A Study in Charlotte

The clothes from the mattress.

She looked up uninterestedly. “Yes,” she said. “Though if you’ve examined them, you’ll see that they’ve never been worn.”

Shepard nodded. She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. “I examined them, Charlotte. I made a lot of calls this morning. One of those was to your mother.”

My father leaned forward. “And?”

Shepard rubbed at his temple, thinking, and then he pulled a binder out of his bag, laying it open on the table. “Jamie, do you mind pointing this purported drug dealer out to me?”

I pushed my plate away. The twelve men in front of me were uniformly blond and ugly. They ranged in age from a few years older than me to forty. One sported an eyebrow scar. Another smiled, missing teeth. The third one from the top looked the closest to what I’d remembered. I racked my memory.

“Him,” I said, sounding slightly more confident than I felt.

“That man turned himself in this morning,” he said, tapping the photo. “Said that Charlotte has been dealing for him for years. Gave me a record, in her handwriting, of transactions he said she’d done for him. Said he was sorry, that he’d seen the error of his ways, that he just wanted the kids to be safe, now, from her.” Shepard shut his eyes for a pained moment. “The records are immaculate, you know. They perfectly match the sample of your handwriting, Charlotte, that I got from your biology teacher.”

“What’s his name?” Holmes asked, showing a glimmer of interest.

Shepard raised an eyebrow. “He gave it as John Smith.”

Wordlessly, Holmes left the room, returning a second later with the little red notebook. She flipped through it there at the table until she reached a page near the end. CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER, it read, in her own spiky hand. “Believe me or don’t,” she said, “but we found this in John Smith’s car.” She went back to her dinner.

“We’re going to follow up with the students that Charlotte sold to,” the detective told us. “We’ll find out the truth of it then.”

“He forged those records,” I said, looking at her. “All of them. The ones in that room—”

“Look,” Shepard said, interrupting. “One of my calls this morning was to Scotland Yard. Everyone there vouches for you, Charlotte. Okay, some of them might not like you much, and they weren’t surprised that you were mixed up in a crime, but to a man, they swore up and down you wouldn’t hurt anyone. Annoy them to death, maybe.”

One corner of Holmes’s mouth turned up, but she stayed silent. The detective rubbed his eyes. “I was also reassured that if you did do it, I wouldn’t have you on my list of suspects at all.” He turned to my father. “Apparently she’s that good. Then I talked to Philly PD about Aaron Davis, Sherringford’s last dealer, and apparently the kid is doing time down there for dealing oxy at UPenn. I have a buddy down there who owes me a favor, asked Aaron some questions. He remembers Charlotte. Confirmed her story, that he sold to her down in that room last year. He also said she didn’t have enough friends or enough patience to ever deal on her own. We’ll follow up, like I said. Aaron’s a con, so his word isn’t golden, but . . .” Shepard shrugged expressively. “But a kid’s dead. Another is in the hospital. You two just look too good for it. Charlotte has a private chemistry lab where she keeps a whole bunch of poisons. And you”—he pointed at me—“you could easily get into Lee Dobson’s room at night. You were flirting with Elizabeth Hartwell. It looks, for all the world, like the two of you are in some kind of lovers’ pact gone wrong. Someone might be doing their best to set you up, might be throwing absolutely everything at the wall to try to find something to stick, but the much more rational answer is that Charlotte Holmes isn’t half as good as everyone thinks she is. I might not like it, but until I have a better answer—”

Holmes looked up, and a beat later, Shepard’s phone rang.

“Hold on.” He put it to his ear. “Shepard. Slow down. She what? No. No, that’s fine. Yeah. Is she—good. Yeah, I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Glancing over at us with something like relief, he said, “I just need to finish up something here.”

“This pie is delicious,” Holmes said to my father. He looked back at her helplessly. “Is there any more?”

SOMEONE HAD TRIED TO KILL LENA.

That’s how Shepard put it to us. Unbothered by Holmes’s absence, Lena had spent the day after homecoming holed up in bed, reading magazines and working her way through a care package of cookies from home. She’d been playing music loud enough that when there was a knock at her door, she wasn’t sure, at first, if she’d imagined it. But when she finally got up to check, there it was on the threshold: a parcel, and inside the parcel, a sliding ivory jewelry box.

Though she unwrapped the paper, Lena didn’t open the box. With the roommate she had, she’d gotten used to seeing some weird things, and in the past, when mysterious packages had arrived, they’d always been for Holmes. (“I do a lot of online shopping,” Holmes told Detective Shepard without batting an eye.) So she’d set it on her roommate’s desk and taken a nap.

She woke up twenty minutes later to a man in a ski mask looming over her, one hand at her throat, as if he were about to check her pulse or strangle her. Lena screamed. The man ran. And she immediately called the police, surrendering the mysterious box to their custody. As we spoke, they were examining it at the station.