A Study in Charlotte (26 page)

“Doesn't look fine,” he grumbled, but stayed outside.

I turned to Tom to apologize, to explain. He'd be shocked,
I thought. Maybe he'd want to make a statement to Detective Shepard; after all, he'd been recorded too.

All the blood had drained from his face except for two bright spots of color, one on each cheek. His eyes had gone all pupil. He blinked rapidly, staring at the floor.

“Tom?” I said, as gently as I could. I hadn't meant to scare him this badly.

He jerked his head up to look at me. “When did this happen?”

The phrasing caught me off guard. Not
what
, but
when
. “The night we were evacuated,” I said cautiously.

“Was it Nurse Bryony?”

I startled, then remembered that I'd told him about my concussion and the infirmary. “I don't know.” It seemed the safest answer.

He went a shade paler and nodded to himself, as senselessly fast as a bobblehead doll.

“Five minutes,” the policeman called.

“Hey,” I said to Tom, “I promise I'll explain later, but can we—”

“Where are they?” he asked in a snarl, shoving me into the door of my closet. His cheerful, bright American face looked like an ugly mask. “Where the fuck are they, Jamie?”

It was like the floor fell open below us.

I shoved him off me and kept him there, an arm's length away. Tears welled up in his eyes as he struggled against my grip.

“What the hell are you talking about?” But I knew exactly what he was talking about. I just wanted to hear him say it.
Admit that he'd bugged our room. Confess that all this time, his friendly gossip mongering was a cover for collecting information for Bryony Downs.

“Oh my God, he's going to
kill
me.” Tom stopped fighting me off. He fell back, gasping, throwing his hands up over his face, and I felt a flare of satisfaction.

That faded as quickly as it came.
He?

The dealer. The Moriarty dealer.

“Two minutes,” the policeman said. “Cut the dramatics and finish packing.”

“Talk fast,” I said, pulling my suitcase out from under the bed and yanking armfuls of clothes from the dresser.

“I never even got anything good,” Tom said, as if to himself. “Nothing conclusive. Charlotte even stopped coming to the room. You two were always hunkered down in her fucked-up little dungeon.”

“I just— I can't deal with this right now.” I grabbed the novels from above my bed and dropped them on top of my clothes, one, two, three, like grenades. Textbooks, soap. I had to get in my closet but Tom was still slouched in front of it.

“Move,” I said to him, but he stared up at me stupidly, and the bovine look on him eroded the last of my temper. “I swear to God I will break your neck if you don't move. I might break your neck anyway. You were spying on me, Tom? On top of all the other awful
shit happening—you had to make it worse
?
I never did anything
to you.”

“He offered to split his advance with me,” he said. “He already sold it, you know, he's in the middle of writing it now.
It's going to be
huge
, and he's going to have all this money, he'll be famous, he'll finally be able to teach somewhere better than this shithole—his friend Penelope is going to get him a job at Yale—”

I stared at him, at his horrible lying mouth. “Wheatley? You're full of shit. The dealer told you to say that.”

Tom went to his desk and, opening the bottom drawer, pulled out a battered legal pad. The top page didn't have any writing on it. Not actual writing, no—someone had painstakingly colored in the indentations made by the words written on the page above.
Skeletons in her office he says starrily as if he's in love with death as much as her.
Lines and lines of florid prose.
He wears the glasses of a Beat philosopher from the 1950s but his face is all Cornwall smooth. When they dance they do not touch.

They were Mr. Wheatley's notes from our meeting, when he'd so impressed me by interrogating me and then handing over what he'd written down. I remembered the piece of cardboard he'd stuck below the top page. The top
two
pages. I'd thought at the time that he was worried his ink would bleed through, but he had just been making himself a copy.

“He was sure you were guilty,” Tom said, almost like he was pleading with me. “Back in October, I was waiting for an appointment with him to talk about my story, and I heard him say it to another teacher inside his office. You. Guilty. And I told him, no, you weren't, and it was actually this great story, you and Charlotte Holmes solving crimes, that you two were totally boning like Bonnie and Clyde, the good-guy version.
He had this idea for a book. True crime. With famous kids as the heroes. The public would eat it up. I'm a good writer, he told me that, better than you, anyway, even if my family's not famous, and I'd do a good job helping, and you'd be happy about it in the end, when you saw how much attention it got you—” He cut himself off.

“So you bugged our room.”

“He had me do it. Ordered all the stuff online. The mirror was the worst, replacing it. But yeah, I'd get you to talk and then I'd review the files when you were gone, write everything down, pass it along to him. But—look at this. He's never going to pay me now.”

“Why?” I asked him again. I'd thought Tom was my friend. He was one of the only constants in my life, his irrepressible grin and his motor mouth and his ridiculous sweater-vest. We watched stupid videos on his computer at night. We ate each other's candy, borrowed each other's shampoo. He was the first person who was nice to me when I came back to America, miserable and alone.

“I was doing you a favor,” he repeated, like he was trying to make himself believe it.

“Time, boys,” the officer boomed from the doorway. I slammed the door in his face and bolted it. I was going to get an explanation even if it got me arrested.

“Tell me why.”

“Lena's family goes to Paris every summer,” Tom said quietly, as the policeman hammered on the door. “She invited me. And she . . . she expects things from me. Dinners out. Presents.
You know her dad's a big oil tycoon out in India. They have a housekeeper
.
She has her own
plane.
And I'm here, from the Midwest, on scholarship. Do you know what that feels like? He was going to give me ten grand!”

I couldn't wring out an ounce of sympathy for him. “Seriously, what do you think Lena will say when she finds out how you got that money? Jesus Christ, everyone at this fucking school acts like they're so rich and half of them aren't, not even close. When are you going to realize that? What do you think all those people are doing at Holmes's poker game every week, wagering all their money? Here's a solution. Get the hell over yourself. Tell Lena the truth. God, she's actually a decent person, do you think she'd really care?”

“I didn't expect you to understand it. You're a show dog with a pedigree. I'm just someone that escaped from the pound.” He shook his head. “It's not like I hurt you or anything. You're my friend. I was doing you a
favor
. It was going to make you famous—”

“Open up the door! Open it up!”

I was disgusted with him, disgusted with Sherringford, with the bullshit and the jealousy and the backstabbing. Furious, I grabbed the handles of my closet doors, ready to throw the rest of the stuff in my suitcase and get the fuck out of Dodge.

Something bit into my skin.

I looked down, stupidly. My hands were so cut up and bandaged that I could hardly tell what had happened. There. A pinprick of blood near the knuckle of my index finger.

I didn't think anything of it. Not until I gripped the handle with the bandaged part of my hand and flung open the door.

Clothes and shoes and the rest of my life's detritus all in a jumble on the closet floor. On the back wall were three giant, jagged lines in marker.

YOU HAVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS TO LIVE

UNLESS SHE GIVES ME WHAT I WANT

XOXO CULVERTON SMITH

Culverton Smith. The man behind Sherlock Holmes's poisoned ivory box.

I stared back down at my bleeding knuckle. Behind me, Tom raised his iPhone with one shaking hand, and took a picture.

I
RIPPED THE INFECTED SPRING FROM THE DOOR HANDLE.
Took my phone from the desk (dead), and its charger. Picked up my suitcase. The whole time Tom was loudly pleading his ignorance—
this wasn't me, I wouldn't do something like that—
like the swine he was until I grabbed him by the shirt with one hand.

“This is what you can do for me,” I snarled at him. “Deal with the cop.”

His eyes were focused on the pinprick of infected blood on his shirt. “But what should I say?”

“Make something up. You're good at that.”

As I stalked down the hall, I heard Tom's half-assed babbling
.
“It's my fault,” he was saying to the policeman, “it's my fault, let him go.”

I made it to the front doors before my legs began to give out under me.

Bryony Downs had won. She'd taken “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” and turned it back on us with deadly earnest, not knowing that Charlotte Holmes had used that same story to clear our names. I had no idea what she'd dabbed that spring with, but my brain was supplying a cavalcade of answers. Spinal meningitis, I thought, or malaria. I used to want to be a doctor; I'd wanted to treat the scariest diseases, and now I couldn't stop running them through my head. Milo was right. She had to be working with the Moriartys; how else could she have access to this sort of thing? She was a puppet, and this was a message directed at the Holmes family.

And the message was going to be my dead body.

I staggered out the front door and down the steps. The next two students were waiting for the officer to fetch them, and one of them stepped forward to help me.

“Don't touch me,” I said, holding up a hand. “I might be contagious.”

Because that was the worst of it. Nurse Bryony could have made me into some kind of bomb. A patient zero that could take out the whole eastern seaboard. I needed to get inside, away from everyone, and I had to start making a plan. My parents couldn't know. There was nothing they could do. I wondered if my father would still find all this crime-solving
fun
after he identified my corpse at the morgue.

No. I wasn't going to die. I was sixteen years old. I was going to be a writer; I was going to go to college, get a flat in London, or Edinburgh, or Paris. I'd get to know my stepbrothers. Oh, God, I didn't want my little sister to be an only child. I didn't want to leave Charlotte Holmes with a controlling family and a brilliant mind and a dead best friend. I didn't want to imagine her life without me. Maybe it was selfish to think that way, but I couldn't imagine mine without her.

The sky was open and blue, guileless in its beauty. And the snow everywhere, blinding. The light was beginning to prick at my eyes, and I rubbed at them with the back of my hand. This had to be psychosomatic, I told myself; it had to be in my head. The denial working its hand around me.
I can't possibly be dying,
I thought, and tried to believe it.

One foot, then the other. Where was I going? I'd walked, I remembered, up the hill from town. The distance was impossibly far. I'd sit for a minute, catch my breath. If I could just arrange my suitcase—there.

Holmes told me that, when they found me, I'd passed out in a snowbank.

They bundled me into the back of Milo's town car, her and her brother and his Greystone mercenaries. Blankets. Something hot to drink. Holmes rubbing my chilled hands between hers, strangely smooth and firm. “No,” I'd managed to say, “the blood, it's contagious,” and then I saw that she was wearing latex gloves.

She knew.

I was racked with chills, and still cold sweat beaded on my forehead before trickling down my face. My mouth burned, my teeth tender to the touch. I couldn't swallow. My throat didn't work. Holmes held a bottle of water to my lips and tipped it, gently, into my mouth. I tried to pull off my shirt, thinking, in my delirium, that it was a straightjacket, and she stilled my hands. All the while Milo watched me from behind his glasses, taking copious notes on his phone. On what, I didn't know. I was a specimen, I thought wildly. I would be experimented on until I died.

When we got to our destination, Peterson had to carry me up the stairs over his shoulder, like he'd rescued me from a burning building. And then there was a bed, with sheets still warm from the dryer, a table beside it. Peterson returned to that table again and again with pill bottles, clean rags. Someone brought in an IV drip and put it into my arm.

What was real? I didn't know. Milo came in, in a suit and watch chain; he lit a pipe by the window, staring broodingly out over the rooftops. My dog Maggie was there, too, though she'd died when I was six. But she put her shaggy head on my mattress and looked up at me with big wet eyes, telling me in silent words what my sister Shelby was reading that week (
A Wrinkle in Time
), how much my mother missed me. My hands were made of lead; I couldn't ruffle her ears the way I wanted.
Good dog,
I wanted to say.
Where have you been?

Bryony came in through an invisible door and put her arm around Milo's waist. They talked as if I wasn't there.

“Lead him up to the mountain and put the dagger to his
throat,” Milo said in his sonorous voice.

“I thought we were done with goats. I thought we only made offerings of sheep.” Still, Bryony smiled into his face. He kissed her like they were in a movie, dipping her back in his arms.

Stop
,
I yelled,
stop
,
but she was at my bedside, with a pillow pressed down over my face to keep the words inside my mouth. And then she was gone, and Milo was, too, and I was alone.