A Study in Charlotte

But my life dictated that the first night I was on the road, I’d end up in a car chase. It wasn’t like the movies, I thought grimly, as we pulled out onto the empty street. The sedan was only a pair of lights in the distance, speeding toward town. It was almost impossible to stay on its tail. The dark was stripped away by a series of streetlights, and ahead of us, the sedan burned through one red light and then another, leading us away from Sherringford and toward the coast.

Holmes had pulled a pair of folding binoculars from God knows where. She leaned forward, peering through the windshield. “The driver’s alone. He has a black coat and a black hat down over his ears. Blond hair under it. I can’t see his face. There’s—there’s a case in his front seat, the kind my old dealer used to carry his—”

“Dealer?” I asked tersely.

She shot me a look from behind the binoculars. “Yes.”

I thought about the pinched-face man talking to the BBC reporter. Charlotte Holmes is the head of this messed-up cult and James Watson is, like, her angry little henchman. “I think I know who it is. But if he’s a dealer, why the hell is he running from us?”

“Watson,” she said, in a warning tone, as I bore down on him. We cleared seventy miles an hour. Eighty.

“You’re not going to tell me to slow down, are you?” I asked, clutching the wheel.

“No.” I heard the smile in her voice. “I was going to tell you to go faster.”

We blew past dark farmland and stands of trees, past hints of civilization—a bait shop, a crappy motel. My brain was racing as fast as the car. If the police pulled us over and hauled us back to school, we’d be expelled for sneaking out after hours. If the car in front of us braked or even slowed down—

We’d be dead.

My hands tightened on the wheel. I wasn’t going to let up, not this close to finally learning something concrete. Give us a clue, I thought, a real one. Let us get just a little bit closer.

At the next intersection, he jerked into a hard right turn, trying to take us by surprise. Which is when he lost control. Under the bright streetlights, his car spun out down the center of the road, finally beaching itself on a curb outside a shuttered gas station.

I slammed on the brakes, and we fishtailed after him. Holmes’s binoculars flew out of her hands and into the windshield with a sharp crack.

We shuddered to a stop two feet from the sedan.

If I didn’t know it before this, I knew it now. I wasn’t like Charlotte Holmes. I wouldn’t ever be. Because while I was still unbuckling my seat belt with shaking fingers, trying to remember how to breathe, she’d freed herself, cleared our car, and was wrenching open the door of the black sedan.

While he was escaping through the passenger side.

“Holmes,” I yelled, stumbling outside. “Holmes!”

We were in the middle of nowhere. Trees crowded the two-lane road, dense with underbrush, and I watched her crash after him into the pitch-black wood, shouting for him to stop.

I took off after them.

It was like a nightmare. Branches lashed back at me as I ran, leaving stinging welts across my face, my arms. More than once, my foot caught on a tree root and sent me sprawling, and when I picked myself up, they were that much farther away. I remembered, suddenly, being a kid in a wood like this one, playing a game of ghost tag in the dark. I’d hidden myself in a burned-out tree trunk, and I remembered the hand reaching in to tag me, a white flash in all that darkness. I’d screamed myself hoarse.

Tonight didn’t feel all that much different.

Holmes pulled farther and farther ahead of me. She didn’t trip. She didn’t fall. She moved like a cat through the night.

And then I couldn’t see her anymore.

“Come back!” I shouted, finally skidding to a stop. “Give it up!” I could hear him, faintly, still crashing through the bushes. We weren’t going to catch him. Besides, what would we do with him if we did? I didn’t have any weapons. I didn’t know how to threaten someone with anything but my fist.

In the far distance, I heard sirens.

“Holmes!” I shouted again. “Someone called the police!”

“Jesus, Watson,” her voice said a little bit ahead of me. “I’m right here.”

She’d stopped to catch her breath. In the dim light, she looked as terrible as I felt, scratched and grim, but I saw her eyes gleaming with the thrill of the hunt.

“We have to get back to the car,” I said. “Now.”

When we got back to the road, the cops were still out of sight, though the sirens were getting louder. We were a long way from anything, out here.

As I started Lena’s car, Holmes quickly rummaged through the dealer’s sedan, taking pictures with her cell phone, touching everything through the cloth of her shirt. Careful, I knew, not to leave fingerprints.

“Come on,” I hissed.

As she climbed back in, she tucked something small into her pocket. “Pull around to the back of the petrol station. Park next to the owner’s truck, turn it off, and duck down.”

I did as she said, and not a moment too soon. Red-and-blue lights flooded in through the rear window. I held my breath as the cop car circled the gas station, slowing down behind us. A door opened, closed. Footsteps padded up to our back window.

If he shone a flashlight in—if he even glanced in—he’d see us. I thought I might throw up.

And then a sound of something big thunking onto metal, as if he’d dropped his bag onto the trunk of our car.