I filled them in. Shepard made a low growling noise. “‘Give my regards to Charlotte Holmes,’” he repeated, shaking his head. “I need to talk to John Smith again. He won’t confess to the attack. Only to dealing drugs, and then he only gives me information he wants me to use against you, Charlotte.”
Holmes touched a finger to the skeleton’s nose, stilling it in its orbit. “Something else is going to happen if our attacker doesn’t get what he wants,” she said. “Someone else is going to get hurt.”
“What does he want?” I said. “Us locked up, no key. I don’t see how he’s going to get that. Unless Shepard puts us away for show.”
“No.” She frowned. “I need unfettered access to the campus, not to be rotting away in some cell. We need to figure out the connection between the man you’re holding and the man he claims he is. I need to make a plan.”
“We need to make a plan,” Shepard said.
So we did.
Holmes and I began by retracing our steps through the access tunnels, back to the police-cordoned storage room. John Smith’s footprints still ended at its door, a literal dead end. But Holmes refused to give up. We covered what felt like miles of territory that night, her coursing ahead, me yawning clandestinely behind my hand.
When we returned to her lab, we stayed up even later examining the school library’s copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was a brand-new school edition of the stories. The bookmark the killer had placed inside was one of the Sherringford ones they left on the circulation desk, and it was clean of all but the school librarian’s fingerprints. But that was to be expected. Besides, Mr. Jones had no conceivable connection to either me or Holmes. The book itself was completely unremarkable: intact spine, intact pages. The only remarkable thing about it was that the killer had tucked it into Dobson’s cold hands. At dawn, when Holmes began going through it page by page with an actual magnifying glass, I curled up on the floor to go to sleep.
I spent the next few nights even more tired, wading through all the BBC America footage that had been shot after Dobson’s murder and put online. The police had requested everything that wasn’t on their website, and there were hours and hours to contend with. I ran through it all frame by frame, looking for a still shot of the dealer’s face. I needed to know if the man Shepard had in custody was the same one I’d seen around Sherringford. It took hours. I found a lot of talking-head speculation about boarding school life, about how privileged kids consider murder to be just another game. I found a number of interviews where our classmates slagged off Holmes, slagged off me, cried for show. I ate a lot of jalapeño-flavored cheese puffs. And I didn’t see a single hair of the man we were looking for. After I slept through my French class three days in a row, Monsieur Cann cheerfully suggested that I would perhaps prefer to take Spanish, n’est-ce pas?, and I decided to give the solo research up as pointless.
While I’d been chained to my laptop, Holmes had done the legwork, pulling up security footage closer to home. Sherringford didn’t have any cameras of their own, so she’d done a circuit of the businesses whose storefronts faced campus, getting the lowdown on their security systems. Then, she told me, it was just the simple expedient of hacking into their feeds, using this particular spring-code that her brother had taught her, which, of course, she had modified herself using the blah-blah differential, and then something else that sounded like conversational calculus, and my eyes began to cross.
She poked my shoulder with her shoe, and I trapped it neatly with my hands. “What?” I asked.
“Since you don’t care about the more complex workings of tonight”—she shook her foot free—“do you want to be in charge of the snacks?”
“Snacks are complex,” I said. “How do you feel about tasty, tasty puffed corn?”
More footage. More cheese doodles eaten in the dark of Sciences 442, one more long, dreary, wasted weekend. Still no sign of the man we were looking for. Could he make himself go invisible? Did he even exist at all? I fell asleep with my head on a bag of Jiffy Pop and woke up nauseous and pissed off to the dim light of the screen against Holmes’s face. My watch read 2:21 in the morning, but her eyes were still wide open.
There was nothing else to do but ask Shepard to let me talk to his prisoner. I was sure that I’d remember his reedy, obnoxious voice even if I couldn’t exactly place his face. Shepard dragged his heels on it for days, but when it became clear that neither he nor we were making progress, he agreed to let one of us in to see him. Holmes, tight-lipped, agreed that it should be me; I’d had the clearer look at him, after all.
The night before I was to go to the jail, the prisoner hung himself.
IT TOOK ANOTHER THREE DAYS BEFORE WE PERSUADED Shepard to let us into the morgue.
“You’re part of the forensics club,” the medical examiner said doubtfully.
I shifted my weight from foot to foot. “Detective Shepard is our adviser,” I said. It was true. Sort of. You could look at this semester as the weirdest independent study anyone had ever had.
“I thought forensics was the school speech team.” She blinked at us through her glasses. “Not the science club.”
“Huh. I haven’t heard that,” I said, straight-faced.
Though it was a Saturday, Holmes was wearing her school uniform, her ribbon tie pressed and perfect. She’d found a pair of glasses somewhere, black-framed ones that dwarfed her features, and she’d drawn on her eyebrows to make them seem thicker. Holmes usually looked like a weapon. Today she looked like a teen movie’s idea of a dork, the one that could take off her glasses, shake out her hair, and instantly be elected prom queen.
She looked, in short, like the kind of girl that adults found themselves confiding in.
“Can I tell you the truth?” she asked the examiner in an American accent. She sounded eager. Bright. “I mostly wanted to come here because I heard you had an amazing microscope. I have some samples from my bio class in my bag. Could I take a look at them? I’m working on a project for the national Intel contest. Cancer research.”
The examiner’s face softened slightly. “That’s fine,” she said, and laughed self-consciously. “For a second, I thought that you wanted to look at a body.”
Holmes laughed too, her pretty-girl laugh. “Oh my God, I don’t know if I could handle that. How do you even get used to it? You must be so brave.”
“Practice,” the examiner said. It was clear that she didn’t get this kind of glowing admiration every day. “Practice, and patience.”
“Are they . . . are they scary? Do you still feel like they’re people? Or does it change for you depending on the body?” Holmes shook her head. “Wow, thinking about this would keep me up at night.”
The examiner pursed her lips philosophically. “It should. These are important questions you’re asking, Charlotte. I think about them every day.”
I nodded to hide the fact that I thought she was full of shit.
As always, Holmes was better at this than I was. “Wow,” she said. “Just—wow. And it’s like you run this whole place by yourself. That’s awesome. How many do you end up dissecting in a day?”
“It depends, really. I only have one intact body right now.” The examiner walked over to the wall of morgue drawers. “Are you feeling brave?”
Game, set, match.
Holmes looked over at me with wide eyes. “Oh my God,” she said, a perfect imitation of the bright, well-adjusted girl she’d never been. “Maybe? Yes! Okay, yes, I am.”
We put on gloves and masks, and the examiner put on her best fortune-teller voice, saying “John Smith!” as she pulled the drawer out of the wall with a flourish.
I won’t describe his face. It’s enough to say that his death by hanging left him bloated and bruised and unrecognizable, far past the point where I could positively identify him. But his height was about right, his shoulders. I stared for a moment at his throat, wishing that I could hear his voice to be sure.
“Can I?” Holmes asked, reach
ing for the corpse’s forearm.
A small line appeared between the examiner’s brows. “I guess,” she said.
Swiftly, Holmes turned it over. The man had a tattoo near his wrist in the shape of a compass. Underneath, the word “navigator.”
Holmes looked at me. Do you remember this? her eyes were asking. I shook my head no, and said aloud, “That’s the kind of tattoo you could hide under long sleeves.” At the examiner’s sharp look, I coughed. “Um, I’ve been thinking of getting one.”
“The navigator,” Holmes said to herself, lifting his arm to examine his fingernails. She checked his fingers one at a time, lifted his chin to look at the veins of his neck. Then she ducked her head to look up the man’s nostrils. “Moriarty means ‘seaworthy.’”
The examiner stared at us furiously.
“Etymology,” I said. “It’s really popular. With the kids.”
Our grace period was up, and Holmes knew it too. “Manual labor,” Holmes said, quickly deducing. She pulled out a folded sheet of paper and an inkpad and took down the man’s prints while the examiner sputtered. “Look at those finger callouses. Look at the state of his ankles. He’s all muscle, but it isn’t from the gym. These are a working man’s muscles. Do you see the rope burn on his arm?”
“He’s not a dealer,” I said. “It’s not him.”
“It’s not him,” Holmes said, in the voice that was ragged and wild and hers. “Jamie—it’s a Moriarty.”
“Get out.” The examiner jerked her head toward the door. “Now.”
On Monday, I’d skipped all my classes—my grades were falling, lower now than they’d ever been—to be alone, to make my half idea into a project without her peering over my shoulder. I pulled from the resources Shepard had given us access to and from the files we’d put together on our own. Flight passenger lists. Family trees. Moriartys with criminal records and lists of their known aliases. I took down the riding crops from the wall and pinned all of this up in their place, then began the long and arduous task of cross-referencing. I needed to know which of the Moriartys had come into this country and when. If John Smith wasn’t a member of the family, he was definitely on their payroll. The trick was to find out who hired him.
In the back of my mind, I knew there was a good chance that I was blowing all of this out of proportion. The simplest answer was almost always the right one, and the idea that the entire Moriarty family was out to get me and Holmes was a big, complicated leap from where I was standing. Even if there had been a conflict between Holmes and that family, it was probably small and contained, nothing like the sprawling conspiracy that I was charting up on the wall.
But I kept thinking how the Sherringford killer was insistently re-creating the Sherlock Holmes stories. Those past wrongs that Sherlock and Dr. Watson had made right were being pushed into our present, and the details of the good deeds they’d done were being used to hurt us and the people we knew. Sure, maybe the killer had a personal vendetta against Holmes, but it felt to me like it was something bigger than that, something older, something reaching back more than a century.
Anyway, I couldn’t ignore the way the word Moriarty made my skin crawl.
I focused on four of them. The four Moriartys whose whereabouts weren’t dictated by respectable jobs, who’d been sloppy enough to have their shadier dealings dragged into the public eye. Whoever was doing this to us was sloppy, there wasn’t any doubt of that, and I meant to use it to my advantage.
Hadrian and Phillipa were a brother-and-sister pair of art collectors whose fortune, rumor had it, was used to buy favors from dictators in countries they wanted to plunder. Lucien was August’s older brother, an adviser for some of the more scandal-ridden members of the British Parliament. I read a profile of him in the Guardian that had hinted strongly that Lucien Moriarty knew how to throw his money around to clear just about anyone’s name.
And then there was Lucien’s younger brother: August.
For this, I didn’t have to look through Shepard’s records. It was as easy as plugging August’s name into Google and clicking a button.
The first article that came up was from his college at Oxford. August had presented some complicated theorem at an academic conference in Dusseldorf. The reporter took special care to mention his age: he’d been doing his doctorate in pure math at twenty. He must’ve been a genius to be doing that work so young. The article described his dissertation (fractals, imaginary numbers) in layman’s terms, and I still couldn’t begin to understand it.
But it was dated two years back. I needed newer information, to know if he was still at Oxford, if he’d graduated or been hit by a car or moved to, I don’t know . . . Connecticut.
The rest of the search results linked to academic journals and fellowship competitions, all dated that same year. Not a word about his personal life or about him dating Charlotte Holmes. Just a list of his achievements: August, recipient of a prestigious Institut Zalen grant. August, publishing on vector spaces and the cosmos in Mathematics Today. August, flown to the Arctic Circle to collaborate with scientists studying something called “ice fractals.”
After that, there was nothing. Not a word had been written about August Moriarty in the last two years.
I put it all up on the wall anyway.
At three o’clock precisely, Holmes swung open the door to 442, humming something under her breath. “Hello, Watson,” she said before she’d even seen me, “you’re here early,” and then she stopped in her tracks, staring at the wall.
I realized, too late, that I’d pretty much re-created the murder den we’d found in the access tunnels.
“Oh,” she said.
I waited for the explosion.
She sighed, dropping her backpack on the floor. “It’s a place to start. I came to tell you that Milo ran down John Smith’s prints in some of the more . . . unusual databases. He’s worked as a domestic for the last five years.”
“A domestic?”
“A servant, Watson. He was Phillipa Moriarty’s driver until his disappearance four months ago. There’s our link to the family, sorted. The question is if he was doing all this alone, or . . .”
“You don’t think he was. So, Phillipa then?”
We looked at the wall, side by side.
“Have you ever heard of a rat-king?” She reached out and touched the corner of Hadrian’s photo. “The Moriartys—their disgusting tails are all tied together. Let’s not try to separate them just yet. We’ll start by finding out which of them came into this country, and when.”
On her direction, ship manifests went up onto the wall, freighters that had traveled from England to Boston and the names of the sailors who manned them. (“Seaworthy,” she muttered, taping them up.) We went through lists of private airstrips and private jets. Helicopters. Rowboats. We scrolled through records in New England and in England both. Moriarty was a horrifyingly common last name, but things became even worse when we began running known aliases. Our series of papers grew, day by day, until they engulfed the wall.
Phillipa spoke at a gallery opening in Glasgow. Lucien was photographed with the British prime minister. Hadrian showed up on some German talk show to chat about the Sphinx. How could it be any of them? Were they taking care of business in Europe, flying by night to Connecticut to ruin our lives? It seemed absurd, even by our standards. I spent every moment in 442, working like a madman. (I was even growing the beginnings of a madman’s scratchy beard, which I secretly thought was kind of awesome.) And she worked right beside me with a fury I hadn’t yet seen. Almost everything else went out the window.
Especially for Holmes.
She’d stopped battling me on August Moriarty. Every time I tried to learn something, anything, about what happened between them, she regarded me with a weary tilt of her head, like I was a fly she couldn’t quite get rid of. I was relatively sure she wasn’t eating or sleeping. But it wasn’t just her attitude. Her eyes were somehow both glassy and dry, and as she scratched absently at he
r scalp, going over her millionth passenger manifest, her hair made a crackling sound that hair really shouldn’t make. I kept stifling the urge to ask her if she was okay, to touch her forehead to see if she had a fever. To take care of her.
I brought her food, but it stayed untouched on the plate no matter how I tried to cajole her into eating. When I caught her taking twenty minutes to eat a single almond, I began wondering if there was some kind of Watsonian guide for the care and keeping of Holmeses.
When I sent my father an email to that effect (subject line I Need Your Help, postscript Still haven’t forgiven you and won’t), he responded that, yes, over the years he’d written down an informal series of suggestions in his journal; he’d do his best to adapt and type them up for me.
When the list arrived the next day, it was twelve pages long, single-spaced.
The suggestions ran from the obvious (8. On the whole, coaxing works rather better than straightforward demands) to the irrelevant (39. Under all circumstances, do not allow Holmes to cook your dinner unless you have a taste for cold unseasoned broth) to the absurd (87. Hide all firearms before throwing Holmes a surprise birthday party) to, finally, the useful (1. Search often for opiates and dispose of as needed; retaliation will not come often, though is swift and exacting when it does—do not grow attached to one’s mirrors or drinking glasses; 2. During your search, always begin with the hollowed-out heels of Holmes’s boots; 102. Have no compunctions about drugging Holmes’s tea if he hasn’t slept; 41. Be prepared to receive compliments once every two to three years; 74. (underlined twice) Whatever happens, remember it is not your fault and likely could not have been prevented, no matter your efforts). I wondered if I should create some kind of subclause for when the Holmes in question was a girl and her Watson was a guy who liked girls. It’s not your fault if you care too much about her. If you want impossible things. It couldn’t have been prevented, no matter your efforts.
A Study in Charlotte Page 14