A Study in Charlotte

“Huh. I haven’t heard that,” I said, straight-faced.

Though it was a Saturday, Holmes was wearing her school uniform, her ribbon tie pressed and perfect. She’d found a pair of glasses somewhere, black-framed ones that dwarfed her features, and she’d drawn on her eyebrows to make them seem thicker. Holmes usually looked like a weapon. Today she looked like a teen movie’s idea of a dork, the one that could take off her glasses, shake out her hair, and instantly be elected prom queen.

She looked, in short, like the kind of girl that adults found themselves confiding in.

“Can I tell you the truth?” she asked the examiner in an American accent. She sounded eager. Bright. “I mostly wanted to come here because I heard you had an amazing microscope. I have some samples from my bio class in my bag. Could I take a look at them? I’m working on a project for the national Intel contest. Cancer research.”

The examiner’s face softened slightly. “That’s fine,” she said, and laughed self-consciously. “For a second, I thought that you wanted to look at a body.”

Holmes laughed too, her pretty-girl laugh. “Oh my God, I don’t know if I could handle that. How do you even get used to it? You must be so brave.”

“Practice,” the examiner said. It was clear that she didn’t get this kind of glowing admiration every day. “Practice, and patience.”

“Are they . . . are they scary? Do you still feel like they’re people? Or does it change for you depending on the body?” Holmes shook her head. “Wow, thinking about this would keep me up at night.”

The examiner pursed her lips philosophically. “It should. These are important questions you’re asking, Charlotte. I think about them every day.”

I nodded to hide the fact that I thought she was full of shit.

As always, Holmes was better at this than I was. “Wow,” she said. “Just—wow. And it’s like you run this whole place by yourself. That’s awesome. How many do you end up dissecting in a day?”

“It depends, really. I only have one intact body right now.” The examiner walked over to the wall of morgue drawers. “Are you feeling brave?”

Game, set, match.

Holmes looked over at me with wide eyes. “Oh my God,” she said, a perfect imitation of the bright, well-adjusted girl she’d never been. “Maybe? Yes! Okay, yes, I am.”

We put on gloves and masks, and the examiner put on her best fortune-teller voice, saying “John Smith!” as she pulled the drawer out of the wall with a flourish.

I won’t describe his face. It’s enough to say that his death by hanging left him bloated and bruised and unrecognizable, far past the point where I could positively identify him. But his height was about right, his shoulders. I stared for a moment at his throat, wishing that I could hear his voice to be sure.

“Can I?” Holmes asked, reaching for the corpse’s forearm.

A small line appeared between the examiner’s brows. “I guess,” she said.

Swiftly, Holmes turned it over. The man had a tattoo near his wrist in the shape of a compass. Underneath, the word “navigator.”

Holmes looked at me. Do you remember this? her eyes were asking. I shook my head no, and said aloud, “That’s the kind of tattoo you could hide under long sleeves.” At the examiner’s sharp look, I coughed. “Um, I’ve been thinking of getting one.”

“The navigator,” Holmes said to herself, lifting his arm to examine his fingernails. She checked his fingers one at a time, lifted his chin to look at the veins of his neck. Then she ducked her head to look up the man’s nostrils. “Moriarty means ‘seaworthy.’”

The examiner stared at us furiously.

“Etymology,” I said. “It’s really popular. With the kids.”

Our grace period was up, and Holmes knew it too. “Manual labor,” Holmes said, quickly deducing. She pulled out a folded sheet of paper and an inkpad and took down the man’s prints while the examiner sputtered. “Look at those finger callouses. Look at the state of his ankles. He’s all muscle, but it isn’t from the gym. These are a working man’s muscles. Do you see the rope burn on his arm?”

“He’s not a dealer,” I said. “It’s not him.”

“It’s not him,” Holmes said, in the voice that was ragged and wild and hers. “Jamie—it’s a Moriarty.”

“Get out.” The examiner jerked her head toward the door. “Now.”

On Monday, I’d skipped all my classes—my grades were falling, lower now than they’d ever been—to be alone, to make my half idea into a project without her peering over my shoulder. I pulled from the resources Shepard had given us access to and from the files we’d put together on our own. Flight passenger lists. Family trees. Moriartys with criminal records and lists of their known aliases. I took down the riding crops from the wall and pinned all of this up in their place, then began the long and arduous task of cross-referencing. I needed to know which of the Moriartys had come into this country and when. If John Smith wasn’t a member of the family, he was definitely on their payroll. The trick was to find out who hired him.

In the back of my mind, I knew there was a good chance that I was blowing all of this out of proportion. The simplest answer was almost always the right one, and the idea that the entire Moriarty family was out to get me and Holmes was a big, complicated leap from where I was standing. Even if there had been a conflict between Holmes and that family, it was probably small and contained, nothing like the sprawling conspiracy that I was charting up on the wall.