A Study in Charlotte (21 page)

“Yes, more than anything.” I stood unsteadily. “No hospital, then?”

He gave a surprised laugh. “Are you mad? Someone's trying to kill you. No, you're staying right here.” Shaking his head, he disappeared into the hallway.

Abbie was putting away her first-aid kit, smiling to herself. Did she think all of this was fun? I subtracted a few of the points I'd given her.

“What exactly is so funny?”

“It's like you're his mini-me,” she said. “Oh, it's awful, all of it, but it's like a spy movie! I mean, how cool.”

Well, my father had married the right woman. She was just as insensitive as he was.

“My best friend almost died today,” I said to her. “It was a really close call. I don't think that's
cool
.”

She patted me on the shoulder. “If you hold on a sec, I'll get a fitted sheet for that mattress.”

I stomped up the stairs with an armload of linens. In the guest room, Holmes was curled under the floral coverlet, sound asleep in her clothes. She'd scrubbed some of the dirt from her face, but not all of it, and she looked like a Dickensian orphan against the white sheets. I unfolded the blanket from the end of the bed and tucked it over her, standing for a long moment to watch the moon move across her hair. She was alive. She would wake up tomorrow to scheme and argue with me, to bring me terrible sandwiches, to push against me until I made myself a better partner. Her sad eyes and her sharp tongue and the way she touched my shoulder when she thought I wasn't listening. I was always listening.

She was right there, and still I couldn't believe it. I resisted
the urge to brush her hair away from her forehead. She stirred, and I pulled my hand back.

“Watson, what is it?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“I shouldn't,” she said, pushing herself up. “We need to work this case. Something terrible is about to happen.”

I gently pushed her back down. “Not tonight. Nothing will happen tonight. Go back to sleep.” I pulled my mattress up next to the bed and lay down; it sighed out a long breath of air.

“Watson.”

“What?”

“I'm sorry I picked a fight with you,” Holmes said sleepily. “But you should know that I had a good reason.”

“I know, I was being an idiot.” I really didn't want to do this now, I didn't, but I would if I had to.

“No. It wasn't your fault.” Her voice was fading into a thin whisper. “The note said you'd be killed if you stayed, so I fixed it. I was horrible until you went away.”

I sat straight up into the dark, but Holmes was already asleep.

H
AD IT BEEN ANY OTHER DAY IN THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE
, and I'd been told something like that, I would have stopped sleeping altogether.

But that night, I was out in the space of ten minutes. It wasn't that I felt particularly brave, or that I'd resigned myself to my violent, rapidly approaching death (though that wasn't a bad plan, really). My body had just proved itself physically
incapable of handling more terror. Enough, it decided, and shut the whole thing down.

I woke as the first rays of sun crept into the room. More precisely, I woke to a toddler-shaped eclipse.

“Hi,” he said, placing a sticky hand square on my mouth.

I removed it carefully, sitting up. “Hello,” I said. “How did you get in here?”

Holmes's bed was rumpled and empty, the door wide open.

“I like ducks.” He looked disconcertingly like pictures I'd seen of myself as a child. Guileless eyes, wild dark hair. My mother used to say I could get away with murder, and looking at him, I believed it.

For the record, I'd never resented my half brothers for anything that happened between my father and me. They were little kids, and none of it was their fault.

Besides, he was pretty cute.

“I like ducks too,” I said, and scooped him up to take him downstairs with me. Thankfully, I wasn't inexperienced at talking to babies—I had a whole mess of little cousins. “What's your name?”

“Malcolm,” he said in a shy voice. “Your name is Jamie.”

“That's right.” I bounced him a little as we walked into the kitchen.

“It snowed!” he yelled, pointing out the back door at the expanse of white lawn.

I wondered what the wreckage of the sciences building looked like this morning. Our destroyed lab open to the air,
all shrouded in white. With a strange pang, I wondered if Holmes's collection of teeth survived.

Abbie turned around from the stove where she was making pancakes. “Oh no, Mal attack! Sorry about that. I wanted to let you sleep in.”

I shrugged, juggling Malcolm to my other arm. “It's okay, he was just saying hi. Have you seen Holmes? I need to find her, and kill her.”

She gave me a dubious look. “In the family room, with your father and Robbie. He's showing her the cat.”

“I didn't know you had a cat,” I said, trying to make conversation. I did, in fact, know they had a cat. I was really hoping to get one of those pancakes.

Abbie frowned and didn't offer me one. “It's skittish and hates everyone. Robbie spent the last hour trying to find him for her.”

“Come along,” I singsonged to Malcolm, “we're going to meet Miss Charlotte, who thinks that keeping Mister Jamie in the dark is a fun, fun game.”

In the family room, my father and Holmes were examining a piece of paper they'd laid out on the coffee table. The cat—a handsome tabby—was purring on her lap.

“But it hates me,” the small boy at her feet was saying plaintively. “Why does he like
you
?”

She looked down at him, considering. “Because I have a bigger lap for him to sit on. Wait ten or so years, and then he might like you better.”

Robbie burst into tears.

“Right,” my father said. He took Malcolm from me and grabbed Robbie by the hand, leading him from the room as he sobbed. “Let's see if your mother has finished with those pancakes.”

Holmes hardly noticed. She whipped out a tiny magnifying glass and leaned over the paper. “Watson, come here and tell me what you can make of this.”

“Is it going to explain why you kept direct communications from our stalker a secret from me, choosing instead to inflict some serious psychic damage with the end goal of getting me to leave you to deal with a bomb all by yourself?”

“Yes.” She didn't even look up. “Come here.”

She'd squared the note in the middle of the table. As I approached, I saw that she'd laid a sandwich bag between it and the wood.

Holmes handed me a pair of latex gloves. “They were in your stepmother's first-aid kit,” she said by way of explanation. “Go on. What do you see?”

I read it aloud.

IF YOU KEEP DRAGGING JAMES WATSON

INTO THIS HE WILL DIE TO

TONIGHT

HE DOESN'T DESERVE IT THE WAY YOU DO

THIS WON'T STOP UNTIL YOU HAVE LEARNT YOUR LESSON

“A grammar error,” I said. “‘To,' instead of ‘too.' Spellcheck wouldn't catch that. And learned is spelled the English way. ‘Learnt.'”

She gestured impatiently. “What else?”

“Well, it's a death threat. Though they seem to like me more than they like you.” Gingerly, I lifted the note by its corner. It was square, cut from regular printer paper, thin to the touch. There was a crease down the middle, probably from where Holmes had put it in her pocket. The ink was black. I held it up to the light, but I couldn't see anything special about the rest of it.

I told her my observations, and she nodded, pleased. Maybe I wasn't so useless after all.

“What did you come up with?” I asked her.

“All the things you didn't,” she said, and took the page from me. “Our letter-writer is most likely a woman, and she's writing it on her own behalf. Look, she's used one of those specialty sans-serif fonts, the kind that doesn't come standard. You'd have to download it, and you wouldn't put in that sort of effort if you were someone's lackey—you'd just use Times New Roman, whatever the default was. And that would be the smarter move, too. Either she's so up herself she feels she doesn't need to cover her tracks, or she wrote this in an absolute hurry and that was the default font.”

I took it back and squinted at the font. “It doesn't look all that weird to me.”

Holmes sighed. The cat on her lap turned its baleful eyes
toward me. Apparently she'd found her spirit animal.

I scrubbed at my face. I needed coffee. Or a sedative. “But how do you know it's a woman?”

She snatched the page back. “All it took was a few minutes' research for me to find the origin of this font—it's called Hot Chocolate, how twee—along with a few hundred others on one of those design sites. Well and fine, but that was the ninth hit on Google. The
first
was a website that catered to ‘sorority life,' and I found our Hot Chocolate on the page about creating invitations for parties.”

“So she's a sorority girl,” I said.

“She's someone who looks at sorority websites,” Holmes corrected me. “But that was only one search term. After working out the algorithms, I tried one hundred and thirty-nine others, beginning, of course, with the most common syntactical search strings and moving, systematically, to the least likely”—here, my eyes began to glaze—“but each time, this website came up first. I doubt that anyone who makes a typo on their death threat looks past the first Google hit. And this website was absolutely covered in glitter.”

“How did the note arrive?”

“It was slipped under my door yesterday morning, like so.” She folded it back in half. “Look at that crease. It wasn't just casually folded. That was done with a blunt object and a considerable amount of pressure—you can tell from the dimpling at the seam. Someone was upset when they wrote this and took it out on the paper.”

Obviously. It was a death threat. The horrible weight of
what Holmes had done yesterday fell back on my shoulders. “So after you received it, you chased me out, and then . . . waited for someone to come by and kill you?”

She regarded me evenly. “It seemed a good chance to meet them, didn't it? But I expected them to come by with a gun. Bombs are a coward's weapon.”

“And if you hadn't been in the bathroom on the other side of the building, you would have
died
.” I bit down on a knuckle, reining in my flare of temper.

“I know. That's why I made you leave.” She popped the note back into the bag. “I'll have your father give this to Detective Shepard, I'm sure he'll want it now that we're finished. You did very well. You just missed one thing.”

“What?”

Leaning over, she held the unsealed bag under my nose. “What does that smell like to you?”

Forever Ever Cotton Candy. I coughed, waving a hand in front of my face. “Didn't you say you could only get that off Japanese eBay?”

“Yes.”

“So where the hell did you even find out about it?”

“August Moriarty gave me my first bottle for Christmas,” she said. “I'd mentioned that I liked cotton candy in passing, and he'd hunted high and low for a perfume that scent. It had only been manufactured in Japan, he told me, and discontinued in the eighties.” Her eyes went faraway. “I wore it for a few weeks, even though it's heinous, because . . . well, no matter. It did prove to be useful, in the end.”

I stared at her. Mom jeans and an oversized sweater—borrowed from Abbie, I could deduce that much—and her face assiduously clean. The sun dappled her hair. I had no idea what she was thinking.

“Holmes,” I said slowly, “how is this not a warning from August Moriarty?”

“It's not. It's a woman's work, Watson, clearly.”

“So . . .”

“Nurse Bryony,” Holmes said, as if it was obvious. “Do you really think Phillipa is likely to be visiting a Delta Delta Delta website? More so than the woman who spent all of homecoming requesting old R. Kelly songs and telling me about her sorority formal? The profile is an excellent fit.”

“But the perfume points right back to August.”

“She most likely wears it too.” Holmes shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”

“Have you smelled it on her?”

“People don't wear the same perfume every day, Watson. I'm sure I'll find a bottle in Bryony's flat. It's in Sherringford Town, and we can search through it while she's away.”

“Holmes. How does this explain anything about the dealer? Or the forger's notebook? Or the guy in the morgue?”

“Do you not trust me to have this worked out?” she said. “Because I do. They employed one agent, and that agent failed. So they hired another. There. It's sorted.”

“Holmes
—
”

“Earlier, when I spoke to Detective Shepard, I asked him to bring Bryony in for questioning tomorrow at ten a.m. We'll
toss her flat then.” She gave me a sympathetic look. “I know the feeling. I'm always disappointed at the end of a case. But we'll find another.”

I was beginning to believe it, now, what she'd said about the dangers of caring too much. How emotions only got in the way. It sounded to me exactly as though Holmes was ignoring some obvious conclusions in favor of devising any theory that let August Moriarty off the hook. How hard would it be for him to plant a typo, or to use a special font, to write this note the way a woman would? He knew what Holmes would look for, how she'd interpret it: he could feed her exactly what she wanted to see.

The worst part? She'd kept on buying that perfume he'd given her. Even though it was expensive. Even though she hated it. It was foreign, and hard to find, and that letter was doused in it.

I knew what I had to do.

“It's a good plan,” I told her. It would be one, too, if there was any chance Bryony Downs was guilty. “But look, I still feel really awful from yesterday—I didn't sleep much, thanks to your sense of timing, ha—and the pancakes smell amazing, but you know, Malcolm got me up so early—I think I need to—”