A Study in Charlotte

So much for composure. Holmes flinched, as if she’d been hit across the face.

“The day after, you called the law down on him. After the police left, after they found Lucien and dragged him away to jail—oh, you look so surprised, what the hell did you think happened to him?—I drove all over creation, looking for him. The police couldn’t find him; he’d made his confession and run. Oxford had expelled him. No other school would have him, not with that record. He’d panicked. Gone home. And he’d taken his father’s pistol into his childhood bedroom, and he shot himself in the face.”

I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand at all—I’d thought August had been hauled away to jail, and when he’d been paroled, had gotten a job at Greystone working for Milo. I racked my memory as best as I could. What had Holmes said, exactly, when she was telling me the story?

August stayed to take the blame, as I suspected he would . . . he got a job, finally. Works for my brother in Germany.

There wasn’t anything about what happened in between.

Even in my feverish haze, I began filling in the blanks.

August Moriarty had faked his death, most likely with his parents’ help. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before: he’d confessed to selling hard drugs to a minor, and the sentence for that would have been much longer than the timeline Holmes had laid out for me between his crime and his new life. His parents had given him up, Holmes had said. They would have had to cut off all public contact to maintain the fiction of his death. But they’d buried the news of it, too. I hadn’t found any obituaries when I was researching him, any mention of a funeral. It was as if August Moriarty had simply stopped existing. Frozen in time as a wonder boy, working on the intricate mathematical patterns in the Arctic Circle, his thick blond Disney hair blowing in the frigid wind.

And Bryony Downs didn’t know.

It would have been difficult for her to accompany him in his new life, but had he really loved her, he would have found a way, I thought. He was a brilliant man. Too brilliant, maybe, not to see the hint of fanatical darkness in his fiancée. The obsession, the wild selfishness. The willingness to do anything to achieve her own ends.

Maybe August Moriarty saw this as his opportunity to escape her. An understandable decision. Despite it leading to where Holmes and I found ourselves now.

“You,” Bryony said, edging still closer to Holmes, who regarded her coolly. “You have his death on your hands. So you’ll do time for a death. I’m just the middleman.”

And Lee Dobson and Elizabeth Hartwell the sacrificial lambs.

Though she hadn’t mentioned Elizabeth at all.

“Who were you working with?” Holmes asked.

Bryony flicked her hair. “Who said I was working with anyone?”

Holmes stared her down until, shifting uncomfortably, Bryony spoke.

“The man who convinced the judge that he’d no idea of the contents of his car’s boot and served a minimum sentence. You didn’t forget who drove the car to your house to get you your fix, did you? Lucien Moriarty, you stupid child. God, the best part of all of this has been feeding you from my hand. I offered you warnings. Touched them with ungloved hands, in case you’d manage to lift my fingerprints. Printed them in the font that I write all my medical reports in. Made the spellings English, instead of American. It was a paint-by-numbers murder, and you were too dumb to learn to pick up the paintbrush. I did everything but hand myself over to you. Knowing, of course, that the moment you found me out, Lucien would close the bear trap. You do know what Lucien does for a living, yes?”

“He’s a fixer,” Milo murmured.

“Precisely,” Bryony said. “Gold star, you. Except for the part where he’s a Moriarty first. They have connections you can only dream of. Tell Lucien you want a rattlesnake as window dressing for your little scene, and he’ll make an untraceable one appear. Tell him you want a beautiful little suitcase bomb, and he’ll hire a professional to make you one. Tell him you want a plastic jewel shoved down a girl’s throat, and she’ll choke on it. Tell him you want a new identity, a passport, a job at Charlotte Holmes’s boarding school, and he’ll give it to you wrapped in a bow. God, the very lack of evidence should have been a clue. I gave up my dreams of being a doctor for this. Do you hear that? I gave up my dreams to make you serve the sentence you deserved. I’d nearly all the credits necessary for a nursing degree, and if that could get me here and to you faster—well. For once, sweetie, you were the hottest ticket in town.”

She knelt down before the ottoman, put her hands on Holmes’s knees, leaned right into her face. “This is why I’m a better person than you. Are you ready? I could kill you right now. No”—she held a finger up to Holmes’s lips—“that suitcase bomb was never intended to kill you, don’t be stupid. I was just disgusted by the thought of you and the Watson boy playing house in there. Acting out your roles. Do you want to know why I set up Dobson’s murder as a remake of ‘The Speckled Band’? It’s a reminder. They’re stories. They’re stories, and this is real life. You are not Sherlock Holmes, and you won’t ever be.”

Holmes stared straight down her nose at Bryony’s sneering face. And then she turned her head to me and, slowly, unmistakably, blinked her eyes twice.

Play your last card, she’d said. What card could I possibly play? Only sheer force of will kept my eyes open now. I could barely speak, much less get to my feet and make a stand. If I was supposed to be the muscle in this operation, I was totally out of commission.