A Study in Charlotte (20 page)

The shirt I'd been wearing was ruined, smeared with blood and bits of glass. I stripped it off and shook it out before I tore it into makeshift bandages for my hands. The knots I'd made would hold, but not for long. Maybe we could steal Lena's car keys again and go to the hospital.
We
,
I kept thinking,
we.
I knew she'd forgive me. She had to. Without each other, we could, quite literally, die.

I put on a clean shirt and flung open the door only to trip over Mrs. Dunham. She'd slouched down against the wall
outside my room, legs kicked out before her. It was clear from her face that she was crying.

“Jamie,” she said hoarsely. I knelt down beside her. “What have you done to yourself? Look at your hands! And your face—are you hurt? I heard the worst noises coming from your room.”

“I didn't mean to scare you,” I told her. “I'm fine. Everything's fine.”

That phrase was beginning to sound meaningless.

She leaned over to look inside my room and pulled back in shock. “Oh,
Jamie.
What have you done?”

“I've got to go,” I said, “but I'll explain later, I promise, I've got to find Holmes.”

She grabbed at my hand to keep me from leaving, and I bit back a yell of pain.

“I guess that means you haven't heard,” she said, and her eyes misted over with tears. “Oh, Jamie, I didn't want to be the one to tell you. But there's been an accident. A horrible, horrible accident.”

M
RS.
D
UNHAM SAID IT
'
D ONLY HAPPENED TEN MINUTES
before—had it only been ten minutes since I found that camera? It could have been seconds, or years, for all I could tell—and that campus was being evacuated, building by building. Michener Hall was empty except for the two of us. She'd thought I'd destroyed my room on hearing the news. Because she, unlike everyone else, knew where Holmes's main haunt was.

They were blaming it on a gas explosion, she'd said.

I'd pelted across campus at a dead run. It was beginning to snow, a powder-dusting that clung to my bare arms and the bandages on my hands. I'd forgotten my coat, my phone. My heart beat harder as I got to the quad.

From clear across campus, I could see that the sciences building was a smoking ruin.

My phone. Where was my phone? What if Holmes was trying to call me? What if she was trapped in the building somewhere? That was the worst possibility I'd allowed myself to imagine, that Julian and George's flightless bones had collapsed on top of her, but that she was fine underneath—a little sooty from the smoke, perhaps, but fine . . . but then, I wasn't giving her enough credit. Holmes was a magician. She had to be standing outside, whole and hale and intact, smoking a cigarette as she watched it all burn. Most important, she'd be alive. Still furious with me, I'd give the universe that—she could never want to speak to me again for all I cared—so long as she was alive.

All of that went straight from my mind when I saw it. It wasn't possible. The northwest corner of Sciences was blown clear through: the corner where Holmes's supply closet was. Battered pieces of granite had thudded mightily to the ground. Through the smoke, I could see the building's interior walls, tattered and stacked like the pages of an old book lit with a match. Here and there, bits of broken wall were still smoldering.

Somewhere in the distance sirens sounded. Uniformed
police officers were cordoning off the area, pushing the few bystanders back into a huddled mass of winter coats. Over a bullhorn, a voice ordered any remaining students to report to the union for further instructions. An officer had set up a standing light that sharply illuminated the building's entrance. There would be a thorough search, he was saying. The firemen would pull out any survivors.

Survivors.

I pushed past him, and the other officer waving a pair of plastic flares, and then past a yellow-suited fireman—there were fire engines behind me, now, flashing their lights—who snagged me by the arm. The look I turned on him must've been that of a feral dog because he loosened his grip for the half second it took me to shake him off. I took off in a sprint toward the front door, and was instantly tackled to the ground.

They wrestled me back toward the emergency vehicles where they assigned an officer to be my babysitter and made me sit under his watchful eye on the edge of the fire engine. They didn't want to arrest me, they said, but they would if I tried to take off again. So I sat dully while the red lights washed everything with fire. At some point, the officer, in a moment of compassion, pressed a cup of something hot into my bandaged hands. He tried to convince me to put on his jacket, but I wanted his pity even less than I wanted his attention. Possibly I insulted his mother. I couldn't remember. He kept away from me after that.

I wondered what Holmes's funeral would be like. I felt sick for a while, and then I stopped really feeling anything at all.

Someone must have taken my wallet from my pocket, or done some calling around, because suddenly my father was there at my elbow. He led me to his car, where the heater was running full blast, and said something about taking me to the hospital. My hands. I'd forgotten about my hands. They were the first words of his I'd registered.

“
No.
” I felt my body come alive with terror. “No, Dad, someone is after us, and I can't go to the hospital. I have to find Holmes. Don't you see? I can't tell you until I know it's safe but there's something very
wrong
going on and I need her. I need her here, do you understand?”

I can only imagine what I must have looked like, half-mad with terror and grief and covered in my own blood, ranting at him from the passenger seat.

But my father did an amazing thing. He put the car into park. Slowly, as if he might scare me into flight, he reached over to cup the back of my head. “I understand,” he said. “For now, let's just go home.”

He put it into drive and turned on the headlights. And there she was, standing in their white glow.

Holmes's skin was smoked black from the explosion, her hair flecked with snow. Her violin dangled from her fingers. She opened her mouth, and I saw her say my name.

I was out of the car in a heartbeat, and in the next, she was in my arms.

Holmes was always Holmes, even after a terrible shock. With the utmost care, she reached around me to place her Stradivarius on the sedan's purring hood. Only once it was
secure did she allow herself to be held, and even then, she kept her palms on my chest as if to brace herself. She was slight, and freezing cold. Her posture, as always, was perfect.

“You're alive,” I murmured, tucking my head over hers. “I'm so sorry.”

For once she didn't chide me for stating the obvious. Instead, she let out a long, shuddering breath. “The only thing I saved was my Strad, and I had to go back in for it. Watson, I was in the bathroom, and if I hadn't been—the bomb was planted in our lab.”

I laughed hollowly. “They're saying it's a gas explosion.”

She shifted to look up into my face. “A homemade bomb, and in our lab. There was shrapnel stuck in the walls. Watson”—she kept returning to my name—“I assume you look such a mess because you've found wiretaps in your room, and not because you've taken up cage fighting.”

“The cut hands,” I guessed, seizing on this chance to feel normal, “and what else?”

“The fact that you're stuck all over with glass like some porcupine. Camera behind the mirror, and then, of course, you'd look for the audio. Which made you feel both personally wronged and suspicious—if you don't trust someone, your left eye twitches at the corner. Right now, it's happening every three seconds. By looking at the kinds of mud on your shoes, it'd only take moments to trace your route from Michener—”

I pulled her back up against me, and she battered my chest with ineffective fists.

“You are doing this to shut me up,” she complained.

“I am,” I said, and she began to cry. I backed off. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—”

“It's not you. This is horrifying,” she said through her tears. “I'm not in the least sad. Why am I crying?”

My father bundled us together in the backseat under a moth-eaten blanket; I insisted that we wrap her Strad in another. I tucked her under my arm, and she wept quietly the whole way.

A
BBIE
,
MY FATHER
'
S WIFE
,
HAD MADE UP THE GUEST ROOM
, and after we arrived Holmes took a cursory look at the bugs from my dorm room, pronounced them dead, and put herself straight to bed. While my father went to call the school, my stepmother pulled me aside to ask where she should put the inflatable mattress.

“Are you having sex with her?” Abbie asked, and promptly looked mortified. “I'm sorry. I'm not used to teenagers, and I can't believe the first thing I've ever said to James's son is . . . I don't really know how to . . . are you two having sex?”

“We're not,” I assured her. Bizarrely, this was proving the perfect way for us to meet—unscheduled, without expectations. I didn't have the energy to hate her. Honestly, I couldn't feel anything except tempered relief. Holmes was safe, if in shock. We were being looked after, if only for a night. And Abbie had an open, charming face, with a spray of freckles across her nose, and I was so tired. I decided to just get it over with and start liking her.

“Then I'm putting you in with Charlotte,” she said, “so don't
start tonight. Having sex, I mean. And your nose is blue—are you hypothermic? Go run yourself a hot bath.”

Upstairs, I peeled off my makeshift bandages in the bathroom sink. I had to soak in the tub with my hands resting over the sides so I wouldn't bleed into the water. Afterward, I put on some of my father's old sweats and let Abbie lead me down to the kitchen table. After giving me some Advil, she cleaned out the wounds in my hands with antiseptic and, with a pair of tweezers she'd sterilized, took out the rest of the glass shards under my skin. Then she got to work on my scalp. I clamped my mouth shut to keep from yelling.

My father came in halfway through the process. He'd been on hold all that time, as Sherringford's lines were jammed with panicked parents calling in. Finally, the school had sent out a mass email. He read it off to us there at the table. There hadn't been any casualties from the “gas leak,” thank God, though the physics teacher had been in his lab and suffered “minor injuries.” But Sherringford was shut down for the rest of the semester.

It's about time,
I thought.

My father kept reading something about rescheduled finals, and incompletes, but I didn't pay much attention because I didn't care. There was too much else to think about. The letter said that, after the explosion, students had been evacuated to a nearby Days Inn under the supervision of the RAs and house mothers until their parents could come retrieve them. Tomorrow, Sherringford was bringing in a specialist team from Boston to sweep the campus for other possible “leaks,”
and after they gave the all clear, students would be escorted, in roommate pairs, to get their things. They'd give us each ten minutes to pack. The schedule for each dorm had been attached.

My father put his smartphone away and looked me hard in the eye. “Charlotte is here. She's safe. And I've been very patient. But now I need you to either give me an explanation for why you've fifteen vicious cuts and an exploded science building, or I'm taking you to the hospital.”

Abbie's hands stilled in my hair.

I tried my best to sketch it out for him: my fight with Holmes, the bugged room and the broken mirror, the homemade bomb, our suspicions about Mr. Wheatley and Nurse Bryony and the Moriartys, what I'd said to Tom in our room.

My father had out his ever-present notebook, and he jotted things down as I spoke. When I came to the part about August Moriarty—how the records on him just stopped, what Milo had scrubbed from the
Daily Mail
,
the thing Charlotte wouldn't tell me—my father made a disgruntled sound. “Jamie. Number fifteen: if you wait for full disclosure from a Holmes, it might be years before you learn a damn thing.”

I threw up my hands. “Tabloids, Dad. The
Daily Mail.
Have they ever been an accurate source of information? And anyway, I couldn't look it up even if I wanted to.”

“You,” my father said sadly, “still have rather a lot to learn. Don't you remember the stories I used to tell you about Charlotte?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm not stupid.”

“Since you're not stupid, you have, of course, reasoned from that information that I've kept tabs on her since she was a little girl. And that I most likely have a file or two up in my study that could fill you in on some of this.”

The answers had been there all this time.

All this time. In my childhood home.

I opened my mouth to ask him for the file when he looked at me and said, “You know, if you hadn't been so unfairly angry with me, you might have gotten your hands on it weeks ago.”

That settled it. Because I might have had a burning need to know the truth about Charlotte Holmes, might have obsessed over it for an endless string of awful nights—but I still resented my father more.

“I don't want it.”

He looked like I'd struck him. “What?”

“You heard me,” I told him. “This is between the two of us, and I trust her.”

“But—”

“I trust her, Dad.” It was true, after all.

“Of course. Of course you do.” My father sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Right. Anyway, that detective of yours has been calling me all night. Do you not have your mobile? No? That explains it. I'll call him back and tell him what you told me”—he lifted his notebook—“if you'd like to go to bed.”