A Study in Charlotte

I realized then that Holmes was laughing.

I looked at her askance, in case she was also bleeding from the head. But there it was: her low chuckle, a hand thrown up to hide it. When our eyes met, there was a kind of confused electricity there, like we’d broken up and simultaneously exchanged vows. It brought back that hallucinatory fear I’d had that night in the infirmary, that Nurse Bryony would just as soon kiss me as smother me with a pillow. I didn’t understand girls at all.

Bryony.

Bryony.

“Holmes,” I said urgently, “what did you say August’s fiancée’s name was?”

“I didn’t.” Her eyes went vague. “I didn’t know her at all, only that they were engaged, and that he left her in the wake of . . . Jesus Christ, Watson,” and she shoved past me in her haste to get out from under the porch.

“Where are you going?” I called.

“Milo,” she replied. I snatched up her shoes and crawled out after her. The two of us together burst through the door, covered in clumps of mud, shivering from the cold—we must’ve looked like we’d come up from some arctic hell. In a way, I guessed we had.

My father was standing with his arms crossed in the middle of the kitchen. “Jamie,” he said, a warning in his voice, as the detective stood up from the table. We pushed past them and ran straight up the stairs. “Where the hell did you two go?” he yelled at our backs.

“Five minutes,” I said, spinning around, “just give us five more minutes.”

In the guest room, Holmes practically fell on her phone. “Milo,” she said into it, and I froze. The text I’d sent. If he ratted me out, this could get ugly all over again. “Where are you? A tarmac? I’m only catching every other word.” Her voice went dangerous. “You’re coming to New York. Tell me why. No, that’s a lie. That is too. Fine, tell me the last time you left your apartment. Before this. No, don’t give me that, you were the one who had them put it in your office building. Yes—no, I’m not on drugs. No. Yes, fine, I am, don’t hang up. Of course I want to see you while you’re here, you ass.”

He was coming. He was coming, and he wasn’t going to tell her that I’d asked him to. I said a silent prayer to the saint of deranged best friends’ deranged older brothers.

Holmes paced, tracking bits of frozen mud into the carpet. “No, don’t hang up, I have a question.” She paused. “What was August’s fiancée’s name? I don’t care. It’s important—no, it’s not what you think—no I’m not—did you just call me a cow, you whale? Milo—damn it.”

She whipped around to face me. “He hung up. The idiot thinks I want her name so I can find her and kill her.”

“There’s some deep irony there,” I said, smiling.

Startled, she smiled back. Just for a second. And then her phone chirped with a message. I peered over her shoulder.

Bryony Davis. Don’t eat her. See you soon.

Bryony Downs. Bryony Davis. She’d barely covered her tracks.

Holmes and I stared at each other. My heart was pounding.

Shepard opened the bedroom door. “So?” he said, his brows knit. “I’ve examined the note. I’ve spoken to your father. And I appreciate your passing along Bryony Downs to me for a more, ah, official interrogation. But what is all this”—he gestured to Holmes’s muddy pants and my damp hair—“about, exactly? Something I should know?”

She threw me a glance. I caught it.

“Um, well, we’re dating now,” she said, a hand creeping up to touch her hair. “We just made it official, and—oh God, Jamie, this is kind of embarrassing.”

I tugged her hand down into mine. “It’s not embarrassing,” I said. “I mean, it’s been such a long time coming. But I guess I was, um, blind to my own feelings.”

Holmes beamed at me, and I pulled her to me, tucking her under my arm. The detective made a small, involuntary noise, like he was choking.

“We were outside in the snow—well, okay, I ran out there because I got mad because I thought he didn’t like me, but it turned out he did like me, he was just shy, so he ran out there to find me, and—” She smiled at him, and it was strange to see how fatigue made that fake expression real. “I mean, do you want to hear what he said? It was so romantic.”

Shepard put up his hands. “I have so much to do,” he said, backing out into the hallway. “You know how it is. All back at the station. Where I should go.”

“We’ll talk more later,” Holmes assured him, with what I could tell were the frayed ends of her composure.

He smiled tightly. “Right. Yes,” he said, shutting the door, and from the hall, we heard him mutter, “God, I hate teenagers.”

THE NEXT MORNING WAS FOREVER IN COMING, AND STILL, when it finally arrived, I wasn’t ready. How could I have been? We didn’t have a plan. Or if we did, I wasn’t in on it.

To top it all off, I was exhausted. I’d spent the night before taking care of Holmes while she came down. It’d happened right after Shepard left, her falling on the bed like her strings had been cut. She’d insisted she didn’t want anything—no surprise there—but I’d forced water on her, and crackers one at a time from a package my father had left outside the door. It was just the two of us, silent, in that dark little floral-sheeted island. She stared at the ceiling fan, her arm thrown over her face. She didn’t say a word until I stood to go tell my father what we’d figured out about the school nurse.