A Study in Charlotte

But if Holmes realized how unimportant a role I actually played in all of this, she might send me packing. Back to chemistry homework and Tom’s dirty jokes and all the other trappings of my American exile. Back to dreaming about her at night while she went on, unmoved, with her life. But it would be worse this time, because I’d know exactly what I was missing.

I decided to keep my mouth shut.

Holmes stopped pacing to lean against the wall for support. I remembered that she hadn’t slept at all last night. I had no idea how she was still on her feet.

“The police aren’t going to let us help them, not if Shepard’s any indication,” she said. “Idiots. I suppose that they don’t like that I tampered with their crime scene.”

“We’re also their prime suspects,” I reminded her. “That sort of puts a damper on our working relationship.”

She shrugged, as if that were beside the point. “That’s it, then.”

“What is?”

“That’s all I have to tell you. I’ll think on our next move.”

It was a dismissal. Whatever use she’d had for me had expired, and our investigation was done for the day. I got to my feet, wondering if I’d made a misjudgment in thinking that I was starting to mean something to her.

Because it seemed that Holmes had already forgotten me. She brought down her violin case from its shelf and drew from it an instrument so warm and polished that it nearly looked alive. I remembered listening to a special on BBC 4 in my kitchen that past summer, in such a profound sulk at leaving that my mother had begun a campaign to cheer me up. That day, she was making cinnamon buns by hand, rolling out the dough in long strips that dangled off the edge of our tiny countertop, and I’d crept from my room, drawn by the smell of the sugar. She looked up at me with floured hands, a brown curl stuck to the side of her face, and before either of us could speak the radio presenter announced a feature on the history of the Stradivarius. Underneath his voice played the famous recording of Sherlock Holmes performing a Mendelssohn concerto on his own Stradivarius for King Edward VII. The music was scratchy and still tremendously alive through the static. I’d drawn nearer, and my mother had pursed her lips but didn’t change the station, and so we spent the afternoon that way, icing the rolls she’d made as they cooled and listening to the announcer speak of the violin’s shape, the density of its wood, how Antonio Stradivari had stored his instruments under Venice’s canals.

The brown-sugar color of Holmes’s violin brought it all back to me in a rush, and I stood there, transfixed, watching her run through a scale before beginning to play. The bow stood out against her dark hair; her eyes were closed. The song was both familiar and alien, a folk melody punctuated by bursts of gorgeous dissonance. Though I was standing only a few feet away, the distance between us stretched like the hundred years between Sherlock Holmes playing for the king and my hearing it—that remote, that distant.

I must have listened for a long time before she stopped playing, and I realized that I was standing frozen with my hand on the doorknob, like a fool.

“Watson,” she said, letting the violin drop to her side. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She turned away from me, and began to play again.

four

AFTER I AVOIDED ALL MY CALLS FOR ANOTHER DAY, MRS. Dunham came by my room and politely told me that if she had to speak to my panicked mother one more time, she would very publicly set herself on fire. So, that Thursday, I had to endure my mom’s histrionics and my sister Shelby’s thousand questions (“What happened? Are you okay? Does this mean that you can come home?”), a call that went on for hours. I told neither of them that I’d been invited to my father’s house for dinner; I still hadn’t decided if I would go.

Things settled down between Tom and me. Or rather, Tom’s good nature won out over his suspicions, and after a day of uncomfortable silence, he came over to my desk while I was writing. I’d been scribbling down everything I could remember since Dobson’s murder—times and dates, names of poisons, those things of Dobson’s that Holmes had cataloged with her hands. I was thinking of making a story of it, and when Tom peered over my shoulder, it was easy enough to try it out on him.

Or to try out the version that wouldn’t get either Holmes or me expelled.

Sherringford had released a statement referring to Lee Dobson’s death as an accident—an “accident with a snake,” which came off much more bizarre than terrifying. It was their attempt to reassure parents that our campus was safe, but students were still being dragged home in droves. Our hall, in particular, had an emptied-out feeling to it—for two days running, there was no line for the shower, no music blaring from behind closed doors.

Into that silence, the reporters appeared.

One day, they weren’t there. The next, they were everywhere, crawling all over the quad with their cameras and flashbulbs and strident voices. They lay in wait after our classes, putting sympathetic hands on our shoulders and pointing the lenses into our faces. Most of the students ignored them. Some didn’t. One day, during lunch, I watched the redheaded girl from my French class crying delicately into a camera. Her headshots, she sobbed, were on her website if they needed them. I guess I couldn’t blame her for using the press; the press were using her, too.

That same reporter took a particular shine to me.

Following me from class to class, murmuring words of sympathy before launching into questions like Do you really think Lee Dobson’s death was an accident? and Is it true you keep a snake in your dorm room? From the logo on the cameraman’s kit, I knew they were from the BBC. I would have known it anyway from the reporter’s plummy accent and haughty chin, the very image of some grown-up Oxbridge wanker. He’d been sent across the pond to try to get some dirt on the Holmeses; I was sure by the way he kept turning the conversation back to Charlotte. Somehow, he’d gotten ahold of my class schedule, and for days he waited for me between classes, his cameraman always towering behind him.