A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Braver than he and Elio were last year,” Theo said; again the note of approval. He’d been appreciatively nodding through all the monologues we’d heard, cheering loudly after they’d stepped down. “Last year,” he told me, “they split the part of a manservant. Getting their feet wet. Good sense of humor on Teo, and Elio’s great. Brought snacks to rehearsal all the time last year. Good guys.”

  Quigley and Larkin consulted; Teo and Elio were allowed to perform together. They were passable actors, but barely. I wrote snacks in my notebook. I noted Theo’s hand on the armrest between us, his eyes drifting down to the notebook in my lap, like a lion lazily regarding his prey.

  I did not like sitting next to him. I didn’t like it at all.

  I should mention that, as usual, I was writing in my own shorthand, one I had developed as a child; it borrowed something from calligraphy, something from number substitution. Any notes I was making would have looked like scribbled abbreviations to a pair of prying eyes. And Theo’s were.

  Rupert leaned over. “I like your doodles.”

  “Nervous hands,” I said with an apologetic smile. “‘Doodles’ is a generous description.”

  Theo had been so long-limbed and casual, so utterly fixed on the stage, that I was surprised when his name was called next. He jogged down the aisle to a flurry of high fives; he was well liked here, despite his seeming tendency to isolate himself from everyone but Rupert and Anwen. Trauma could do that, I knew.

  So could guilt.

  And perhaps that’s what he drew on for his monologue, that snarl inside him, the wanting to shove it all into a container that could fit it. “I’m doing a monologue from the Scottish play, as the main . . . Scottish character,” he said, and there was a titter through the audience.

  “Macbeth,” Rupert said, too loudly, and was shushed. “He’s doing Macbeth,” he said to me in a whisper, because perhaps I hadn’t heard him when he was louder.

  “It’s bad luck, isn’t it? To even say the name.”

  He looked like he wanted to clap a hand over his mouth. “He’s really pushing it,” he said. “So many of us are already on edge—I knew he was planning to find a monologue outside of Hamlet, but—”

  “‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,’” Theo was saying, and I waved Rupert quiet. Not that I would have needed to. The room itself went quiet, and telescoped in, and in, until all I was watching was Theo’s face. The quick knit of his brow. The back of his hand, quickly, across the forehead, and then his feet, pacing—or no, beginning to pace, but not, and all the while the language spun out of him like he was making straw into gold.

  “‘A tale told by an idiot,’” he said, “‘full of sound and fury, / signifying nothing,’” and there was humor creeping in the depths of his desperate voice, and it was that that sold it.

  I realized, after he’d finished speaking, after the silence gave way to applause and Theo was trotting gaily up the stage, that my pen was still poised over my page.

  “Theo,” Rupert said, extending a hand to Theo as he walked down our row. They shook. Rupert reached his free hand to grasp Theo’s arm. “You know you’re a marvel, don’t you?”

  He grinned. “Never a marvel til it’s proven,” he said, and I liked him, then, and I wanted to be far away.

  Below us, Quigley and Larkin were shuffling papers. Larkin announced a break; we’d begin again in five.

  “You’re very good,” I told Theo, still processing.

  “Ah,” he said, kicking back in his seat. “There it is. Your real voice. It’s hoarser than what I’d imagined.”

  The tension inside me kicked into high gear. Had I had a gun, it would have been out and trained on his forehead.

  “Don’t worry, Charlotte,” he said, amused. That didn’t do anything to ease my flash of anger. “Everyone has one. The please-like-me voice. Yours went on for so long, I almost thought it was real.”

  Behind me, Rupert sighed. “Ignore him. He’s just testing one of his pet theories.”

  “Not a pet theory,” Theo said. “Actual fact. You had one too, Rupert, but you lost it pretty fast with me. The shitty thing is, women end up keeping theirs for days after I first meet them. Self-protection, maybe?”

  I folded my arms.

  “Your body language, too. It’s been almost too open. You keep your arms at your sides. I’m noticing it now because they’re across your chest—sorry, not looking like that—but before, you’ve had this . . . invitation to you. Like you want—”

  I had heard enough. “You don’t know anything about me,” I told him, and I pitched my voice still lower, the bottom of its register, scraping out each syllable from its gravel. “You know fuck all, Theo. Stop talking, or I will make you stop.”

  “—me to tell you all my secrets.” He looked at me curiously. “But I think I’ve just learned one of yours, maybe? Um. Sorry.”

  I had been sitting next to him, ignoring the instincts that had told me to run, because I knew that instincts weren’t logical. Especially mine, which ran so quickly toward self-protection.

  My neutral expression is that, neutral, but listening to a stranger wax poetic about my “physical availability” in the years after my rape was nothing close to a neutral experience for me.

  Theo straightened a bit. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I can be kind of an armchair psychologist. People just . . . I think a lot about how they tick. It helps my acting.”

  “Think about it, then.” I could hear it, the disgust in my voice, the thread of fear. (Matilda on that street corner, Theo reaching for her neck.) “But keep your mouth shut.”

  I could hear Rupert shift in the seat behind me.

  “I’m sorry,” Theo said again, quietly. “I really am.”

  “Everything okay?” a voice said. Watson. He made his way down our row, face smiling, eyes cold. “I saw your audition, Theo. You were great.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I think I just scared Charlotte. Didn’t mean to.”

  Watson looked at me for his cue. I nodded, and he relaxed, infinitesimally. We both knew I didn’t need protection, but occasionally, I did need backup. “Everything’s fine,” I said. Asymptote, I thought. But no—that was the word for when I wasn’t acting.

  “I watched Theo from the doorway,” Watson said, popping down next to Rupert. “So, he’s Hamlet, right?”

  “He’s probably Hamlet,” Rupert said proudly.

  “Probably.” It was fair to say as such without seeing the rest of the company audition. There was little chance they were hiding another Theo in their ranks, and even if they were, I didn’t think I could be there to see it.

  I was only moments away from crying—a reaction, nothing more, and yet I didn’t want these strangers to see me vulnerable.

  Something about this case was crawling underneath my skin.

  Swallowing, I pulled out my phone. I need to go home and lie down. You stay here? Take notes.

  You’re not okay, Watson wrote back. Let me come with. We’re not going to miss anything.

  I was fighting myself. I couldn’t fight Watson too. “I need to go.” My fake voice again, but shaking this time. “I’ll see you all later,” I said, and he followed me out the door and all the way home, a foot behind me, quiet and steady and sure.

  I was grateful for it then. I wasn’t later.

  One of us should have stayed.

  LATER, MUCH LATER, I WOKE IN MY BED FEELING LIKE I’D drunk three whole bottles of champagne and then broken into a government building with a flamethrower.

  I hadn’t, though I knew what that felt like. I was a different sort of wrecked.

  Watson was propped up beside me, his fingers in my hair, his other hand turning the pages of a book. The Good Soldier, I saw. He was nearly finished; hours must have passed. The sky outside was dark.

  “Did you hear something?” I asked him sleepily.

  “A knock, maybe?” He looked down at me, pulled a strand of hair from my eyes. “But it’s been thund
ering outside. Kind of hard to tell.”

  There it was again—rap, rap, rap. An argument muffled in the hall.

  At that, Watson was on his feet. He opened the second drawer of my dresser, pulled out my knife, and stalked out of the room without bothering to do up his shirt.

  People were shouting.

  Then I was awake, too, putting on clothes as Mouse dashed for the safe, quiet space under my bed. I picked up a blanket from the floor and threw it around my shoulders and followed.

  “—she’s dead,” Rupert was saying in the living room, his hair plastered to his face. It must have been raining quite hard; water was leeching out from his boots into the carpet. “Dead. And I saw it happen. We all did.”

  At first I thought he meant Anwen, but no—she was there behind him in a translucent rain slicker, a lace dress beneath it, her face drawn and thin. Theo, behind her, was shutting the door. Under his arm was a bottle in a brown paper bag.

  “Dead,” Rupert said again, and he sat right there on the rug, his back against the door. “I can’t believe it.”

  “And Rupert—Rupert is playing Hamlet,” Anwen burst out, as though it were the worst thing of all.

  Thirteen

  “NOBODY SAY ANYTHING ELSE,” WATSON SAID, HEADING into the kitchen. He dropped the knife on the counter.

  “Were you making something?” Rupert asked, confused. “Cooking shirtless can be sort of dangerous—”

  “Rupert,” Anwen said despairingly, and then burst into tears, turning her face into Theo’s shirt. He recoiled slightly, and then brought his hands up to her shoulders. Rupert, chastened, stared at the floor.

  In my experience, the teenage brain tended to go one of two ways in the aftermath of tragedy: one became either the animal or the child. Giving these three orders right now would satisfy that second impulse. And, under the guise of taking care of them, I might be able to ferret out some information.

  “Jackets,” I said, and as they shucked them off and hung them in the entryway closet, Watson came from the kitchen with three glasses of water cradled between his hands. “Shoes, too.”

  Once the water was distributed, Watson produced a stack of fresh towels from the bathroom and handed them out, and the three of them gathered shakily on the couch.

  I sat in the leather club chair, tossing the end of my blanket over my shoulder. Watson perched on its arm. “What on earth happened?” I asked. For Theo’s benefit, I kept my voice at its natural register, though I was certainly not going to play this round as myself.

  Blindly, Theo drained off his water, then fetched the bottle from his paper bag, affecting a mad scientist’s squint as he refilled his glass with brown liquor.

  “That,” Watson said, “is a lot of rum.”

  “That,” Theo said, “is the point,” and took a gigantic swig, then sputtered. Anwen reached to take the glass from him, but he batted her away like a child.

  “Please forgive Theodore’s theatrics,” she said. “Dr. Larkin is dead.”

  With a low groan, Rupert buried his face in his hands. Theo tossed back his rum.

  Watson shot me a horrified look, and I reached out to take his hand, to steady myself as much as him. One would think, perhaps, that recent years would have hardened me to the possibility of death. But Dr. Larkin hadn’t seemed in any danger. She’d been a harried academic at my uncle’s party, asking for my help to protect her students.

  Though part of me was reeling, another, abstract part knew that it was important to catalog Anwen’s and Theo’s and Rupert’s reactions before they could begin to paper them over with what they wanted me to see. But grief did strange things to you. Made you see yourself at a distance. Theo’s drinking was clearly taken from something he’d seen onstage, or in a movie, a portrait of a young man prettily losing control; perhaps he’d had practice in the weeks after Matilda’s disappearance. Anwen’s grief was laced with the resentment I’d still yet to see her shake.

  Rupert? His seemed genuine, which in its own way made me suspect him more.

  “What happened?” I asked quietly, though more than that, I wanted to ask, why did you come here first?

  Theo tilted his head to the side, locking eyes with mine. “Tonight, while she was onstage, explaining to us the idea of betrayal in Hamlet, a light fell out of the grid.”

  “Oh my God,” Watson murmured. “Onto her?”

  Anwen nodded. My heart seized, but I said nothing more. I owed it to Dr. Larkin to stay silent, to let them talk.

  “We were all watching. We were all there.” Theo scrubbed at his face. “People were screaming. Running out of the theater like there had been gunshots, or like there was a fire . . . no one went up to help her, so I climbed onto the stage and I got down there beside her and I didn’t want to move the light in case—in case—you know, on the television shows, they tell you not to move them—”

  “You did the right thing, mate,” Rupert said, reaching out to touch Theo’s knee.

  He batted away Rupert’s hand, struggling to sit up on the couch. “And because I was up there when the police came, they took me back to the station and questioned me. Some bitch of a detective named Sadiq, she went at me for hours. I had been the last person to see Matilda before she disappeared. I had been unhappy about her casting. I had been onstage when Larkin was—was—and because these things keep happening around me, because my life sucks, I keep being the one they go after.” With shaking hands, he tried to topple more rum into his glass.

  “Stop, Theo,” Anwen said, though I didn’t know whether she meant the drinking or the talking.

  “We need to get some food into him.” With a sigh, Rupert stood and padded over to the kitchen. “Is it all right if I raid your fridge?”

  Too much was going on. Was he moving away to hide his reaction?

  “Was there anyone near the lighting grid?” Watson was asking Theo. “Do they have any suspects?”

  “Why does your fridge smell like anchovies?” Rupert asked, popping his head over the door. “Why is it filled with toasts? Were you having a party?”

  Watson shrugged. “Maybe. Or is this a wake?”

  “Theo?” I prompted, “The lighting board,” but he was staring somewhere over my shoulder.

  A sharp lash of thunder outside, a burst of wind. In the kitchen, Rupert set out trays on the kitchen island, bottles of juice, the rest of the Diet Coke.

  “I’m starving,” Anwen said, jumping to her feet, “and I can’t talk about this anymore, not now. I’ve been with the police for hours.”

  Theo followed suit, rum in hand, and the three of them together made short work of the rest of the breakfast I’d made for the week. I watched them gathered around the kitchen island, their heads bent, the three of them silent as they ate. Apparently, their animal brains had won out.

  I looked up at Watson. He looked down at me. “It’s a party,” he said in an undertone, and kissed my forehead.

  “It’s a party,” I said grimly. “Why are they here?”

  “I know one way to find out.” He looked up, his mouth in a tight smile. “Who wants to do shots?” he called. “Theo, you’re hogging that rum.”

  Theo flipped him off, mouth full of toast, but Rupert, ever obliging, was pulling glasses from the bar cart as though he’d lived in my flat for months. Anwen had already drifted over to sit at the table with her makeshift cocktail, stealing little sips of it. She traced a pattern on the floor with one sock foot.

  The night went on like that, in fits and starts. Watson poured a round of shots, mine into the glass I kept in my fist so that no one could see that he’d given me only a splash. I understood the plan he’d come up with: it was simple, really. In vino veritas. If we could get them drunk, we could maybe get them to talk, and if we had to burn Watson on the pyre as well—

  Well. At least alcohol was flammable.

  There was a second round, and a third, Watson bellowing out the numbers like he was the sort of rugby asshole that we’d always avoided back at
school. He fit the part, confidently broad-shouldered, slim-hipped (I had been thinking much more about his body lately, nemo malus felix); he performed his role with vigor, and soon enough they were all soused.

  We’d turned on the lamps against the dark, and they cast strange shadows across the room. Rupert’s nose went peakier still, and Anwen’s chin disappeared as she ducked it, studying her hands, picking her cuticles. I was surprised by how cowed she was tonight, how she’d been holding herself apart. The only way they’d have known about my flat would be from her: she’d been here only yesterday. Rupert had made some throwaway apology about barging in on us, and Theo had said hollowly, “Where else could we go? The dorms? A pub?”

  “Everyone else was going to The Bell and Book to, you know, grieve—”

  Theo slammed his glass down on the table. “People repeating the same horrible patterns. Someone else is going to get hurt.”

  “Hey.” Anwen glanced up. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “I know we don’t, but I want to—”

  “You haven’t told me anything about this spring,” she said. “How was Boston? How was your last semester of school?”

  “School?” Rupert asked. He glanced between the two of them. “You two haven’t talked about it? I thought you’d been in touch.”

  Anwen swallowed. “I mean—”

  “Oh, school,” Theo said, fury lurking at the corners of his voice. “School. Yes, let’s not talk about Larkin. Let’s not talk about this summer. Why would we need to? It’s not like last year had anything to do with it—”

  “Theo,” Anwen said, hands up, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry—”

  “Pry?” Theo laughed. “How is it prying? You and me are friends, Anwen, remember? Remember when my girlfriend broke up with me last summer, because she thought I knew why people were being attacked and wasn’t telling anyone. Who knows where she got that idea. Oh, and then she disappeared.”