A Study in Charlotte

“Excellent.” She scraped at it with the edge of her tweezers. I’d said it just to make her laugh, but I warmed at the compliment anyway. “Jar,” she said, and I handed her one.

“I don’t see any blood,” I said, and she shook her head. There wasn’t any to see, not anywhere.

Outside the door, I heard footsteps—more than one set—and people talking. To my horror, I heard the edges of my name, of Dobson’s. Above the din, a grizzled voice said, “Is this the boy’s room?”

“We need to go,” I told Holmes, and for a second she looked like she was about to protest. “Now,” I said, pulling her to the window—I swear I saw the doorknob begin to turn. Without waiting, I lowered myself down the outside of the building, then jumped the rest of the way.

The second my feet hit the ground, my fear broke open into exhilaration.

I heard the window shut with a snap. Holmes landed behind me, and I spun her around by the arm.

“Were you seen?” I asked breathlessly.

“Of course not.”

“Holmes,” I said, “that was brilliant.”

That flicker of a smile again. “It was, wasn’t it. Especially for a first effort.”

“A first—you hadn’t done that before.”

She shrugged, but her eyes were gleaming.

“You had us break into a crime scene to steal evidence—something that could make us look even more guilty than we do already—and you’ve never done that before?” If I sounded a bit shrill, it was because I felt a bit shrill.

Holmes had already moved on. “We need to get to my lab,” she said, pulling her shoes from her bag, “without arousing any suspicion for why we’re together. Do you want to split up and meet there in twenty? Sciences, room 442.” She tossed my sneakers to me in an elegant, underhand lob. “And take the long way, will you? I want to get there first.”

SCIENCES 442 WAS A SUPPLY CLOSET.

A big one, but still.

When I walked in, Holmes was already bent over her chemistry set. It was the real deal, the kind I’d only seen in movies—tall beakers, and big fat ones, smoke coming off of the strange green substances inside. Bunsen burners all lit like a row of stage lights. This setup had pride of place in the middle of the room, and she’d lashed a pair of desk lamps to a neighboring bookshelf for light. That bookshelf was filled with a collection of battered-looking textbooks, everything from Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Gray’s Anatomy to huge tomes with names like The History of Dirt and Baritsu and You. There was an entire shelf just on poisons. At the bottom, I spied the famous biography of Dr. Watson, the one my mother had told me was too scandalous to read. (Which meant I had read it immediately. Apparently, he was really, really . . . popular with girls.)

Next to it was the only fiction in the entire bookcase: a handsome leather-bound set of Dr. Watson’s Sherlock Holmes tales. The whole series, from A Study in Scarlet to His Last Bow. Their spines were all broken like they’d been read a million times.

If I was harboring any doubts about my part in this investigation—and to be honest, I’d had some Titanic-sized ones ever since we broke into Dobson’s room—seeing those well-thumbed books made me feel better. I belonged here, I thought, with her, as surely as anyone belonged anywhere.

As weird as here was.

Because there was just so much else crammed in that space, and any one part of it would have made her Prime Suspect #1 in Every Murder Ever. One wall was plastered with diagrams of handguns, obscured by a hanging set of giant bird skeletons. (A vulture peered knowingly at me, its eyehole bullet-black.) The tatty love seat against one wall was spattered in what had to be blood, dripped, most likely, from the riding crops hung above it. There were sagging shelves filled with soil samples, blood samples, what looked like a jar of teeth. Beside the jar was a violin case, a lone bastion of sanity.

I fervently hoped that I was the only visitor she’d ever had to this lab. Or else she was most definitely going to jail.

“Watson,” she said, gesturing to the love seat with a set of tongs, “sit.” I grimaced. “The blood’s all dried,” she added, as if that helped.

It was a measure of how tired I was that I obeyed her. “How goes—whatever you’re doing? What did you find, anyway?”

“Twelve minutes,” she said, and busied herself with her chemistry table.

I waited. Impatiently.

“I don’t like to hypothesize in advance of the facts,” she said finally. “But what I have found suggests that our killer wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He used at least two methods of poison, maybe three.”

“Poison?” I asked, unable to hide the relief in my voice. I knew nothing about poison; there was no way I could be accused of killing Dobson.

But Holmes could.

I swallowed. “I thought you were a sophomore. You haven’t had chemistry yet.”

“Not here,” she said, holding a pipette to the light. “But I was privately tutored when I was younger.”

Of course she was. I thought again of what my mother had said, that the Holmeses drilled their children from birth in the deductive arts. I wondered what else Holmes had learned up there in their vast, lonely Sussex manor.

She cleared her throat. “How to defend myself. How to move silently through a room, how to locate every possible exit within seconds of entering a space. Entire city plans, beginning with London, including the names of every business on every street, and the fastest way to get to any of them. How, in short, to be always aware of what everyone is doing and thinking. From there, you can reason to why they do the things they do.” For a moment, her eyes went dark, but her face cleared so quickly I decided I had imagined it. “And I was taught all the other subjects one learns in school, of course. Is that enough of an answer?”