A Study in Charlotte

Her fingers were cool and soft against my face, and I found myself leaning into her touch. Then I froze. “Sorry,” I whispered to her, mortified.

“What are you apologizing for?” she asked, her voice surprisingly rough-edged. With her other hand, she brushed my hair back from my face.

The nurse cleared her throat, cutting into my confusion. “I’ll keep a close eye on him. It’s not bad enough to send him to the hospital, but I still don’t want to take chances. You might have to reschedule your plans, just to be safe.”

Holmes smiled down at me. She wasn’t Hailey. She was something much more insidious. Charlotte Holmes without the edges, all combed and clean, well loved and loving in return. I knew it would be gone tomorrow, all of it—the gentle way she touched me, the glitter of her undivided attention, the bows and the perfume. It would all go back into her costume box, and she would be the real Holmes again.

Because this wasn’t real, even if she spoke to me in what sounded like her real voice. “Do you hear that? You should be fine,” she said.

I shouldn’t have wanted it the way I did.

I was beginning to go, I could tell, and I knew I would wake up back into our old life. The lights winked at me; they liked the secrets I told them. But silently, I reminded myself, secrets are best when kept to oneself. They began blowing out, one by one, like candles. “Good night,” I told Holmes, pulling her hand to my chest, and then I was awash in sleep.

“WATSON,” SHE HISSED. “WATSON, WAKE UP, I’VE GOT TO GO. Night check’s in ten minutes.”

The room was dark, but I could see light coming in from under the door, where the nurse’s desk was. Thankfully, it seemed my head had cleared enough to form coherent sentences. “Did you find anything?” I asked. Or tried to ask. It came out cotton-mouthed.

Holmes handed me a glass of water with an impatient look. I was right; she was herself again, and I suppressed a flare of disappointed guilt.

After a gulp, I repeated my question.

“She went out for a smoke, and I picked the lock on the medicine cabinet. There’s a store of protein powder in with the other prescriptions, for Gabriel Tinker, according to the tag, but the canisters were all empty. I tasted a bit of powder I found in the cabinet, and it seemed innocent enough.”

Tinker was the rugby team’s fly-half, the one who’d been sleeping on the field. “You tasted it? Why couldn’t you take it back to your lab and examine it there?”

She looked affronted that I should even ask. “Efficiency.”

“Right, okay, you nut.” I pulled myself, slowly, into a sitting position. Holmes tucked a pillow behind my back. “So let’s break it down: she’s from England. That’s why we flagged her file originally, right?”

“She was born there, but she moved here when she was a teenager. Or so she said when I pressed her, after I shed a few homesick tears. My face is still swollen. I forgot how uncomfortable this whole crying business is.”

“No powder, no England. Two near misses, then,” I said. “Unless you somehow wronged her back when you were a toddler, if I’ve got her age right. Twenty-two?”

“Twenty-three.” Holmes got to her feet. “If she is, in fact, our culprit, she wouldn’t be telling the truth to us anyway, so it hardly matters. As it stands, I can tell she’s hiding something, but that could just be the sort of reserve you have around students. I’ll try to track down an actual sample of that powder tomorrow, because what I tried tasted more like dust than protein.”

“Shouldn’t we focus on someone who we have a clear lead on? Like, I don’t know . . . August Moriarty?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m off to write my Macbeth paper. Be careful tonight. And maybe shower. You smell awful.”

When she left, I realized I was starving. I wolfed down a roll of crackers I found next to the bed and took the small cup of what looked like Tylenol, washing it down with the rest of the water. As I set the glass carefully back down on the table—depth perception was a bit of an issue, post-concussion—I realized what I’d done. The woman taking care of me might be a poisoner. With a fixation on me and Holmes. And I’d put myself into her overnight care, tossing back the pills she gave me without a second thought.

The light in the next room flicked off. I stared at the door, willing it to stay shut, willing the nurse to pack up her things and leave. I willed this feeling to be just paranoia from my head injury, to remember the cluster of Moriartys sharing space on our wall. I willed Bryony to just be an ordinary woman who took a job at Sherringford because of the pay and the beautiful campus and because she didn’t mind taking care of teenagers with the flu, not because she’d tracked Holmes and me across an ocean to frame us on Moriarty’s orders.

The knob turned. The door swung open.

“I’m headed out,” Nurse Bryony said softly. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, thanks.” Leave, I thought. Go home.

But I heard her set down her bag. She padded into the room, smelling faintly of flowers. An ordinary, pretty-girl smell. I swallowed hard. The room was beginning to sway, like a ship, and I wished badly that Holmes was still there.

“You’re nearly out of water.” Nurse Bryony refilled my glass at the sink and took another roll of crackers from the cabinet above, setting them both by my bed. “There. Go easy on these. I’m surprised you’re not more nauseous.”