A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  He’d had all of ten minutes to clean out the living room. I hadn’t even seen him go in the door. No rush. Right.

  “You’re very kind, sir,” one of the men said from the back, and resumed whistling. They were cracking open Bryony’s eggs now.

  Holmes crossed her arms. “You do scratch. Every time. I do a very pretty one, as you well know. You should’ve waited for us.”

  He drew on his cigarette. “You look better than I was expecting. My sources led me to believe that it was very bad, this time.”

  I swallowed.

  “Yes, well, it’s much less razor blades and three a.m. phone calls now, isn’t it, and much more saving my own neck from the noose.” It was easy for me to imagine them as children: Milo, inexorable as a tank, and Holmes, the dervish circling him. She was so restrained, most of the time, but when she wasn’t . . . well. Then, she said things like, “Tell me right now what you have done with my evidence or I will tell Mother about you spying on our fencing instructor in the shower.”

  “You won’t. And you know very well what I’ve done with your evidence.”

  Holmes cast one hateful look around the room. “New York? Honestly? And you’ve missed all the important parts. I was handling this. It was handled.”

  “Handle August Moriarty’s ex-fiancée? Lottie, really.” (Lottie, I thought gleefully, despite myself. Lottie.) “You’re emotional. You really should have left this to the adults. Now that this idea of Mother’s has run its course, let’s bring you home. Boarding school? All wrong. We’ll put you in the London flat. I’m sure I could convince Professor Demarchelier to tutor you—”

  “Milo, he hates me, and—”

  “No, you aren’t thinking. What if they try to throw you in jail? Americans, with their prisons. My men would get you out before that, of course, but such a hassle. You always did like the skiing in Utah. I would want you to be able to come back. I’d want that, for you.”

  It was becoming abundantly clear why Holmes didn’t want her family involved. Emotional? Leaving things to the adults? Sending her away? Skiing?

  I was an idiot for calling him in. He could go straight to hell.

  “I’d like to know what you’ve done with the evidence,” I said. It came out as a growl. “And how you knew to be here, at this flat.”

  Milo arched an eyebrow. “Is this your bulldog?” he asked Holmes. There wasn’t any venom in it, but that didn’t make it better.

  “This,” Holmes said, “is James Watson, my friend and colleague, and you will give him an answer.”

  I stood up a bit straighter.

  “My sister asked me a question yesterday,” Milo said. “Do you know the last time that happened? November 2009. Lottie doesn’t ask questions. She deduces and decides for herself. That alone would be enough to get me on a plane, particularly when that question has to do with a Moriarty. Thankfully, I was headed to New York already. And as for her things? This—this nurse?” He said nurse the way you’d say gelatinous slug. “This bank of flats has a very nice little alley behind it, and we sent away her possessions by armored car right as you walked in. My men at Greystone HQ in the city will sort through them, determine the appropriate angle, and return them to your Detective Ben Shepard.”

  “By the city, he means New York,” Holmes said, not taking her eyes off her brother. “And by Greystone, he means the mercenary company currently razing the Middle East. Which he owns—Greystone, that is—and which apparently works as his personal honor guard, if the breakfast knights back there are any indication.”

  “Glad to be of service,” Peterson called. The other one grunted.

  “You know, none of this explains the Moriarty agent practicing your handwriting,” Milo said conversationally.

  “No,” Holmes said. “But my ruining August’s life does. His fiancée’s decided to play avenging angel on his behalf.”

  “Two separate people out to get you,” he mused. “You really are popular. I’m just not sure why you won’t come to the obvious conclusion—that the two of them are working together. That this Bryony Downs creature is in August Moriarty’s employ.”

  Holmes set her chin.

  “Fine, Lottie,” Milo sighed. “We’ll focus on the nurse, at least for now.”

  “How is any of this efficient?” I asked him, changing the subject. “What is this woman going to do when she returns and finds out her things are gone?”

  Milo coughed politely to hide his laugh. “We’ll have proof enough before her interview with Detective Shepard is over to have him charge her with murder.”

  “And you know the facts of the case,” I said. “You know what you’re looking for, in her things.”

  “Obviously,” he said.

  “Will you come up with real proof?” I asked. “Or manufacture it?”

  Milo spread his hands wordlessly.

  “Do you have to ask?” Holmes said to me.

  “Well, now that that’s settled. Take this,” Milo said, handing me his cigarette. “I want to text Uncle Leander the adorable thing you just said about James.”

  “Watson,” she and I said together.

  “Of course,” he said. “Friend and colleague. I love it.”

  Holmes snatched the phone away.

  “So that’s it?” I asked, grinding his cigarette out on the floor. “Is this the end? Detective Shepard gets a confession out of Bryony Davis-Downs, and you take her stuff off to be freelance policed, and . . . what, roll credits?”

  “It appears so,” Holmes said. Already she was beginning to slump into herself, something I identified now with back porches and mud and pain-pill misery.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  She looked at it, and then up at me. Slowly, the color returned to her face. The corners of her mouth pulled up into a smile, one that stayed.

  “Peterson,” she called, “won’t you tell your colleague there—yes, you, with the Persian cat and the basement flat in Berlin—to call the armored truck and have them turn around. I want everything back in this room just as it was. I suppose you took photographs of the original, or you’re a bigger fool than I’d imagined, disrupting the crime scene as you have. Really, why on earth would you have moved it to your headquarters except to allow this would-be Orson Welles—sorry, Milo, you’re not handsome enough to be Olivier—to pose in an empty room? How dull.”

  I bit my lip against my smile.

  “What I could have told you from the dust trails alone would have solved this case,” she continued. “As you’ve utterly ruined that possibility, I want any powders or creams you find brought straight to me. Cosmetics, of course, but do look for jars marked as protein powder. Any wires or tools, anything to suggest a bomb. And I want the receiver for whatever tracker you’ve affixed to Bryony’s car. Give it to me. No. Bring it here.” She held out an impatient hand. “I want to make sure that she’s actually arriving at her appointment and not, oh, dashing to the airport and then on to Fiji and thereafter, gone. Have I missed anything, Watson?”

  As she examined the tracker she’d been handed, I made a show of surveying the room. “Were you going to tell him about the molted snakeskin under the chair cushion he’s sitting on, or should I?”

  With an undignified yelp, Milo leapt to his feet.

  “Oh, yes,” Holmes said blandly. “That. Peterson, do check the walls for a rattlesnake.”

  THE TWO GREYSTONE GRUNTS BUSILY REARRANGED THE FURNITURE to Holmes’s specifications. Milo watched the proceedings, arms crossed, with a faint air of distaste.

  That is, he appeared to, if you didn’t look closely. I did. I’d learned to do that much. Whenever Milo’s hard gaze fell on his sister, it softened the slightest bit. He could’ve stopped Peterson and Michaels at any point, ordered Bryony’s place stripped bare again, frog-marched Holmes onto the nearest London-bound plane.

  He didn’t. He stood and watched his sister work.

  It seemed safe enough for me to take the
few minutes to gather my things from the dorm. Holmes had put me in charge of watching the GPS tracker on Bryony’s car, and other than two quick stops for coffee and for gas, she’d driven a straight course to the police station. There wasn’t really much else I could do, and honestly, I was looking forward to getting a clean set of my own clothes.

  “I’ll be back,” I told her. She nodded and kept on directing traffic.

  The day had turned out to be mild, so I left my father’s car parked on the street and walked the half mile up to campus. I was suffused with a sense of well-being, the kind I associated with waking up late on a lazy Sunday, no plans, no obligations. I had no doubts that Holmes would find the necessary evidence to implicate Bryony Downs for every terrible thing that had happened. It was over. Over. And Charlotte Holmes and I were still here.

  I let myself daydream about spending Christmas break with her in London. Hopefully Holmes would be at her family’s flat there for the month, but if not, I’d jailbreak her from Sussex myself. We’d go get a proper curry, first thing, and then I’d take her to my favorite secondhand bookshop, the one where the owner had asked me to sign my great-great-great-grandfather’s books. Maybe she’d want to see a violin program at Royal Albert Hall. And after that, I’d ask her to show me her personal London, the one she’d memorized as a child. We’d see how it had changed and grown in our absence, the way cities do. We’d both have to get to know it again as our London.

  As I crossed the quad to Michener Hall, I couldn’t help but notice how bare Sherringford was. The sciences building was in ruins, still smoking faintly, under the black tarp they’d thrown over the roof. That woman had wanted Holmes dead, I thought with a shiver. It hadn’t really hit me until then. Bryony Downs had wanted to end Holmes’s life. Thank God we were done with it.

  I was a few minutes early, but Tom was already waiting on the steps of our dorm, shivering in his thin jacket. We both looked a little threadbare, I thought: me in my father’s coat, Tom in his raggedy sweater-vest. It was surprisingly good to see him, argyle and all.

  “Hey,” he said brightly. “Where have you guys been? At your dad’s house? And Charlotte’s okay? I’ve been trying to call you but it kept going straight to voicemail.”

  I told him about the cell phone I’d abandoned on my desk. He’d been evacuated straight from the library, he said, and put on a bus to that Days Inn without anyone telling them what had happened. “We’d heard the explosion,” he said. “People were crying. It was awful. But we got filled in eventually. For the first day it was like a church in there. And now it’s a total shit show, people climbing the walls. Lots of rumors. Like, what really happened in the science building? Do you have any insider info? No, tell me inside, I want—”

  I said a silent thank you as the front doors opened, cutting him off. A bored-looking policeman consulted a clipboard. “Thomas Bradford? James Watson? Come with me. The building’s secure, but they’re having us stay with you as a precaution.”

  In my haste the other night, I’d forgotten to lock our door or even fully close it. The policeman frowned at me when a slight push threw it open. When he saw what was inside it, his hand went for his gun.

  It really did look like a crime scene. The slit mattress and the torn-up curtains and the hollowed-out books. The glint of broken glass over everything. “It’s fine, Officer,” I said. “I had an accident with the mirror right before we were evacuated.”

  “Doesn’t look fine,” he grumbled, but stayed outside.

  I turned to Tom to apologize, to explain. He’d be shocked, I thought. Maybe he’d want to make a statement to Detective Shepard; after all, he’d been recorded too.

  All the blood had drained from his face except for two bright spots of color, one on each cheek. His eyes had gone all pupil. He blinked rapidly, staring at the floor.

  “Tom?” I said, as gently as I could. I hadn’t meant to scare him this badly.

  He jerked his head up to look at me. “When did this happen?”

  The phrasing caught me off guard. Not what, but when. “The night we were evacuated,” I said cautiously.

  “Was it Nurse Bryony?”

  I startled, then remembered that I’d told him about my concussion and the infirmary. “I don’t know.” It seemed the safest answer.

  He went a shade paler and nodded to himself, as senselessly fast as a bobblehead doll.

  “Five minutes,” the policeman called.

  “Hey,” I said to Tom, “I promise I’ll explain later, but can we—”

  “Where are they?” he asked in a snarl, shoving me into the door of my closet. His cheerful, bright American face looked like an ugly mask. “Where the fuck are they, Jamie?”

  It was like the floor fell open below us.

  I shoved him off me and kept him there, an arm’s length away. Tears welled up in his eyes as he struggled against my grip.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” But I knew exactly what he was talking about. I just wanted to hear him say it. Admit that he’d bugged our room. Confess that all this time, his friendly gossip mongering was a cover for collecting information for Bryony Downs.

  “Oh my God, he’s going to kill me.” Tom stopped fighting me off. He fell back, gasping, throwing his hands up over his face, and I felt a flare of satisfaction.

  That faded as quickly as it came. He?

  The dealer. The Moriarty dealer.

  “Two minutes,” the policeman said. “Cut the dramatics and finish packing.”

  “Talk fast,” I said, pulling my suitcase out from under the bed and yanking armfuls of clothes from the dresser.

  “I never even got anything good,” Tom said, as if to himself. “Nothing conclusive. Charlotte even stopped coming to the room. You two were always hunkered down in her fucked-up little dungeon.”

  “I just— I can’t deal with this right now.” I grabbed the novels from above my bed and dropped them on top of my clothes, one, two, three, like grenades. Textbooks, soap. I had to get in my closet but Tom was still slouched in front of it.

  “Move,” I said to him, but he stared up at me stupidly, and the bovine look on him eroded the last of my temper. “I swear to God I will break your neck if you don’t move. I might break your neck anyway. You were spying on me, Tom? On top of all the other awful shit happening—you had to make it worse? I never did anything to you.”

  “He offered to split his advance with me,” he said. “He already sold it, you know, he’s in the middle of writing it now. It’s going to be huge, and he’s going to have all this money, he’ll be famous, he’ll finally be able to teach somewhere better than this shithole—his friend Penelope is going to get him a job at Yale—”

  I stared at him, at his horrible lying mouth. “Wheatley? You’re full of shit. The dealer told you to say that.”

  Tom went to his desk and, opening the bottom drawer, pulled out a battered legal pad. The top page didn’t have any writing on it. Not actual writing, no—someone had painstakingly colored in the indentations made by the words written on the page above. Skeletons in her office he says starrily as if he’s in love with death as much as her. Lines and lines of florid prose. He wears the glasses of a Beat philosopher from the 1950s but his face is all Cornwall smooth. When they dance they do not touch.

  They were Mr. Wheatley’s notes from our meeting, when he’d so impressed me by interrogating me and then handing over what he’d written down. I remembered the piece of cardboard he’d stuck below the top page. The top two pages. I’d thought at the time that he was worried his ink would bleed through, but he had just been making himself a copy.

  “He was sure you were guilty,” Tom said, almost like he was pleading with me. “Back in October, I was waiting for an appointment with him to talk about my story, and I heard him say it to another teacher inside his office. You. Guilty. And I told him, no, you weren’t, and it was actually this great story, you and Charlotte Holmes solving crimes, that you two were totally boning like Bonnie and Cl
yde, the good-guy version. He had this idea for a book. True crime. With famous kids as the heroes. The public would eat it up. I’m a good writer, he told me that, better than you, anyway, even if my family’s not famous, and I’d do a good job helping, and you’d be happy about it in the end, when you saw how much attention it got you—” He cut himself off.

  “So you bugged our room.”

  “He had me do it. Ordered all the stuff online. The mirror was the worst, replacing it. But yeah, I’d get you to talk and then I’d review the files when you were gone, write everything down, pass it along to him. But—look at this. He’s never going to pay me now.”

  “Why?” I asked him again. I’d thought Tom was my friend. He was one of the only constants in my life, his irrepressible grin and his motor mouth and his ridiculous sweater-vest. We watched stupid videos on his computer at night. We ate each other’s candy, borrowed each other’s shampoo. He was the first person who was nice to me when I came back to America, miserable and alone.

  “I was doing you a favor,” he repeated, like he was trying to make himself believe it.

  “Time, boys,” the officer boomed from the doorway. I slammed the door in his face and bolted it. I was going to get an explanation even if it got me arrested.

  “Tell me why.”

  “Lena’s family goes to Paris every summer,” Tom said quietly, as the policeman hammered on the door. “She invited me. And she . . . she expects things from me. Dinners out. Presents. You know her dad’s a big oil tycoon out in India. They have a housekeeper. She has her own plane. And I’m here, from the Midwest, on scholarship. Do you know what that feels like? He was going to give me ten grand!”

  I couldn’t wring out an ounce of sympathy for him. “Seriously, what do you think Lena will say when she finds out how you got that money? Jesus Christ, everyone at this fucking school acts like they’re so rich and half of them aren’t, not even close. When are you going to realize that? What do you think all those people are doing at Holmes’s poker game every week, wagering all their money? Here’s a solution. Get the hell over yourself. Tell Lena the truth. God, she’s actually a decent person, do you think she’d really care?”