A Study in Charlotte

Somewhere in the distance sirens sounded. Uniformed police officers were cordoning off the area, pushing the few bystanders back into a huddled mass of winter coats. Over a bullhorn, a voice ordered any remaining students to report to the union for further instructions. An officer had set up a standing light that sharply illuminated the building’s entrance. There would be a thorough search, he was saying. The firemen would pull out any survivors.

Survivors.

I pushed past him, and the other officer waving a pair of plastic flares, and then past a yellow-suited fireman—there were fire engines behind me, now, flashing their lights—who snagged me by the arm. The look I turned on him must’ve been that of a feral dog because he loosened his grip for the half second it took me to shake him off. I took off in a sprint toward the front door, and was instantly tackled to the ground.

They wrestled me back toward the emergency vehicles where they assigned an officer to be my babysitter and made me sit under his watchful eye on the edge of the fire engine. They didn’t want to arrest me, they said, but they would if I tried to take off again. So I sat dully while the red lights washed everything with fire. At some point, the officer, in a moment of compassion, pressed a cup of something hot into my bandaged hands. He tried to convince me to put on his jacket, but I wanted his pity even less than I wanted his attention. Possibly I insulted his mother. I couldn’t remember. He kept away from me after that.

I wondered what Holmes’s funeral would be like. I felt sick for a while, and then I stopped really feeling anything at all.

Someone must have taken my wallet from my pocket, or done some calling around, because suddenly my father was there at my elbow. He led me to his car, where the heater was running full blast, and said something about taking me to the hospital. My hands. I’d forgotten about my hands. They were the first words of his I’d registered.

“No.” I felt my body come alive with terror. “No, Dad, someone is after us, and I can’t go to the hospital. I have to find Holmes. Don’t you see? I can’t tell you until I know it’s safe but there’s something very wrong going on and I need her. I need her here, do you understand?”

I can only imagine what I must have looked like, half-mad with terror and grief and covered in my own blood, ranting at him from the passenger seat.

But my father did an amazing thing. He put the car into park. Slowly, as if he might scare me into flight, he reached over to cup the back of my head. “I understand,” he said. “For now, let’s just go home.”

He put it into drive and turned on the headlights. And there she was, standing in their white glow.

Holmes’s skin was smoked black from the explosion, her hair flecked with snow. Her violin dangled from her fingers. She opened her mouth, and I saw her say my name.

I was out of the car in a heartbeat, and in the next, she was in my arms.

Holmes was always Holmes, even after a terrible shock. With the utmost care, she reached around me to place her Stradivarius on the sedan’s purring hood. Only once it was secure did she allow herself to be held, and even then, she kept her palms on my chest as if to brace herself. She was slight, and freezing cold. Her posture, as always, was perfect.

“You’re alive,” I murmured, tucking my head over hers. “I’m so sorry.”

For once she didn’t chide me for stating the obvious. Instead, she let out a long, shuddering breath. “The only thing I saved was my Strad, and I had to go back in for it. Watson, I was in the bathroom, and if I hadn’t been—the bomb was planted in our lab.”

I laughed hollowly. “They’re saying it’s a gas explosion.”

She shifted to look up into my face. “A homemade bomb, and in our lab. There was shrapnel stuck in the walls. Watson”—she kept returning to my name—“I assume you look such a mess because you’ve found wiretaps in your room, and not because you’ve taken up cage fighting.”

“The cut hands,” I guessed, seizing on this chance to feel normal, “and what else?”

“The fact that you’re stuck all over with glass like some porcupine. Camera behind the mirror, and then, of course, you’d look for the audio. Which made you feel both personally wronged and suspicious—if you don’t trust someone, your left eye twitches at the corner. Right now, it’s happening every three seconds. By looking at the kinds of mud on your shoes, it’d only take moments to trace your route from Michener—”

I pulled her back up against me, and she battered my chest with ineffective fists.

“You are doing this to shut me up,” she complained.

“I am,” I said, and she began to cry. I backed off. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s not you. This is horrifying,” she said through her tears. “I’m not in the least sad. Why am I crying?”

My father bundled us together in the backseat under a moth-eaten blanket; I insisted that we wrap her Strad in another. I tucked her under my arm, and she wept quietly the whole way.

ABBIE, MY FATHER’S WIFE, HAD MADE UP THE GUEST ROOM, and after we arrived Holmes took a cursory look at the bugs from my dorm room, pronounced them dead, and put herself straight to bed. While my father went to call the school, my stepmother pulled me aside to ask where she should put the inflatable mattress.

“Are you having sex with her?” Abbie asked, and promptly looked mortified. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to teenagers, and I can’t believe the first thing I’ve ever said to James’s son is . . . I don’t really know how to . . . are you two having sex?”