A Study in Charlotte

It was a single paragraph, down at the very end of a long stream of gossip, squeezed between a bit on the Royal Family and another about Shelby’s favorite band:

Remember how the oh-so-secretive Holmeses made a big splash last year inviting boy-genius heartthrob (and DPhil student) August Moriarty, 20, to be a live-in tutor for their daughter Charlotte, 14? The two families have had bad blood between them for more than a hundred years now, and daddy Alistair wanted to make a very public peace offering. Well, it looks like things at Casa Holmes took a turn this past week. August was escorted out by the police, and not for diddling with the children! Our source tells us that he got caught feeding Charlotte’s dirty little drugs habit. Oxford’s already expelled him, the Moriarty family’s disowned him: what’s next for the former future professor? As for Miss Charlotte Honoria Holmes, we hear it’s boarding school or bust.

So her middle name was Honoria.

I had to read it again. A third time. A fourth. And then I made myself read between the lines. Was I feeling bad for August Moriarty? Was that what this was? Anyone else would look at the age disparity there and think, Oh, that asshole took advantage of an innocent young girl, but Charlotte Holmes wasn’t innocent. She was imperious, and demanding, with a self-destructive streak that ran as wide as the Atlantic. I thought about the way she’d run roughshod over Detective Shepard when she’d wanted in on this case. About how she’d convinced me of my own worthlessness when she’d wanted to be alone with her homemade bomb. Her blackmailing a math tutor into buying her drugs was only a hop, skip, and a jump away.

The worst part? I’d almost known. I’d made an educated guess, that night in the diner, and she’d let me believe it was the whole story—that she was sent to America because of her drug problem. Never mind the Moriarty at the center of it all.

If any of this was true, August would have a million reasons to want to bring Holmes down. I racked my brain to remember what Lena had said that night at poker. If she was right that Holmes was upset about August her freshman year, it was further proof that she did actually have a heart, and a conscience, despite her protests. (Honestly, if I were Holmes, I’d be worried he was living on a street corner somewhere.) Milo had come to visit and said . . . what? That he’d take care of things. But Lena hadn’t known how, only that Holmes had been happier after Milo left. At the time, I’d thought, oh, drone hit. And now I just wanted to know how much it had set Milo back to pay August off. I hoped August had been given a sizable check, maybe a little house by the sea. A book-lined study where the poor bastard could continue doing his math on his own terms.

It would’ve been one thing for a Holmes to fall in love with a Moriarty, I thought bitterly. In fact, it’d be sweepingly, crushingly romantic—and on cue, my imagination began to color it in. Charlotte and August, our star-crossed lovers, locked in a constant battle of deductive wills. Missile codes swapped via elaborate games of footsie. Having veal cutlets in the garden while debating whether to annex France. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

The thing was, Charlotte Holmes didn’t fall in love.

And even if, somehow, she had (my stomach roiled again), she’d fucked him over in the end. Jesus, Holmes had screwed a Moriarty. A whole family of art forgers and philosophers and blue-blooded assassins sitting in their ivory towers, connected to the lowest reaches of the underworld by the gleaming strands of their ambition. Sure, they weren’t all bad, but enough of them were, and after this business with August, every last one would have reason to be out for Charlotte’s blood.

I tried to yank myself back from the brink. I could be doing that same thing I did in the diner—seeing ninety percent of the story, but missing the ten percent that actually mattered. Maybe I was all wrong. For one thing, the Daily Mail wasn’t exactly known for their journalistic integrity. And maybe August really had encouraged her habits—maybe she was the innocent one.

Then why was he trying to kill her?

Well, I thought, as long as I was being awful, I might as well go ahead and be petty with it. I opened my father’s computer and, half-covering my eyes, put Moriarty’s name into an image search. He was a dork, I told myself, a math nerd; he probably had gelled hair and an overbite.

The page loaded slowly. The pictures came up, one by one.

He looked like a Disney prince.

I shut the laptop hard.

FOR ANOTHER HOUR I SAT THERE, PARALYZED IN MY DELIBERATIONS. When I finally reached a decision, I didn’t feel any better. I spent an hour on Google, trying to dig up what I needed—but as I suspected, it was nowhere to be found.

All right, then. This had to get even more personal.

As silently as I could, I unlocked the study door and crept into the hall. All was still. Downstairs, I heard the lonely, spectral sound of Holmes’s violin; she was safely occupied. In the guest room, her dirty clothes were gone from the edge of the bed, but her phone was sitting out in plain view.

A few weeks back, she’d decided to give me the passcode—for emergencies, she’d said. Her eyes had glittered as she rattled it off.

“I thought it was supposed to be a random string of numbers,” I’d protested. It was a weak protest: I’d been thrilled. Birthday, snow day, Christmas Day thrilled.

Holmes had graced me with her half-second smile. “If someone can get their hands on my mobile, I’m either dead, or close to it. In any case, you’re the only other person I’d want to use it. So I thought I should choose a key code you can remember. Surely you can remember this.”