A Study in Charlotte (17 page)

“All right,” Randall said, “later.” The venom was gone from his voice. I was happy about that, at least.

“You good?” Kline asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, so, he said something about protein powder? Do you . . . do you know a good brand?” I bent to lace a cleat so he couldn't see my face. I wasn't sure I could pull that one off: I wore cable-knit jumpers and read Vonnegut novels and had a girl for a best friend. I was about as likely to build up giant biceps as to build a colony on the moon.

“Talk to Nurse Bryony at the infirmary,” he said. “She has some prescription stuff she gets from Europe.”

I reached in my bag, ostensibly for my water bottle, and sent Holmes an urgent text. I just hoped her phone was on this time, and not pickled in formaldehyde or in pieces across her chemistry table.

Practice crawled by at a snail's pace, especially once we began running plays. When Kline announced the last of them, I gritted my teeth and waited for my opportunity. Then I threw myself up for a catch in the most insane possible position, sprawling out like a diver going into water. I let myself go limp. My head bounced once, twice, three times against the frozen ground.

No one could say I wasn't dedicated to my game.

I heard Kline holler, “That's
it
! Watson! Watson!” and the rest of the team roaring.

Things went black.

When I woke, I found myself blinking up into fluorescent lights. Holmes's tear-streaked face was hovering over mine. She seemed genuinely upset, and for a second, I thought there'd been another murder. I struggled to sit up on my elbows.

“Oh, baby,” she sniffed, shoving me back down on the bed with a touch more force than was necessary. “I thought you'd never wake up!”

I completely failed to catch on, at first. But then again, I
had
hit my head. “Where am I?” I tried to ask, but it came out more like a woof.

Holmes burst into tears, putting a hand to her mouth. Her nails were painted a bright red, and she smelled like Forever Ever Cotton Candy. Then I noticed she was in a polka-dot sweater. With a
bow
in her hair.

Apparently, she'd been working on her caring-girlfriend routine.

I thought I was going to be sick, but then, it might've been the concussion; I was fairly sure I had one. Everything was out of focus, in a doubled sort of way, and the only solution I could think of was to sleep. I shut my eyes, satisfied that I'd fulfilled my end of our makeshift plan. I had an injury that was bound to keep me in the infirmary for at least a day. Enough time for Holmes to poke around.

Somewhere across the room, a voice said, “Oh, you two are too much,” and I snapped my eyes open again. From the little supply station, Nurse Bryony beamed at us. “Do you know she hasn't left your side for the past three hours? You blacked out
for a bit, and then you were drifting between asleep and awake, and the whole time she just sat and held your hand, fretting. Poor thing.”

The accent was American, but the cadences were faintly, unmistakably English. I don't know how I hadn't noticed it before. Or was it in my head? This time, if I ignored the halos I saw around all the lights and the soft little hum in my head, I could almost pay attention.

“How long will he be here?” Holmes asked, laying her hand against my cheek. “We have dinner reservations for tomorrow in town. It's our two-month anniversary.”

Her fingers were cool and soft against my face, and I found myself leaning into her touch. Then I froze. “Sorry,” I whispered to her, mortified.

“What are you apologizing for?” she asked, her voice surprisingly rough-edged. With her other hand, she brushed my hair back from my face.

The nurse cleared her throat, cutting into my confusion. “I'll keep a close eye on him. It's not bad enough to send him to the hospital, but I still don't want to take chances. You might have to reschedule your plans, just to be safe.”

Holmes smiled down at me. She wasn't Hailey. She was something much more insidious. Charlotte Holmes without the edges, all combed and clean, well loved and loving in return. I knew it would be gone tomorrow, all of it—the gentle way she touched me, the glitter of her undivided attention, the bows and the perfume. It would all go back into her costume box, and she would be the real Holmes again.

Because this wasn't real, even if she spoke to me in what sounded like her real voice. “Do you hear that? You should be fine,” she said.

I shouldn't have wanted it the way I did.

I was beginning to go, I could tell, and I knew I would wake up back into our old life. The lights winked at me; they liked the secrets I told them. But silently, I reminded myself, secrets are best when kept to oneself. They began blowing out, one by one, like candles. “Good night,” I told Holmes, pulling her hand to my chest, and then I was awash in sleep.

“W
ATSON
,”
SHE HISSED.
“W
ATSON
,
WAKE UP
, I'
VE GOT TO GO.
Night check's in ten minutes.”

The room was dark, but I could see light coming in from under the door, where the nurse's desk was. Thankfully, it seemed my head had cleared enough to form coherent sentences. “Did you find anything?” I asked. Or tried to ask. It came out cotton-mouthed.

Holmes handed me a glass of water with an impatient look. I was right; she was herself again, and I suppressed a flare of disappointed guilt.

After a gulp, I repeated my question.

“She went out for a smoke, and I picked the lock on the medicine cabinet. There's a store of protein powder in with the other prescriptions, for Gabriel Tinker, according to the tag, but the canisters were all empty. I tasted a bit of powder I found in the cabinet, and it seemed innocent enough.”

Tinker was the rugby team's fly-half, the one who'd been
sleeping on the field. “You
tasted
it? Why couldn't you take it back to your lab and examine it there?”

She looked affronted that I should even ask. “Efficiency.”

“Right, okay, you nut.” I pulled myself, slowly, into a sitting position. Holmes tucked a pillow behind my back. “So let's break it down: she's from England. That's why we flagged her file originally, right?”

“She was born there, but she moved here when she was a teenager. Or so she said when I pressed her, after I shed a few homesick tears. My face is still swollen. I forgot how uncomfortable this whole crying business is.”

“No powder, no England. Two near misses, then,” I said. “Unless you somehow wronged her back when you were a toddler, if I've got her age right. Twenty-two?”

“Twenty-three.” Holmes got to her feet. “If she is, in fact, our culprit, she wouldn't be telling the truth to us anyway, so it hardly matters. As it stands, I can tell she's hiding something, but that could just be the sort of reserve you have around students. I'll try to track down an actual sample of that powder tomorrow, because what I tried tasted more like dust than protein.”

“Shouldn't we focus on someone who we have a clear lead on? Like, I don't know . . . August Moriarty?”

“No, I don't think so,” she said matter-of-factly. “I'm off to write my
Macbeth
paper. Be careful tonight. And maybe shower. You smell awful.”

When she left, I realized I was starving. I wolfed down a roll of crackers I found next to the bed and took the small cup
of what looked like Tylenol, washing it down with the rest of the water. As I set the glass carefully back down on the table—depth perception was a bit of an issue, post-concussion—I realized what I'd done. The woman taking care of me might be a poisoner. With a fixation on me and Holmes. And I'd put myself into her overnight care, tossing back the pills she gave me without a second thought.

The light in the next room flicked off. I stared at the door, willing it to stay shut, willing the nurse to pack up her things and leave. I willed this feeling to be just paranoia from my head injury, to remember the cluster of Moriartys sharing space on our wall. I willed Bryony to just be an ordinary woman who took a job at Sherringford because of the pay and the beautiful campus and because she didn't mind taking care of teenagers with the flu, not because she'd tracked Holmes and me across an ocean to frame us on Moriarty's orders.

The knob turned. The door swung open.

“I'm headed out,” Nurse Bryony said softly. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, thanks.”
Leave
, I thought.
Go home
.

But I heard her set down her bag. She padded into the room, smelling faintly of flowers. An ordinary, pretty-girl smell. I swallowed hard. The room was beginning to sway, like a ship, and I wished badly that Holmes was still there.

“You're nearly out of water.” Nurse Bryony refilled my glass at the sink and took another roll of crackers from the cabinet above, setting them both by my bed. “There. Go easy on these. I'm surprised you're not more nauseous.”

I wondered if Dobson was nauseous, before he died. I'd never had a concussion before. Was nausea a symptom? Was it a symptom of arsenic poisoning?

That's it,
I thought.
Holmes can come up with the next plan.

In the half-light, Bryony was a dark silhouette, all except the shining hair that fell across her face as she leaned down over me. She had a strange, hot electricity to her. I thought, in my confusion, that she might kiss me, or slap me across the face, that she would pick up the pillow and smother me with it.

But she put a cool hand to my forehead instead. “Get some rest, Jamie, so you can see that girl of yours again tomorrow,” she whispered, her breath hot on my face. “The other nurse will be in first thing.” She gathered her things and left.

I didn't even try to sleep. Instead, I stayed up listening to the quiet clock of my heart, wondering every moment if I was about to stop breathing. I'd been careless with my life, I knew I was, but if I died tonight, I was going to be furious. I debated texting Holmes a thousand times. If I was wrong, I'd look like an idiot.

Around dawn, I threw the water glass to the floor, needing to hear something shatter. It was plastic. It bounced. When the morning nurse came in—an older woman with round Midwestern vowels—I was shivering with the effort to stay awake.

But she washed and filled the same cup, gave me pills that matched the ones I'd taken earlier. She made some crack about how I looked as if I'd been chased through hell, and I was overcome with the sensation that I was missing something, something huge.

W
HEN
I
FINALLY GOT SIGNED OUT OF THE INFIRMARY
,
IT WAS
dinnertime. Mrs. Dunham insisted on escorting me back to my room.

“Now get into bed,” she said, waiting with crossed arms until I did. “I've already talked to Tom, and he's going to bring you something back from the dining hall. I want you to call me if you need anything, or if you start feeling terrible, and we'll get you right to the hospital.”

“Yes, Mrs. Dunham,” I said unhappily. I was horribly ripe—I hadn't showered since before rugby practice—and starving, and ragged at the edges from my all-night vigil, and I just wanted to be left alone.

She bustled around, gathering extra blankets for my bed and picking Tom's clothes up from the floor. “I got special permission for an after-hours visit, if you'd like to see Charlotte.”

“Thanks. I don't really need anything else,” I said, because she was genuinely sweet, and she wasn't showing any signs of leaving.

“I love that you two are friends,” she said. “Those stories were my favorite when I was younger.”

I smiled tightly at her. It was terrible, the way my stomach contracted at that sentence. I'd used to love hearing people talk about the Sherlock Holmes stories, and now I couldn't help making anyone who mentioned them to me into a suspect. “They were mine too.”

When Tom returned, he was juggling a sandwich, a pair of apples, and a cup of hot cocoa. “There you are,” he said,
arranging it all on my desk with a flourish. “I heard you ate it pretty hard at practice. Incredible catch, though, according to Randall.”

I tore into the sandwich. “How are you? How are things with Lena?”

“She's good. What's Charlotte paying her off for? Lena's, like, rolling right now.”

“That's from poker,” I said, mouth full. I wanted to leave the investigation behind at least long enough to get through dinner.

“Well, are you and Charlotte still prime suspects?” he asked, pulling over a chair.

I shrugged. It hurt to. “Can we talk about something else? What did I miss in my history class? I got all my other assignments.”

His face fell. “Nothing really,” he said, and waited, as if he expected me to cave and tell him all about my adventures. I wished he knew how stressful and humiliating those adventures actually were. It wasn't my job to educate him on that, though, so I let the conversation die, crunching into one of the apples he'd brought. Eventually, Tom gave up on me.

Holmes swung by an hour later. Thankfully, I'd had a chance to shower. “How's the patient?” she asked as she perched on the edge of my bed.

I was always suspicious of Holmes in a good mood. “Has someone else been killed?” I asked, only half-joking.

She smiled at me. “Better. Try again.”

Without turning around, Tom tugged out one of his earbuds, then the other. I don't know why it annoyed me so much, his clumsy attempt at spying. Maybe I was done being grist for the gossip mill. I lifted an eyebrow in his direction to tip Holmes off, but she'd already noticed. She whipped out her phone.

“I've got a date,” she announced, texting furiously. My phone lit up silently on the bed between us, and I craned my neck to see.
Apparently Wheatley's brother keeps snakes in NJ.