A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(31)

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “You’re a terrible person.”

It derailed her completely.

She stiffened and put her hands up to her mouth. I looked down reflexively at where they’d been, covering the pages of the notebook.

I got it, then. Why she was nervous.

In her lap was a madman’s journal. Its pages were thick with handwriting, the same five words scrawled again and again. Each time they were written in a markedly different style, as though a group of schoolboys had each been made to copy down a line from the chalkboard all into the same notebook. Here, the stark black capitals of a military general. Here, the rounded letters of a high school girl. Here, the elegantly dashed scrawl of a Victorian gentleman.

Every line said the same thing.

CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

CHARLOTTE HOLMES IS A MURDERER

I snatched the notebook off her lap. She didn’t try to stop me. She watched in aching silence as I turned one page, another, another, every single one striped with those same five words.

As I stared down uncomprehending, the doors burst open with a bang. The dance was over.

“Holmes,” I said, my voice almost drowned out by the people streaming by, “what the hell is this?”

“I have the same book at home,” she murmured. “Mine is green. It’s a forger’s notebook. I was made to practice in it until I could imitate nearly anyone’s handwriting. Real people’s, those of archetypes, characters I’d made up. You’re given a phrase to work with, one that represents most of the alphabet. But this . . . this one is terrible.” She reached out to touch the words. “It uses many of the same letters.”

“It says you’re a murderer. A murderer. And that dealer had it,” I said. “He can’t work for your brother. He’s something else, some kind of maniac writing crazy things in the dark. He’s probably not a dealer at all. He has to be responsible for Dobson—for framing us—God, and we let him get away—”

“How do we know that man wrote this? We don’t. He could have picked it up; someone could have given it to him.”

“Why did you wait to show me this?” I demanded.

Something snuffed out behind her eyes.

“Holmes—”

“Do you know that I dusted it for prints? I did, it’s clean. Do you know that Professor Moriarty carried a little red memoranda book? He did; I’ve seen it. My father keeps it in a drawer. Did you know you can buy this particular model that I’m holding from seventy-two different online shops, not to mention innumerable bookstores and gift shops? You can. I ran down the license on that black sedan. It doesn’t exist. The car itself was stolen from a Brooklyn street corner five years ago. Why does it reappear now? Watson, there’s no pattern here. I can’t figure this out. I don’t know. Do you know what it’s like to not know?”

I did know. She was the one who kept me in the dark.

“You still could have shown it to me,” I said, getting to my feet.

Across the quad, a girl let loose a long, laughing scream as a boy grabbed her around the waist and lifted her over his shoulder.

“What if it read ‘Jamie Watson is a murderer’? Would you have shown it to me?”

She set her chin, avoiding my eyes. “You wouldn’t, for one single moment, worry that I might believe it?”

There was an unnerving quaver in her voice. I stared down at her, at her thin shoulders, the dark lines of her dress under my jacket. Just last night, I was sure I knew her better than anyone else in the world.

What had Charlotte Holmes really done to get herself sent to America?

“You didn’t kill Dobson,” I said.

“No,” she whispered. “I didn’t kill Dobson.”

“So then—” I swallowed. “Did you—is August Moriarty still alive?”

At that, she stood and fled into the quad.

I picked up the notebook and followed, pushing past the clusters of shrieking girls, the boys surrounding them like black flies in their suits. Some chaperone’s voice shouted for us to get back to our dorms, that night check would be in ten minutes, but Holmes plunged through the crowd, not toward Stevenson Hall, but to the sciences building. As if it were her safe house. Her panic room.

The place where she could hide away from me.

I called for her, hoarsely, as she cut through the small stand of trees in the middle of the quad, and though people turned to look, she plowed straight on ahead. I put on a burst of speed and with a lunge caught her by the arm and whirled her around.

She shook my hand off with a snap. “Don’t you ever touch me without my explicit permission.”

“Look,” I said, “I am not saying that you killed him. I’m saying that someone wants me to think that. Wants the world to. Why can’t you just tell me if he’s dead? Is August dead?”

“You thought it,” she said. “I watched you think it. That I killed him.”

“Why can’t you just tell me—”

I must’ve stepped forward; she must have stepped back. I was pressing her farther into the trees as if every step brought me that much closer to the answer. I was so caught up in finding out that I missed what was written all over her face. I was so used to her fearlessness that I couldn’t recognize her fear.