A Study in Charlotte

I don’t think I would have spent so much time thinking about it—about her—if I wasn’t also coming to grips with how poorly I fit in at Sherringford. By the time all the trouble with Dobson started, I’d made friends—mostly through Tom, who seemed to know everyone from the cute girls in my classes to the upperclassmen playing ultimate Frisbee in the quad. Soon, I knew them too. But there was a flimsiness to all of those friendships, like a strong wind might blow them away.

For one thing, people were always talking about money.

Not upfront, not How much do your parents make? More like, What do your parents do? Was your mom a senator? Did your dad manage a hedge fund? Oh my God, I’ll be in the Hamptons for Christmas, too, I heard one girl tell another in a voice that carried across the room. More than once, I saw students buying drugs from the creepy blond townie who lurked in the corners of our parties and around our quad at night. When they weren’t using their parents’ money to fund their coke habits, my classmates were globe-trotting. I overheard the girls in my French class trading notes on who was building orphanages in Africa last summer (never a specific African country, just “Africa”), who was backpacking through Spain.

Sherringford wasn’t one of those schools like Andover or St. Paul’s, filled with future presidents and baseball stars and astronauts. Sure, we had electives like screenwriting and Swahili, teachers with PhDs and tweed jackets, students sent off to the lesser Ivy League schools—but we were a rank or two below extraordinary, and maybe that was the problem. If we weren’t in the fight to be the best, we’d fight instead to be the most privileged.

Or they would, anyway. I’d just landed myself a front-row seat to their match. And somewhere out there, in the dark, Charlotte Holmes prowled, playing entirely by her own rules.

The night of Dobson’s murder, I’d been up late mulling over how to fix things between us. Holmes and I. I was fairly sure that I’d blown any chance of our ever being friends, and that thought kept me up until half past three. I’d been asleep for what felt like a moment when I was woken by the panic spreading down our hall. Tom had already thrown on clothes and gone to investigate before I’d even dragged myself from my bed. I thought, hazily, that it must be a fire drill and that I had somehow missed the alarm.

But there was a crowd gathered at the end of the hallway: guys from our floor, mostly, but our gray-haired hall mother was there as well, and beyond her was the school nurse and a knot of policemen in caps and uniforms. I pushed through them until I found Tom, staring blank-faced at a door wrapped in police tape. It stood open about an inch, and beyond it, the room was dark.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“Dobson,” Tom said. When he finally turned to face me, I saw the frightened look in his eyes. “He’s dead.”

I was shocked to realize he was frightened of me.

The guy behind me said, “That’s James Watson, he’s the one who punched him,” and the buzz around me ratcheted up to a roar.

Mrs. Dunham, our hall mother, put a protective hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right, James,” she said, “I’ll stay here with you.” Her glasses were askew, and she’d thrown a ridiculous silk robe over her pajamas; I hadn’t known that she stayed nights in the dorm, or that she even knew my name. Still, I was fiercely glad she was there, because a man in a button-down shirt broke away from the policemen and crossed straight over to me. “James, is it?” he asked, flashing a badge. “We’d like to ask you some questions about tonight.”

“Oh no, you don’t,” Mrs. Dunham said. “He’s a minor, and you need his parents’ permission to question him without a guardian present.”

“He’s not under arrest,” the man insisted.

“All the same,” she said. “Sherringford policy.”

“Fine.” The detective sighed. “Do they live close by, son?” He produced a notepad and pen from his trouser pocket, like this was Law & Order.

Well. It kind of was.

“My mother lives in London,” I said, and my voice sounded strained even to my ears. Tom’s stare was hardening into something like a glare. Behind him, a boy who lived next door to me was quietly crying. “My father lives here in Connecticut, but I haven’t seen him in years.”

“Can you give me his number?” the detective asked, and I did, pulling out my phone to read out the digits I’d never once called myself. He said some other things about staying put, and getting some sleep, and them coming by to see me in the early afternoon, all of which I agreed to. Did I have a choice? He gave me his card: it read Detective Ben Shepard in a businesslike font. He didn’t look much like the other policemen I’d seen, on-screen or otherwise. On first glance, he gave an impression of grocery-store averageness, but as I stared at him, holding his card, I saw that his face had an unusually eager cast to it, like a dog eyeing a lofted ball. He didn’t look like he had a tragic past, some murdered mother or brother that drove him to become a detective. He looked like someone who played video games with their kids. Who did the dishes without being asked.

That impression of goodness unsettled me more than if he’d been a mustache-twirling villain. Because it was clear that Detective Shepard thought I was the bad guy.

He gave me what was meant to be a reassuring smile. Then he left, him and the other policemen, and everyone else milled around for another few minutes until Mrs. Dunham sent them back to their rooms. They shoved past me. All of them did, Harry and Peter and Mason and even Tom, wrapped in his ubiquitous sweater-vest. The looks they gave me were uniform. Outsider, their faces said. Killer, you deserve what’s coming to you.