A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Hi,” he said, stilling my hands against him.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “Hi,” I said again. I was a bit unsure why we were greeting each other.

  “God.” He ducked down to kiss me, then pressed his lips against one temple, the other, the top of my head. “I—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He laughed again, in disbelief. “We can’t go in, not like this. We can’t go back outside, it’s pouring. And I don’t want to leave you. Not yet.”

  I took a steadying breath. “Let’s sit and wait a moment. We can . . . straighten ourselves out, and then go in and to my room and he won’t suspect anything.” Of course, we both knew I was lying. My uncle, the private detective, would suspect everything, but he would at least wait until morning to make fun of me.

  We settled ourselves on the top carpeted stair. Watson buttoned his shirt, blushing a little, murmuring something I couldn’t quite hear. I asked him to repeat himself.

  “Maybe you should finish telling me your story,” he said. “About your elderly aunt. And the things you did as a child.”

  “Do you want me to also pour a bucket of cold water over your lap?”

  He grinned. “If you have one handy.”

  “I don’t remember,” I said, running a hand over my hair to smooth it. “Oh. The theater.”

  “The theater.”

  “How she used to leave me and Milo, and go alone.” I took a steadying breath; I was still so distracted. “I wondered about it for years, you know. Once, late at night, she came back to our hotel room when my brother was already asleep. And she was weeping.”

  Watson studied me. “Do you know why?”

  “I asked her what was wrong,” I said, remembering that night. The heavy curtains. The polished sconces on either side of the out-of-date television. The twin beds the hotel had given us, and my aunt, who had insisted on sleeping on a rickety cot by the radiator. “She said she had been someone else for a time, and now she wasn’t. I think she might have been a bit drunk.”

  Watson sighed, adjusting his collar. “I imagine that’s metaphorical,” he said.

  “I put it out of mind, until that day I was telling you about. She’d asked me to see her before I left for Sherringford. More specifically, she asked me to see her ‘hives.’ I thought she meant that we would look at them and talk—someone might ask you down to see a café, for instance, but they mean to have a conversation. This wasn’t like that. She wanted me to work.”

  “She put you in a suit,” Watson said. I could tell he liked the idea: the heavy white garment, the netted headdress, the gloves that grew your hands into a giant’s.

  “She did. She led me out into the apiary. I was to help her transfer a hive. We had it stacked up, ready to be moved on a dolly . . .” I studied my boots, the toes pushing into the carpet two steps below me. “I’m usually very precise. I imagine I would be an obvious choice to help with a delicate operation.

  “But it was odd. She didn’t offer help, just gave instruction. Load the hives. Move them slowly. She watched me, and all was going well until the wheels of the dolly I was pulling hit a rock. Two of the hives fell. Burst open. The bees began rioting. I panicked and pulled off my headgear and I was stung, and I hadn’t ever been stung before, and though I’m not the sort of allergic that needs to go to hospital, I’m allergic enough that I swelled.

  “I wasn’t weeping. I was fascinated, in the middle of all that . . . destruction. And my aunt Araminta stood and watched me. After a minute or two, she brought me inside, gave me some tea. Pulled out the stingers with tweezers, washed my face with soap and water. Wished me luck at school, and off I went. I kept feeling as though I’d failed a test.

  “We haven’t spoken much since then. Birthdays. Christmastime.” I dropped my head against his shoulder, and his arm went around me, an instinct. “Is that enough cold water for you?”

  He squeezed my arm. “Why tell that story?”

  “Leander says she’s planning a visit,” I said, “to meet with some shops here to sell her honey. Maybe she’s wanting to expand her business? I’m not sure. But she’ll be in the flat for a few days, sometime soon.”

  “I’d like to meet her.”

  “You’re into any Holmes you meet,” I said. “You want to add us to your anthropological study.”

  “That’s not nice.”

  “It’s true. It doesn’t need to be nice.” My voice came out stiff.

  He tipped his head to the side, considering. It was more than I deserved. “You don’t want me to meet her.”

  We sat together in a silence that wasn’t particularly companionable. Inside, I could hear my uncle beginning to stir—he was pulling pots and pans from the cupboard. The deep, hollow bell of the Dutch oven on the countertop. The drawn-in breath of the kettle as it settled on the stove.

  My upbringing had taught me to listen and to assign meaning to what I heard. Both the formal training, and the informal—those moments when I woke in the morning, determining how safe it was for me to go downstairs.

  It was the only way I knew how to be in the world.

  “She’s a version of myself,” I said. “She hides in plain sight. She might be interesting to you, for that reason.”

  “Every version of you is interesting to me,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. I had been someone else, I remembered her saying, and now I’m not.

  He, who more than anyone saw every part of me, could feel the shift and stutter of my mood. It had turned, as it always did; I was like the water that way.

  “Do you want to go in now?” he asked.

  I listened. There was another voice in with my uncle—the handsome man from the party. I remembered his clear tenor. She wants me to step in, the voice was saying, and in the background, the water in the kettle began to turn over. A hiss, a splutter.

  You shouldn’t do anything you’re not prepared for, my uncle’s boyfriend told him, and I could hear the shuffle of his feet in slippers, the sharp sound of the spoon against the pan.

  “I can leave,” Watson was saying. “We can pick this up tomorrow. I know we haven’t talked at all about the case.”

  “The case.” I’d forgotten. The sheet monster with Matilda’s face pinned to it, the gang of feuding friends around the supper table, Anwen in her floral dress. It’s all her fault.

  I reached for his hands and settled them on my hips. “Come in with me,” I said. “Stay over.”

  Inside the flat, a pot clattered loudly against the stove, and for once, neither of us startled.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked. “I can see those gears moving. What do you want?”

  I wanted to know who I was, now, in what felt like the aftermath of my life. I had survived my childhood. I was an adult, standing with the boy I loved, doing meaningful work that I had trained for.

  I reached up to smooth Watson’s brow. The neatness of my life now was shocking to me, a girl with such ragged edges. I wasn’t sure if I could fit inside its borders.

  But I wanted him. I always did. “I want to tell you more stories about my aging aunt,” I told him, instead, and when he realized I was teasing, he wound his fingers into my hair and kissed me, a promise in a language I couldn’t yet speak.

  Ten

  I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO THE SOFT, RHYTHMIC KNEADING of my cat’s paws on my stomach. When I opened my eyes, Mouse peered at me, shook herself all over, and then leapt from the bed.

  Watson didn’t stir at such slight movement. It took more than that to wake him—I knew that from lingering in doorways, seeing him passed out on his back on his father’s couch, his eyes bruised underneath the arm flung over them. I often felt like some kind of wretched war bride, watching him recover from whatever trouble we’d gotten ourselves into. Moments like that, brief and far between, before I pulled him off to the next adventure.

  But we had nowhere to go this morning, not yet, and still I couldn’t keep myself fro
m stirring. I slid out from under the coverlet and picked up my dressing gown from the floor. My black mood had evaporated, as it often did, with the dawn. I had at least a few hours until it returned.

  I had a cigarette by the window, a cup of tea in the kitchen. On the counter was a note from my uncle, written in his leisurely cursive: In London with Stephen through the weekend; he has tickets for Hamilton! You and your young man have fun. Call if you need anything xxxx.

  I read the note over again. The flat was ours, then. I’d always been allowed a measure of freedom (see: boarding school, Berlin, the boy asleep in my bedroom), but Leander had been so present these past months—making meals, arranging doctors’ appointments—that I found myself reflexively looking over my shoulder, expecting to see him in the sitting room with a book braced against one knee, calling out, Charlotte, do you want toast soldiers with your eggs?

  My stomach rumbled. I did, in fact, want toast soldiers with my eggs.

  After spending some time with Anwen’s text messages, I stubbed out my cigarette in a coffee mug and began pulling things from the cupboards. There was a loaf of good sourdough bread on the counter, a pot of Araminta’s honey, a pair of avocados, some jam. There was a carton of brown eggs in the fridge, vegetables in the crisper. Onions in a wire basket, and potatoes. Butter and margarine.

  Oil was for cooking. I knew that abstractly. I opened up the cupboard above the stove and pulled down bottles one by one. Olive oil, sunflower, sesame, coconut. I lined them all up on the counter, then redid my alignment alphabetically, then from largest bottle to smallest. I picked up the avocado and poked at it, the way I’d seen people do in markets. I lifted each egg to the light, then shook them, then placed them delicately back in the carton.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t prepare food. I had done so, often, for myself. Sandwiches, wraps, a salad. Things that required assembly more than art. I had grown up with a housekeeper, which was the sort of privilege that made one into an ornament, a useless decoration of a girl; I had never in my life made something for someone else that wasn’t a cup of tea. True, I could download a food app on my phone or leaf through one of the cookbooks Leander kept on the counter (though I didn’t want to consider why he owned a copy of 38 Meals for Your Picky Toddler), but I was intelligent. I was capable. I could figure this out for myself.

  An hour later, I nudged open the bedroom door, carrying a tray.

  Watson sat up on his elbows. “What do you have there?” he asked, his voice coated in sleep.

  “I made you breakfast.”

  “How domestic of you.” He picked up his glasses from the bedside table and put them on. “That’s—that’s a rather large plate you’ve got there. Plates?”

  “This is tray one of four,” I said, placing it at the end of the bed.

  He blinked at me. Perhaps he was still tired.

  “Don’t begin eating until you see all your options,” I told him, and went off to fetch the next platter.

  By the time I’d arranged it all on my coverlet to my satisfaction, Watson had roused himself appropriately. He’d put on one of my oversized sleep shirts—CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS—and poured himself a cup of coffee. That surprised me; he usually took tea.

  “I need real caffeine to deal with this.” He lofted a piece of toast. “Can you explain this?”

  “Salt, fat, acid, heat.”

  For a long moment, Watson inspected it. “Holmes,” he said. “This sort of looks like cat food. So you should maybe explain.”

  “I read it this spring, in a magazine, in that facility in London.” I sat down in my armchair, resisting the urge to light another cigarette. “I was supposed to reconfigure my relationship with food, you know, and so my therapist as an experiment gave me a stack of cookery magazines and told me to pick out what sounded ‘good.’ None of it did. All these garish close-ups of food arranged in pans, as though they were strange decomposing art. But one of the chefs they interviewed, some Danish man, said that the only thing you needed to know to cook was that every dish had to balance ‘salt, fat, acid, and heat.’”

  “And you stopped reading there.”

  “The brain can only hold so much information,” I reminded him. “If that was all I needed to know on the subject, I could move on to studying something interesting, like blood spatter.”

  “And so what am I holding?” Watson asked, gesturing at me with the toast.

  “That,” I said, “is tinned herring, cottage cheese, lemon juice, and a green substance from a jar with a rubbed-off label that smelled like tomatillos and motor oil.”

  “I see,” Watson said, his expression perfectly blank. “And this one?”

  “That is bacon, egg, avocado, sriracha”—he was already putting it into his mouth—“and a drizzle of Diet Coke.”

  Watson only paused his chewing for a moment. “It’s not bad,” he said, mouth full, and went in for another slice.

  “I added lemon. I know you like a lemon with your soda.” I sat back. “The rest of those are in similar permutations; the bread was an easy vehicle for their delivery.”

  “Their delivery.”

  I ignored him; I was enjoying spinning out my train of thought. “I wake before you. I should make breakfast. Therefore, I thought we could determine what you like for breakfast this way, all at once, rather than my undertaking a series of trial and error over the next few weeks.”

  He smiled at me, all rumpled and covered in crumbs. “So you’re planning for the long term, then?”

  “I am,” I said hesitantly.

  “Well then. This one,” he said, holding another toast happily aloft, “looks like anchovy, carrot, and fig. And . . . pickled pig’s feet. Bombs away.”

  WATSON ATE ON THE BED; I ATE QUICKLY IN THE KITCHEN. He swapped his glasses for contacts, and we both put on our boots, and the two of us were out the door by ten. Oxford, outside, was in all its May glory; Watson was waxing rhapsodic as we walked up the block, winding our way away from the college.

  “Does it just smell better here?”

  A bus had just braked hard in front of us, coughing out a cloud of exhaust.

  “Better than where, exactly?”

  “Than Sherringford,” Watson said, laughing, “or New York. For sure better than New York. Like, there aren’t bags of garbage along the streets baking in the sun, here.”

  “How would you describe it, then?”

  “Home. Or a home,” he amended. “And you?”

  To me, Oxford was a patchwork—the corner of our road smelled like the chip shop (grease and fish and the occasional hot-sugar smell of a Mars Bar in the deep fryer), and the next road down was fresh soil from someone turning over their front garden for the summer, and St. Genesius like grass and the river and dust, and the High Street, where we were headed, like commerce.

  “Commerce?” Watson grinned at me. “That’s pretty metaphorical, for you.”

  “It’s a marker. Everything has one. I need to be able to differentiate where I’m going in the dark, or in case I’m blindfolded.”

  “Like that happens.”

  I gave him a look. “You should know better than to say that, pumpkin.”

  “You’re a jerk,” he said, reaching out to tousle my hair, and I ducked. “No, for real. Show me how you to do it.”

  “It’s simple.” I took his hand and shut my eyes and let him pull me along for half a block. “Stationery shop, bookstore, used bookstore, kebab shop. New paper and ink; new paper; old paper; lunch.”

  “Lunch?”

  “I like kebabs.”

  He tangled his fingers with mine. “Nothing lost on you, then.”

  “Not a thing,” I said, and he tugged me up against him for a moment, and because he was Watson, because the sky was milk-white and open and the morning smelled clear and because he trusted me (somehow, he trusted me), he didn’t ask a single question about where I was leading him.

  “So Leander gave us the place to ourselves,” he said. “Do you want me to stay wi
th you, then? Keep you company? Keep the wolves from the door?”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I did once knock out Lucien Moriarty in a restaurant bathroom,” he reminded me.

  “Point,” I said. “I’d of course like you there.” I glanced down at our clasped hands. “Here. Alongside me. But it might also be useful for us to spend some nights digging up dirt on Theo and Anwen and Rupert, and your staying in your rooms makes it easier.”

  “Are those your suspects?”

  “I don’t have suspects. They’re our entrée into this community. Did I tell you about the text messages I lifted off of Anwen’s phone?”

  Watson slowed to a stop.

  We were in front of a café. “Oh. Are you still hungry?” It seemed improbable, given the acres of toast he had consumed, but many things about Watson were improbable.

  “I need . . . something,” he said, after a moment. “And you . . . you need to sit there and not touch anything.”

  Five minutes later, I had settled in to watch Watson drain a cup of tea. “You lifted her texts?” he asked, finally, creasing the cup with an anxious hand.

  “She made the mistake of letting me watch the time on her phone while she practiced her monologue.” I shrugged. “I still have one of Milo’s ‘little mice’ from our jaunt in Berlin; I plugged it in, stuck it under a magazine, and thirty seconds later I had her text message history.”

  “And she has no idea.”

  Anwen was fairly perceptive, but I didn’t think she’d clocked me as the particular threat I was. “No. And to be clear, I didn’t download all her information.” I would have, had I had more time, though Watson didn’t need to know that. It was always odd to me what upset him (small violations of privacy; blunt truths) and what made him proud (breaking someone’s nose in a restaurant bathroom). Though as I’ve grown, I’ve found that to often be the case—most are more comfortable with explosions and bodily harm than the expression of ideas using language they don’t like. “The results were scattershot. I only have some of her messages. Nothing between her and Rupert. Quite a few between her and her mates back in Wales, setting up study dates. But—and here’s the kicker, as they say—I have nearly everything between her and Theo for the last nine months.”