A Study in Charlotte

Something about all this was naggingly familiar, but I couldn’t put a finger on what.

“When did this happen?” Holmes demanded, hands shaking. I hadn’t realized that she’d cared about Lena so much. “Just now? I spoke with her not twenty minutes ago.”

The detective took out a notepad and paper. “What about?”

Holmes’s mouth twitched. “She’d spilled punch on me at homecoming and wanted to know if I was still angry. I told her I was over it, and we’d get my dress to the cleaners. No harm, no foul.”

So it had been Lena on the phone, earlier. I’d never seen Holmes take one of her roommate’s calls before. She always sent them, and everyone else’s, straight to voicemail to screen at her leisure.

“Does she know that you went down to the station? Did she know where you were today?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “The only person I really talk to is Jamie. I doubt anyone at the school knows I’m gone, unless they saw you haul us away in the cruiser. But it was dark.”

My father was taking notes in a chair in the corner. “Dark,” he muttered to himself.

“But Lena’s okay?” Holmes asked. Her lower lip trembled. “I’m sorry, I just—this sounds awful, but I really do think that man was there to hurt me, not Lena. And that weird box . . . Jamie, doesn’t it ring a bell for you too?”

She wasn’t acting like herself. She was acting normal. Like she’d have any reaction other than swift and extreme mobilization at hearing that that she’d missed a crime in her own dorm room. Like she wasn’t . . .

I put it together in a flash.

Oh, she was brilliant. Like a hurtling comet you couldn’t look at dead on without burning your retinas right off. Like a bioluminescent lake. She was a sixteen-year-old detective-savant who could tell your life story from a look, who retrofitted little carved boxes with surprise poison springs early on a Saturday morning when everyone else, including me, was asleep in their beds.

She’d set herself up to be the target of a fake crime to get us off the hook for the real one. And she’d used Lena, and some mysterious guy, to do it.

“Culverton Smith,” I said, piecing it together aloud for Shepard’s sake. “It’s from a Holmes story. We’re being set up. Jesus Christ, tell your policemen to wear gloves when handling that box. Thick ones.”

To his credit, he took me seriously. “Making a call. But I want an explanation as soon as I’m back.” He stepped outside.

“You,” I said to her, “are a genius.”

Across the table, Holmes slipped from false concern into very real satisfaction. “It’s quite a good story, you know. ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective.’ Pity that Dr. Watson smothered what should have been an exercise in logic in all that sentimental garbage about his partner.”

“The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” for me, has always been the hardest of the Sherlock Holmes stories to read, and not because it isn’t brilliantly done. It’s 1890. Dr. Watson, who’s living with his wife away from Baker Street, is urgently called to Sherlock Holmes’s bedside. The detective has caught a rare, highly contagious disease that, as he tells Dr. Watson, can only be cured by Culverton Smith, a specialist in tropical illnesses living nearby. The catch: Smith hates Holmes because he correctly accused Smith of murder. His victim was infected with, and died of, this same disease. But Holmes insists that Watson bring Smith anyway, that Smith is their only hope. While Holmes rattles off a series of ridiculous-sounding orders on how Watson is to go about fetching this specialist, Watson idly picks up a small ivory box that’s been resting on the table. Out of nowhere, Holmes insists that Watson put it down and not touch it again.

All the while, Watson thinks his best friend is dying. It’s wrenching to read, and even more so as we watch Watson follow Holmes’s orders—the clear product of a hallucinating mind—to the letter. From trust, or affection, or old habit, we’re not sure, but either way, the last of these insane directions has Watson hiding himself in the closet in preparation for Smith’s arrival. Smith comes in. The gaslight is low. Holmes is sweating in feverish agony on the settee. The specialist begins to gloat, thinking he and the detective are alone. That little ivory box? He’d mailed it, fitted with an infected metal spring, hoping to catch Holmes with it unaware. After Smith has confessed everything to Holmes, who he believes to be a dead man, Holmes asks him to turn up the gaslight. It’s a signal: in bursts Inspector Morton of Scotland Yard, who’s been waiting at the door, and Watson, who’s witnessed the whole conversation from the closet. Smith is hauled away to jail.

And Holmes? Not sick at all. He faked his symptoms. Starved himself for three days until he was skin and bone, then applied a convincing coat of stage makeup to make himself appear at death’s door. As for the box—well. He wasn’t in any danger. He reminds Watson that he always thoroughly examines his mail.

Charlotte Holmes had stripped the “Dying Detective” for details and rearranged them to make her own narrative, pulling Lena in on her scheme to sell the story. I wondered who the man in the ski mask was. Tom? Unlikely. Still, it was just the sort of story that our Sherlock-obsessed murderer would’ve seized on and used against us.

The part I couldn’t get over, that distracted me from even this show of Charlotte Holmes’s powers, was remembering how much my great-great-great-grandfather had trusted hers. Oysters, I remembered. Between the instructions he’d given Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes had been ranting, in his “hallucinations,” about oysters.