A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  It was confusing, what she said, but I thought I understood it.

  “You don’t have to try,” I said to her. “Whatever this is, already—it’s already enough.”

  “I know,” she said, straightening. “It has to be.”

  We looked at each other for a minute.

  “If you get yourself thrown in jail over this,” I told her, “I will never, never forgive you. You need to find another way, or I swear to God I will die on you just out of spite.”

  Her flickering smile. “Okay.”

  “Okay? It’s that simple?”

  “Okay,” she said again. I had no choice but to believe her. “Your pulse is racing, and you’re far too warm. I’m going for Dr. Warner.” She smirked. “Don’t want you to die before you can use it as a bargaining chip.”

  “Thanks,” I said, pleased, at least, that she chalked my hammering heart up to my fever.

  eleven

  I WAS MUCH, MUCH WORSE IN THE MORNING.

  It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Logic dictates that a deteriorating illness deteriorates. But then, logic is hard to come by when you’re dying.

  Whatever brief reprieve Dr. Warner’s drugs had granted me ended around midnight, when I maxed out on the highest morphine dosage he’d allow me. The hours after that were . . . well, I’ve been assured it’s best that I can’t remember them.

  As morning broke, I moved in and out of fitful dreams, dark, sodden landscapes that were at once cruelly hot and cut through by the bitterest winds. At the same time, I was conscious of something happening in the room around me. A hand on my forehead. A pair of voices, shouting. It all added to my unrest, since, for the life of me, I couldn’t make myself understand what was happening. Burma, I thought, I was in Burma. I was in Afghanistan. No, my mother was baking cinnamon rolls in the kitchen, and if I was very good, if I made my bed and put all my toys away, she’d bring them in to me. Holmes was there too, dressed in all black. Someone had died. We were headed to the funeral.

  I woke to the barest hint of sunlight through the curtains.

  My room was silent. I could tell that much without opening my eyes. The effort I had to put into even that simple task left me dizzy and sweating. When I managed it, I realized that I was alone. Was this another hallucination? It didn’t feel like one. There was the bedside table, there the tufted chair.

  And I wasn’t in any pain.

  I turned my head to look at the morphine drip (that took another eternity), but I didn’t understand how to read the dosage on the bag. Whatever I was being given, it was working. In place of the pain, there was a sort of bodily rebellion. I asked my legs to swing off the bed. They didn’t. I asked my arm to reach out for my water glass. It wouldn’t. I panted with the effort, and the panting took effort. I was about as weak as a newborn child.

  “No,” a woman insisted in the other room. It was a voice I recognized, but from where?

  “No,” she said again, angrier this time, and then fell silent.

  It was Bryony Downs.

  The meeting was taking place in the next room.

  It was brazen of her to do it here, to walk into the enemy’s stronghold and cut a deal in the place where they had every advantage. She really did think herself invincible.

  The antidote could be out there, nestled in her pocket.

  No. She wouldn’t have brought it with her, not where it could be taken from her by force. She’d have hidden it somewhere nearby, only giving its location over when she’d gotten what she wanted. If Holmes gave her what she wanted.

  Which meant, of course, that I would die, and in the next two hours.

  I struggled, again, to get my legs to obey me. Move, I told them, as laughter pealed in the next room. Move. The shirt and soft pants I’d been dressed in were already drenched through with sweat. Sweat. Was that a good thing, sweating? Did that mean the nerves and veins inside me—I imagined them now, crackled black and breaking—were still healthy? Was I somehow beating this?

  If I was beating this, I’d probably have working legs, I reminded myself. Grinding my teeth, I focused on my knees. Move.

  And I did. I rolled right off the bed and onto the carpeted floor, bringing the bedside table down with me.

  The crash was tremendous, and I lay in the middle of it, in the spilled pills and scattered tissues and the shards of my drinking glass, helpless.

  I’d been in denial until that point, I think. But that was when it really hit me. That I was going to die. That they were going to put me in the ground, not years from now, not surrounded by books I’d written in the little flat on the Rue du Rivoli at age seventy-three, but today. In a matter of hours. I’d kissed Charlotte Holmes once, and I would die before I’d see a second time.

  The door flung open with a bang.

  “Watson,” Holmes said, going down to her knees beside me.

  “Bring the boy in here.” The voice rang out like a sweet bell. “I’d like to see him.”

  “Can you move?” Holmes asked, unnaturally loud. She put her hands under my arms. “If I get you to your feet, can you lean on me?”

  “Yes,” I managed to say, though I had no idea if it was true.

  She heaved me up to my knees. “Listen to me,” she said in my ear. Her black hair brushed against my cheek. “When I blink twice, you play your last card.”

  “Okay,” I said, because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about was seven more words than I could force out.

  “Milo,” she called, “I could use a hand.”

  Together, the two of them manhandled me out of the bedroom and into the sitting room that, when I’d last seen it, had been empty. Under Holmes’s direction, Milo’s mercenaries had reassembled it into what it had been, which was something like a preppy brothel. A pink shag rug. Lucite chairs around a Lucite table. A sofa that looked like it’d been stuffed with marshmallows, and a pair of men’s trousers hung over its arm. An iPod dock and speakers, a haphazard setup of slides and beakers and a microscope (those must’ve been Dr. Warner’s).

  A gilt mirror spanned the whole length of one wall, gathering the entire room in its reflection—Charlotte Holmes, in her trim black clothes, sitting on a fuzzy ottoman that looked like it escaped from Fraggle Rock; Milo, so close to his sister that their knees were touching; and me, slumped like a beached whale on one of those clear plastic chairs. If the beached whale had lost fifteen pounds overnight, coated his face in Vaseline and blacked his eyes, and then crawled up onto a beach to end it all.

  Looking at me, Bryony Downs curled her lip in disgust.

  She’d come in no further than the front door. Her purple puffer coat was unzipped, but she still wore her pom-pomed hat and gloves. With her porcelain doll face, flushed from the cold, she could have been taking a breather from the slopes. Really, everything about her belonged in a catalog for Fair Isle sweaters, or an advertisement for a ski lodge in Aspen. Everything except the fanatical gleam in her eyes.

  “Hi, Jamie,” she said brightly. “It’s good to see you.”

  If I hadn’t been an hour from death, I would’ve walked right up to her and snapped her neck.

  But I was. That was the point.

  “Okay, where was I? Before this one’s attempt to prematurely kick the bucket?” She rested against her doorframe, hands in her pockets.

  “You were gloating,” Milo offered.

  “Yes,” Holmes said, leaning forward. “Do go on, it’s fascinating.” She had that cataloging look to her, with her fingertips pressed together and that line at the bridge of her nose. I noticed, then, that there was a briefcase at Holmes’s feet, a pair of plane tickets resting on it. Bryony’s terms, fulfilled.

  Her eyes flicked to the two of them, and then back to me. “I don’t want to bore you,” she said, clearly thinking about her getaway.

  “Tell me,” I coughed, in an attempt to stall her. “Dobson. How?”

  “Poor thing,” she said. “I’d come over to check your vitals, but I think little Ch
arlotte here might react poorly to my hands on you. A shame. You know, this orthomyxoviridae surrexit nigrum virus doesn’t have a precise countdown clock. It isn’t a bomb. Really, you could croak at any time. So I’ll honor your last wish.” She put a hand to her heart in apparent sincerity. “I’ll do that. Isn’t that how all those stories always end? The hero explaining everything to his hapless confidant? You are a Watson, after all, so let’s stick with tradition.”

  Holmes wasn’t listening, it was clear. Her eyes were fixed on Bryony’s boots. Slowly, her hand stole over to her brother’s, and she took it. For comfort, or for another reason, I wasn’t sure. So I clamped my eyes on Bryony, giving her the captivated audience she obviously wanted.

  “Lee Dobson. Nasty thing, wasn’t he? One of my first patients back in September, with a mean case of thrush. He had to come in for a follow-up, and I think he thought . . . well, you know. Attractive older woman, lusty young man. He was trying to impress me. Asking all these ‘oblique’ questions about narcotics, opiates. For a friend. They always say it’s for a friend. How does someone react to heroin? As opposed to morphine? To oxycodone? Did they go nonresponsive? At what dosage? How pliable were they? Were they still able to have sex?”

  Holmes’s shoulders went stiff, her jaw set. Part of her was listening, after all. Beside her, Milo’s expression was set in a determined blank.

  “Oh, I was happy to oblige him and answer his questions. I had no qualms about it. Because how many other students at this school could be depraved enough to do drugs of that caliber? I knew I wasn’t pointing him toward the innocent. Why, yes, I told him, your friend will be euphoric. So happy, so lazy, so unwilling to move. They should be careful, I said. Terrible things can happen to girls when they’re that high. He thanked me profusely. Nearly wrung my hand off. And I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was sending our little whore here exactly the man she’d been asking for.

  “And after that he kept coming back. It was clear he was infatuated with me. You can see why, of course.” A smile crept over her face like a poisonous fog. “I can see you are, too, Jamie, from the way you look at me. I knew it the day that you got into that tussle with my Lee, the starry-eyed look on your face. Don’t be ashamed. I did pageants, you know. Won quite a few prizes. But no. No, I was talking about Lee Dobson and that protein powder.

  “Because the two of you had more or less marked him for dead. Charlotte had made her disgust for that poor boy so loudly clear, and, you, Jamie, had made an attempt to kill him. No, don’t look at me like that—you would’ve beaten him stupid, and all for him saying things about your Charlotte that were true. I got all of it from Dobson in the infirmary. How he’d tried to warn you about what a slut she was. He was doing you a favor! And look at how he repaid it. Poor thing marked himself for death at that point. From my own experience”—here she huffed, like a disappointed grandmother—“I know that Charlotte is utterly ruthless. She would’ve taken him out eventually, especially with such a besotted baby mastiff like you by her side. I was doing him a favor, really. At least I got rid of him in a humane way.

  “It wasn’t hard to start dosing him with arsenic in his protein powder. A little bit at a time, building the dosage each day—I made him come to me to take it, of course. And then I had a blank page to write my story on, once he was dead. You know, I loved Dr. Watson’s tales when I was young. It was so much fun to get to do a reenactment. I nicked a brand-new copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes out of the library and made a dorm visit that night—came up through the back stairs. I’d asked Lee to prop them open for me. Had a surprise for him, I said. He probably thought he was going to get laid. I knew his roommate was on that rugby tour; he’d told me, so eager to get his hands on me. Well. By the time I arrived, he was dead. They called me to help comfort the students, after.”

  She studied a nail. In a flash, I remembered seeing her there outside Dobson’s door, patting my sobbing hallmate on the shoulder. I swallowed the bile that had risen in my throat.

  “Of course, I had help with the snake.”

  Holmes started. “What help?”

  Bryony clucked her tongue. “Speaking out of turn,” she said, and for the first time, I heard a trace of anger in her voice. “But I’ll play along. Still haven’t thought through the consequences of your actions, have you? Well, birds can’t change their feathers. Here’s a quick education: when you orchestrated my fiancé’s downfall—all for the crime of loving me—you ruined my life. You ruined. My life.” She took a step closer to the two of them, almost inadvertently. When she moved, I saw the gun she’d holstered underneath her puffer coat.

  “You whore. I’d been with Augie since we were kids. He’d gone to Eton, and then early to Oxford, while I went to the village school, but all the while he’d always loved me. Me, do you understand? I went over to the Moriartys’ for every Sunday dinner. They came to my flute recitals, when my own mother was too drunk to scrape herself off the sofa. And when I was seventeen and my mother died, and my father couldn’t be fucked to take me in, do you know who did? Oh, that’s right. Professor Moriarty and his wife. I don’t care what they did on the side—they were saints, do you understand? If they asked me to slit my own throat, I would have, for them.”

  “I thought you came to the States when you were sixteen,” Holmes whispered.

  Bryony smiled. “Do you think my name was the only part of my employment records I had falsified? No, I was never sent away across an ocean. No one wanted to be rid of me that badly. You see, I was to marry Augie as soon as I finished at uni. His parents paid for me to attend the University of London, and his family had already bought a flat for us to live in as husband and wife. I was to be a doctor. I’m very smart, you know. Though you Holmeses all think that there’s no one as bloody brilliant as you, Augie could run circles around you with his eyes shut, and I was going to be a doctor.

  “And then Augie took that horrible job.” She ground her teeth so hard that I could hear it, the enamel and bone. “At your house.

  “His parents warned him against it. His brother Lucien did too. They thought he was mad, going into a den of vipers like that. Your bitch of a mother and your homicidal brother and you, the enfant terrible, as his student? God, the games the Moriartys play are small compared to yours. But Augie believed the best of people. He believed the best from you, baby Charlotte. That was his downfall.”

  That was when I realized that she was talking about him as if he were dead. Holmes noticed, too—her eyes finally drifted up from Bryony’s boots to her cruelly smiling face. But Holmes kept her immaculate poker face. Either this wasn’t a surprise, or her composure was even better than I’d thought.

  “The last time I saw Augie alive,” Bryony said, “was the day before the drugs bust. He’d come up to London for a few days, to visit me. It was beautiful. He took me to this gorgeous restaurant. White tablecloths. We talked about our wedding. It was going to be small, intimate. In his family’s backyard, wildflowers, his mother’s wedding dress. We were so happy. We didn’t need anything but each other.” She lost her dreamy look, then. “He went back to your house the next day. I reckon you could smell me all over him. Made you crazy with jealousy. Just a little girl, but with such big-girl appetites. He told me all about your crush, you know. He thought it was adorable.”

  So much for composure. Holmes flinched, as if she’d been hit across the face.

  “The day after, you called the law down on him. After the police left, after they found Lucien and dragged him away to jail—oh, you look so surprised, what the hell did you think happened to him?—I drove all over creation, looking for him. The police couldn’t find him; he’d made his confession and run. Oxford had expelled him. No other school would have him, not with that record. He’d panicked. Gone home. And he’d taken his father’s pistol into his childhood bedroom, and he shot himself in the face.”

  I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand at all—I’d thought August had been hauled away to jail,
and when he’d been paroled, had gotten a job at Greystone working for Milo. I racked my memory as best as I could. What had Holmes said, exactly, when she was telling me the story?

  August stayed to take the blame, as I suspected he would . . . he got a job, finally. Works for my brother in Germany.

  There wasn’t anything about what happened in between.

  Even in my feverish haze, I began filling in the blanks.

  August Moriarty had faked his death, most likely with his parents’ help. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before: he’d confessed to selling hard drugs to a minor, and the sentence for that would have been much longer than the timeline Holmes had laid out for me between his crime and his new life. His parents had given him up, Holmes had said. They would have had to cut off all public contact to maintain the fiction of his death. But they’d buried the news of it, too. I hadn’t found any obituaries when I was researching him, any mention of a funeral. It was as if August Moriarty had simply stopped existing. Frozen in time as a wonder boy, working on the intricate mathematical patterns in the Arctic Circle, his thick blond Disney hair blowing in the frigid wind.

  And Bryony Downs didn’t know.

  It would have been difficult for her to accompany him in his new life, but had he really loved her, he would have found a way, I thought. He was a brilliant man. Too brilliant, maybe, not to see the hint of fanatical darkness in his fiancée. The obsession, the wild selfishness. The willingness to do anything to achieve her own ends.

  Maybe August Moriarty saw this as his opportunity to escape her. An understandable decision. Despite it leading to where Holmes and I found ourselves now.

  “You,” Bryony said, edging still closer to Holmes, who regarded her coolly. “You have his death on your hands. So you’ll do time for a death. I’m just the middleman.”

  And Lee Dobson and Elizabeth Hartwell the sacrificial lambs.

  Though she hadn’t mentioned Elizabeth at all.