A Study in Charlotte

My name: Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.

“Go away,” I hollered, and eased myself down into the chair. I was beginning to feel the cuts on my hands, the glass that I’d pushed still further into the skin with each new thing I’d rifled through or discarded. I should go to the infirmary, I thought, but I didn’t want to tip off anyone—anyone who hadn’t already heard the commotion, that is—and Nurse Bryony was still sharing space with Mr. Wheatley on my no-fly list.

I hunted through my shaving kit for a pair of tweezers, put a T-shirt between my teeth, and got down to the business of pulling out the glass. It wasn’t sanitary, God knows, but it also hadn’t been a good day for making decisions. You don’t seem to have a lot of good ones, Tom had said. He wasn’t wrong. I nearly bit through the cloth trying not to scream, but I didn’t manage to keep myself from crying. It wasn’t so much from sadness or pain as acceptance of the impossible, a great well of this is wrong bubbling up all at once. I wondered absently if the transmitters on my desk were picking up the sound. One more shameful thing in with all the rest. I resisted the urge to smash the audio bugs like the insects they were—I’d need them as evidence, after all.

What I didn’t understand was why they’d bugged my room. Who was I, anyway? I wasn’t the extraordinary one. I was Jamie Watson, would-be writer, subpar rugger, keeper of the most boring journal in at least five states. I couldn’t even get people to call me by my full first name. If I was important, it was only as a conduit. Holmes’s only access point.

What information had I revealed, unwittingly, in this room? What had I given away?

With a growing sense of horror, I realized that I’d given away plenty, even some that day. Mr. Wheatley; the faked concussion; the search through Bryony’s things: I’d said all of it out loud. I’d spent the week after the murder telling Tom about all our suspicions and our findings, what we’d found in Dobson’s room. I’d even bitched about August Moriarty. God, how stupid could I have possibly been?

By now, I was sure they knew I’d found their bugs. I needed to get over to Sciences 442 and sweep our lab, see if Holmes could trace the signal. If she couldn’t, I knew that Milo could, and I knew he wasn’t more than a phone call away.

The shirt I’d been wearing was ruined, smeared with blood and bits of glass. I stripped it off and shook it out before I tore it into makeshift bandages for my hands. The knots I’d made would hold, but not for long. Maybe we could steal Lena’s car keys again and go to the hospital. We, I kept thinking, we. I knew she’d forgive me. She had to. Without each other, we could, quite literally, die.

I put on a clean shirt and flung open the door only to trip over Mrs. Dunham. She’d slouched down against the wall outside my room, legs kicked out before her. It was clear from her face that she was crying.

“Jamie,” she said hoarsely. I knelt down beside her. “What have you done to yourself? Look at your hands! And your face—are you hurt? I heard the worst noises coming from your room.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I told her. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

That phrase was beginning to sound meaningless.

She leaned over to look inside my room and pulled back in shock. “Oh, Jamie. What have you done?”

“I’ve got to go,” I said, “but I’ll explain later, I promise, I’ve got to find Holmes.”

She grabbed at my hand to keep me from leaving, and I bit back a yell of pain.

“I guess that means you haven’t heard,” she said, and her eyes misted over with tears. “Oh, Jamie, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. But there’s been an accident. A horrible, horrible accident.”

MRS. DUNHAM SAID IT’D ONLY HAPPENED TEN MINUTES before—had it only been ten minutes since I found that camera? It could have been seconds, or years, for all I could tell—and that campus was being evacuated, building by building. Michener Hall was empty except for the two of us. She’d thought I’d destroyed my room on hearing the news. Because she, unlike everyone else, knew where Holmes’s main haunt was.

They were blaming it on a gas explosion, she’d said.

I’d pelted across campus at a dead run. It was beginning to snow, a powder-dusting that clung to my bare arms and the bandages on my hands. I’d forgotten my coat, my phone. My heart beat harder as I got to the quad.

From clear across campus, I could see that the sciences building was a smoking ruin.

My phone. Where was my phone? What if Holmes was trying to call me? What if she was trapped in the building somewhere? That was the worst possibility I’d allowed myself to imagine, that Julian and George’s flightless bones had collapsed on top of her, but that she was fine underneath—a little sooty from the smoke, perhaps, but fine . . . but then, I wasn’t giving her enough credit. Holmes was a magician. She had to be standing outside, whole and hale and intact, smoking a cigarette as she watched it all burn. Most important, she’d be alive. Still furious with me, I’d give the universe that—she could never want to speak to me again for all I cared—so long as she was alive.

All of that went straight from my mind when I saw it. It wasn’t possible. The northwest corner of Sciences was blown clear through: the corner where Holmes’s supply closet was. Battered pieces of granite had thudded mightily to the ground. Through the smoke, I could see the building’s interior walls, tattered and stacked like the pages of an old book lit with a match. Here and there, bits of broken wall were still smoldering.