A Study in Charlotte

“Stop being dramatic, and tell us what happened,” Shepard said, sounding like he wanted to get out of 442 as quickly as possible. I couldn’t blame him—Holmes had lit up her jar of teeth from behind, probably in anticipation of the detective’s visit. It was, I thought, her version of hanging fairy lights.

I filled them in. Shepard made a low growling noise. “‘Give my regards to Charlotte Holmes,’” he repeated, shaking his head. “I need to talk to John Smith again. He won’t confess to the attack. Only to dealing drugs, and then he only gives me information he wants me to use against you, Charlotte.”

Holmes touched a finger to the skeleton’s nose, stilling it in its orbit. “Something else is going to happen if our attacker doesn’t get what he wants,” she said. “Someone else is going to get hurt.”

“What does he want?” I said. “Us locked up, no key. I don’t see how he’s going to get that. Unless Shepard puts us away for show.”

“No.” She frowned. “I need unfettered access to the campus, not to be rotting away in some cell. We need to figure out the connection between the man you’re holding and the man he claims he is. I need to make a plan.”

“We need to make a plan,” Shepard said.

So we did.

Holmes and I began by retracing our steps through the access tunnels, back to the police-cordoned storage room. John Smith’s footprints still ended at its door, a literal dead end. But Holmes refused to give up. We covered what felt like miles of territory that night, her coursing ahead, me yawning clandestinely behind my hand.

When we returned to her lab, we stayed up even later examining the school library’s copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was a brand-new school edition of the stories. The bookmark the killer had placed inside was one of the Sherringford ones they left on the circulation desk, and it was clean of all but the school librarian’s fingerprints. But that was to be expected. Besides, Mr. Jones had no conceivable connection to either me or Holmes. The book itself was completely unremarkable: intact spine, intact pages. The only remarkable thing about it was that the killer had tucked it into Dobson’s cold hands. At dawn, when Holmes began going through it page by page with an actual magnifying glass, I curled up on the floor to go to sleep.

I spent the next few nights even more tired, wading through all the BBC America footage that had been shot after Dobson’s murder and put online. The police had requested everything that wasn’t on their website, and there were hours and hours to contend with. I ran through it all frame by frame, looking for a still shot of the dealer’s face. I needed to know if the man Shepard had in custody was the same one I’d seen around Sherringford. It took hours. I found a lot of talking-head speculation about boarding school life, about how privileged kids consider murder to be just another game. I found a number of interviews where our classmates slagged off Holmes, slagged off me, cried for show. I ate a lot of jalapeño-flavored cheese puffs. And I didn’t see a single hair of the man we were looking for. After I slept through my French class three days in a row, Monsieur Cann cheerfully suggested that I would perhaps prefer to take Spanish, n’est-ce pas?, and I decided to give the solo research up as pointless.

While I’d been chained to my laptop, Holmes had done the legwork, pulling up security footage closer to home. Sherringford didn’t have any cameras of their own, so she’d done a circuit of the businesses whose storefronts faced campus, getting the lowdown on their security systems. Then, she told me, it was just the simple expedient of hacking into their feeds, using this particular spring-code that her brother had taught her, which, of course, she had modified herself using the blah-blah differential, and then something else that sounded like conversational calculus, and my eyes began to cross.

She poked my shoulder with her shoe, and I trapped it neatly with my hands. “What?” I asked.

“Since you don’t care about the more complex workings of tonight”—she shook her foot free—“do you want to be in charge of the snacks?”

“Snacks are complex,” I said. “How do you feel about tasty, tasty puffed corn?”

More footage. More cheese doodles eaten in the dark of Sciences 442, one more long, dreary, wasted weekend. Still no sign of the man we were looking for. Could he make himself go invisible? Did he even exist at all? I fell asleep with my head on a bag of Jiffy Pop and woke up nauseous and pissed off to the dim light of the screen against Holmes’s face. My watch read 2:21 in the morning, but her eyes were still wide open.

There was nothing else to do but ask Shepard to let me talk to his prisoner. I was sure that I’d remember his reedy, obnoxious voice even if I couldn’t exactly place his face. Shepard dragged his heels on it for days, but when it became clear that neither he nor we were making progress, he agreed to let one of us in to see him. Holmes, tight-lipped, agreed that it should be me; I’d had the clearer look at him, after all.

The night before I was to go to the jail, the prisoner hung himself.

IT TOOK ANOTHER THREE DAYS BEFORE WE PERSUADED Shepard to let us into the morgue.

“You’re part of the forensics club,” the medical examiner said doubtfully.

I shifted my weight from foot to foot. “Detective Shepard is our adviser,” I said. It was true. Sort of. You could look at this semester as the weirdest independent study anyone had ever had.

“I thought forensics was the school speech team.” She blinked at us through her glasses. “Not the science club.”