A Study in Charlotte

Holmes hardly noticed. She whipped out a tiny magnifying glass and leaned over the paper. “Watson, come here and tell me what you can make of this.”

“Is it going to explain why you kept direct communications from our stalker a secret from me, choosing instead to inflict some serious psychic damage with the end goal of getting me to leave you to deal with a bomb all by yourself?”

“Yes.” She didn’t even look up. “Come here.”

She’d squared the note in the middle of the table. As I approached, I saw that she’d laid a sandwich bag between it and the wood.

Holmes handed me a pair of latex gloves. “They were in your stepmother’s first-aid kit,” she said by way of explanation. “Go on. What do you see?”

I read it aloud.

IF YOU KEEP DRAGGING JAMES WATSON

INTO THIS HE WILL DIE TO

TONIGHT

HE DOESN’T DESERVE IT THE WAY YOU DO

THIS WON’T STOP UNTIL YOU HAVE LEARNT YOUR LESSON

“A grammar error,” I said. “‘To,’ instead of ‘too.’ Spellcheck wouldn’t catch that. And learned is spelled the English way. ‘Learnt.’”

She gestured impatiently. “What else?”

“Well, it’s a death threat. Though they seem to like me more than they like you.” Gingerly, I lifted the note by its corner. It was square, cut from regular printer paper, thin to the touch. There was a crease down the middle, probably from where Holmes had put it in her pocket. The ink was black. I held it up to the light, but I couldn’t see anything special about the rest of it.

I told her my observations, and she nodded, pleased. Maybe I wasn’t so useless after all.

“What did you come up with?” I asked her.

“All the things you didn’t,” she said, and took the page from me. “Our letter-writer is most likely a woman, and she’s writing it on her own behalf. Look, she’s used one of those specialty sans-serif fonts, the kind that doesn’t come standard. You’d have to download it, and you wouldn’t put in that sort of effort if you were someone’s lackey—you’d just use Times New Roman, whatever the default was. And that would be the smarter move, too. Either she’s so up herself she feels she doesn’t need to cover her tracks, or she wrote this in an absolute hurry and that was the default font.”

I took it back and squinted at the font. “It doesn’t look all that weird to me.”

Holmes sighed. The cat on her lap turned its baleful eyes toward me. Apparently she’d found her spirit animal.

I scrubbed at my face. I needed coffee. Or a sedative. “But how do you know it’s a woman?”

She snatched the page back. “All it took was a few minutes’ research for me to find the origin of this font—it’s called Hot Chocolate, how twee—along with a few hundred others on one of those design sites. Well and fine, but that was the ninth hit on Google. The first was a website that catered to ‘sorority life,’ and I found our Hot Chocolate on the page about creating invitations for parties.”

“So she’s a sorority girl,” I said.

“She’s someone who looks at sorority websites,” Holmes corrected me. “But that was only one search term. After working out the algorithms, I tried one hundred and thirty-nine others, beginning, of course, with the most common syntactical search strings and moving, systematically, to the least likely”—here, my eyes began to glaze—“but each time, this website came up first. I doubt that anyone who makes a typo on their death threat looks past the first Google hit. And this website was absolutely covered in glitter.”

“How did the note arrive?”

“It was slipped under my door yesterday morning, like so.” She folded it back in half. “Look at that crease. It wasn’t just casually folded. That was done with a blunt object and a considerable amount of pressure—you can tell from the dimpling at the seam. Someone was upset when they wrote this and took it out on the paper.”

Obviously. It was a death threat. The horrible weight of what Holmes had done yesterday fell back on my shoulders. “So after you received it, you chased me out, and then . . . waited for someone to come by and kill you?”

She regarded me evenly. “It seemed a good chance to meet them, didn’t it? But I expected them to come by with a gun. Bombs are a coward’s weapon.”

“And if you hadn’t been in the bathroom on the other side of the building, you would have died.” I bit down on a knuckle, reining in my flare of temper.

“I know. That’s why I made you leave.” She popped the note back into the bag. “I’ll have your father give this to Detective Shepard, I’m sure he’ll want it now that we’re finished. You did very well. You just missed one thing.”

“What?”

Leaning over, she held the unsealed bag under my nose. “What does that smell like to you?”

Forever Ever Cotton Candy. I coughed, waving a hand in front of my face. “Didn’t you say you could only get that off Japanese eBay?”

“Yes.”

“So where the hell did you even find out about it?”

“August Moriarty gave me my first bottle for Christmas,” she said. “I’d mentioned that I liked cotton candy in passing, and he’d hunted high and low for a perfume that scent. It had only been manufactured in Japan, he told me, and discontinued in the eighties.” Her eyes went faraway. “I wore it for a few weeks, even though it’s heinous, because . . . well, no matter. It did prove to be useful, in the end.”