A Study in Charlotte

“We’re not,” I assured her. Bizarrely, this was proving the perfect way for us to meet—unscheduled, without expectations. I didn’t have the energy to hate her. Honestly, I couldn’t feel anything except tempered relief. Holmes was safe, if in shock. We were being looked after, if only for a night. And Abbie had an open, charming face, with a spray of freckles across her nose, and I was so tired. I decided to just get it over with and start liking her.

“Then I’m putting you in with Charlotte,” she said, “so don’t start tonight. Having sex, I mean. And your nose is blue—are you hypothermic? Go run yourself a hot bath.”

Upstairs, I peeled off my makeshift bandages in the bathroom sink. I had to soak in the tub with my hands resting over the sides so I wouldn’t bleed into the water. Afterward, I put on some of my father’s old sweats and let Abbie lead me down to the kitchen table. After giving me some Advil, she cleaned out the wounds in my hands with antiseptic and, with a pair of tweezers she’d sterilized, took out the rest of the glass shards under my skin. Then she got to work on my scalp. I clamped my mouth shut to keep from yelling.

My father came in halfway through the process. He’d been on hold all that time, as Sherringford’s lines were jammed with panicked parents calling in. Finally, the school had sent out a mass email. He read it off to us there at the table. There hadn’t been any casualties from the “gas leak,” thank God, though the physics teacher had been in his lab and suffered “minor injuries.” But Sherringford was shut down for the rest of the semester.

It’s about time, I thought.

My father kept reading something about rescheduled finals, and incompletes, but I didn’t pay much attention because I didn’t care. There was too much else to think about. The letter said that, after the explosion, students had been evacuated to a nearby Days Inn under the supervision of the RAs and house mothers until their parents could come retrieve them. Tomorrow, Sherringford was bringing in a specialist team from Boston to sweep the campus for other possible “leaks,” and after they gave the all clear, students would be escorted, in roommate pairs, to get their things. They’d give us each ten minutes to pack. The schedule for each dorm had been attached.

My father put his smartphone away and looked me hard in the eye. “Charlotte is here. She’s safe. And I’ve been very patient. But now I need you to either give me an explanation for why you’ve fifteen vicious cuts and an exploded science building, or I’m taking you to the hospital.”

Abbie’s hands stilled in my hair.

I tried my best to sketch it out for him: my fight with Holmes, the bugged room and the broken mirror, the homemade bomb, our suspicions about Mr. Wheatley and Nurse Bryony and the Moriartys, what I’d said to Tom in our room.

My father had out his ever-present notebook, and he jotted things down as I spoke. When I came to the part about August Moriarty—how the records on him just stopped, what Milo had scrubbed from the Daily Mail, the thing Charlotte wouldn’t tell me—my father made a disgruntled sound. “Jamie. Number fifteen: if you wait for full disclosure from a Holmes, it might be years before you learn a damn thing.”

I threw up my hands. “Tabloids, Dad. The Daily Mail. Have they ever been an accurate source of information? And anyway, I couldn’t look it up even if I wanted to.”

“You,” my father said sadly, “still have rather a lot to learn. Don’t you remember the stories I used to tell you about Charlotte?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m not stupid.”

“Since you’re not stupid, you have, of course, reasoned from that information that I’ve kept tabs on her since she was a little girl. And that I most likely have a file or two up in my study that could fill you in on some of this.”

The answers had been there all this time.

All this time. In my childhood home.

I opened my mouth to ask him for the file when he looked at me and said, “You know, if you hadn’t been so unfairly angry with me, you might have gotten your hands on it weeks ago.”

That settled it. Because I might have had a burning need to know the truth about Charlotte Holmes, might have obsessed over it for an endless string of awful nights—but I still resented my father more.

“I don’t want it.”

He looked like I’d struck him. “What?”

“You heard me,” I told him. “This is between the two of us, and I trust her.”

“But—”

“I trust her, Dad.” It was true, after all.

“Of course. Of course you do.” My father sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Right. Anyway, that detective of yours has been calling me all night. Do you not have your mobile? No? That explains it. I’ll call him back and tell him what you told me”—he lifted his notebook—“if you’d like to go to bed.”

“Yes, more than anything.” I stood unsteadily. “No hospital, then?”

He gave a surprised laugh. “Are you mad? Someone’s trying to kill you. No, you’re staying right here.” Shaking his head, he disappeared into the hallway.

Abbie was putting away her first-aid kit, smiling to herself. Did she think all of this was fun? I subtracted a few of the points I’d given her.

“What exactly is so funny?”

“It’s like you’re his mini-me,” she said. “Oh, it’s awful, all of it, but it’s like a spy movie! I mean, how cool.”