A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  George Wilkes wasn’t one to be bossed around, especially by his daughter. He went to Oxford the night of her final dress rehearsal and plucked her directly off the street. The argument bystanders had heard was between the two of them. He and his wife bundled her into their car, and drove her home to London, where her grandmother was waiting.

  She was put on a train and taken up to her grandmother’s house in Scotland, up in Caithness. Quite literally as far north as she could be sent. She’d been homeschooled. Had her baby. Was living there now, far away from her friends and the rest of her family, from her acting, from her life.

  “She must have managed to get her hands on her old phone,” Watson said, “to call Theo last Christmas. God. I can’t imagine what kind of lock and key they had her under.”

  “We’ll find out when we raid it,” Sadiq said. “A team should be breaking down the door right about now.”

  “Was he . . .” This was a strange question for me, and I wasn’t sure why I was asking. “Was he sorry?”

  Sadiq sighed. “He was insistent that she was a bad girl. One who needed to be punished. And as her father, he was the one to do it.”

  “Got it.” I found myself staring at nothing. “Thank you for calling. I’m still very tired. I think I need to go back to bed.”

  Watson touched my arm, and I turned to bury my face in his shirt.

  “Thanks, Miss Holmes,” Sadiq said. “We’ll be in touch again soon.”

  LEANDER AND STEPHEN RETURNED THAT NIGHT, AFTER I called to tell him the news. He insisted on tending to me like I was a child—making steak and kidney pie, tucking blankets in around me on the couch. Stephen and Watson played Scrabble at the kitchen table, and the television droned, and I slept. I slept, it felt, for days. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I was coming to some decisions.

  And then, one morning, I woke to an empty flat. Watson was in his tutorial, discussing a new story of his. It was quite good. Elegant, and spare, and it had a peacock in it that appeared at opportune moments. With each new tale, he was getting better.

  Leander and Stephen were down at the farmers’ market, and the street was quiet. I dressed myself and went for a walk.

  I knew, by then, what I wanted to do.

  MEET ME AT THE BOATHOUSE, I’D WRITTEN HIM.

  By the time I’d made it there, Watson had already paid and was hauling a stack of cushions over to the punt.

  “Leander could have paid,” I said, picking up the long metal pole and bracing it against my shoulder.

  He grinned, tossing the cushions in one at a time. “I didn’t want him to tease us about what we were doing.”

  It took some maneuvering to get the both of us in the boat—we pitched in our things, and he held the pole while he helped me in, and then I braced the pole and helped him in. The punt listed from side to side as the two of us got settled, him standing at the back, in the “huff,” while I settled down cross-legged to watch him.

  He stuck the pole into the shallow water and pushed us off into the River Cherwell. “Can you dig into my bag?” he asked.

  “For what?”

  That smile again. “For my straw hat,” he said, and caught it one-handed when I chucked it at him.

  “You’re very confident for someone who hasn’t ever been punting before,” I said, as he lazily maneuvered us down the river. The Cherwell had a current, but it wasn’t a strong one. Every now and then Watson dipped the pole back into the water to steer us back onto course.

  “You do realize,” he said, “that most punters are drunk.”

  I considered this. “Still.” He cut a dashing figure, like some Venetian gondolier who’d given up the striped shirt for a blue oxford and boat shoes. The hat was a bit silly, but Watson wore it at the back of his head, like the hipster he was always pretending he wasn’t. His thick hair curled up under the brim; his trousers were loosely cuffed. It was all endlessly charming.

  “So you’re saying,” I clarified, “that you can punt only middling-well for a sober person.”

  “Do I need to make this thing do backflips?” Watson asked, and dug the pole into the muck. Our boat tilted crazily to the right. I made a high-pitched sound, then clapped a hand over my mouth.

  “You squealed. Did you just squeal?”

  “If you have to ask,” I said, with some dignity, “then no, I did not.”

  He dug in the pole again, and we spun in a neat circle.

  I bit my lip while he laughed at me. “Jamie, I swear to God I will pull this boat over—”

  He lifted the pole again, threateningly. I lunged forward, and Watson leaned backward, and then began windmilling his free arm to keep his balance. I considered pushing him in, but the water smelled a bit like bad fish, and anyway, I liked his shirt too much to ruin it.

  “You were going to let me drown,” he protested, pushing us off again.

  “Yes. In knee-deep water. It would take some skill, but I believe in you.”

  The water was quiet this evening, so close to sunset. A pair of ducks paddled alongside us, and on the bank, I watched a stealthy little fox work the underbrush. The water was dappled green from the trees that listed low along the water. Watson must have seen me studying their canopies; he pushed the boat on an angle, and we drifted through the long, slim arms of a willow tree. I traced it with a finger. It left a handful of leaves in the bottom of the boat.

  “You have one in your hair,” he said fondly, and I plucked it out and tucked it behind my ear. “Did you send a photo to your uncle?”

  “No,” I said, taking out my phone. “I should.” The light had taken on that effervescent quality it did around sundown. Watson was smiling, one hand on his hat, the river out behind him.

  Leander responded almost instantly. Adorable! You two are breaking my heart, he said, along with a row of (unbroken) heart emojis.

  “I wonder how often they did this,” Watson said. “Leander and my dad.” They had been at Oxford at the same time, though they hadn’t met until an alumni event after graduation. In their twenties, though, they’d returned quite a few times together to their old stomping grounds.

  I settled in against the cushion. “I’m not sure. They talk about it enough.”

  We drifted in silence for a moment. Knowing Watson, he was painting the scene in his head. Leander trailing his hand in the water, James inexpertly steering, some sandwiches and a bottle of wine in a wicker basket. The two of them spinning out some merry argument the way we’d heard them do so many times before.

  “How’s your father?” I asked finally. “Have you responded to him at all?”

  Watson stabbed the pole back into the water. “No. I don’t understand him, sometimes. It’s like he can maintain the illusion that he’s a normal, healthy human for about ten years at a stretch. That’s how long he was with my mom. How long he was with Abby. And then he . . . he burns it all down. Gleefully.”

  I was with him until that last adverb. “I don’t know if he enjoys it.”

  “Some part of him has to,” Watson said, making a face. “I keep—I keep waiting for him to show up at Leander’s door, here in Oxford. It’s the absolute last thing he should do, which means it’s probably at the top of his list.”

  “I’m not defending him,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me, pushing us along down the river.

  The evening was starting to cool. I took my sweater out of my bag and slipped it on.

  Watson’s eyes refocused on me. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t apologize,” I told him, pulling my hair out from the collar. “You have every right to be mad.”

  With his father, and with me.

  “You’re here now,” he said, and he dragged the pole against the riverbed to slow us. “You aren’t going anywhere.” The taut line of his shoulders. His eyes everywhere but on mine.

  “Watson,” I said. “I have to tell you something.”

  Twenty-Four

  WATSON SHOOK HIS HEAD AS THOUGH TO CLEAR IT, AS though a
fleet of sirens had gone screaming by.

  “I’m going to bring us ashore,” he said stiffly. “Can you grab that paddle out of the bow? Give me a hand.”

  Together, we maneuvered the punt toward the bank. Watson kicked off his shoes and stepped into the shallow water. We carried the boat ashore to rest in the soft bed of leaves under the willow grove.

  He dropped down to sit on the till, hands folded. “Why is it,” he said, “that when you have to tell me something, it’s usually that we’re about to die?”

  “It isn’t anything that terrible,” I said, though I knew, in a way, that I was lying. “Why do you think it’s always something terrible?”

  He opened his mouth, then thought better of it.

  “Most of my past behavior notwithstanding,” I allowed.

  “Spill,” Watson said, and there was an edge to it. “We’re paying for the punt by the hour.”

  “I’ve dropped out of my summer classes,” I said quickly.

  It wasn’t what he’d been expecting, that much was clear. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “But that means you won’t be able to enroll this fall.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I thought you were taking chemistry,” he said. “Really advanced-level chemistry. I thought that was what you’d wanted?”

  It had been. And yet. “I can’t . . . I can’t see myself doing it.”

  He nodded. Watson, of everyone, would understand this: a boy who lived enough in his head that he rehearsed each moment before he lived it. “It makes sense,” he said. “You’ve been all caught up in this case.”

  “Watson,” I said, somewhat louder than I intended. “That’s not the point. Do you understand? None of that is the point! I never . . .”

  I’d run out of words. All I had was the sharp pulse in my throat.

  “Hey,” he said, standing. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  A punt went by on the water—four blond children with ice lollies, their blond mother with an ice lolly, the father steering them onward, steering them home.

  “I’ll always take a case if it seems like someone needs me,” I said. “But Jamie . . . I don’t know if I can see myself doing this, either.”

  “So, not chemistry,” he said, more lightly than I think he felt. “And not detective work.”

  “Not this kind of detective work. Not solving cases that the police could easily take on, and I’m not planning to join the force. I don’t do well with institutions.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  I smiled. “I want to know how I can be of use.”

  “What, then?”

  “Is it okay if I don’t know?”

  “Of course it is. You don’t need my permission.” He reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, and I leaned into the warmth of his hand. “Is there anything you can see, when you look into your future?”

  Scotland, perhaps. The winding streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town; it was the only British city that hadn’t been bombed during the Second World War. I hadn’t seen them since I was a child, and the child in me wanted too to disappear into the highlands, see cows wander across a field, their faces like kindly, bearded old men. I wanted to go even farther, to Sweden and Iceland and to Norway. Up to Tromso to see the Arctic Cathedral, to Reykjavik to see the night stretch long into the day. I was as pale as the snow and as wicked-looking. I thought that was a landscape in which I’d fit.

  “I pick up languages quickly,” I was saying, “and I notice things, and I can get into places no one else can. There are other girls out there who need help they don’t even think they can ask for. Girls like Matilda. I always felt so alone, you know, but now? I think I could be that person for them. Their . . . champion, I suppose. I want to find a way to put all that together.”

  He took off his hat, held it loosely by his side, waiting. He could hear it, I think. What was coming.

  I laughed hollowly. “These past few months have been the happiest I’ve ever been.”

  I hadn’t known why my aunt had taken me to that little gilded restaurant where August had been tending bar. The towel tied in his apron strings. His hair longer, now, falling around his temples. His smile quicker than I’d ever seen. I’d never see it again.

  I’d thought it was a punishment, of sorts. That had been so much of my past few years: people coming out of the woodwork to punish me for being who I was. A girl who’d been fashioned as a weapon, then left to rust out in the rain.

  But it hadn’t been a punishment. She had offered me a kind of freedom.

  And Watson was just looking at me.

  “I love you,” I said. “But I don’t know if I can stay here, after all this is settled.”

  He nodded once, twice. Took a step off to the side. Pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, and turned from me, walking out of the grove and into the darkening night.

  It was selfish to follow, but I did.

  “Jamie,” I said, crashing after him. “Jamie!” He sped up, but I lunged forward, close enough now to catch him by the elbow.

  He stopped there, his back to me still. “You say the two things like they go together. That you love me, and that you have to go. Do you understand how—I have no idea what to say to that, Holmes.”

  “Come with me,” I said. “I never said I didn’t want you to come.”

  At that, he spun, so close to me that I could feel the heat of him through his shirt. “I don’t have the money,” he said. “I don’t have the time. I need to go to college. That’s what I’m doing this fall, Holmes. College. Not—not Tromso. Despite everything, I got into a good school, and I need to get a degree. And then maybe I’ll make, like, a wild decision and go to grad school for fiction instead of immediately getting a job as . . . as a copywriter. Which I would be lucky to get! I can’t just hare off after you while you go extravagantly find yourself. I think, actually, that would kind of defeat the purpose, don’t you?”

  He shut his eyes, hard, and I felt childish. I felt like a fool. I had rehearsed all this in my head so many times. What had I expected?

  “I can’t stay here,” I said desperately. I had to make him understand. “I can’t. I’ve changed. For the better, I think, but there’s still this . . . shadow over me. No one trusts me. No one but you.”

  “I trust you,” he said. “How long? How long before you go—fuck, before you go wherever you’re going to go, and—” He was crying now, and he wiped at his eyes with his knuckles. “God.”

  I couldn’t help it. I reached out and pulled his arms apart and stepped between them. He stood still and resistant for a moment, and then he collapsed, his arms going around my waist, tucking me up close. I could hear the hard echo of his heart.

  “I love you,” he said quietly. “I’ve never in my life loved anything more.”

  And somehow, somehow, that had been the last thing I’d imagined him saying.

  “I’ll be back,” I promised. “I won’t be long. A year. Maybe two. And even if it isn’t to stay—maybe you can take a long summer, and come away with me.”

  “You’re asking me to wait for you,” he said, pulling away. There was something broken in his eyes. “And you know I will. But I can’t make you feel better about this. I can’t. Not right now.”

  “Jamie—”

  “Come on,” he said, walking back to the boat. “I’ll take us home.”

  Epilogue

  Two years later

  THE TRAINS FROM LONDON PADDINGTON STATION TO Oxford ran more than 150 times a day; the journey itself took about an hour. It cost seventeen quid to go there and back, twenty if you factored in the sausage roll I liked to buy in the station. I usually didn’t have a seatmate, but if I did, more often than not they’d be someone who looked like me—a university student with a weekender bag and a textbook they weren’t reading, off to visit a friend in another town.

  She had a small little set of rooms in East Oxford, near Cowley Ro
ad, the sort of place with a half kitchen and radiators that hissed and a bedroom that didn’t have a door. But the view from the sitting room window was magnificent—you could glimpse the dreaming spires of the university from her gray velvet sofa, and she sat there in the mornings, her silk blanket tossed over her shoulders, while she saw clients during her business hours. Fridays only, ten to two, and what she made in those sessions covered her rent, because she had to pay her own rent now. Her reputation had gotten round town to her satisfaction in the year since she’d been back. There wasn’t ever a wait to speak with her, but she was never in want of work, either.

  I’d rearranged my classes this term so I could sit in and assist where I could. It meant forgoing the Robert Louis Stevenson tutorial I wanted in favor of one on American poetry, but in the end I found I didn’t mind. Mrs. Dunham would be proud of me, carrying John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs around, reading even the ones I hadn’t been assigned. The rhythms of them got into my head, and as I took the stairs two at a time to her door, I ran compulsively through my favorite bits. I don’t know how Henry pried / open for all the world to see survived. A one-two tap, and then I’d call out, “Charlotte?”

  There wasn’t ever an answer, but I wanted to give her a moment, in case she was on the phone or wasn’t dressed. Sometimes I thought if we lived in the same city I’d be more comfortable treating her flat as my own, but as it stood, I showed up with my duffel and my train ticket home, and when I got to her door, I knocked.

  I was a visitor here.

  Inside, I’d find her at her little stove, the electric kettle already going. She made herself breakfast now, two hard-boiled eggs and a green leafy something. Gone were the experiments that she’d made for me in Leander’s kitchen; when she cooked for herself now, it was with the grim determination of a soldier tearing into rations. If the first of her clients arrived at her door during breakfast, she took her meal to her bedroom and let me entertain her visitor until she’d properly finished.