A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(10)

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?”

I had no idea how to handle these conversations, where the questions were picked right out of my head. “It sounds incredible,” I said honestly, “but I don’t know if I’d want to always know what other people are thinking. Where they come from, what they want. Where’s the mystery in that?”

She shrugged her shoulders with a nonchalance I didn’t quite believe. “I suppose few people hold up to the scrutiny. But my family’s business was never in maintaining mysteries. It’s in unraveling them.”

I wanted to ask her more questions, but I was exhausted. I caught myself smothering a yawn. “What time is it?”

“Eight,” she said, and eye-dropped a clear substance onto a slide. “Any minute now, there’ll be a campus-wide text saying that classes are off because of the murder. We can skip the optional counseling, I’m sure.”

“Wake me up in two hours.” I had to curl up small to fit on the sofa. As I pulled my jacket up to my chin, I caught Holmes’s pale, considering eyes for the briefest moment before she looked away.

I WOKE UP TO A STALE TASTE IN MY MOUTH, SWEAT COOLING on my forehead. In my pocket, my phone let out the three-note sigh that meant that it was dying. For a horrible second I had no idea where I was. I looked up into the pleated ends of Holmes’s riding crops, and remembered. It shouldn’t have been as comforting as it was.

“That’s been going off now for an hour,” Holmes said from across the chemistry set. She was more undone than she’d been before: her jacket was rucked up to her elbows, and her hair was a spider web of frizz from the heat in our cramped quarters.

“And you didn’t wake me up? What time is it?”

“You’re wearing a watch.”

“What time is it, Holmes?”

She looked blankly at me. “Seven?”

I swore, fumbling my phone out of my pocket. It was five till noon. I had a text from the school saying that classes were canceled and that grief counseling would be available in the infirmary. I also had thirteen missed calls. Ten of them were from my father, at least two were from England—Unavailable, read the caller ID—and one was a local number that I didn’t recognize. I played the message on my voicemail.

“This is Detective Shepard, calling for James Watson. . . .”

At her chemistry set, Holmes peered into the bottom of an Erlenmeyer flask. “Yellow precipitate,” she announced, more to herself than for my benefit. “Excellent. Absolutely perfect.” Humming tunelessly, she poured the solution into a test tube and stoppered it, sliding it into her pocket.

I listened to the end of Shepard’s message with a sinking stomach. “Is there a bathroom nearby?” I asked her blearily. “I need to wash my face.”

She pointed wordlessly to the laundry sink in the corner, and I splashed myself with cold water. “According to the detective,” I said, “they’ve all spoken to each other, and apparently my father is afraid I’ve hung myself from a tree branch, and we’re all meeting in my room in thirty minutes. What am I going to say to him?”

It was a rhetorical question, and a confused one, at that, but she walked over to perch on the love seat’s battered arm. “Your father?” she asked, and I nodded. She twisted her hands in her lap, and I noticed that the soft inside of one elbow was puckered with scars. I heard it was going into her arm, the redhead had said.

“I haven’t seen him since I was twelve.”

“Do you want to tell me why?” she asked. It was clear that she knew that this was what friends did—showed interest in each other’s lives, offered a willing ear when the other was upset—and that she was doing her best to mimic it. It was also clear that she’d rather be pouring a gallon of water onto a live wire.

Then again, maybe she did that for fun, anyway. Who the hell knew.

“You could tell me,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve already come to some deductions. Read some invisible bits of my past in my pinky finger.”

“It isn’t a party trick, you know.”

“I know,” I told her. “But it might be easier. For both of us.”

“Easier?” Holmes sighed, and tossed me my jacket. “Come on, or we’ll be late.”

A sharp wind cut through the quad, but the sky above was mercilessly clear. Everywhere, students huddled in clusters of two or three against the cold. Quite a few were openly crying, I noticed as we walked past; freshmen who probably didn’t even know Dobson were hugging each other.

But when they spotted me and Holmes, everyone just . . . stopped. Stopped talking, stopped weeping, stopped telling tearful stories. One by one, they turned to glare at us, and then the whispering started.

Holmes tucked her small white hand in the crook of my arm and powered me along. “Listen to me,” she said rapidly. “Your parents are English, but you were raised in America; I know that from what my family has said about yours. Your accent isn’t very strong, but how you stress your sentences is very specifically London. And you love London; I could tell from the look on your face when you first heard me speak, like you’d had a glimpse of home. You must have lived there, and at a particularly impressionable time in your life. Add in the fact that you said ‘bathroom,’ not ‘toilet’ earlier—and other times, you’ve shied away from using any slang at all, rather than make a decision to be English or American about it—and so you must have moved to London around age eleven or twelve. Am I correct?”