A Study in Charlotte (13 page)

Shepard nodded. She wasn't telling him anything he didn't know. “I examined them, Charlotte. I made a lot of calls this morning. One of those was to your mother.”

My father leaned forward. “And?”

Shepard rubbed at his temple, thinking, and then he pulled a binder out of his bag, laying it open on the table. “Jamie, do you mind pointing this purported drug dealer out to me?”

I pushed my plate away. The twelve men in front of me were uniformly blond and ugly. They ranged in age from a few years older than me to forty. One sported an eyebrow scar. Another smiled, missing teeth. The third one from the top looked the closest to what I'd remembered. I racked my memory.

“Him,” I said, sounding slightly more confident than I felt.

“That man turned himself in this morning,” he said, tapping the photo. “Said that Charlotte has been dealing for him for years. Gave me a record, in her handwriting, of transactions he said she'd done for him. Said he was sorry, that he'd seen the error of his ways, that he just wanted the kids to be safe, now, from
her
.” Shepard shut his eyes for a pained moment. “The records are immaculate, you know. They perfectly match the sample of your handwriting, Charlotte, that I got from your biology teacher
.
”

“What's his name?” Holmes asked, showing a glimmer of interest.

Shepard raised an eyebrow. “He gave it as John Smith.”

Wordlessly, Holmes left the room, returning a second later with the little red notebook. She flipped through it there at
the table until she reached a page near the end. CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER, it read, in her own spiky hand. “Believe me or don't,” she said, “but we found this in John Smith's car.” She went back to her dinner.

“We're going to follow up with the students that Charlotte sold to,” the detective told us. “We'll find out the truth of it then.”

“He forged those records,” I said, looking at her. “All of them. The ones in that room—”

“Look,” Shepard said, interrupting. “One of my calls this morning was to Scotland Yard. Everyone there vouches for you, Charlotte. Okay, some of them might not like you much, and they weren't surprised that you were mixed up in a crime, but to a man, they swore up and down you wouldn't hurt anyone. Annoy them to death, maybe.”

One corner of Holmes's mouth turned up, but she stayed silent. The detective rubbed his eyes. “I was also reassured that if you
did
do it, I wouldn't have you on my list of suspects at all.” He turned to my father. “Apparently she's that good. Then I talked to Philly PD about Aaron Davis, Sherringford's last dealer, and apparently the kid is doing time down there for dealing oxy at UPenn. I have a buddy down there who owes me a favor, asked Aaron some questions. He remembers Charlotte. Confirmed her story, that he sold to her down in that room last year. He also said she didn't have enough friends or enough patience to ever deal on her own. We'll follow up, like I said. Aaron's a con, so his word isn't golden, but . . .” Shepard shrugged expressively. “But a kid's dead. Another is
in the hospital. You two just look too good for it. Charlotte has a private chemistry lab where she keeps a whole bunch of poisons. And you”—he pointed at me—“you could easily get into Lee Dobson's room at night. You were flirting with Elizabeth Hartwell. It looks, for all the world, like the two of you are in some kind of lovers' pact gone wrong. Someone might be doing their best to set you up, might be throwing absolutely everything at the wall to try to find something to stick, but the much more
rational
answer is that Charlotte Holmes isn't half as good as everyone thinks she is. I might not like it, but until I have a better answer—”

Holmes looked up, and a beat later, Shepard's phone rang.

“Hold on.” He put it to his ear. “Shepard. Slow down. She
what
?
No. No, that's fine. Yeah. Is she—good. Yeah, I'll be there as soon as I can.” Glancing over at us with something like relief, he said, “I just need to finish up something here.”

“This pie is delicious,” Holmes said to my father. He looked back at her helplessly. “Is there any more?”

S
OMEONE HAD TRIED TO KILL
L
ENA.

That's how Shepard put it to us. Unbothered by Holmes's absence, Lena had spent the day after homecoming holed up in bed, reading magazines and working her way through a care package of cookies from home. She'd been playing music loud enough that when there was a knock at her door, she wasn't sure, at first, if she'd imagined it. But when she finally got up to check, there it was on the threshold: a parcel, and inside the parcel, a sliding ivory jewelry box.

Though she unwrapped the paper, Lena didn't open the box. With the roommate she had, she'd gotten used to seeing some weird things, and in the past, when mysterious packages had arrived, they'd always been for Holmes. (“I do a lot of online shopping,” Holmes told Detective Shepard without batting an eye.) So she'd set it on her roommate's desk and taken a nap.

She woke up twenty minutes later to a man in a ski mask looming over her, one hand at her throat, as if he were about to check her pulse or strangle her. Lena screamed. The man ran. And she immediately called the police, surrendering the mysterious box to their custody. As we spoke, they were examining it at the station.

Something about all this was naggingly familiar, but I couldn't put a finger on what.

“When did this happen?” Holmes demanded, hands shaking. I hadn't realized that she'd cared about Lena so much. “Just now? I spoke with her not twenty minutes ago.”

The detective took out a notepad and paper. “What about?”

Holmes's mouth twitched. “She'd spilled punch on me at homecoming and wanted to know if I was still angry. I told her I was over it, and we'd get my dress to the cleaners. No harm, no foul.”

So it had been Lena on the phone, earlier. I'd never seen Holmes take one of her roommate's calls before. She always sent them, and everyone else's, straight to voicemail to screen at her leisure.

“Does she know that you went down to the station? Did she know where you were today?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “The only person I really talk to is Jamie. I doubt anyone at the school knows I'm gone, unless they saw you haul us away in the cruiser. But it was dark.”

My father was taking notes in a chair in the corner. “Dark,” he muttered to himself.

“But Lena's okay?” Holmes asked. Her lower lip trembled. “I'm sorry, I just—this sounds awful, but I really do think that man was there to hurt me, not Lena. And that weird box . . . Jamie, doesn't it ring a bell for you too?”

She wasn't acting like herself. She was acting
normal
. Like she'd have any reaction other than swift and extreme mobilization at hearing that that she'd missed a crime in her own dorm room. Like she wasn't . . .

I put it together in a flash.

Oh, she was brilliant. Like a hurtling comet you couldn't look at dead on without burning your retinas right off. Like a bioluminescent lake. She was a sixteen-year-old detective-savant who could tell your life story from a look, who retrofitted little carved boxes with surprise poison springs early on a Saturday morning when everyone else, including me, was asleep in their beds.

She'd set herself up to be the target of a fake crime to get us off the hook for the real one. And she'd used Lena, and some mysterious guy, to do it.

“Culverton Smith,” I said, piecing it together aloud for Shepard's sake. “It's from a Holmes story. We're being set up. Jesus Christ, tell your policemen to wear gloves when handling that box. Thick ones.”

To his credit, he took me seriously. “Making a call. But I want an explanation as soon as I'm back.” He stepped outside.

“You,” I said to her, “are a genius.”

Across the table, Holmes slipped from false concern into very real satisfaction. “It's quite a good story, you know. ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective.' Pity that Dr. Watson smothered what should have been an exercise in logic in all that sentimental garbage about his partner.”

“The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” for me, has always been the hardest of the Sherlock Holmes stories to read, and not because it isn't brilliantly done. It's 1890. Dr. Watson, who's living with his wife away from Baker Street, is urgently called to Sherlock Holmes's bedside. The detective has caught a rare, highly contagious disease that, as he tells Dr. Watson, can only be cured by Culverton Smith, a specialist in tropical illnesses living nearby. The catch: Smith hates Holmes because he correctly accused Smith of murder. His victim was infected with, and died of, this same disease. But Holmes insists that Watson bring Smith anyway, that Smith is their only hope. While Holmes rattles off a series of ridiculous-sounding orders on how Watson is to go about fetching this specialist, Watson idly picks up a small ivory box that's been resting on the table. Out of nowhere, Holmes insists that Watson put it down and not touch it again.

All the while, Watson thinks his best friend is dying. It's wrenching to read, and even more so as we watch Watson follow Holmes's orders—the clear product of a hallucinating mind—to the letter. From trust, or affection, or old habit, we're
not sure, but either way, the last of these insane directions has Watson hiding himself in the closet in preparation for Smith's arrival. Smith comes in. The gaslight is low. Holmes is sweating in feverish agony on the settee. The specialist begins to gloat, thinking he and the detective are alone. That little ivory box? He'd mailed it, fitted with an infected metal spring, hoping to catch Holmes with it unaware. After Smith has confessed everything to Holmes, who he believes to be a dead man, Holmes asks him to turn up the gaslight. It's a signal: in bursts Inspector Morton of Scotland Yard, who's been waiting at the door, and Watson, who's witnessed the whole conversation from the closet. Smith is hauled away to jail.

And Holmes? Not sick at all. He faked his symptoms. Starved himself for three days until he was skin and bone, then applied a convincing coat of stage makeup to make himself appear at death's door. As for the box—well. He wasn't in any danger. He reminds Watson that he always thoroughly examines his mail.

Charlotte Holmes had stripped the “Dying Detective” for details and rearranged them to make her own narrative, pulling Lena in on her scheme to sell the story. I wondered who the man in the ski mask was. Tom? Unlikely. Still, it was just the sort of story that our Sherlock-obsessed murderer would've seized on and used against us.

The part I couldn't get over, that distracted me from even this show of Charlotte Holmes's powers, was remembering how much my great-great-great-grandfather had trusted hers. Oysters, I remembered. Between the instructions he'd given
Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes had been ranting, in his “hallucinations,” about oysters.

And his partner had still followed his directions exactly.

I thought about the piped-in interrogation in the police station. About the little notebook that still lay open between us on the table. About how my own doubts about Holmes's innocence ran alongside my doubt that she could get us out of this mess.

She
had
just gotten us out of this mess. And no matter what my head wanted to tell me, I knew in my bones that she wasn't a killer.

“I'm sorry I didn't trust you,” I said to my Holmes, in a low voice.

She shook her head. “I needed your shock to be genuine for me to sell it.”

“I don't mean about the details. I don't need to hear the details.” I reached across the table to put my hand on hers. “I meant to say that I won't doubt you again.”

I watched her catalog me. The planes of my face, the tilt of my head, how I sat in my chair, my fingers' heat and the ruck of my hair: she took it all in, deduced from what she saw, and came up, in the end, with something she hadn't expected.

“You won't,” she said with flat surprise. “You really won't, will you?”

Next to me, my father cleared his throat. I didn't spare him a glance.

When Shepard returned from speaking to his team, we gave him the background on the Culverton Smith story. And
he told us what we already knew. They had, in fact, found a spring loaded into the ivory box, poised to strike when it was slid open. That spring was coated in an infectious tropical disease; the police lab weren't sure of its exact origin, but they guessed it to be Asia. Samples of this kind were tightly controlled, and so far, their search into local scientists who had requested access to them had ended in an absolute null.

(I asked Holmes, much later, how she got her hands on the sample. She said something about Milo, an ex-girlfriend at the CDC, and “catching as catch can.”)

“This blows my list of suspects wide open,” Shepard said. “So we're back to option one. Someone trying their damnedest to frame you two. We'll need to talk about who out there in the world wants to get you. And I'll have to notify the station that I won't be needing a pair of cells. At least not tonight.”

So his plan
had
been to arrest us.

“Let us help you,” Holmes said. “I'm an official informant for Scotland Yard, and between Watson and me”—I was gratified to be back on a last-name basis—“we're experts on the killer's MO. Sherlock Holmes stories? We're the obvious choice. Not to mention that we can informally question anyone at Sherringford without arousing suspicion, or that you're getting an excellent chemist and a relatively fearless pugilist in the bargain. We're not a bargain. We're luxury goods.”

“No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

Holmes shrugged; she'd anticipated this response. “Then I'll conduct my own investigation, and deal with the culprit, after I catch him or her, as I see fit.”