A Study in Charlotte

  “Who were you working with?” Holmes asked.

  Bryony flicked her hair. “Who said I was working with anyone?”

  Holmes stared her down until, shifting uncomfortably, Bryony spoke.

  “The man who convinced the judge that he’d no idea of the contents of his car’s boot and served a minimum sentence. You didn’t forget who drove the car to your house to get you your fix, did you? Lucien Moriarty, you stupid child. God, the best part of all of this has been feeding you from my hand. I offered you warnings. Touched them with ungloved hands, in case you’d manage to lift my fingerprints. Printed them in the font that I write all my medical reports in. Made the spellings English, instead of American. It was a paint-by-numbers murder, and you were too dumb to learn to pick up the paintbrush. I did everything but hand myself over to you. Knowing, of course, that the moment you found me out, Lucien would close the bear trap. You do know what Lucien does for a living, yes?”

  “He’s a fixer,” Milo murmured.

  “Precisely,” Bryony said. “Gold star, you. Except for the part where he’s a Moriarty first. They have connections you can only dream of. Tell Lucien you want a rattlesnake as window dressing for your little scene, and he’ll make an untraceable one appear. Tell him you want a beautiful little suitcase bomb, and he’ll hire a professional to make you one. Tell him you want a plastic jewel shoved down a girl’s throat, and she’ll choke on it. Tell him you want a new identity, a passport, a job at Charlotte Holmes’s boarding school, and he’ll give it to you wrapped in a bow. God, the very lack of evidence should have been a clue. I gave up my dreams of being a doctor for this. Do you hear that? I gave up my dreams to make you serve the sentence you deserved. I’d nearly all the credits necessary for a nursing degree, and if that could get me here and to you faster—well. For once, sweetie, you were the hottest ticket in town.”

  She knelt down before the ottoman, put her hands on Holmes’s knees, leaned right into her face. “This is why I’m a better person than you. Are you ready? I could kill you right now. No”—she held a finger up to Holmes’s lips—“that suitcase bomb was never intended to kill you, don’t be stupid. I was just disgusted by the thought of you and the Watson boy playing house in there. Acting out your roles. Do you want to know why I set up Dobson’s murder as a remake of ‘The Speckled Band’? It’s a reminder. They’re stories. They’re stories, and this is real life. You are not Sherlock Holmes, and you won’t ever be.”

  Holmes stared straight down her nose at Bryony’s sneering face. And then she turned her head to me and, slowly, unmistakably, blinked her eyes twice.

  Play your last card, she’d said. What card could I possibly play? Only sheer force of will kept my eyes open now. I could barely speak, much less get to my feet and make a stand. If I was supposed to be the muscle in this operation, I was totally out of commission.

  But she knew that. So what could she mean?

  Last night—a hand on my forehead, a deliberate, closed-mouth kiss. Roses. And her smile as she walked out the door, telling me not to die before I could use it as a bargaining chip.

  Oh.

  I let my eyes fall closed. I willed my breathing to slow. And I fell, heavily, out of the chair onto the thick pink carpet.

  “Watson!” Holmes cried, a perfect parody of the last time she’d thought I was dead.

  Stumbling. Footsteps. Bryony saying, “Oh, damn,” as she crouched above me. I could smell the Forever Ever Cotton Candy. A man’s cold fingers on my cheek, then moving to my neck to take a pulse.

  “He’s alive,” Milo announced. “He’s alive, but barely.”

  “Don’t move him,” Holmes said. “I’ll get the blanket from the bed.”

  I opened my eyes to slits. Bryony was still crouched over me, an unexpected look of concern on her face. “Jamie,” she said. “It’ll be okay. This will be over soon, as soon as your girlfriend agrees to let me go.”

  I was actually beginning to think that wasn’t the worst idea.

  More footsteps. Milo saying, “Couldn’t you take a look at him, Bryony? For his sake?” Bryony’s bit lip as she took her eyes off the bedroom door and fixed them on me.

  The sound of a handgun being cocked.

  “Get up,” Holmes snarled. “With your hands behind your head.”

  Nurse Bryony got to her feet, stiffly.

  “You’re wearing a wire,” Holmes said. “It’s wrapped around your handgun holster, which is in and of itself very clever, as most of us would notice the gun and then instantly avert our eyes. I am not most people, as you well know. So yes, hello Lucien, I’m happy to know that you’re well and having your crony deal drugs to the Sherringford milieu, and as I’ve said in the many letters I sent you in prison, I am very sorry for my part in your two months’ incarceration, though I’d wager that one of the dozens of other children you sold coke to would’ve ratted you out eventually. I hope that you’ve enjoyed being an accessory to murder.”

  She walked forward, the gun steady in her hands. “I’d suggest that you don’t attempt to blow the suitcase bomb that I found in the linen closet, as I’ve already defused it. I didn’t even need to take to Google for that one. But then, thanks to my father, I imagine I’ve forgotten more about designing explosives than you’ve ever learned.”

  She was close enough now that she and Bryony were eye to eye. With wild eyes, Bryony opened her mouth, and Holmes lifted one black boot and stomped the heel of it onto the nurse’s foot.

  “Now, now. Speaking out of turn. I’m afraid that I’m not as tolerant of that as you. I really should be taking lessons.”

  Bryony whimpered against the pain, her hands still tucked behind her head. Swiftly, Holmes pulled the pistol from under Bryony’s coat and tossed it to Milo, who caught it neatly.

  “Bryony Downs,” Holmes mused. “What can I say? If I could apologize to August, I would.”

  I noticed that she was still maintaining the fiction that August Moriarty was dead, even now, when throwing the truth into Nurse Bryony’s face would be the ultimate punishment.

  But Holmes was still speaking. “I’ve been through three separate rehabilitation programs. I may, in fact, simply be a terrible person at heart, but the difference between you and me is that I fight it. With every single atom of my being I fight against it. I might be an amateur detective but you are a bloody psychopath, and I would rather put this gun in my mouth than let you skip away to St. Petersburg where you can prey on teenage boys on my brother’s blood money. You orchestrated my rape, and you call me a whore? No. This is the absolute end of the line.”

  “And you’re just going to leave your friend to die,” Nurse Bryony said in a harsh whisper.

  It was what I’d asked her to do, after all. To keep herself out of jail at any cost. I tried to breathe through the panic clenching my lungs.

  Holmes sighed. “No, of course I’m not,” she said, and I almost died right there from relief. “My brother’s men are retrieving the antidote from Watson’s dorm room as we speak. It’s a clever place to hide it, isn’t it? The same place where you infected him? Wanted us to really be kicking ourselves when we found it. But it was easy enough to deduce from the university keys sticking out of your pocket, and not your handbag, and the glass shards embedded in your boot soles. Those, I confirmed when Watson here so obligingly fainted and you got to your knees to examine him. Shards of one-way glass, specifically. Any second now, Peterson will text me that he’s found the antidote.”

  As if on cue, her phone chirped.

  “How could you know that,” Bryony said. “How could you know that for sure,” and I was surprised to hear an element of jealousy in her voice.

  “Because, right now, you look furious,” Holmes said. “So thanks for the confirmation.”

  Nurse Bryony spat on the floor.

  Holmes rolled her eyes. “It was a bloody stupid place to hide it anyway, far too close to your flat—which is perfectly awful, by the by. So close, in fact, that we’d have fetched i
t and injected Watson before you had proper time to make your getaway. Why, really, would we let you abscond with three million dollars’ worth of my brother’s money when you had no further cards to play?

  “Though I suppose you had Lucien as a last resort. Hello again, Lucien.”

  Milo’s phone rang.

  He startled. It was like seeing the Sphinx jump. “No one is supposed to have this number,” he muttered, picking it up, and then, into the phone, “Yes. Fine. I’ll put you on speaker.”

  Lucien Moriarty’s voice crackled into the room.

  “Hello again, Charlotte,” he drawled.

  Bryony’s eyes flickered back and forth. “This wasn’t part of the plan,” she hissed.

  “No, no, darling,” he said. “Your part in this is done. Hush, now. Dear Charlotte. You had a question? I’ll give you one answer. As your consolation prize.”

  “Consolation prize?” Holmes laughed. “I won. Lucien, I am quite literally standing here, holding the gun.”

  “So there’s nothing you want me to clear up. Nothing at all. No questions about the drug dealer”—and here, his voice changed to a dark snarl—“who stuffed a plastic gem into that little prize turkey? Who was so obliging as to hang himself to break any remaining links between him and his employer? No questions about that employer who is, even now, calling you from Russia?” A laugh. “That’s me, by the way. In case you’re as slow as you seem.”

  I tried to swear, but I couldn’t force out any words. Holmes’s hand shook. It was almost imperceptible, but I saw it. She’d taught me to notice things, after all.

  “Fine,” she said. “You win. So tell me. Why did you make it so easy for us to catch Bryony?”

  “I never wanted you in jail,” Lucien purred. “That was never the plan. The plan was to torment you, and how can I do that from within a jail cell? Oh, you could lose yourself within weeks in a juvenile penitentiary, but you could also start a riot. Or break yourself out. No, this was a practice round. I wanted to see what was important to you. I wanted to see how much this foolish boy trusted you. I threaten him, and you kiss him. Cue strings. Cue the applause.”

  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.”

  twelve

  Five days later

  “WHEN’S YOUR FLIGHT?” HOLMES 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.