dangers of caring too much. How emotions only got in the way. It sounded to me exactly as though Holmes was ignoring some obvious conclusions in favor of devising any theory that let August Moriarty off the hook. How hard would it be for him to plant a typo, or to use a special font, to write this note the way a woman would? He knew what Holmes would look for, how she’d interpret it: he could feed her exactly what she wanted to see.

  The worst part? She’d kept on buying that perfume he’d given her. Even though it was expensive. Even though she hated it. It was foreign, and hard to find, and that letter was doused in it.

  I knew what I had to do.

  “It’s a good plan,” I told her. It would be one, too, if there was any chance Bryony Downs was guilty. “But look, I still feel really awful from yesterday—I didn’t sleep much, thanks to your sense of timing, ha—and the pancakes smell amazing, but you know, Malcolm got me up so early—I think I need to—”

  “Are you all right?” she asked. I was beginning to sweat.

  “I feel terrible.” The truth. “I need to go lie down.” Also the truth.

  “Go,” she said, waving me away. “I’ll wait for the detective. And maybe I’ll go through the note with your father again. He can’t follow my reasoning.”

  I ran into my father at the foot of the stairs. “Can I see that file?” I asked him in a whisper.

  He looked at me sadly. “In my study, upstairs. In the second drawer.” He had a kind face, my father. I’d remembered a lot of things about him when we moved to England: his dorky enthusiasms and plaid ties, the stupid nicknames he had for Shelby, the way my mother used to shout at him as he slumped at the kitchen table, head buried in his hands. But I’d forgotten how kind he was. How much he’d always trusted me.

  “I’ll give you some space,” he said, and after I found his study, I locked the door behind me.

  nine

  I PUT THE FILE ON THE DESK.

  My father had clipped things from newspapers, printed articles off the internet. It went chronologically: the oldest information was at the front. I resisted the urge to flip to the back.

  No. I’d ease myself into it. Into betraying my best friend.

  It started with the usual sorts of things. Sherlockian societies and book clubs. Fan sites for my great-great-great-grandfather’s stories, but far more for the film and television adaptations. Flipping through the pages, I found printouts from some of the fan sites that tracked the movements of the Holmes clan. They were intensely secretive, Holmes’s family, and so gathering kernels of information had become something of a sport for the greater world.

  I folded out a taped-together family tree, one in my father’s own handwriting. Watsons, always the record-keepers. At the top, he’d placed Sherlock. Then came Henry, the son he’d had so late in life, categorically refusing to name the mother. I traced through Henry’s sons down to Holmes’s father, Alistair, and his siblings: Leander, Araminta, and Julian. A small line connected Alistair to Emma, Holmes’s mother; below that was a fork each for Milo and Charlotte Holmes.

  I browsed through the articles about Holmes’s first case, when she tracked down the Jameson diamonds. In a photograph with her parents at the Met’s press conference, she stood pale and solemn-faced between her parents. On one side stood her father, looking at the camera with hooded eyes. Her mother had blond hair and a dark-red smile, one possessive hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

  Enough of what I already knew. I flipped through to the last page and worked backward. Information on Leander Holmes’s charity. The page before it was a clipping from a Yard fund-raiser. And the one before that, like a lump of pyrite nestled into all that gold, was from the Daily Mail.

  It was a single paragraph, down at the very end of a long stream of gossip, squeezed between a bit on the Royal Family and another about Shelby’s favorite band:

  Remember how the oh-so-secretive Holmeses made a big splash last year inviting boy-genius heartthrob (and DPhil student) August Moriarty, 20, to be a live-in tutor for their daughter Charlotte, 14? The two families have had bad blood between them for more than a hundred years now, and daddy Alistair wanted to make a very public peace offering. Well, it looks like things at Casa Holmes took a turn this past week. August was escorted out by the police, and not for diddling with the children! Our source tells us that he got caught feeding Charlotte’s dirty little drugs habit. Oxford’s already expelled him, the Moriarty family’s disowned him: what’s next for the former future professor? As for Miss Charlotte Honoria Holmes, we hear it’s boarding school or bust.

  So her middle name was Honoria.

  I had to read it again. A third time. A fourth. And then I made myself read between the lines. Was I feeling bad for August Moriarty? Was that what this was? Anyone else would look at the age disparity there and think, Oh, that asshole took advantage of an innocent young girl, but Charlotte Holmes wasn’t innocent. She was imperious, and demanding, with a self-destructive streak that ran as wide as the Atlantic. I thought about the way she’d run roughshod over Detective Shepard when she’d wanted in on this case. About how she’d convinced me of my own worthlessness when she’d wanted to be alone with her homemade bomb. Her blackmailing a math tutor into buying her drugs was only a hop, skip, and a jump away.

  The worst part? I’d almost known. I’d made an educated guess, that night in the diner, and she’d let me believe it was the whole story—that she was sent to America because of her drug problem. Never mind the Moriarty at the center of it all.

  If any of this was true, August would have a million reasons to want to bring Holmes down. I racked my brain to remember what Lena had said that night at poker. If she was right that Holmes was upset about August her freshman year, it was further proof that she did actually have a heart, and a conscience, despite her protests. (Honestly, if I were Holmes, I’d be worried he was living on a street corner somewhere.) Milo had come to visit and said . . . what? That he’d take care of things. But Lena hadn’t known how, only that Holmes had been happier after Milo left. At the time, I’d thought, oh, drone hit. And now I just wanted to know how much it had set Milo back to pay August off. I hoped August had been given a sizable check, maybe a little house by the sea. A book-lined study where the poor bastard could continue doing his math on his own terms.

  It would’ve been one thing for a Holmes to fall in love with a Moriarty, I thought bitterly. In fact, it’d be sweepingly, crushingly romantic—and on cue, my imagination began to color it in. Charlotte and August, our star-crossed lovers, locked in a constant battle of deductive wills. Missile codes swapped via elaborate games of footsie. Having veal cutlets in the garden while debating whether to annex France. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

  The thing was, Charlotte Holmes didn’t fall in love.

  And even if, somehow, she had (my stomach roiled again), she’d fucked him over in the end. Jesus, Holmes had s
crewed a Moriarty. A whole family of art forgers and philosophers and blue-blooded assassins sitting in their ivory towers, connected to the lowest reaches of the underworld by the gleaming strands of their ambition. Sure, they weren’t all bad, but enough of them were, and after this business with August, every last one would have reason to be out for Charlotte’s blood.

  I tried to yank myself back from the brink. I could be doing that same thing I did in the diner—seeing ninety percent of the story, but missing the ten percent that actually mattered. Maybe I was all wrong. For one thing, the Daily Mail wasn’t exactly known for their journalistic integrity. And maybe August really had encouraged her habits—maybe she was the innocent one.

  Then why was he trying to kill her?

  Well, I thought, as long as I was being awful, I might as well go ahead and be petty with it. I opened my father’s computer and, half-covering my eyes, put Moriarty’s name into an image search. He was a dork, I told myself, a math nerd; he probably had gelled hair and an overbite.

  The page loaded slowly. The pictures came up, one by one.

  He looked like a Disney prince.

  I shut the laptop hard.

  FOR ANOTHER HOUR I SAT THERE, PARALYZED IN MY DELIBERATIONS. When I finally reached a decision, I didn’t feel any better. I spent an hour on Google, trying to dig up what I needed—but as I suspected, it was nowhere to be found.

  All right, then. This had to get even more personal.

  As silently as I could, I unlocked the study door and crept into the hall. All was still. Downstairs, I heard the lonely, spectral sound of Holmes’s violin; she was safely occupied. In the guest room, her dirty clothes were gone from the edge of the bed, but her phone was sitting out in plain view.

  A few weeks back, she’d decided to give me the passcode—for emergencies, she’d said. Her eyes had glittered as she rattled it off.

  “I thought it was supposed to be a random string of numbers,” I’d protested. It was a weak protest: I’d been thrilled. Birthday, snow day, Christmas Day thrilled.