A Study in Charlotte

“You should have called us, Charlotte.” The sound of a chair scraping back. And then a final blow. “By the way, what was Jamie Watson’s part in all this? Your accomplice? He’s clearly not the brains of the operation.”

“Hey!” I yelled again. I did not want to hear this. “Hey! Anybody!”

“Don’t cater to my vanity,” she snapped. “You’ll find I do that well enough on my own.”

“Your accomplice,” he said again, louder, “until you needed a fall guy. Someone to stay and swing for all of this when your rich mommy and daddy smuggle you out of the country on a private plane.”

At that moment, I was in the awful position of thinking something that I desperately didn’t want to believe.

Thought: The police set this up, this weird, “accidental” eavesdropping, so that when Holmes admits she’s been using me all this time, I’ll flip out and confess to her doing everything. I’d seen Law & Order. I knew how this worked, how they divided suspects, got them to tell on each other. But they were wrong. There was nothing to tell.

Except.

What if the police were right?

What if she actually did kill Lee fucking Dobson and decided, for a lark, to drag me along, pretending to solve the crime that she committed? What if Holmes was so unnerved by someone calling her a murderer because she was, in fact, a murderer? What if, in the time between stomping away from me and Mr. Wheatley at the punch table and when I found her on the bench, she clobbered Elizabeth Hartwell on the head and stuffed that plastic jewel down her throat? What if she really did elaborately off Dobson in an act of cold-blooded revenge? What if—oh God—what if our friendship was just a sick footnote in her sick reenactment of these stories? Holmes and Watson, together again, playing out “The Blue Carbuncle” on the dark Sherringford quad. Only, instead of hiding the stolen gem in a goose’s craw, we stuffed it down a girl’s throat to make her choke to death.

“Jamie Watson,” Holmes said evenly, “is far smarter than you think. He isn’t my accomplice. He’s no one’s accomplice. And he isn’t guilty of anything.”

He isn’t, she said. Not the both of us.

I didn’t feel any better. Not even when the door swung open to let in my haggard father, who took one look at my face and said, “Right, we’re going home.”

ON THE WAY OUT, MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT NEITHER Holmes nor I were being charged with a crime. The police didn’t have enough evidence to hold us; everything they had right now was circumstantial, so the best they could do was question us. “It’s good they didn’t get around to you,” he said, then looked at me hard and told me, like he was imparting great wisdom, to always remember to request a lawyer.

Usually, I hated that my father didn’t act like a father. Most days, I would’ve traded him and his enthusiasms for the most boring authority figure on the block, but tonight, I was just happy to be spared a lecture and tears.

My father is picking me up from the police station in the middle of the night, I thought, and he mostly just seems kind of excited.

“I’ll pull around the car,” he said at the entrance. “Once we get home, you’ll need to sleep. I could only get you a day’s reprieve. They want you back for more questioning after dinner. Shepard’s keeping his Sunday-night appointment.”

I swayed a little on my feet, not thinking much of anything. Not until I felt her creep up behind me on cat feet. I refused to turn around.

When my father pulled the car up, Holmes opened the passenger door and climbed in without a word. Fuming, I got into the backseat, pushing aside a small avalanche of toys and snack wrappers that belonged, no doubt, to the half brothers I’d never met. I tried to fight the feeling that I was a guest star in my own life.

As we drove, my father kept up a steady stream of chatter that Holmes replied to in monosyllables. I couldn’t manage any response at all. My brain had roared back to furious, nervous life. When he stopped at a Shell station outside town, I tipped my head against the cold window and tried to steady my breathing. In a few hours, I’d be arrested for a crime I hadn’t committed. I wished I’d never come back to America. That I had killed Dobson, just so I’d have something to confess to. A way to get this all to end. I thought again about my pathetic fantasy, the two of us on that runaway train. Maybe this was the sensation of it crashing.

Without a word, Holmes reached back, fumbling for my hand, and when she found it, she grasped it firmly in hers. I thought about taking it back. I reminded myself that I was maybe holding the hand of a killer, but I decided I was too tired to care. The three of us drove the rest of the way in silence.

Really I’d been so distracted by what had happened at the station that I’d forgotten to dread the rest of it. Then it came into sight, my childhood house in the country, and I remembered all at once learning to ride a bike down this street, my father holding on to the seat even after I told him he could let go. He did, finally, with a great laugh like a shout, and I went a full three feet before I hit a bump and flew head over handlebars.

Today, despite the cold weather, there was a bike fallen on its side in the yard. It wasn’t mine. I watched my father notice it, how his eyes flickered to me in the backseat. I noted the worry there, his own dose of dread. It was the first time I ever felt sorry for my father.

“Abbie and the boys are at her mother’s for the weekend,” he said with false cheer as we pulled into the garage. “So we’ll have the place to ourselves. I made a steak pie that I’ll put in the oven for dinner. But right now, you two need to get some rest.”