A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(40)

“We’re going to follow up with the students that Charlotte sold to,” the detective told us. “We’ll find out the truth of it then.”

“He forged those records,” I said, looking at her. “All of them. The ones in that room—”

“Look,” Shepard said, interrupting. “One of my calls this morning was to Scotland Yard. Everyone there vouches for you, Charlotte. Okay, some of them might not like you much, and they weren’t surprised that you were mixed up in a crime, but to a man, they swore up and down you wouldn’t hurt anyone. Annoy them to death, maybe.”

One corner of Holmes’s mouth turned up, but she stayed silent. The detective rubbed his eyes. “I was also reassured that if you did do it, I wouldn’t have you on my list of suspects at all.” He turned to my father. “Apparently she’s that good. Then I talked to Philly PD about Aaron Davis, Sherringford’s last dealer, and apparently the kid is doing time down there for dealing oxy at UPenn. I have a buddy down there who owes me a favor, asked Aaron some questions. He remembers Charlotte. Confirmed her story, that he sold to her down in that room last year. He also said she didn’t have enough friends or enough patience to ever deal on her own. We’ll follow up, like I said. Aaron’s a con, so his word isn’t golden, but . . .” Shepard shrugged expressively. “But a kid’s dead. Another is in the hospital. You two just look too good for it. Charlotte has a private chemistry lab where she keeps a whole bunch of poisons. And you”—he pointed at me—“you could easily get into Lee Dobson’s room at night. You were flirting with Elizabeth Hartwell. It looks, for all the world, like the two of you are in some kind of lovers’ pact gone wrong. Someone might be doing their best to set you up, might be throwing absolutely everything at the wall to try to find something to stick, but the much more rational answer is that Charlotte Holmes isn’t half as good as everyone thinks she is. I might not like it, but until I have a better answer—”

Holmes looked up, and a beat later, Shepard’s phone rang.

“Hold on.” He put it to his ear. “Shepard. Slow down. She what? No. No, that’s fine. Yeah. Is she—good. Yeah, I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Glancing over at us with something like relief, he said, “I just need to finish up something here.”

“This pie is delicious,” Holmes said to my father. He looked back at her helplessly. “Is there any more?”

SOMEONE HAD TRIED TO KILL LENA.

That’s how Shepard put it to us. Unbothered by Holmes’s absence, Lena had spent the day after homecoming holed up in bed, reading magazines and working her way through a care package of cookies from home. She’d been playing music loud enough that when there was a knock at her door, she wasn’t sure, at first, if she’d imagined it. But when she finally got up to check, there it was on the threshold: a parcel, and inside the parcel, a sliding ivory jewelry box.

Though she unwrapped the paper, Lena didn’t open the box. With the roommate she had, she’d gotten used to seeing some weird things, and in the past, when mysterious packages had arrived, they’d always been for Holmes. (“I do a lot of online shopping,” Holmes told Detective Shepard without batting an eye.) So she’d set it on her roommate’s desk and taken a nap.

She woke up twenty minutes later to a man in a ski mask looming over her, one hand at her throat, as if he were about to check her pulse or strangle her. Lena screamed. The man ran. And she immediately called the police, surrendering the mysterious box to their custody. As we spoke, they were examining it at the station.

Something about all this was naggingly familiar, but I couldn’t put a finger on what.

“When did this happen?” Holmes demanded, hands shaking. I hadn’t realized that she’d cared about Lena so much. “Just now? I spoke with her not twenty minutes ago.”

The detective took out a notepad and paper. “What about?”

Holmes’s mouth twitched. “She’d spilled punch on me at homecoming and wanted to know if I was still angry. I told her I was over it, and we’d get my dress to the cleaners. No harm, no foul.”

So it had been Lena on the phone, earlier. I’d never seen Holmes take one of her roommate’s calls before. She always sent them, and everyone else’s, straight to voicemail to screen at her leisure.

“Does she know that you went down to the station? Did she know where you were today?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “The only person I really talk to is Jamie. I doubt anyone at the school knows I’m gone, unless they saw you haul us away in the cruiser. But it was dark.”

My father was taking notes in a chair in the corner. “Dark,” he muttered to himself.

“But Lena’s okay?” Holmes asked. Her lower lip trembled. “I’m sorry, I just—this sounds awful, but I really do think that man was there to hurt me, not Lena. And that weird box . . . Jamie, doesn’t it ring a bell for you too?”

She wasn’t acting like herself. She was acting normal. Like she’d have any reaction other than swift and extreme mobilization at hearing that that she’d missed a crime in her own dorm room. Like she wasn’t . . .

I put it together in a flash.

Oh, she was brilliant. Like a hurtling comet you couldn’t look at dead on without burning your retinas right off. Like a bioluminescent lake. She was a sixteen-year-old detective-savant who could tell your life story from a look, who retrofitted little carved boxes with surprise poison springs early on a Saturday morning when everyone else, including me, was asleep in their beds.