“Yes,” she said, automatically. Then she winced. “No. No, of course not. But can you blame me for not thinking clearly after what happened to—?”
“To August,” I said. “Well, you were thinking clearly enough to give me orders.”
She gave me a despairing look. “Not good ones.”
“Clearly not.”
Holmes shifted her weight. “Anything else?”
“Well.” I pulled my knees up to my chest. “I— That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“I had— There’s been so much I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve made so many mistakes. I feel . . . I feel almost like you’ve ruined me.”
“Watson—”
“Or maybe I was like this all along. I didn’t know why you put up with me, for so long, and at first I thought, I’m not as smart as her, I’m just her sidekick, that you wanted me around because I—I admired you. I couldn’t hide it, I felt it so much. I just didn’t know what you wanted from me. What you got from the two of us together. And then you left, and I—I think I got lost, somewhere. I don’t like myself anymore. I used to. Like myself. At least a little. And I’ve just been behaving like a monster.”
“You think I’ve done that to you?” It was an honest question.
“Maybe,” I said, and swallowed, and said the thing I’d been thinking ever since Lucien Moriarty dragged me out of that bathroom stall. “Holmes, I don’t know if we’re going to get out of this one alive.”
Her eyes were shining. “I know.”
I forced a laugh. “Any final words?”
She shrugged a shoulder.
“Holmes—” I pulled it off, the comforter, the sheets, all those mountains of white, clearing a space beside me. “Come here,” I said, then winced. “I mean. If you want to.”
She sat down gingerly at the edge of the bed. “Jamie—”
The word hovered in the air.
“I’m sorry,” she said, all at once.
“For what?”
“I’m—I’m sorry, Jamie.”
I waited. Sometimes I could read her as clearly as though her thoughts were scrolling across the sky, and sometimes she was the most unknowable creature in the world.
“When I met you, I was still . . . I hate this.”
Words are imprecise, I remembered her saying once. Too many shades of meaning. And people use them to lie.
Holmes had this look on her face like she was trying to drag something up from the basement of her heart.
“Try,” I said.
“I was . . . I think the only way to describe it is wild.”
“Wild?”
As she spoke, she left long pauses between her sentences. “Or hungry. Like I’d been kept in a room for years, and given enough food and water to survive. Then I was brought out to a buffet, and there were all these people there who had been eating for years. I knew that I wasn’t one of them. I was hardly even a person. I was . . . I just wanted. I was starving, but it had made me sharp. The world was too soft, too complacent. I hated it for that.
“This isn’t right either. Maybe I was being held underwater. Maybe I held myself there. When I met you, I’d been thinking I was at the end of it all.” She drew her knees up to her chest. “The end of me, I suppose. I think it was true, that I was at the end of whatever that self was. But I had to go off and end it myself, do you understand? Alone. I wanted . . . by the time I saw you again, I wanted to have found my way back to a beginning.”
I didn’t understand her at all. I thought, I’ll never know anyone better than I know her.
“I’m sorry,” she said simply. Her dark hair fell down around her face. “I should have told you what I was planning. I panicked. August was dead, and everyone else had scattered, and there were weapons in play, and you weren’t safe. All I could think was, If I can get Watson to DI Green, he’ll be out of harm’s way. She’ll know what to do. I skipped all the other steps and went straight there. I get so impatient, but I was wrong, and I . . .”
“You let your brother walk.” I tried to keep my voice firm.
Holmes shook her head rapidly. “He would have walked anyway. You couldn’t arrest him, then. Maybe you still can’t. Not with his money, not with his team of lawyers. Milo got sued maybe twice a week. He had a crisis team on twenty-four-hour call, he would eat the Sussex constabulary for breakfast. And now—I don’t know. Maybe he’ll see justice for it.”
“I hope so. If not, there isn’t going to be anybody left to hold responsible,” I said. “For August.”
“There will be. I might have started this, but I’ll finish it with putting Lucien away. And even if he wasn’t the one to kill August, I’ll still consider that case closed. Maybe I’m the one responsible for him dying. But I was . . . I was a child, and I hadn’t been given a compass, and I made a terrible decision. I thought I’d get him fired from being my tutor. I don’t think that makes me responsible for his death. Maybe that makes me a bad person.” She straightened her shoulders “But I . . . I don’t think I am.”
“I don’t think you’re a bad person.”
“You did.”
“I don’t anymore,” I said, and found that I meant it.
“I want to be good,” she said. “I want to be good without being nice. Can I do that?”
I smiled, despite myself. “I like you best when you aren’t nice.”
I’d been holding out hard against the urge to touch her, but she turned to me now in a rush, buried her face against my neck. My arms went up and around her almost of their own accord.
“I hate this.” She wiped at her face with an angry hand. “All week I’ve been crying, and why? Over you? Over Lucien Moriarty?”
“I’m getting his blood all over your dress,” I told her. “I’d cry, too.”
“You’re not still dating that girl,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows. “That wasn’t a question.”
“You’re not wearing her scarf anymore.”
“When did you ever see me wear that scarf? In that stairwell?”
Her quicksilver smile. “I have my sources.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing all this time?” I asked, stroking her hair. “Watching me?”
“Would it be terrible if I had?”
I exhaled. “A little terrible.”
She pulled back to see my face. “You don’t think it’s terrible.”
“I don’t.”
“You think it’s kind of hot, actually.” That smile again, there and gone.
“Did you just say ‘kind of hot’? Who are you?”
“Most recently, I was a fashion vlogger,” she said, and then she kissed me, quickly, like an impulse, like an accident.
“Hey,” I said softly, pulling back.
She tugged at my collar. I felt her hand trace its way down, and she undid the top button, slowly, sliding it between her fingers. It was like this with her. Fits and starts. Nothing I could ever see coming.
I’d never thought we’d be here again.
“Holmes,” I said, reaching up to touch her hands, to fold them in mine.
“Do you forgive me?”
“You sound like you’re making some kind of decision,” I said, because she was scaring me a little.
“Do you?”
I paused, thinking. Not long ago, I’d wanted everything from her. For her to be my confidant, my general. My best and only friend. I wanted her to be the other half of me, like we together made a coin. She the king’s head to my tails. I loved her like you would the person you’d always wanted to be, and in return I would have followed her anywhere, excused any action, fought to keep her hoisted high on her throne.
When that myth I’d made of her shattered, I didn’t know what to do. This last year, any thought I had of her felt wrong. Skewed. How could I understand what had happened, when I had put up so many lenses between my experience of her and the girl herself?
Holmes wasn’t a myth, or a king. She was a person. And to h
ave a relationship with a person, you had to treat them like one.
“Can I forgive you a little now?” I asked. “And then a little more tomorrow, and the next day? If there is a next day?”
“Yes,” she said, quickly, like it was more than she had asked for. Like I might take it back.
“Provided you don’t blow anything up, of course.”
“Yes.”
“Or try to look in my ears again while I’m sleeping—”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. That look on her face, always, like she was surprised to be laughing, like it was something involuntary and slightly shameful, like a sneeze.
I couldn’t take it. “I missed you,” I said, gripping her shoulders. She was here. She was here, and I could touch her and God, how could I be so lucky? I said it again, like a compulsion: “I missed you, I missed you—”
“Jamie,” she said helplessly. She said my name again, trying out the word’s edges, almost like she was saying it aloud for the first time.
“Since when you do call me Jamie?” It came out soft, a little dangerous.
“Why don’t you call me Charlotte?” she whispered. Her fingers went back up to my neck, and then followed an invisible line up to my cheek, traced my lips. “Why don’t you call me by my name?”
Because she’d been a girl from a story I loved. Because when we first met, she told me to call her Holmes, and when Charlotte told me to do something, I listened.
“Do you want me to?” I asked.
“No,” she said, urgently. “No, I only want to know why.”
“Because I needed a name for you that was mine,” I said, and her eyes went wide and dark with something I didn’t have a word for. An hour later, I still had her in my arms.
Twenty-Six
Charlotte
WE ROUSED OURSELVES, FINALLY, WHEN THERE WAS A knock on the door.
“You have thirty minutes before the car arrives to take you to Sherringford,” Milo’s assistant said, handing me a bundle. She had bought dark clothing in our sizes and then had it pressed. It was far nicer than anything I’d been able to purchase myself this past year; the shoes, in particular, were things of beauty. I thought that I might love her. I felt very loving, just then.
Watson and I took turns showering. Back in the room, I hummed a little to myself as I did up the buttons of my shirt. He laced up his new black boots. He was smiling—he had always wanted a pair like mine.
“How are you feeling?” he asked when he’d finished.
For me, anything done in a bed with a boy was a fraught prospect. I didn’t know how long that would be true, if it would be true forever. Several times tonight we had had to stop ourselves, talk through what we were doing and how we felt about it. It sounded like a tedious exercise, and perhaps in some ways it was. I didn’t care.
How was I feeling? Like one of my Aunt Araminta’s beehives, buzzing, like I had a city inside of me. With Watson I had always been made better. I had spent the last year mourning our friendship, but knowing too it was better to be away. And now—
Now I’d have to keep on mourning our friendship, I supposed. He and I had been here once before, in a hotel in Prague, but before we could reconfigure what we were to one another, everything had disintegrated around us. Tonight, his dark, tousled hair was half dry, and he smelled the same as I did, as we’d used the same shampoo. He’d done the half cuffs on his trousers because they were, like all his other pairs, a bit too long, and there was nothing new about his shoulders, but an hour before I had mapped them anyway with my fingers. I loved them, his shoulders. He’d watched me, wondering, while I touched his wrists, his palms. What are you remembering? I fitted his hand against my hip and told him the three other times he’d put it just there (a bookshop in South London, by accident; on the flight back to England, to take my phone from my pocket; while brushing our teeth in the same bathroom in Sussex, because he needed to open a drawer and I’d been in the way). I was unmarked by what had happened tonight, but his torso was darkening with bruises where that bastard had driven in his fist and there was still a bit of blood under his fingernails and there was a look to him that was altogether new, wary and alert and impossibly sad, even now, especially now, one I’d first seen when I’d barged in on him beating the life out of Lucien Moriarty. I’d thought I’d come in to save him, but Watson had needed a partner, not an avenging angel.
He had a lovely left hook. He had a nick on his jaw where he’d cut himself shaving. How had I just seen it now? I wanted to examine it with my fingers, to put my lips there, and so I did.
He made a sound deep in his throat. He pulled me down onto his lap, his breath coming fast and warm and when the knock came I tried not to snarl at it.
“Hide the knives,” Watson said, laughing at my expression, his hands caught up in my hair.
“Mr. Watson and Miss Holmes,” the assistant said through the door. “Your car is here.”
Nothing cut the feeling of it—not the dash out the door to the car, not the rain that had started to break up the snow, not the not-knowing of what would be waiting there for us at Sherringford. I had the pieces of a plan. Watson helped me rearrange them to my satisfaction, or something approximating it. So much of what we’d needed to know this past year had been in our separate hands—Anna Morgan-Vilk, for one. Had I stayed at school I would have known her for what she was. I could have done my work without leaving school, without leaving Watson, and if I told myself I’d gone away only to track down Lucien Moriarty, I knew it for a half-truth. Had I stayed I would have had to face the mess I’d made. Had I stayed, Watson would not have been wearing that scarf when I’d met him. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, the idea that some kind, resourceful girl had been kissing him. Because I knew Watson well enough to know that in my absence, there would be another girl beside him. He wouldn’t pine forever. Why should he? The thought gave me comfort. It made me furious. It made me reach out and take his hand more forcefully than I’d meant to. He raised an eyebrow, then intertwined his fingers with mine.
What was wrong with me? It was, as they say, the question. The lovely, buzzing feeling I’d had wasn’t gone, but it was shifting into something else.
In Sherringford Town, all was seeming quiet. I counted three police cars lingering on side streets, their engines on and their lights off. No doubt Lucien Moriarty had mentioned that Watson would perhaps try to return to school. Still, our black car cut quietly through the night, and the cruisers stayed where they were. Getting through the school gates would be another matter.
“Would you please find an alley to pull over into?” I asked the driver as we drove through downtown. “We’ll need to climb into the trunk.”
It was an ignominious return to Sherringford, to be sure, but I found I didn’t mind it. We folded ourselves in quickly, and Watson put a hand on that spot on my hip (the fourth time in a car boot in Connecticut, I thought), and when the car was stopped at the Sherringford entrance by the police, the driver said something muffled about being a teacher returning to use the copier, provided his fake ID, and we trundled slowly up to the sciences building parking lot.
The car stopped. Watson tensed but didn’t move as the driver rounded to pop the trunk. He leaned over us, unseeing—the zipper on his jacket was close enough to swing into my hair—and took his briefcase from behind Watson’s head. I had a moment to see where he’d parked: the corner of the lot that I’d directed him to, one I remembered having a cluster of thick bushes.
He put the bag over his shoulder. Then he shut the trunk, gently. It didn’t latch.
Footsteps. “Evening, officer,” I heard him say. “Just here to use the copier.”
“I’ll let you into the building,” the cop said, her voice stern. “Do you know how long you’ll be?”
“I’m doing class prep. Won’t be more than an hour.” As he kept talking—about the quiz he was writing—I heard them make their way to the entrance. His voice, then hers, began to fade.
This was
our chance, while their backs were turned to the lot. Our driver hadn’t said “midnight,” our code word for policemen lingering in the area. We were in the clear.
By the time the officer returned, Watson and I were in the bushes; by the time she returned to her car, we’d made it to the Carter Hall tunnel entrance.
“Elizabeth texted me the key code earlier,” he whispered, pressed up against the door. “57482.”
“You’re much quieter than you used to be.” I punched in the code.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ve been practicing,” and when the door clicked open, we crept down the stairs.
We were a half hour early for Watson’s rendezvous with Elizabeth. The way time had passed tonight reminded me of an accordion, of all things: as we went on, it expanded here, contracted there. Our time in the safe house had felt like mere minutes; our mad rush to Connecticut, hours. And now we would wait for Watson’s ex-girlfriend to tell us information about Anna Morgan-Vilk I most likely knew, while Lucien Moriarty mobilized the police force to haul us in for assaulting him.
I hadn’t been in the access tunnels in more than a year, but I remembered their layout. The Carter Hall entrance put us by the academic buildings and the chapel, far from Watson’s dorm. Hopefully, any searchers would be stationed there and not down by us. Any detective worth their salt would know to search these tunnels for a missing Sherringford student, but then, only Shepard really seemed particularly salty, and I supposed we had him on our side. Besides, the tunnel access code hadn’t been changed since Elizabeth had texted him. That could mean everything; that could mean nothing.
That left the obvious fact that the access tunnels, which were customarily lit day in, day out, were tonight in total darkness.
Watson’s hand in mine. A murmur: “Should I turn on my phone’s flashlight?”
I waited for my eyes to adjust, but the darkness was too complete. “No,” I told him, running a hand against the wall. “Follow me, and stay silent.” I heard him slip off his boots and tuck them under his arm.
We moved slowly. Three doors on the left, before the hallway turned—a generator, a water heater, an empty room that had once been used by snowbound nuns for prayer. The latter would work for our purposes (all I wanted was a room to hide in while we finalized our plan), but the door was locked. My kit had been strapped to my leg below my dress, but when I’d changed, I’d thrown a few picks into my useless little purse and left the rest. I only had my snake and my variable tension wrench—quick and dirty tools. One-size-fits-all tools. I could break the lock if I made a mistake.