A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Above us, the sun took its watery light behind a cloud. In the sudden wash of shadow, the birds went louder, louder, calling for something that refused to answer.

  “Go look in Anwen’s room,” he said, already walking away. “Then get your boyfriend out of there.”

  Fifteen

  I SAT IN THAT GARDEN LONGER THAN I’D LIKE TO ADMIT.

  Meet me in the main quad, I’d texted Watson, and he was there as I made my way over the freshly trimmed grass. He nodded his head toward his building, and the two of us ducked inside, out of the late morning.

  “I thought I was going to the station with you,” he said, holding the door.

  “You were sleeping,” I said. He was put out, I could tell, so I continued. “You were very handsome while you were sleeping.”

  His lips quirked. “Too handsome to be useful?”

  “One can’t have everything,” I told him, and he caught my hand and squeezed it.

  “It’s fine. It gave me a chance to talk with Theo this morning, over coffee. I pressed gently on the Anwen thing from last night, but he’s all clammed up. He changed the subject to orchids.”

  “What about them?”

  We’d reached his stairwell and paused at the door; his common room was within earshot.

  Watson adjusted the straps of his backpack. “Well, we haven’t really considered the . . . finickiness of orchids.”

  “‘We,’” I scoffed. “I certainly have. Did you know that only older forests grow the sort of fungi that feeds the variety of orchid called Goodyera pubescens—”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “I promise you, I’m not making up mushroom facts for your amusement.”

  “Pubescens? Pubescent orchid?” He snorted. “Has it grown a little stupid mustache? Does it skateboard?”

  “Watson.”

  “You were the one suggesting that I haven’t stopped to consider one of the key aspects of this case—”

  “You hadn’t,” I said mildly.

  He groaned. “So, this morning, Theo and I were talking, and like . . . right, some of them only eat really old mushrooms. You have to feed some of them with an eyedropper. With honey. Some of them can’t deal with shade or sun. And they’re bloody expensive. It’s not like there’s just a garden patch of these that the Orchid Killer—”

  “Has he been officially promoted from Orchid Attacker?”

  “—that the Orchid Killer is harvesting them from,” Watson said. “Someone is spending a lot of time in a greenhouse, or stealing them from someone who does.”

  “Well,” I said. “When that sheet-ghost fell on me, the culprit thought it funny to hang an orchids calendar beside the door. Someone didn’t have access to their flowers anymore. Or we’re dealing with someone else entirely.”

  He shifted his weight foot to foot. “I brought my backpack,” he said. “I can act like I’m here to switch some stuff out, though almost everything I own is over at your flat. Is there anything you need me to do?”

  “If Theo or Rupert is home, we’ll need to roust them from their rooms. I don’t want any witnesses.”

  “Gotcha,” he said, and opened the door. “After you, pumpkin.”

  The rooms in St. Genesius were arranged this way, in stairwells that connected a small number of bedrooms to a common area with a kitchen and a few worn-in couches. We came through the kitchen first, which was unoccupied, though an electric kettle was switched on on the counter. The shelves were largely bare, as you’d imagine from summer students in undergraduate housing, but a sad-looking little saucepan was drying upside down next to the sink. Quickly, I searched the cabinets for a pair of drinking glasses, and we headed upstairs before someone could come down to find us.

  We stopped off first in Watson’s room so he could drop his empty backpack. I took a minute to marvel at the space he’d been given. Tall ceilings that sloped with the ceiling of the turret. A full-sized bed, chairs and a coffee table, a pair of casement windows that overlooked the St. Genesius chapel. The walls were plastered white. A fireplace at the far corner was heaped with wood, and I walked over to touch it. It looked a hundred years old.

  Watson leaned against the wall. “I want to use that to dramatically burn a letter at least once before this program’s over.”

  “Fireplaces,” I informed him, “are wasted on teenage boys.”

  “I’m not arguing with you there.” He dropped his voice. “They requested the same rooms they’d had last year. Theo’s to the left, Rupert to the right. Anwen has the little room at the very top next to the bathroom.”

  I handed him one of the drinking glasses. “You take Theo,” I said, and put the mouth of mine against the closest wall.

  “Really?” he said, interested. “This works?”

  I held a finger up to my lips, leaning forward and backward until I came across a decent spot to listen. I could hear the radiator rattling away, the creak of a window sash in the slight wind. After a few minutes, I straightened.

  “Nothing,” I murmured, and joined Watson at the other wall. His brow was furrowed with concentration; he was still moving the glass against the wall as one would a stethoscope against a human chest. But if Theo were in there, he was sleeping. The only sound either of us could hear was the quiet chatter of the students on the quad, someone beginning to strum a guitar.

  “Upstairs,” I said, and Watson followed.

  There, I put my glass to Anwen’s door, but her room was quiet except for the whirring of her fan, something I noted uneasily. White noise; I couldn’t listen around that. The door was locked—another difficult detail to explain away if we were caught inside. Sighing, I pulled my picks from my bag and got to work.

  “To think,” Watson said, “I used to wonder why girls carried purses.”

  “We need somewhere to keep our mace.” I smiled as the lock shifted and gave under my hands. “Will you keep watch on the landing? Think of some suitable explanation if we’re caught.”

  He leaned to look inside. “As long as your plan isn’t to go out that window,” he said, taking in the fourth-story view.

  “My father trained me for every eventuality,” I said, and left the door cracked as I slipped inside.

  While Watson’s cavernous room was as bare as when he’d moved in, Anwen’s was small and alive. At first, I had the confusing impression that I’d stumbled into a spiderweb: her walls were electric with ragged, moving white. I moved closer, extending a hand, and as my hand touched the wall, my eyes finally recognized a pattern. A series of patterns. She’d hung layers and layers of vintage lace, cut down to handkerchief squares, and pinned them with wooden clothespins to wire that she’d extended across the wall. Her windows had been left open, and the breeze coming through shuffled and reshuffled them, lifted the fringe on her window seat cushions.

  There wasn’t much else in that space. A twin bed, heaped in light blankets, with a stack of pillows arranged for reading. A desk, bare but for the oscillating fan I’d heard outside. A shelf of books above it. (She hadn’t left her laptop, though I didn’t imagine I’d be able to crack into it in the time I had now.) And a wardrobe that spanned the length of the remaining wall, stuffed so full that its wooden doors wouldn’t latch across its contents.

  I opened it with care.

  This, I realized, would take longer than five minutes.

  I’d known Anwen had designed costumes, made her own clothes and bits and bobs for friends; I’d taken the lace wallpaper she’d concocted as a tasteful way of storing a number of fabric samples. But still the closet in front of me was shocking in its exuberance.

  Before I did anything else, I snapped photos with my phone to keep as a reference. And then, in the quick, neat-handed way I’d been trained, I removed the evidence and cataloged it on the floor.

  A peacock-blue silk dress with a drop waist and a rhinestone-embellished Peter Pan collar. A vintage 1960s majorette costume, with full skirt and brass buttons. A marabou-feathered flapper dress with a b
elt, and behind it a second, identical, except made up in red instead of champagne.

  It was wild, all of it, more costumes than clothing, and I could feel my deductive faculties rioting against the restrictions I’d placed on myself. I badly wanted to hunt for patterns, to figure out the girl from the clothes. Instead I forced myself to focus on minutiae: Did these have designer labels? Was there any hint that they weren’t what they seemed to be, a closet full of vintage “finds” assembled with a sniper’s accuracy—were they instead purchased at huge markup from a London resale shop or similar?

  Nothing that I could tell from my cursory inspection. I was furious that I didn’t have more time, not the least for myself. My profession calls for me to be an artist of a different kind, and below my searching hands were a hundred different selves I could slip on to wear like weapons.

  But I’d taken too much time already. Before I returned each piece to the wardrobe, I examined it thoroughly, then around its sides and back; had it held secrets, I would have found them. Cursing quietly, I put back the clothes the way I’d seen them and shut the doors.

  I could hear Watson lean heavily against the wall.

  “No one’s coming?” I asked.

  “We’re clear,” he said.

  I opened the drawers under the bed (a pair of jeans with the tags on, tights in their packaging, black boots shined to a polish), the drawers to the desk (a jewelry box, locked; a notebook with pages trimmed in rose gold—blank; three blue pens—new; a cloth bag full of ribbons; a pair of sunglasses). Her toiletries would be in the bathroom.

  Shutting the final drawer, I realized that there wasn’t a single thing in this room to remind Anwen of a place outside its walls.

  No photographs. No cards from friends. No notes, no ephemera, no trinkets. Nothing that had the slightest bit of wear, the slightest bit of story. Nothing but those clothes.

  I wasn’t unfamiliar with this aesthetic, or with how it unnerved me. There had been girls back at Sherringford who kept their rooms like pristine film sets for their Instagram shoots. I don’t doubt that this made them happy. I understood, too, that a six-week summer program like this wasn’t necessarily long enough to want to bring your whole life along. But as someone who spent her life reading history into trifles, walking into a room washed clean of its owner made me feel as though I’d stepped right through a ghost.

  I moved through these thoughts quickly as I stood at the window. Sebastian Wallis had told me to check Anwen’s room, and I had. It was, indeed, strange, but it wasn’t as strange as his terse warning had implied.

  Below, the quad had emptied out, students having rushed off to lunch or to their next lecture. All except for a brunet boy ambling along the path that bisected the lawn, his hands in his pockets. I knelt on the window seat and put my head out to make sure of who he was.

  “Watson,” I said, turning. “Rupert’s on his way.”

  “Hurry up, then,” he whispered back.

  I leaned back to put a foot down on the floor when I heard the window seat groan below me. Frowning, I stood, pushing off the pillows, the raw-edged silk covering below them.

  The seat was a storage bench.

  I’m not sure what I expected; largely, I try not to expect anything at all. Life is emphatically disappointing to those who expect it to be otherwise. Still, I was put out to find another stack of improbable clothing folded neatly in a series of garment bags.

  I unzipped them, quickly, one by one. Velvet shifts; wide-legged corduroy pants; a faux-fur jacket with oversized lapels. Winter clothing, all of it too unseasonable to wear. It was odd for it to be here, but not incredibly so—she might have a job away from home between the end of her time at Oxford and when she began at Cambridge; she might not have storage at her house; she might be estranged from her family, as I was, and not welcome to keep her things at their house.

  I was tucking the final piece back into its bag when I felt a sharp prick in my finger. A pin, most likely. I stuck my finger into my mouth and attempted to wrestle the coat back in one-handed. I had no intention of leaving bloodstains.

  “Holmes,” Watson said, low. The stairwell door had just slammed shut.

  “Just a moment,” I said, leaning forward to straighten it with my elbow. My brain was listing away what it saw, the way it always did: the cut of the coat, the name on the lapel (Guy Laroche), the bit of stitching that had come undone in the lining, the—

  The name penned onto the label, in the tiniest possible handwriting.

  Larissa.

  Footfalls up the stairs, slow ones.

  “Holmes,” Watson said.

  Cursing, I lifted up the garment bag and checked the one below. The corduroy pants. A different store on the label. The same name on the tag.

  Larissa.

  The dresses, the silk blouses, the cashmere sweaters—the name, or the initial. Larissa; L; L.

  “Hallo!” Rupert, calling from downstairs. The kitchen. “Anyone home? I’m making popcorn! Beastly time with the police . . .”

  I dropped the window seat and threw the cloth over it, the pillows. There wasn’t any time, I knew that, but I threw myself on the wardrobe anyway. The clothes inside were packed together too tightly for me to separate one-handed—even if my one hand wasn’t bleeding.

  Moments. I had moments. I shucked off my jacket, then my shirt, and I wrapped the material around my hand to keep from leaving marks with my bleeding fingers.

  There—

  The majorette outfit: L. The flapper dress: L. The blue silk: Larissa.

  “Anwen?” His steps were coming up the stairs now; I could hear the popcorn swishing in the bowl. “You here? I know you were upset . . .”

  Shaking his head violently, Watson backed into the room on his toes. His eyes widened when he saw me. You’re in your bra! he mouthed. What the hell, Holmes—

  I gestured frantically with my bleeding hand.

  “Anwen?” Rupert was almost on us.

  “Goddammit,” Watson said, out loud, and kicked the door shut with his foot. He grabbed his T-shirt by the collar and pulled it over his head.

  “Oh!” I said, surprised. “I get it.”

  “Do you, now,” he said, a bit hoarsely, and took my hips in his hands, pulling me to him. His pulse was quick, his eyes gone black with fear or with something else, and in the moment before Rupert could open the door, Watson pushed me up against the wardrobe and put his lips to the hollow of my throat.

  The door swung open.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Rupert said. “Guys! Shit!”

  With a clatter, the bowl of popcorn overturned on the floor. Watson stumbled backward, and I spun to face the wardrobe.

  “What are you guys doing!” he yelled. “Guys! Why are you naked!”

  “I mean,” I said into the wardrobe door. “The usual reasons?”

  “I’m so sorry, dude,” Watson said, reaching for his shirt.

  Rupert dropped to his hands and knees. “Your room is downstairs,” he said, picking up handfuls of popcorn and throwing the kernels back into the bowl. “Ugh, it’s all covered in dust now.”

  Watson got down to help him. He glanced up at me, a clear your move.

  “I know, but Jamie’s room was locked, and he forgot his keys,” I said sheepishly, “and my uncle is at my flat and so we came here, and . . . things just kind of got out of hand?”

  “Right,” Rupert said. “Obviously.”

  “We were in the bathroom,” Watson said, “but we heard you coming up and she panicked and ran in here and I just kind of followed.” He dusted his hands off and gave Rupert his most winning smile.

  Rupert picked up the bowl, rattling it nervously. “I’m sorry. I’m being a grouch. Anwen would have a little bit of a fit over this if she knew, so let’s not tell her, all right? I’ll sweep up here in a moment.”

  “Bad day?” I asked. I was still pressing my front into the wardrobe.

  He glanced up at me, colored pink, and snapped his eyes back to the groun
d. “How about—ah. How about we talk about it downstairs? I’ll make some more popcorn!”

  “That’s a great plan,” Watson said, clapping him on the back. “Charlotte and I will be right down after we’ve . . . recombobulated.”

  As Watson and I dressed, I listened carefully to Rupert descending the stairs. And there it was, what I’d expected: the slightest rattle as he tried the handle on Watson’s door. Making sure it was, in fact, locked.

  Of course, since I am the girl I am, it was.

  Sixteen

  “THAT WAS YOUR BRILLIANT PLAN?” I WHISPERED. I TURNED my T-shirt so the spatter of blood faced my back, then slipped my jacket on over the top.

  “You,” he said, sitting on the bed, “were in a state of déshabillé.”

  “Since when do you speak French?”

  “I did suffer through two solid years of class with Monsieur Cann,” he said. “I wasn’t sleeping the whole time.”

  “No, of course not. You woke up during the lesson on how to describe the scandalously underdressed.”

  “I also know in flagrante,” he said, “and coitus interruptus—”

  “That’s Latin,” I protested, but he was laughing.

  “I hope it was worth it.” He swept a hand across the room. “Did you find what you needed?”

  “I always do.”

  Watson’s eyes crinkled at the corners. He didn’t pry further. How glorious that was; it gave my mind time to sort and contextualize what I’d found. “Come on, then,” he said. “Rupert’s waiting for us downstairs.”

  In the kitchen, Rupert had a bag of popcorn spluttering away in the microwave, and the kettle was already boiling for tea. “Forgot to turn it off when I went to the shops,” he said. There was a string bag full of vegetables on the counter. “Thought I’d make something nice for dinner, for a change.”

  “That’s hard to do on a hot plate,” Watson said, settling down at the table.

  “I know.” From the cupboard, Rupert took down a trio of mugs, horrible novelty ones, WORLD’S BEST GRANDMA written in red and another with a penguin-shaped handle. “Anwen and I had a hard morning, though, and I thought maybe she’d like something home-cooked for a change. Just a stir-fry. Nothing complex.” He bit his lip. “Have you ever made a stir-fry?”