A Study in Charlotte

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Shouldn’t we focus on someone who we have a clear lead on? Like, I don’t know . . . August Moriarty?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m off to write my Macbeth paper. Be careful tonight. And maybe shower. You smell awful.”

  When she left, I realized I was starving. I wolfed down a roll of crackers I found next to the bed and took the small cup of what looked like Tylenol, washing it down with the rest of the water. As I set the glass carefully back down on the table—depth perception was a bit of an issue, post-concussion—I realized what I’d done. The woman taking care of me might be a poisoner. With a fixation on me and Holmes. And I’d put myself into her overnight care, tossing back the pills she gave me without a second thought.

  The light in the next room flicked off. I stared at the door, willing it to stay shut, willing the nurse to pack up her things and leave. I willed this feeling to be just paranoia from my head injury, to remember the cluster of Moriartys sharing space on our wall. I willed Bryony to just be an ordinary woman who took a job at Sherringford because of the pay and the beautiful campus and because she didn’t mind taking care of teenagers with the flu, not because she’d tracked Holmes and me across an ocean to frame us on Moriarty’s orders.

  The knob turned. The door swung open.

  “I’m headed out,” Nurse Bryony said softly. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thanks.” Leave, I thought. Go home.

  But I heard her set down her bag. She padded into the room, smelling faintly of flowers. An ordinary, pretty-girl smell. I swallowed hard. The room was beginning to sway, like a ship, and I wished badly that Holmes was still there.

  “You’re nearly out of water.” Nurse Bryony refilled my glass at the sink and took another roll of crackers from the cabinet above, setting them both by my bed. “There. Go easy on these. I’m surprised you’re not more nauseous.”

  I wondered if Dobson was nauseous, before he died. I’d never had a concussion before. Was nausea a symptom? Was it a symptom of arsenic poisoning?

  That’s it, I thought. Holmes can come up with the next plan.

  In the half-light, Bryony was a dark silhouette, all except the shining hair that fell across her face as she leaned down over me. She had a strange, hot electricity to her. I thought, in my confusion, that she might kiss me, or slap me across the face, that she would pick up the pillow and smother me with it.

  But she put a cool hand to my forehead instead. “Get some rest, Jamie, so you can see that girl of yours again tomorrow,” she whispered, her breath hot on my face. “The other nurse will be in first thing.” She gathered her things and left.

  I didn’t even try to sleep. Instead, I stayed up listening to the quiet clock of my heart, wondering every moment if I was about to stop breathing. I’d been careless with my life, I knew I was, but if I died tonight, I was going to be furious. I debated texting Holmes a thousand times. If I was wrong, I’d look like an idiot.

  Around dawn, I threw the water glass to the floor, needing to hear something shatter. It was plastic. It bounced. When the morning nurse came in—an older woman with round Midwestern vowels—I was shivering with the effort to stay awake.

  But she washed and filled the same cup, gave me pills that matched the ones I’d taken earlier. She made some crack about how I looked as if I’d been chased through hell, and I was overcome with the sensation that I was missing something, something huge.

  WHEN I FINALLY GOT SIGNED OUT OF THE INFIRMARY, IT WAS dinnertime. Mrs. Dunham insisted on escorting me back to my room.

  “Now get into bed,” she said, waiting with crossed arms until I did. “I’ve already talked to Tom, and he’s going to bring you something back from the dining hall. I want you to call me if you need anything, or if you start feeling terrible, and we’ll get you right to the hospital.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Dunham,” I said unhappily. I was horribly ripe—I hadn’t showered since before rugby practice—and starving, and ragged at the edges from my all-night vigil, and I just wanted to be left alone.

  She bustled around, gathering extra blankets for my bed and picking Tom’s clothes up from the floor. “I got special permission for an after-hours visit, if you’d like to see Charlotte.”

  “Thanks. I don’t really need anything else,” I said, because she was genuinely sweet, and she wasn’t showing any signs of leaving.

  “I love that you two are friends,” she said. “Those stories were my favorite when I was younger.”

  I smiled tightly at her. It was terrible, the way my stomach contracted at that sentence. I’d used to love hearing people talk about the Sherlock Holmes stories, and now I couldn’t help making anyone who mentioned them to me into a suspect. “They were mine too.”

  When Tom returned, he was juggling a sandwich, a pair of apples, and a cup of hot cocoa. “There you are,” he said, arranging it all on my desk with a flourish. “I heard you ate it pretty hard at practice. Incredible catch, though, according to Randall.”

  I tore into the sandwich. “How are you? How are things with Lena?”

  “She’s good. What’s Charlotte paying her off for? Lena’s, like, rolling right now.”

  “That’s from poker,” I said, mouth full. I wanted to leave the investigation behind at least long enough to get through dinner.

  “Well, are you and Charlotte still prime suspects?” he asked, pulling over a chair.

  I shrugged. It hurt to. “Can we talk about something else? What did I miss in my history class? I got all my other assignments.”

  His face fell. “Nothing really,” he said, and waited, as if he expected me to cave and tell him all about my adventures. I wished he knew how stressful and humiliating those adventures actually were. It wasn’t my job to educate him on that, though, so I let the conversation die, crunching into one of the apples he’d brought. Eventually, Tom gave up on me.

  Holmes swung by an hour later. Thankfully, I’d had a chance to shower. “How’s the patient?” she asked as she perched on the edge of my bed.

  I was always suspicious of Holmes in a good mood. “Has someone else been killed?” I asked, only half-joking.

  She smiled at me. “Better. Try again.”

  Without turning around, Tom tugged out one of his earbuds, then the other. I don’t know why it annoyed me so much, his clumsy attempt at spying. Maybe I was done being grist for the gossip mill. I lifted an eyebrow in his direction to tip Holmes off, but she’d already noticed. She whipped out her phone.

  “I’ve got a date,” she announced, texting furiously. My phone lit up silently on the bed between us, and I craned my neck to see. Apparently Wheatley’s brother keeps snakes in NJ.

  “Where’d you find the guy? Craigslist? The sewers?” Any missing? I texted back.

  Shepard’s running it down. “Funny. You’re funny. Look, I thought tomorrow you could help me write a poem for him. Maybe show it to Mr. Wheatley tomorrow after class, get his opinion?” Interrogate him.

  Why don’t you? “Love poems? It sounds serious.”

  “Oh, quite. He’s dreamy.” Because you’re his student. He doesn’t know me. She swung her legs off the bed. Furtively, she fished a chocolate bar out of her coat pocket and slid it onto the desk. It was a Cadbury Flake; she must’ve ordered it online. I don’t know how she knew it was my favorite. “Feel better,” she said, smiling crookedly at me, and then slipped out of the room.

  Tom stuck his earphones back in with a sigh.

  So you didn’t find anything on Nurse Bryony? I texted her.

  No. Sciences 442 at lunch. I heard her footsteps retreating down the hall. We’ll make a plan for Wheatley then.

  I LINGERED BY MR. WHEATLEY’S DESK AFTER CLASS, WAVING an inquisitive-looking Tom on to his next class. I had a free period at the end of the day, so I wasn’t in a rush.

  Wheatley was talking to one of our class’s better poets, a shy, small girl who wrote exclusively about communing with nature in her native Michigan. As I
waited, he gave her a series of book recommendations in his meandering, sleepy voice, and she scribbled them down. Our journals were identical. I tucked mine discreetly back in my bag, feeling a little cliché, and tried to focus on remembering the strategy that Holmes and I had hammered out at lunchtime.

  Finally, he turned to me. “Ah, Mr. Watson,” he said to me. “What can I do for you?”

  I shuffled my feet. “I wanted to talk to you about my poems,” I told him. “I’m having some trouble putting them together. They’re a lot harder than stories. I was wondering if you had any books I could borrow to do some outside reading.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “I have something in my office I could lend you. Follow me.”

  Wheatley’s office was the kind of book-lined cave that, in other circumstances, I would’ve let myself get lost in. There was a hooded copper lamp on his desk that spotlit a stack of our manuscripts, and I recognized my most recent short story on the top. In the corner, a stand-up globe was turned so that a dusty Europe faced out. I sat gingerly in a chair and took a harder look around.

  I didn’t have the facility for observation that Holmes had, I knew that. But I’d always liked cataloging the details of a place and its people, using it as grist for my stories. Maybe that interest was more about romanticizing my surroundings than deducing from them, but it still spurred me to look closely at the authors of the books on his shelves (Kafka, Rumi, some Scandinavian mystery writers), the kind of rug on his floor (it had a folksy, hand-woven feel), the kind of coffee he was drinking (he’d brought it from home, in a stainless steel mug). I’d been too muddled and, frankly, scared to look that closely at Nurse Bryony when I was in the infirmary, and I was determined to have more to show for my efforts this time.

  Wheatley hummed to himself as he ran his finger along a bookshelf. Though he was a nervous teacher—a pacer, a hand-wringer who started each sentence two or three times—he seemed at ease now, in his office, and I wondered if it was the confidence of a man who knew he had me in his power. Or maybe he just liked me, and was more comfortable speaking one-on-one. It was impossible for me to tell. I wished that Holmes were there.

  “Found them,” he said, pulling a few books from the shelf to hand to me. “There’s a book of poetry prompts, in case you’d like to practice, and a collection of essays by contemporary poets that you might find useful in thinking about the impetus for writing a poem.”

  “Thanks.” I tucked them in my bag.

  “Your fiction is good, as I told you at homecoming,” he said. “Clean and sharp, and very readable. Some of your plots are a bit far-fetched, but I don’t mind the wish-fulfillment aspect of it. I think it runs in your blood, maybe. I read all your great-great-whatever-grandfather’s stories when I was a boy. Wonderful. The movie adaptations from the thirties were very good, too.”

  I’d always hated those films—they’d portrayed Dr. Watson as a bumbling idiot, and Sherlock Holmes as an automaton. But I saw my opening, and took it. “They’re great, aren’t they? My favorite is the one about the snake. ‘The Speckled Band.’”

  “I know that story.” Mr. Wheatley shuddered. “I hate snakes. My brother keeps them on his farm, and I—well, I make him visit me. Can’t do it. After I heard what happened to that Dobson boy, I couldn’t sleep for days.”

  His distress seemed genuine, but I couldn’t be sure. “He was attacked by a snake?” I asked innocently.

  “After he died,” Mr. Wheatley said. “I’m surprised you don’t know. Didn’t the police talk to you about it?”

  “They talked to you about it?”

  He squirmed a little in his chair. It was strange to see an adult act so squirrelly. “I keep a close tab on the news. I have a friend on the force. You know.”

  I could tell he was lying. But it didn’t mean I knew what the truth was.

  “That reminds me,” I said, trying a different tack. “I wanted to know about how to write from our lives, especially when things get weird and . . . unbelievable. Can you still do it? Write about them? You talk a lot about how we need to write from our own experiences, but when awful things happen—”

  “You can talk to me about it, if you need to,” he cut in. “It might help you organize your thoughts. You could even write me a story about it. For extra credit. After all, you’ve skipped almost a week’s worth of classes.”

  I looked at my hands, wondering what he’d try to get out of me. It might be useful to play along.

  Also, I could use the extra credit.

  “Sure, I could try that,” I said.

  He pulled a legal pad out from under the stack of papers on his desk and balanced it on his knee. “So,” he said, lifting a page or two and sliding a piece of cardboard beneath it. “What are you finding so unbelievable?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s a little weird that my best friend is a Holmes. I never really expected that to happen.”

  “Hm,” he said, making a note. “Tell me more about your relationship with Charlotte Holmes?”

  Even though I’d led him to the topic, I still found his tone obnoxious. I gritted my teeth. “Like I said, she’s my best friend.”

  “And yet you went to the dance together. She could have more complicated feelings. It’s important to consider these kinds of things,” he said, slipping into teacher mode. “For character development.”

  If anyone had complicated feelings, it was me. And those were none of his fucking business. “We’re talking about Charlotte Holmes here. I think she has complicated relationships even with the skeletons in her lab. Nothing is straightforward to her.”

  I thought I’d dodged the question, but his eyes lit up. “She keeps skeletons in her office,” he said, scribbling it down. “Interesting.”

  “Her lab,” I corrected him. Too late, I remembered what Holmes had taught me, about how easy it is to get people to correct you.

  “Where’s her lab?” he asked, not looking at me.

  “I can’t remember,” I lied. “She doesn’t let anyone in there.”

  “Very private,” he said. “Good. She has kind of a goth look to her, doesn’t she? Is it cultivated, do you think?”

  “Holmes wears what she wants to wear. Like I do.” I frowned. “She’s not some agent of death. Or a cartoon. I always thought she looked very London, that’s all. I don’t understand how this would help me write this story.”

  “Character development,” he repeated. “Tell me, when she investigates, does she behave much like her famous forebear?”

  “Sherlock?” I asked. “I don’t know, I haven’t exactly met him in the flesh.”

  Mr. Wheatley laughed, then abruptly stopped. “No. Really. Does she?”

  It went on for a long time. I let him draw me out bit by bit, noting carefully to hear where he directed the conversation. I told him that I’d been struggling to write down the story of Dobson’s death and the police’s investigation into my life, but Mr. Wheatley didn’t want to talk about Dobson at all. I took it as a sign that he already knew all there was to know about “that poor boy” and his murder. And though everyone on campus knew now that Holmes and I had found Elizabeth unconscious in the quad, he didn’t even ask about her either. But Holmes? Mr. Wheatley wanted to know everything: about her childhood, about her older brother (whose name he readily knew), about the circumstances of her coming to Sherringford. Thankfully, my own knowledge of her was patchwork enough that I could plead ignorance. But it was all incredibly damning, watching him write down her whole dossier. Why could he possibly want that information except to use it against us?

  That is, until he ripped the sheet he’d been writing on from his legal pad and handed it over to me. I stared at it for a minute, not understanding. “There. Sometimes it helps to say it all aloud before you start shaping your piece. But it all sounds very hard to deal with, Jamie, like I’d said before.” He leaned over to scribble something at the top of the paper. “If you’d prefer to talk to someone else, here’s the name of the school therapist.
She’s very kind, and you shouldn’t be ashamed about making an appointment. Most people eventually do.”

  I folded the sheet and put it in my pocket, feeling distinctly ashamed. He’d just been trying to help after all, if a little ham-handedly. Mr. Wheatley was a good man, and he was concerned about me, and still I had been imagining him to be out for my blood. Wondering if he had lowered that rattlesnake onto Dobson’s convulsing form.

  Was this what it was always like, doing detective work? How could you ever let yourself get close to anyone? No wonder Holmes was so determined to keep herself apart.

  When I left Wheatley’s office, I went straight to Sciences 442. It had only taken an hour alone for Holmes to trash her lab. The carpet was an explosion of open file folders, their pages spread out like snow. Something bright green was frothing over on a Bunsen burner, and the entire room smelled of cilantro. In the midst of all this chaos, Holmes was slumped on the floor in her uniform like a black-and-white bird, smoking a cigarette and reading The History of Dirt. It was so gigantic that she had to brace it against her knees. Above her, the vulture skeletons swung lazily on their strings. During one of our marathon research sessions, I’d decided to name them Julian and George, and today, Julian’s skull sported a small knife that looked as if it’d been stabbed there. I shuddered.

  “Your book looks great,” I said, picking a path across the room. “What’s the sequel? Worms and You?”

  “Don’t tease, I know nothing about American soils. And the idea of tracing a murder victim by the contents of their shoe soles is hardly far-fetched.” She turned a page, and I could see that she was incredibly tense. “You sound disappointed. You don’t suspect Wheatley, then.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “Or Nurse Bryony. Or maybe I suspect both of them because we have a disappeared dealer, and I want someone concrete to suspect. I’m in some muddled state where I can’t tell what I think.”

  “It’s because you care,” she said. “About nearly everyone. It’s remarkable, really, but in this instance, it clouds your judgment. It’s why I try to avoid sentiment.”