A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(33)

“Here,” a harried voice said. It was the first time I’d seen Nurse Bryony outside the infirmary; her party dress fit her so tightly that it looked painted on. She smiled reassuringly at me, but I looked away. I didn’t deserve reassurances.

“Tend to her, will you?” Holmes told the nurse, straightening. “Where is that ambulance?” She shaded her eyes against the nonexistent light.

“Holmes.”

“Not now, Watson.” She plucked another boy’s phone out of his hands, dialing 911 as he sputtered at her in protest. “You talk, then,” she said to him, handing it back. “Be of some use.”

“Holmes,” I said, more urgently.

I’d caught a glimpse, at the very edge of the crowd, of the drug dealer’s thick blond hair.

She followed my gaze and made a startled noise. “I didn’t think we’d see him again.”

“Well.” I got to my feet. “What now?”

“Don’t look at him directly.” But it was too late. As she spoke, he turned in a way he must’ve thought unobtrusive, beginning to melt into the darkness.

“We’re going to have to chase him again,” I said. God, my legs hurt at the thought.

That quicksilver smile. “On your marks.”

The dealer threw a glance behind him, and took off at a run.

We bolted through the crowd. Some ducked out of our way; others tried to pull us back, thinking we were fleeing the crime scene. We were, but not in the way they thought. There: he was pelting across the flat green expanse, headed straight for Stevenson Hall. Lots of the underclassmen girls lived there—Holmes did, and Elizabeth did too, and I couldn’t think of any reason why he’d be heading there except to do more damage. Guilty people ran. He had to be guilty. I pushed myself to run harder, but I was already topped out. Sirens wailed—the soundtrack of my ridiculous life—and Holmes’s dress ahead of me caught the red-and-blue light, strangely beautiful. She was faster than me, smaller, leaner. She was just beginning to gain on him when three cruisers and an ambulance pulled off the road and onto the grassy quad beside us.

“Some help here,” Holmes yelled as a group of policemen clambered out. The EMTs were already unloading a stretcher from the ambulance.

“Is that Charlotte Holmes?” It sounded like Detective Shepard. I spared a look and spotted a lone man not in uniform. “Stop! What are you doing? James! Jamie Watson!”

Neither of us slowed down in the slightest. So Shepard took off after us.

The policemen gave confused chase behind him, cursing and breathing heavily. Up ahead, the dealer rounded the corner of Stevenson Hall and disappeared from view.

“The access tunnels,” Holmes called. “There’s an entrance, there—it’s that half door; it has a key code—”

I pushed the building’s tangled ivy out of the way as she tapped out the code.

“You have about two and a half seconds,” I said, “before the police brutality begins.”

She gave me a feral look. “I only needed one.”

The lock clicked open. She jerked me inside. The door slammed shut behind us.

WHEN HOLMES HAD FIRST MENTIONED THE SCHOOL’S TUNNEL system to me, I’d had trouble wrapping my head around it. A network of passages below campus, connecting Sherringford’s buildings underground? I’d done some digging to find out more.

By digging, I mean that I’d turned around in my desk chair and asked Tom, my personal font of useless information, what the deal was.

Legend has it the tunnels had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, back when Sherringford was still a convent school. When the grounds were under a few feet of snow, the nuns used these heated passages to get from their quarters to prayers at dawn and vespers. These days, Tom said, the tunnels were used by the maintenance workers who took care of our dorms. There were boilers down there and supply closets. Every entrance to the tunnels was only accessible via key code, and those codes changed every month. I’d told Tom about how disappointed I was that the tunnels weren’t used as Cold War bomb shelters or by moonshine smugglers or something equally interesting, and he’d grinned at me. Even better, he’d said. The codes changed so often because students were always bribing janitors for them—the access tunnels were one of the only private places to hook up on campus.

Holmes, I knew, used the tunnels to practice her fencing.

“They’re the only space long enough and private enough at this school,” she’d said, bright spots of color on her cheeks, “and if you continue to snicker at me, I swear that I will tell your father you want a weekly lunch date with him to talk about your feelings.”

Tonight, the tunnel in front of us was empty. Our man was nowhere in sight. As I crept down the hall behind her, the lights above us flickered. Holmes’s shoes clicked against the floor, sounding like an insect tapping its legs together. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“He’ll have holed up here somewhere,” she said, a breath of sound.

“Should we start trying doors?”

She shook her head, putting up a finger. There were footsteps ahead of us, creeping ones. We were shifting gears from a chase to a slow, deliberate stalk, and I followed her as she slunk along, her eyes fixed on the ground.

She was following a trail he’d left on the linoleum floor, one I couldn’t make out through the dirt tracked in by that week’s workmen, the ragged lines from carts and trolleys. What was she tracing, I wondered, straining my eyes to see—and then I remembered. Why was he wearing four-hundred-dollar shoes? she’d asked the other night. Looking again, I saw the narrow tread of a dress shoe on the floor.