A Study in Charlotte

She, of course, ignored the sarcasm. “It was, wasn’t it?”

“Okay, normal lunch is an abject failure,” I said, “so just get on with it. Why are we being framed?”

“You’re asking the wrong questions,” she said, tossing the sandwich on the floor as she stood. I picked it up and put it in the trash. “We’re not on who, or why, Watson, we’re still working out how. You can’t theorize in advance of facts, or you’ll waste everyone’s time.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, because I didn’t.

I swear, she nearly stamped an impatient foot. “Fact one: Lee Dobson tormented me for an entire year before assaulting me on September 26. Fact two: you and Dobson got into an altercation on October 3. Fact three: Dobson was murdered on Tuesday, October 11, close enough to both incidents to link them all together. When his toxicology reports come back, they’ll prove that Dobson was a victim of gradual arsenic poisoning, that it began the night you first punched him, and that the doses increased in amount until the night he died. I’m sure that his roommate and the infirmary will testify to the attendant headaches, nausea, and so on.”

“Jesus Christ.” I stared at her. “Arsenic? Don’t tell me you have access to arsenic.”

“Watson,” she said patiently, “we’re in the sciences building, and I have the keys.”

I put my head in my hands.

“He was holding a copy of your great-great-great-grandfather’s stories. They’ll also find that, last night, Dobson was the victim of a rattlesnake bite, perhaps even shortly postmortem while the blood was still warm. Remember the scale that I found on Dobson’s floor?” Stooping, she pulled a book from the bottom of her bookshelf and tossed it to me. I was startled to see it was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. “No? How about the glass of milk on his bedside table? Or the vent above his bed? Come on, Watson, think!”

I blinked down at the book in my hands, not quite believing what she was implying. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I’m quite serious. They’re re-creating ‘The Speckled Band.’”

“The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is one of my great-great-great-grandfather’s most well-known stories; it’s definitely the most frightening, and also the most riddled with factual errors. As so many of his tales do, “The Speckled Band” opens in 221B Baker Street, with a shaken woman asking for help. Her sister had died two years before in the middle of the night under mysterious circumstances, and now Helen Stoner, Holmes’s client, has been moved by her patently evil stepfather into that same bedroom, weeks before her wedding. During their investigation, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find that the bed in that room is bolted to the floor. Beside it, a bellpull trails down from a vent above that opens into the stepfather’s study next door. There, Holmes finds a saucer of milk, a leash, a locked safe, and, during their stakeout, an Indian swamp adder—the speckled band of the title—that Evil Stepfather is using to kill his stepdaughters, controlling the snake with a whistle and tossing it into the safe when he’s finished.

John H. Watson might have been many things—a doctor, a storyteller, and by most accounts a kind and decent man—but he clearly wasn’t a zoologist. There’s no such thing as a swamp adder. And the idea that Sherlock Holmes deduced its existence from a saucer of milk is ridiculous—snakes have zero interest in milk. They also can’t hear anything but vibrations, so they wouldn’t hear a whistle. But they do breathe, so a snake couldn’t survive in a locked safe.

When I was younger, my father and I liked to speculate about what actually happened on that case to drive Dr. Watson to that much invention. My pet theory is still that he slept late that day in Baker Street, missed both the client and the investigation entirely, and was only half-listening when Sherlock Holmes broke it down for him later.

At least, that sounds like something I would do.

“Whoever they are, they’re taunting us,” Holmes was saying, pacing the length of her lab like a caged cat. “The arsenic would have done Dobson in on its own. The snake is just a ridiculous flourish, there to send a message. Of course, our culprit couldn’t find a swamp adder, because your great-great-great-grandfather made those up.” I rolled my eyes at her clear disdain. “But honestly, Watson, why would Dobson have a glass of milk? There wasn’t a mini-fridge in his room; he’d have to carry it back from the dining hall after dinner. And while I suppose it’s possible that Lee Dobson had discovered a passion for folk music, having a slide whistle is too strange in the context of everything else. The presence of these items is just plausible enough that the police wouldn’t see them as significant, and so, in planting them there, the killer must have known we would make our own investigation.”

“We’re being toyed with,” I said. “But why would he want us to know he’s after us?”

“Us, specifically.” She arched an eyebrow. “Dobson was after me all last year, and nothing happened to him. Then you show up, and all this starts. We’ll begin by investigating people who arrived in the area since the summer, or those who have a particular stake in bringing the both of us down.”

Why would anyone be after me? Holmes, I understood. She was so clearly smarter than, faster than, braver than—there had to be someone on the other side of that equation to make it work. Maybe I was just collateral damage. Maybe there had been some mistake. Because, no matter how badly I wanted my life to be interesting, it wasn’t. There was no reason for anyone to target me.