A Study in Charlotte

Well, my father had married the right woman. She was just as insensitive as he was.

“My best friend almost died today,” I said to her. “It was a really close call. I don’t think that’s cool.”

She patted me on the shoulder. “If you hold on a sec, I’ll get a fitted sheet for that mattress.”

I stomped up the stairs with an armload of linens. In the guest room, Holmes was curled under the floral coverlet, sound asleep in her clothes. She’d scrubbed some of the dirt from her face, but not all of it, and she looked like a Dickensian orphan against the white sheets. I unfolded the blanket from the end of the bed and tucked it over her, standing for a long moment to watch the moon move across her hair. She was alive. She would wake up tomorrow to scheme and argue with me, to bring me terrible sandwiches, to push against me until I made myself a better partner. Her sad eyes and her sharp tongue and the way she touched my shoulder when she thought I wasn’t listening. I was always listening.

She was right there, and still I couldn’t believe it. I resisted the urge to brush her hair away from her forehead. She stirred, and I pulled my hand back.

“Watson, what is it?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“I shouldn’t,” she said, pushing herself up. “We need to work this case. Something terrible is about to happen.”

I gently pushed her back down. “Not tonight. Nothing will happen tonight. Go back to sleep.” I pulled my mattress up next to the bed and lay down; it sighed out a long breath of air.

“Watson.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry I picked a fight with you,” Holmes said sleepily. “But you should know that I had a good reason.”

“I know, I was being an idiot.” I really didn’t want to do this now, I didn’t, but I would if I had to.

“No. It wasn’t your fault.” Her voice was fading into a thin whisper. “The note said you’d be killed if you stayed, so I fixed it. I was horrible until you went away.”

I sat straight up into the dark, but Holmes was already asleep.

HAD IT BEEN ANY OTHER DAY IN THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE, and I’d been told something like that, I would have stopped sleeping altogether.

But that night, I was out in the space of ten minutes. It wasn’t that I felt particularly brave, or that I’d resigned myself to my violent, rapidly approaching death (though that wasn’t a bad plan, really). My body had just proved itself physically incapable of handling more terror. Enough, it decided, and shut the whole thing down.

I woke as the first rays of sun crept into the room. More precisely, I woke to a toddler-shaped eclipse.

“Hi,” he said, placing a sticky hand square on my mouth.

I removed it carefully, sitting up. “Hello,” I said. “How did you get in here?”

Holmes’s bed was rumpled and empty, the door wide open.

“I like ducks.” He looked disconcertingly like pictures I’d seen of myself as a child. Guileless eyes, wild dark hair. My mother used to say I could get away with murder, and looking at him, I believed it.

For the record, I’d never resented my half brothers for anything that happened between my father and me. They were little kids, and none of it was their fault.

Besides, he was pretty cute.

“I like ducks too,” I said, and scooped him up to take him downstairs with me. Thankfully, I wasn’t inexperienced at talking to babies—I had a whole mess of little cousins. “What’s your name?”

“Malcolm,” he said in a shy voice. “Your name is Jamie.”

“That’s right.” I bounced him a little as we walked into the kitchen.

“It snowed!” he yelled, pointing out the back door at the expanse of white lawn.

I wondered what the wreckage of the sciences building looked like this morning. Our destroyed lab open to the air, all shrouded in white. With a strange pang, I wondered if Holmes’s collection of teeth survived.

Abbie turned around from the stove where she was making pancakes. “Oh no, Mal attack! Sorry about that. I wanted to let you sleep in.”

I shrugged, juggling Malcolm to my other arm. “It’s okay, he was just saying hi. Have you seen Holmes? I need to find her, and kill her.”

She gave me a dubious look. “In the family room, with your father and Robbie. He’s showing her the cat.”

“I didn’t know you had a cat,” I said, trying to make conversation. I did, in fact, know they had a cat. I was really hoping to get one of those pancakes.

Abbie frowned and didn’t offer me one. “It’s skittish and hates everyone. Robbie spent the last hour trying to find him for her.”

“Come along,” I singsonged to Malcolm, “we’re going to meet Miss Charlotte, who thinks that keeping Mister Jamie in the dark is a fun, fun game.”

In the family room, my father and Holmes were examining a piece of paper they’d laid out on the coffee table. The cat—a handsome tabby—was purring on her lap.

“But it hates me,” the small boy at her feet was saying plaintively. “Why does he like you?”

She looked down at him, considering. “Because I have a bigger lap for him to sit on. Wait ten or so years, and then he might like you better.”

Robbie burst into tears.

“Right,” my father said. He took Malcolm from me and grabbed Robbie by the hand, leading him from the room as he sobbed. “Let’s see if your mother has finished with those pancakes.”