A Study in Charlotte

“Bye,” Lena trilled, and disappeared.

Holmes sat on a bench by the entrance, staring out across the dark quad at a particular copse of trees. It was where I’d faced down Dobson, I realized. It was the last time we’d talked before he died.

She was shivering. I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders.

“Thank you,” she said, not looking at me.

A little notebook was open on her lap, her fingers splayed across its pages.

“Is that the thing you took from the sedan last night?”

Holmes nodded.

“And you brought it with you?” I sat down next to her cautiously, the way you’d sit next to a bomb. I had questions. I didn’t want her to hide the notebook away before I got a chance to ask them.

To my surprise, she didn’t. “I didn’t think I’d get to it,” she said, and went on, her voice strange (was Holmes nervous?), “I played a few rounds of poker, but it wasn’t sufficiently distracting. It was me and Tom and one of the chaperones—the school nurse. Tom spent the entire game staring at Lena’s butt across the room. So obvious. Everyone is so obvious. For example, that school nurse? She wishes she were a doctor. She misses her boyfriend, who has blond hair and an earring, whom she’s been with since high school, and who doesn’t like her as much as she likes him.”

“How could you—”

Holmes smiled a relieved sort of smile. Better to be making deductions, I supposed, then answering my questions. “She couldn’t take her eyes off the dance floor. Her eyes teared up when ‘I Luv U Girl’ came on. Why would anyone react like that? Especially to that song? Nostalgia is the only answer. She’s attractive enough, but not a knockout—that is to say, not so attractive to have been popular enough in high school that she pines to be back there. And every time a tall blond boy walked by, her eyes trailed after creepily. She’s wearing an ugly tennis bracelet on her left wrist that could only have been chosen by a man, but not one who cares enough to pay attention to her actual taste. And she wishes she were a doctor because she tried to diagnose the cause of my shaking hands three separate times over the course of our game.”

“Why were your hands shaking?”

“Exhaustion. I haven’t slept since that nap you woke me from. She thought it was pneumonia at first, and then she implied it was from mental illness, the cow. And the whole time I had to pretend to like her just in case we need to question her again. So I cleaned her out. It was satisfying, even if it was Monopoly money.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “You’re a terrible person.”

It derailed her completely.

She stiffened and put her hands up to her mouth. I looked down reflexively at where they’d been, covering the pages of the notebook.

I got it, then. Why she was nervous.

In her lap was a madman’s journal. Its pages were thick with handwriting, the same five words scrawled again and again. Each time they were written in a markedly different style, as though a group of schoolboys had each been made to copy down a line from the chalkboard all into the same notebook. Here, the stark black capitals of a military general. Here, the rounded letters of a high school girl. Here, the elegantly dashed scrawl of a Victorian gentleman.

Every line said the same thing.

CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

I snatched the notebook off her lap. She didn’t try to stop me. She watched in aching silence as I turned one page, another, another, every single one striped with those same five words.

As I stared down uncomprehending, the doors burst open with a bang. The dance was over.

“Holmes,” I said, my voice almost drowned out by the people streaming by, “what the hell is this?”

“I have the same book at home,” she murmured. “Mine is green. It’s a forger’s notebook. I was made to practice in it until I could imitate nearly anyone’s handwriting. Real people’s, those of archetypes, characters I’d made up. You’re given a phrase to work with, one that represents most of the alphabet. But this . . . this one is terrible.” She reached out to touch the words. “It uses many of the same letters.”

“It says you’re a murderer. A murderer. And that dealer had it,” I said. “He can’t work for your brother. He’s something else, some kind of maniac writing crazy things in the dark. He’s probably not a dealer at all. He has to be responsible for Dobson—for framing us—God, and we let him get away—”

“How do we know that man wrote this? We don’t. He could have picked it up; someone could have given it to him.”

“Why did you wait to show me this?” I demanded.

Something snuffed out behind her eyes.

“Holmes—”

“Do you know that I dusted it for prints? I did, it’s clean. Do you know that Professor Moriarty carried a little red memoranda book? He did; I’ve seen it. My father keeps it in a drawer. Did you know you can buy this particular model that I’m holding from seventy-two different online shops, not to mention innumerable bookstores and gift shops? You can. I ran down the license on that black sedan. It doesn’t exist. The car itself was stolen from a Brooklyn street corner five years ago. Why does it reappear now? Watson, there’s no pattern here. I can’t figure this out. I don’t know. Do you know what it’s like to not know?”