A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “I didn’t expect you to understand it. You’re a show dog with a pedigree. I’m just someone that escaped from the pound.” He shook his head. “It’s not like I hurt you or anything. You’re my friend. I was doing you a favor. It was going to make you famous—”

  “Open up the door! Open it up!”

  I was disgusted with him, disgusted with Sherringford, with the bullshit and the jealousy and the backstabbing. Furious, I grabbed the handles of my closet doors, ready to throw the rest of the stuff in my suitcase and get the fuck out of Dodge.

  Something bit into my skin.

  I looked down, stupidly. My hands were so cut up and bandaged that I could hardly tell what had happened. There. A pinprick of blood near the knuckle of my index finger.

  I didn’t think anything of it. Not until I gripped the handle with the bandaged part of my hand and flung open the door.

  Clothes and shoes and the rest of my life’s detritus all in a jumble on the closet floor. On the back wall were three giant, jagged lines in marker.

  YOU HAVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS TO LIVE

  UNLESS SHE GIVES ME WHAT I WANT

  XOXO CULVERTON SMITH

  Culverton Smith. The man behind Sherlock Holmes’s poisoned ivory box.

  I stared back down at my bleeding knuckle. Behind me, Tom raised his iPhone with one shaking hand, and took a picture.

  I RIPPED THE INFECTED SPRING FROM THE DOOR HANDLE. Took my phone from the desk (dead), and its charger. Picked up my suitcase. The whole time Tom was loudly pleading his ignorance—this wasn’t me, I wouldn’t do something like that—like the swine he was until I grabbed him by the shirt with one hand.

  “This is what you can do for me,” I snarled at him. “Deal with the cop.”

  His eyes were focused on the pinprick of infected blood on his shirt. “But what should I say?”

  “Make something up. You’re good at that.”

  As I stalked down the hall, I heard Tom’s half-assed babbling. “It’s my fault,” he was saying to the policeman, “it’s my fault, let him go.”

  I made it to the front doors before my legs began to give out under me.

  Bryony Downs had won. She’d taken “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” and turned it back on us with deadly earnest, not knowing that Charlotte Holmes had used that same story to clear our names. I had no idea what she’d dabbed that spring with, but my brain was supplying a cavalcade of answers. Spinal meningitis, I thought, or malaria. I used to want to be a doctor; I’d wanted to treat the scariest diseases, and now I couldn’t stop running them through my head. Milo was right. She had to be working with the Moriartys; how else could she have access to this sort of thing? She was a puppet, and this was a message directed at the Holmes family.

  And the message was going to be my dead body.

  I staggered out the front door and down the steps. The next two students were waiting for the officer to fetch them, and one of them stepped forward to help me.

  “Don’t touch me,” I said, holding up a hand. “I might be contagious.”

  Because that was the worst of it. Nurse Bryony could have made me into some kind of bomb. A patient zero that could take out the whole eastern seaboard. I needed to get inside, away from everyone, and I had to start making a plan. My parents couldn’t know. There was nothing they could do. I wondered if my father would still find all this crime-solving fun after he identified my corpse at the morgue.

  No. I wasn’t going to die. I was sixteen years old. I was going to be a writer; I was going to go to college, get a flat in London, or Edinburgh, or Paris. I’d get to know my stepbrothers. Oh, God, I didn’t want my little sister to be an only child. I didn’t want to leave Charlotte Holmes with a controlling family and a brilliant mind and a dead best friend. I didn’t want to imagine her life without me. Maybe it was selfish to think that way, but I couldn’t imagine mine without her.

  The sky was open and blue, guileless in its beauty. And the snow everywhere, blinding. The light was beginning to prick at my eyes, and I rubbed at them with the back of my hand. This had to be psychosomatic, I told myself; it had to be in my head. The denial working its hand around me. I can’t possibly be dying, I thought, and tried to believe it.

  One foot, then the other. Where was I going? I’d walked, I remembered, up the hill from town. The distance was impossibly far. I’d sit for a minute, catch my breath. If I could just arrange my suitcase—there.

  Holmes told me that, when they found me, I’d passed out in a snowbank.

  They bundled me into the back of Milo’s town car, her and her brother and his Greystone mercenaries. Blankets. Something hot to drink. Holmes rubbing my chilled hands between hers, strangely smooth and firm. “No,” I’d managed to say, “the blood, it’s contagious,” and then I saw that she was wearing latex gloves.

  She knew.

  I was racked with chills, and still cold sweat beaded on my forehead before trickling down my face. My mouth burned, my teeth tender to the touch. I couldn’t swallow. My throat didn’t work. Holmes held a bottle of water to my lips and tipped it, gently, into my mouth. I tried to pull off my shirt, thinking, in my delirium, that it was a straightjacket, and she stilled my hands. All the while Milo watched me from behind his glasses, taking copious notes on his phone. On what, I didn’t know. I was a specimen, I thought wildly. I would be experimented on until I died.

  When we got to our destination, Peterson had to carry me up the stairs over his shoulder, like he’d rescued me from a burning building. And then there was a bed, with sheets still warm from the dryer, a table beside it. Peterson returned to that table again and again with pill bottles, clean rags. Someone brought in an IV drip and put it into my arm.

  What was real? I didn’t know. Milo came in, in a suit and watch chain; he lit a pipe by the window, staring broodingly out over the rooftops. My dog Maggie was there, too, though she’d died when I was six. But she put her shaggy head on my mattress and looked up at me with big wet eyes, telling me in silent words what my sister Shelby was reading that week (A Wrinkle in Time), how much my mother missed me. My hands were made of lead; I couldn’t ruffle her ears the way I wanted. Good dog, I wanted to say. Where have you been?

  Bryony came in through an invisible door and put her arm around Milo’s waist. They talked as if I wasn’t there.

  “Lead him up to the mountain and put the dagger to his throat,” Milo said in his sonorous voice.

  “I thought we were done with goats. I thought we only made offerings of sheep.” Still, Bryony smiled into his face. He kissed her like they were in a movie, dipping her back in his arms.

  Stop, I yelled, stop, but she was at my bedside, with a pillow pressed down over my face to keep the words inside my mouth. And then she was gone, and Milo was, too, and I was alone.

  I didn’t trust anything that was happening to me—Where was Holmes? For that matter, where was I?—but I was so overwhelmed by a wave of exhaustion that I let myself be carried away by it, all the way to sea.

  When I woke—when I fully woke—night had fallen. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed things I hadn’t before. There was a dim lamp by my bed, its mouth turned away to throw a white circle on the wall. Beside me, a machine counted out my pulse, reading it from a plastic clip attached to my index finger. My hands had been re-bandaged, expertly this time. I felt present in my body, in a way I hadn’t since I opened that closet door.

  There was a bright blanket at the end of my bed, a door across from me. In the shadowed corner was a chair. Empty, I thought, and as I squinted to make sure, I saw the velvet fabric, the tufted buttons.

  I was in Bryony Downs’s flat.

  Frantically, I pulled myself up in bed, yanking the heart monitor off my finger and going to work on the medical tape over the needles on my arm. She’d taken me—she’d taken me somewhere. Had Holmes and her brother been hallucinations, too? The heart monitor screamed a warning, and the door across from me flew open.

  By the time she
came in, I was on my feet, panting, the desk lamp ripped out of the wall and brandished like a weapon before me.

  “Watson,” Holmes cried from the doorway. “Watson. God, I thought you were dead.”

  It took some doing, but I let her coax me back into bed. She called a name I didn’t recognize, and a man in scrubs came in and put my IV back in. He took my vitals while Holmes hovered behind him, biting her lip. She’d pulled her hair back roughly from her face; her nose was red, her face white. She looked ascetic and harsh. She looked, in fact, like she’d been crying. I started to reach out to touch her but then drew back my hand.

  “Right now, we’re managing your symptoms,” the doctor murmured. “We’ve given you medication to control the pain, and to bring your fever down. Don’t try to get up. If you need to use the bathroom, let us know.”

  I nodded. Now that the adrenaline rush was over, my legs were trembling from my attempt at self-defense.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Charlotte,” the doctor said. “He could be contagious, and I don’t want you touching him—”

  Stepping forward, she took my hand in hers.

  “So be it,” the doctor said, and left.

  “Holmes,” I asked her, “what did she give me? How did you know?”

  She hoisted herself up on my bedside. I remembered the night I’d woken her this way, when she’d fallen asleep as Hailey and woken up, again, as my best friend. We’d had pancakes. She’d asked me to trust her.

  “It’s a created virus,” she said hoarsely. “Brewed in a lab. That doctor—Dr. Warner—is a specialist on this particular strain.” She rattled off a series of Latin words I didn’t know. “That’s what it’s called.”

  “Can you give me something easier to call it?” I asked, half-joking. “The Watson flu?”

  She shrugged. “As you’d like. It was created, originally, as a bioweapon, for the rapidity with which it kills its victims. Dr. Warner works for the German government. Luckily for us, he was presenting at a conference in Washington. Milo more or less had him clubbed over the head and brought up here.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So it can be cured?”

  Holmes bit her lip again. I’d never seen her so ragged. “We think so,” she said carefully. “He has some theories. Right now, he’s in the other room, researching.”

  “The other room. Here, in Bryony’s flat.”

  “It was my idea,” she admitted. “God knows she won’t be returning here after pulling a stunt like this. And I didn’t want to bring you to your house, not contagious like this. So we took this place over, changed the locks; Milo called in some favors, as you can see. We’ll bring in a professional cleaning crew, of course, after this is all over. The next tenant doesn’t deserve to get the Watson flu in the bargain.”

  After this is all over. One way or another, it would be over soon. She caught my gaze, and with that magician’s trick of hers, I watched her read my mind.

  She shook her head quickly, hugging her arms around herself.

  “You can’t do that,” I said quietly. “You can’t fall apart yet.”

  She nodded, her face turned from me.

  “Come here,” I said, moving over in the bed. “If you really don’t mind my being patient zero.”

  She swallowed her tears. I pulled back the sheet, and she crawled in beside me, putting her head on my chest. I pressed my lips against the dark crown of her hair. It was like those hours under the porch, the stillness, the waiting; and it was nothing like it at all. My muscles ached. My limbs were heavy. My lungs were raw in my chest. I had to brace myself against the bed as another round of shivers ground their way through me.

  “How did you know?” I asked, gritting my teeth. “About the virus? About what happened to me?”

  “Bryony sent me a list of her demands,” she said, her voice muffled in my shirt. “Via text, of course. She had it timed to your appointment at Michener Hall. Must’ve gotten the schedule from the all-campus email.”

  “Via text? Holmes, that can be used as evidence against her.”

  “That’s not what we’re going to do.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t, Watson.”

  I didn’t have the strength to argue with her. “What were her demands? What does she want?”

  “A pony,” she said.

  I smiled against the pain. “The very prettiest pony in the land, on a golden lead. Only then will the favorite sidekick be cured.”

  “You’re not my sidekick,” Holmes said softly. “That’s her first mistake.”

  “What am I, then?”

  But I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the answer. Not now.

  She must have heard the reticence in my voice. “A pony,” she said, “and three million dollars, and safe passage to Russia, a country which, given my father’s history as well as the current state of US-Russo relations, won’t extradite her to either Britain or America to stand trial for what she’s done. Which would be moot, anyway, because she wants me to claim full responsibility for Dobson’s murder and Elizabeth’s attack.”

  “Jesus Christ.” I struggled against the idea.

  “She’s done the thing very completely,” Holmes said. There was a touch of admiration in her voice. “I should have known.”

  “This is not your fault,” I told her, before she could go on. “You claiming it’s your fault makes it sound like I’m just a piece of cargo getting hauled next to you. No will of my own. So stop it.”

  “But—”

  “I’m dying,” I told her, with a grim sort of glee. “You have to listen to me.”

  She laughed hollowly. “Milo has the money, and he’s arranging the airfare as we speak. I’ve written out my confession. It’s done. The exchange will be made at nine o’clock in the morning. She has the antidote. I don’t know how—Dr. Warner doesn’t know how it’s possible—but she does, and even if she’s lying, it’s still a chance we have to take. We’re meeting her twenty-two hours after your infection, so you should still be—ah. It should be fine.”

  “Where?”

  “She’ll text us the location when it’s time.”

  “You’re not going to jail for this,” I said. “Detective Shepard won’t let you. Wait, isn’t she in his custody? What the hell happened there?”

  “Remember when we thought she stopped for gas? She switched cars at the police station. Left her Toyota in the lot and picked up another car that she’d left there.” Again, that note of admiration. “We saw her as a stupid sorority girl, and she ran circles around us.”

  “And where is he now? Detective Shepard?”

  “Her terms were no police involvement, no sending you to the hospital. So I don’t know. I’ve been focused on you.” I felt her shrug. “That’s the other part. You’ll die. One way or another, you’ll die if I don’t take this fall. I think it’s a good idea to listen to her, as she’s proven herself handy with a suitcase bomb.”

  The door cracked open, and Milo stuck his glossy head in. If he was surprised to see his sister tucked in my arms, he didn’t show it.

  “You’re awake. How are you feeling?” he asked.

  Like I’d been run down by a truck. “Fine,” I said.

  “Do you want us to contact your parents?”

  “Oh God. My father thought—”

  “—thinks you are discussing strategy with myself and Lottie until late tonight. This afternoon, Peterson and Michaels returned his car and gave him my reassurances. As we’ve decided to broker with Nurse Bryony for your cure, you don’t have a real reason to worry him. Though I understand how one’s parents could be a comfort, in a time like this.” He said the last part academically, like it was a theory he’d never personally tested.

  “Right,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “No, that’s fine, don’t contact them.”

  “Get some sleep,” he advised. “We’ll handle this.”

  If I wasn’t included in that we—and how could I be; I couldn’t handle even standing up—at leas
t his sister was. I nodded at him, and he nodded back, and shut the door.

  “You’re not going to jail,” I said again. My mouth felt dry. “There has to be another way.”

  “I need to be arrested, and convicted. Or she’ll find another way to end you. She was very specific on those terms.”

  “Holmes.”

  “Watson,” she said roughly, “I remember a very recent conversation where you detailed all the horrible possibilities of my death. Do you remember that? Would you like to, for just a moment, imagine what it would be like to watch one come true? Think about what this is like for me.”

  “The trade-off shouldn’t be spending the rest of your life in a cell for a crime you didn’t commit!”

  “No.” She curled my shirt into her fist. “No, but perhaps I should serve time for the crime I did.”

  “I can’t talk about your martyr complex right now,” I said, swallowing against the sand in my throat. “I can’t.” I reached blindly for the glass of water by the bed and drank it down.

  She drew back to look at me. “You’re flushed,” she said, scrambling to her feet, “I think your fever’s returning—I’ll fetch Dr. Warner—”

  “Wait,” I said.

  She was rumpled, undone, her hair coming out of its elastic to curl in tendrils around her face. There was something I had to say to her, I thought, something necessary, something right at the tip of my tongue.

  I guess she knew it before I did.

  Leaning over, she smoothed my hair back from my forehead. I closed my eyes at her touch. And so it was a surprise when she kissed me on the lips.

  She smelled, unexpectedly, like roses.

  “That’s all I can do,” she whispered, resting her forehead to mine.

  “That’s a lot,” I said, and she laughed.

  “No. I mean, that’s all—it’s nearly too much for me to touch anyone, after Dobson, and I—for you, I’m trying.”

  I could feel her breath on my lips. “I don’t know how long I’ll be like this,” she said, slowly, “or if I’ve maybe been this way all along. I don’t know if it’ll ever be enough.”