A Study in Charlotte (29 page)

Milo whipped around to stare at his sister, but her eyes were fixed on the phone.

“It's good to know what matters to you, Charlotte. So very little does. My brother didn't. Your own family doesn't. But this boy . . .” I could almost hear him licking his lips. “No, I don't want you in jail. I don't want you to have the satisfaction of this being over.”

No one in the room was looking directly at anyone else. I wondered, briefly, if anyone remembered that I was quite literally dying on the floor.

“Well. Go on. Take out the trash,” he said. “I see that your antidote is waiting at the door.”

A click, and he was gone.

“I knew about his plan,” Nurse Bryony said into the silence. “I knew this whole time.”

“No,” Holmes said, pressing the gun to Bryony's temple. “You're a terrible liar. How sad, you've made me resort to
guns.
How incredibly cheap. Milo, tie her hands. I hope you're ready to take her . . . wherever you're going to take her. I don't want to know.”

“I promise not to tell you,” Milo said, in a tone that suggested he'd said this many times. He bound her hands neatly in a zip-tie, put her own pistol to the base of her neck, and led her out the door.

I'd missed something. But then, I'd missed a lot of things.

“Holmes,” I managed, but Peterson chose that minute to charge in. With brutal precision, he pulled a syringe out of his pocket, flipped my arm, found a vein, and stabbed it in.

“Sir,” he said respectfully, and left the two of us alone.

“Hi,” Holmes said, getting down beside me. “You look terrible. I'm sorry I didn't tell you everything. I just needed—”

“—my reaction to be genuine,” I said, coughing through my smile.

“Precisely.”

“Holmes,” I said again.

“Yes?”

“Hospital?”

She nodded seriously, as if the idea had only now occurred to her too. “I think that would be wise.”

Five days later

“W
HEN
'
S YOUR FLIGHT
?” H
OLMES ASKED
,
PLAYING WITH THE
ends of my scarf. “You could always fly back with Milo and me tonight. The offer's still open.” Her brother had set aside a seat for me in his company jet.

“I'd like to,” I said, “but I think I owe a few more days to my father after all this. I'll be back in London next weekend.”

He was, understandably, still upset with me for not having told him I was dying. Ever since I'd been brought home to recover, I'd watched him struggle to understand how he should feel. One minute, he was begging me for a description of Nurse Bryony's face that day in her flat—“Was it more like
a snake's, or an assassin's?”—his hands clasped in schoolboy glee, and the next minute he was forbidding me to bring in the mail because it was too dangerous with Lucien Moriarty still at large. My father liked reading about adventures, liked talking them through over a glass of whisky. He even liked the thought of his son having them, up to a certain point.

I had, in this past week, plunged off that point and into a very troubling ocean.

“Well,” he'd said, cleaning his glasses, “I suppose you're looking forward to getting back to your mother and sister.”

“I am,” I'd told him honestly.

“And I imagine you won't be wanting to return here in the spring when school reopens.” He hadn't looked at me as he spoke.

“Actually, I've heard that someone got me a full scholarship for the year.” I'd hidden my smile. “And though the creative writing teacher left something to be desired, I did make one or two good friends. And I found out my stepmom makes really amazing mac and cheese.”

His eyes had shone. “Ah.”

“Dad,” I'd said. “If your methods were a little obnoxious . . . well. I'm still happy to be here.”

He'd patted me on the arm. “You're a good man, Jamie Watson.”

It might have even been true. At least, I was trying.

We both were.

“Well, if you stay, you can take over my duties as Robbie's
Mario Kart
opponent,” Holmes said now with a wry smile.
“That little bugger is very good. I'm used to playing by myself, though, so maybe I'm just easy to beat. Milo was never one for games.”

“You had a Wii,” I said, disbelieving.

“Of course.” She raised her eyebrows. “Why wouldn't I?”

I shook my head at her.

We'd been spending our days in my father's house after my brief stint in the hospital. After I'd been released, Dr. Warner had stayed on in a nearby hotel, coming by each morning to examine me. But other than a lingering veil of fatigue (I was sleeping fourteen hours a night), a sickly sheen to my skin, and a tremor in my hands, I was well and truly cured.

Despite my clean bill of health, Holmes had appointed herself my nursemaid. This meant I was served endless bowls of tasteless soup (rule #39 finally rearing its ugly head) and gallon after gallon of water while confined to the living room couch. She kept the room dark, the boys from pestering me (when they'd actually have been a welcome distraction), and the television firmly off. I couldn't so much as stand without her appearing at my elbow, ready to bully me back into lying down. When I asked, plaintively, for something to do, she'd brought me a biography of Louis Pasteur. I promptly used it as a coaster. (“But he invented vaccinations!” she'd cried, seeing the water marks on its cover.)

That isn't to say that I didn't have visitors. Mrs. Dunham came by, with a present of Galway Kinnell's first book of poems. She took one look at my face—I did look kind of like a ghoul—and burst into tears. Which was strangely okay. It
sounds stupid to say, but after several months of being unparented (my father clearly didn't count), it was almost nice to have someone make a fuss.

Detective Shepard came by, too, in a bluster of frayed nerves and exhaustion. After railing at Holmes for her unprofessional behavior—“You confronted a murderer! In her own apartment! Without telling the police, and with your best friend dying at your feet! And now we have
nothing
to show for it!”—for a good half hour, he paused for breath. And Holmes produced a flash drive from her inner pocket.

“You recorded her confession,” the detective had said, weakly.

Holmes smiled. “My brother did, but yes, I thought you'd like this. Though I gather you'll have some difficulty finding Bryony Downs, née Davis. Milo has—what's the term? Oh, that's right—disappeared her.”

“Holmes,” I'd hissed. Wasn't that supposed to be a state secret?

“What?” She was clearly enjoying herself.

The detective was not.

“Oh,” I'd said then, remembering. “I guess there's something I should probably tell you about my creative writing teacher.”

“Is there anything else?” Shepard had snapped, when I finished speaking. “Missile codes, maybe, that you happened to pick up? No? Good.” He'd left in a huff, slamming the door behind him.

“I rather doubt we'll be invited to assist with solving future
murders in the sunny state of Connecticut,” Holmes had sighed. “More's the shame.”

Lena came by, too. In her bright coat, she perched at the end of my father's armchair and caught us up on all the gossip I'd missed. (Tom had come with her, but Holmes had barred him at the door.) She and Tom were still together, she told us. Holmes forced her mouth into a smile that morphed into a real one when Lena asked if she could come visit over the holiday. “For a few days in January,” Lena had said carelessly. “I'll be coming through on my way back to school and I thought it'd be fun to tell my pilot I needed a long layover. We could hang out!”

We both agreed. I always did like Lena, after all.

On the quieter afternoons, when no one came by the house, I found myself sorting through my journal from the last few months, looking at the notes I'd made, the crackpot theories I'd had as to Dobson's murderer, the list of possible suspects that seemed so laughable now. To these, I added sketches of scenes. The jar of teeth on Holmes's laboratory shelf. How her eyes dropped closed as she danced. My leather jacket around her shoulders. The way my father stood so nervously as I walked toward him for the first time in years. It all began to form a story, one I wanted to continue, one thread at a time, onward without a visible end.

Maybe Charlotte Holmes was still learning how to pick apart a case; maybe I was still learning how to write. We weren't Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. I was okay with that, I thought. We had things they didn't, too. Like electricity, and refrigerators. And
Mario Kart
.

“Watson,” she said, “you don't need to pretend that you've forgiven me.”

This came out of nowhere. “For what?”

“For—for what I did to August. For me not telling you the whole truth, again. You know, in the future, stop me when I think I'm being clever. Because I'm shooting myself in the foot. If we'd both had all the facts at the beginning of this mess—”

“If,” I said. “That's a big if. Look. I've forgiven you. You have my implicit forgiveness, you know, even when you're driving me crazy.”

“You got dragged into this because of me,” she said. “Nurse Bryony was making me do my penance. She used you to get to me.”

“So the next crime will have nothing to do with either of us. It'll be a very benign car theft. In another country. A warm one. We'll solve it very lazily, lie on the beach between interrogations. Drink margaritas.”

“Thank you,” she said, very seriously.

“Don't thank me, you're buying the plane tickets.” I stretched out on the couch with my head in her lap. “Fiji is expensive.”

“I don't want Fiji. I want home.” She put her hands in my hair. “Jamie.”

“Charlotte.”

“Do come home soon. It won't be London without you.”

“You never knew me in London,” I said, smiling.

“I know.” Holmes looked down at me with gleaming eyes. “I intend to fix that.”

A
FTER READING
W
ATSON
'
S ACCOUNT OF THE
B
RYONY
D
OWNS
affair, I feel the need to make a few corrections.

Perhaps more than a few.

First off, his narrative is so utterly romanticized, especially as regards to me, that the most efficient way of breaking down its more metaphorical misconceptions would be in a list.

To wit:

1.
    
When I speak, I don't sound like Winston Churchill. I sound like Charlotte Holmes.

2.
    
Why on earth would he name my vulture skeletons? They aren't deserving of names. They're
artifacts
. And one of them tried to kill Mouse (Californian vacation, very lazy
cat, vultures have no sense of smell), which made me rather upset, and which is why the two idiot things were hanging in my lab until they exploded. Which, for the record, I am fine with.

3.
    
I took Watson to the homecoming dance because Lena's friend Mariella would have certainly asked him if I didn't, and she eats boys like him for breakfast before flossing with their bones. (See entry two, re: California condors.) I told Lena I'd take him and then forgot to tell Watson until very late not because I'm shy about my enjoyment of dancing and/or pop music, but because I was busy. To be precise, I was busy studying how quickly blood congeals within an iPhone. I had to draw rather a lot of my own for my test sample, and then I was forced to sleep due to its loss, and then I had to pay Lena back for her bloody mobile. (She didn't mind. She even let me draw some of her blood, too. Mine is O negative and hers is O positive, which made for a pleasing symmetry.) It was all very interesting, and homecoming is not, and I only went to find him when my test beaker exploded. The blood never quite came out of the ceiling.

4.
    
Tom looked frightful in his powder-blue tuxedo. In this, as in many things, Watson is far too kind. I never corrected him on the subject because at least one of us should be. Kind, that is.

I suppose the rest of his account is more or less bearable, if I ignore the proliferation of adjectives. But it appears that I
am willing to put up with many things for the sake of Jamie Watson. He is fond of watching old episodes of
The X-Files
, which is, to the best of my understanding, a show about a rather appallingly dumb man who is nevertheless very attractive, and aliens. It's tolerable if I pretend there isn't any sound. We began when he was still in hospital, and now we're three seasons in and he shows no sign of giving it up. He was the same way about curry shops in London during our first few days home. I heard quite a bit of rot from him about the curative powers of chicken jalfrezi. He is incapable of eating Indian food without getting red sauce on his clothing; I've taken to carrying a bleach pen.

I am doing all kinds of chemical researches on snake venom. I aim to know everything about it by the end of the month. While Watson was ill I learned all there was to know about oysters, because Watson's father gave them to us at a dinner at his house, and they were delicious. At that dinner, Abbie Watson asked me to watch her two young sons while she did the shopping the next day, most likely because I happen to be a girl and she assumes that this is what girls do for spending money. I agreed, and taught them how to make bombs from dung, and where best to hide them. She didn't ask me again. Watson's father thought it very funny, and Watson did too, though he refuses to admit it. I can tell he's hiding a laugh when he curls his mouth in like he's eating a lemon. Sometimes I say terrible things just to see him do it.

There haven't been any more murders, which makes things a bit dull, though I suppose it's only been a week since we
wrapped up our last case. There was an official inquiry into Mr. Wheatley's actions that resulted in his termination; for his part, Tom was merely suspended. Watson has insisted on forgiving his old roommate, which I consider rather foolish. He and Tom had an obscenely long and emotional phone call that I heard every word of from the next room. That said, I don't like to see Watson upset, and so I have withheld my opinion on the matter. As the Americans say, we have bigger fish to fry.

I am fairly sure that Bryony Downs is dead, though I allow Watson to go on believing that she is in Milo's custody. I do think that my theory may be the kinder one. For his part, August Moriarty sent me a card on my birthday.
Verbum sap.

Lucien Moriarty has been spotted in Thailand. I asked my brother to fit him with a microchip, like the kind they have for dogs, and he categorically refused. Ergo, we are relying on Milo's operatives to trace his movements.

We will be back at Sherringford in the spring. Watson's scholarship meant he was paid up through this year, so we have decided to stay. His family hasn't any money and I don't much care where I study, as my most important work is independently accomplished. Milo agreed that it was best to remain here, for now, though naturally my parents were displeased.

I'm rather beginning to enjoy displeasing them.

I am one week clean and don't wish to say any more on the subject.

A final note on Watson. He flagellates himself rather a lot, as this narrative shows. He shouldn't. He is lovely and warm and quite brave and a bit heedless of his own safety and by any
measure the best man I've ever known. I've discovered that I am very clever when it comes to caring about him, and so I will continue to do so.

Later today I will ask him to spend the rest of winter break at my family's home in Sussex. (I must remember to tell my parents, though I'm sure they've already deduced my intentions.) My always-amusing uncle Leander is due in for a visit. We will look for a good murder or, at the very least, an interesting heist to solve. Watson will say yes, I'm sure of it. He always says yes to me.