A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Still, it was a compromise I was willing to make.

  Theo and Watson got on like a house on fire. They read the same books; they listened to the same grunge rock from the nineties; they both wanted the carbonara for dinner and the tiramisu for dessert. Theo had on a cheap military jacket cut to look stylish and shoes that he’d bought secondhand. He was attractively rumpled, a boy with strong shoulders and a slim waist, like a diver. Unlike Rupert, Theo didn’t have much to say about his life back home, only that he’d always wanted to do theater in Britain, ever since a Shakespeare troupe had come to do a workshop at his school in Boston and told him he was talented. It was true, he had a certain clarity of expression, a certain resonance to his speaking voice. He would do well playing a shipwrecked prince or a well-intentioned pirate; for now, he told us he’d set his sights on playing Hamlet. “The audition’s the day after tomorrow, and I shouldn’t be drinking at all—my voice, you know—but I’m a little nervous,” he said. He didn’t seem nervous. He had a boyfriend back home in Boston, and when Anwen poked him for texting under the table, she said to us, fondly, “Theo’s like this whenever he dates anyone. Smitten. You should have seen him with his girlfriend last year.” It was important to her for us, for whatever reason, to know about the girlfriend, to know he was bisexual, or pansexual, that he wasn’t only attracted to boys.

  But he didn’t give her any response, so there was nothing more for me to go on. I watched Rupert twirl his spaghetti. Watched Anwen flag down the waiter to order another glass of wine. Watched Theo pick a white thread out of her hair, shaking his head, saying, “I always find string there. Where on earth does it come from?” As Anwen laughed, Rupert darted his eyes over to Theo, then to me, then back to his plate, so fast I wouldn’t have seen it if I wasn’t looking.

  “I’m auditioning as well,” I told them. “For Ophelia.”

  Watson ran a finger down his water glass. “She’s a terrific actress. Totally transforms herself into someone else. It’s like she disappears.”

  Theo said lightly, “It’s a relief, sometimes, isn’t it?”

  “To disappear, or be the one watching?”

  “Both,” Rupert said, to my surprise. As far as I knew, he wasn’t someone who had issues with being seen. “But—” He glanced at Anwen, then back at me. “Have you heard at all about what happened last summer, in the theater department?”

  Aha.

  “They’re just stories,” Theo said.

  Rupert fidgeted. “The orchids—”

  “Were someone’s idea of a sick joke. An expensive sick joke. Do you know how much those things cost?” Theo rolled his eyes. “Someone just wanted to scare us, that’s all.”

  “What was it?” Watson said, as if on cue. I admired him, then: he’d established himself earlier as the sort of boy to ask the brash question, and then did so. “Everyone keeps talking about something that happened last year—what was it?”

  “Just . . . just some accidents.” Anwen grimaced. “They weren’t . . . they weren’t terrible, you know? But they weren’t nothing, either.”

  Rupert’s eyes widened. “Matilda isn’t here. All right? Matilda didn’t come back, she’s gone—”

  “She’s not dead,” Anwen said. “She’s just not, you know, here—”

  “Theo, you of all people should be upset—”

  “I am upset. And now we’re done talking about it,” Theo said. He stood. “I haven’t seen the waiter in, like, a year. I’m going to go get the bill.”

  Anwen tossed a handful of cash on the table, and followed him.

  Rupert watched her go. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “But it’s important that you know, if you’re thinking of doing this year’s play. They never found out who was behind it.”

  Watson nodded. “Thanks for the warning. We’ll think about it.”

  “‘We’ll’?” Rupert asked, with some interest. “Are you auditioning too?”

  The light outside was fading, and as Watson sat, deliberating his answer, the young hostess walked around, touching the tea lights on each table with a match. A stroke, a light, the brief smell of sulfur. And then all the candles lit, like small stars in a dark night.

  “I might be,” he said finally, as Theo and Anwen returned. Together, I noticed. He had waited for her at the restroom. To have a tête-à-tête away from prying eyes?

  It came to me then. One of those moments I spent months chasing, through calculus or pills or a list of deductions so swift I arrived at the answer before I’d begun to articulate the question.

  We’re going deep here, I texted Watson under the table. Do you trust me?

  He met my eyes. Mouthed yes.

  “Well,” I said to them, “thanks for inviting us out. Honestly, we were both a bit nervous coming along.”

  “Oh, don’t be,” Anwen said, and she reached out to touch Theo’s arm. Any excuse to do so, it seemed. “The academics aren’t that hard, right, Teddy? I mean, they are hard, but—”

  There really was little I hated more than someone condescending to me for show. Still, I fixed a smile on my face, one that showcased my incisors. “Oh, not that. That’ll be fine. No—just socially, I mean. Jamie and I have been dating now for a few years, and I think we both get a bit nervous that we won’t meet anyone because of it. We can be a little bit reclusive.”

  A glance between Anwen and Theo, whisper-quick, and that was it, the nudge I needed to cast my wager.

  I dropped Rupert’s eyes. Then I slowly, deliberately ran my foot up his leg under the table.

  He didn’t blush, or look down; he didn’t even look surprised. He had exactly the reaction I knew he would.

  He smiled.

  Five

  “I KNEW WE WERE DATING. BUT I DIDN’T KNOW THAT YOU were cheating on me.”

  Watson had worked himself into a state, standing in his sock feet in the middle of my bedroom. He was furious at me, and also he was trying very hard not to laugh, and it was something of a personal failure on my part that this was how I found Watson most appealing.

  “That does seem to be accurate,” I admitted.

  He ran a hand over his face. “Holmes—”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re dating and you’re cheating on me,” he said, his voice going higher in pitch. “You’re the kind of cheater who plays footsie with country squires while I sit there eating ladyfingers across the table.”

  I frowned. “It’s the twenty-first century. They aren’t country squires anymore. Rupert is a gentleman sheep-farmer-in-training.”

  “I was drinking a decaf cappuccino while my girlfriend had her foot up a gentleman sheep farmer’s pant leg—”

  “Yes,” I said, and really, I was moments from laughing in his face, “you are a cliché, I’ve made you some kind of awful cliché. I apologize. I grovel. I throw myself upon your mercy.”

  Watson rolled his eyes up to the ceiling and finally, after a long moment, he sat down on the bed. “You’re lucky I adore you,” he said. At last he was smiling, and I resisted the urge to go to him, to put my hands in his hair.

  I considered him, then, sitting comfortably on the white cloud of my bed. I’d decorated this room sparely, the better to fill in details when I knew them. I had a rail for my clothes, a desk in the window, a table for my experiments that right now stood bare. At Sherringford, back in my supply closet, Watson had fit in amongst the teeth and the vultures and the marked-up books like he, too, had been something I’d collected. The thought had given me pleasure. I remembered studying him through the bow of my violin, thinking, Why are you here, why are you here—why do you sit so still like that, watching me?

  But he didn’t look like a curio to me anymore, not in this bedroom that I’d left quiet and open. He looked like a boy. One who, by his presence, was beginning to fill in the blank space around him.

  I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that either, and I snatched up the dressing gown off the back of my door and put it on like a suit of armor.

/>   “I also ran my foot up Rupert’s leg in a way that made him think it was Anwen’s,” I told him, belting my robe. “Unless my aim is incredibly poor.”

  “Jesus, Holmes. You could have led with that, you know—”

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “But you didn’t. Okay. At what point do you fill me in on what’s happening here, exactly?” He twisted his hands. “If this isn’t anything more than a puzzle, why have you kept me in the dark?”

  “Because I needed your interest tonight to be genuine,” I said. He was on my bed. Why was he still on my bed?

  Frowning, I pulled a cigarette from the packet in my robe and began casting around for a match.

  “Will you please just tell me?” he asked, and it was either I did so, or I sat on his lap and put his arms around my waist, and I wasn’t ready for that, not yet. Terms or no terms, I wasn’t particularly good with romance unless one or the other of us was about to die.

  Fortunately (unfortunately?), that wasn’t on the table. I briefly considered poisoning us both so I could take him to bed, then discarded the idea.

  I needed a distraction.

  “Fine,” I said, and stuffed the unlit cigarette back into my pocket. “It began last summer.”

  “Not just the facts, Holmes. Tell it like a story.”

  “Like a story,” I said. “Fine. Fine.” After all, Dr. Larkin had provided me with a number of dramatic flourishes when she had told it to me.

  It had been a hot June, a damp one. The air had lain thicker than usual over the dreaming spires of Oxford, and underneath that suffocating blanket, as the Dramatics Society painted their sets and learned their lines for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the company had fallen, too, under a spell from which they couldn’t easily wake.

  The Dramatics Soc hadn’t always done Shakespeare, but they’d gotten into a pattern: comedy and tragedy in alternate summers. Midsummer had been Larkin’s idea, a way to showcase their finest actress, the reason they’d been doing all the Bard’s plays in the first place. Matilda Wilkes—tall, with burning eyes and with an understanding of the language that far outstripped her years—had come from London the previous year and laid everyone flat with her talent. She was only a rising junior when Dr. Larkin decided on Midsummer: Matilda, with her air of natural authority, would play the fairy queen, Titania, and the roles of the four lovers—the ostensible leads—could go to seniors, who hopefully wouldn’t realize they were being upstaged.

  After the auditions, Dr. Larkin had posted the casting list and taken her customary place in her office across the hall, in hopes that she’d catch any malcontents early to comfort them. This was, after all, a precollege program; the goal was education more so than performance. Still, the posting of the cast list still brought students to tears.

  (“It’s an extracurricular,” Watson interjected. “We all have to take other classes. It’s just acting.”

  “You’d feel differently if someone yanked you from your fiction workshop because ‘it’s just stories, he can take something else.’”

  “Yes, okay, point.”)

  The students came and went, in their clogs and ripped jeans and crop tops, with their neon-colored hair; there had been good-natured ribbing (“Of course you’re playing Bottom”) and some dickering over details (“Uh, I don’t think I’m ‘delicate’ enough to be Hermia, but whatever?”) but largely they all had been pleased. The only surprise had been Matilda Wilkes, lingering near the back of the crowd, her face dark and drawn. She’d fled as soon as Dr. Larkin caught her eyes.

  Why? The reason soon became clear. Matilda Wilkes had stage parents. More accurately, stage parent—her father had called Dr. Larkin not ten minutes later, upset that his daughter had passed over acting programs at Royal Scottish and Juilliard to be cast in such a humiliatingly small role.

  (“Brat,” Watson said. “Not her, her father. ‘Oh no, can’t believe I had to send my daughter to Oxford.’”)

  Mr. Wilkes had threatened to pull his daughter from the program, a move Dr. Larkin thought was a bluff until she received a call from her director. An extracurricular should not be causing this much turmoil, Larkin was told. If this girl was really the best, she should have the best role, regardless of seniority.

  “Fix it,” the director said. “Fix it, or else.”

  (“Entertaining enough?” I asked him. “I’m attempting to channel you.”

  Watson was shaking his head. “This is what I sound like when I talk?”

  “You’re much more . . . emphatic.”)

  Dr. Larkin capitulated, but on her terms. She called a meeting, told her students that Midsummer was off the table (“I made some excuses about not getting the rights,” Larkin told me, “which was ridiculous, but no one noticed”), and introduced a new play: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Auditions were held. The cast list was posted. Matilda was given the lead.

  The next week, the accidents started.

  Small things, at first. Scripts went missing. A light fell from the grid above the stage in the night; the company arrived in the morning to find it there (“like a robot’s broken heart”). After the first round of costume fittings, the dresses meant for the girl playing Miss Prism had all of their seams let out. When she tried them on again, she was drowning in a sea of lace and ribbons.

  All of this was exactly innocuous enough that it could have been ignored. Passed off as a prank, or a mistake. But the day after Harriet Feldstein, the girl playing Lady Bracknell, twisted her ankle dashing out of the dressing room—there had been a tangle of wires just outside that no one could remember leaving there—she came back to find an orchid (an odontoglossums; lovely) waiting for her at the makeup mirrors. Its tag was addressed to her. It said, Watch your step.

  Naturally, no one stepped forward to say they’d sent it. Harriet Feldstein wanted to drop out, but Dr. Larkin convinced her to stay by installing a nanny cam in the dressing room for another level of security. The professor told no one except Harriet and the program director that she had done so.

  It worked, to a certain extent, in that no further incidents happened there. They happened everywhere else instead.

  The backdrops were painted and hoisted up into the fly space above the stage with ropes, and stayed there—until one of those ropes was cut during Algernon’s monologue. He jumped backward just in time to avoid being clobbered by a hand-painted garden. That had been Theo Harding.

  During tech rehearsals, the tea the characters “drank” onstage was replaced with motor oil; Matilda Wilkes spit hers out in a long black arc across the stage. The lighting cues were reset, every night, and had to be fixed by hand. The black-painted stairs behind the stage that led down to the dressing rooms—their edges had been marked with glow-in-the-dark tape, since the actors had to thunder up and down them in the dark. During dress rehearsals (tech week, as those in the theater called it), that tape was removed, and Harriet went flying down the steps. She twisted her other ankle and bruised her face.

  Harriet was sent a moth orchid the next day. The tag had her name, typed, and below it the words watch your step. Thankfully, it was in character for her to perform her role with a cane.

  The orchids, it seemed, were only delivered on occasions that the victim had been successfully injured. No one saw the flowers arrive. No florist in town would claim responsibility.

  Fear grew. Students stayed in pairs at all times, cried quietly in corners, dropped out of the smaller parts in droves. (Anwen Ellis, who had been cast as the “manservant” Lane, was the first to go.) All unused rooms were locked and could only be opened by a key that Dr. Larkin held on her person at all times. Parents called vociferously for the play to be canceled, and Dr. Larkin had an all-day meeting with university administrators the day before The Importance of Being Earnest was set to open. She had made up her mind, she told me, to call the show off in her concern for her students’ safety.

  That night, Matilda Wilkes had been walking home from
a night out with friends. They were cast members from Earnest; they had all gone one way, and Matilda had gone the other. One could follow her path from one CCTV camera to the next—that’s what the police did the next day, poring through the grainy, washed-out footage, trying to put together a timeline. A narrative.

  When they found her, though, there was no story. Her bag over her shoulder, her head down, her pace steady, quick, that of a girl eager to collapse into her bed. But not because she was being followed. Not because she was afraid.

  And then, at the end of a long block, she had glanced up as though to check the name of the street she was turning onto, and for just a moment she looked directly into the camera’s dark lens. The streetlights had washed her face into a blank. A suggestion of dark eyes, a haughty chin. She had nodded to herself and rounded the corner, out of sight.

  That was, of course, the last that anyone had seen of her.

  As though she had cut a hole into the night and climbed through it. As though she had erased herself from the bottom up.

  (I was familiar with that feeling.)

  Her father, who had come down from the city to see her perform the next night, stalked around the police station, shouting at the detectives; her mother had haunted the theater, begging information from students, from teachers. She had known nothing of the orchid attacks. She had called her lawyer. Matilda’s boyfriend, Theo Harding, refused to perform. And without Cecily and Algernon and with the lawsuit the Wilkes family served the precollege program, the play was definitively canceled.

  “Dr. Larkin stepped away from the precollege program at the end of the summer,” I told Watson. “Of her own volition, supposedly, but the way she talked about it made it sound as though she’d been forced out. And took a pay cut, based on her new shoes—cheap—and her jacket, handbag, and scarf, which were very much not. I think she wants her job back.”

  “This is all, like . . . really awful,” Watson said. “I can’t believe they’re letting the program continue.”