A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(41)

She’d set herself up to be the target of a fake crime to get us off the hook for the real one. And she’d used Lena, and some mysterious guy, to do it.

“Culverton Smith,” I said, piecing it together aloud for Shepard’s sake. “It’s from a Holmes story. We’re being set up. Jesus Christ, tell your policemen to wear gloves when handling that box. Thick ones.”

To his credit, he took me seriously. “Making a call. But I want an explanation as soon as I’m back.” He stepped outside.

“You,” I said to her, “are a genius.”

Across the table, Holmes slipped from false concern into very real satisfaction. “It’s quite a good story, you know. ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective.’ Pity that Dr. Watson smothered what should have been an exercise in logic in all that sentimental garbage about his partner.”

“The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” for me, has always been the hardest of the Sherlock Holmes stories to read, and not because it isn’t brilliantly done. It’s 1890. Dr. Watson, who’s living with his wife away from Baker Street, is urgently called to Sherlock Holmes’s bedside. The detective has caught a rare, highly contagious disease that, as he tells Dr. Watson, can only be cured by Culverton Smith, a specialist in tropical illnesses living nearby. The catch: Smith hates Holmes because he correctly accused Smith of murder. His victim was infected with, and died of, this same disease. But Holmes insists that Watson bring Smith anyway, that Smith is their only hope. While Holmes rattles off a series of ridiculous-sounding orders on how Watson is to go about fetching this specialist, Watson idly picks up a small ivory box that’s been resting on the table. Out of nowhere, Holmes insists that Watson put it down and not touch it again.

All the while, Watson thinks his best friend is dying. It’s wrenching to read, and even more so as we watch Watson follow Holmes’s orders—the clear product of a hallucinating mind—to the letter. From trust, or affection, or old habit, we’re not sure, but either way, the last of these insane directions has Watson hiding himself in the closet in preparation for Smith’s arrival. Smith comes in. The gaslight is low. Holmes is sweating in feverish agony on the settee. The specialist begins to gloat, thinking he and the detective are alone. That little ivory box? He’d mailed it, fitted with an infected metal spring, hoping to catch Holmes with it unaware. After Smith has confessed everything to Holmes, who he believes to be a dead man, Holmes asks him to turn up the gaslight. It’s a signal: in bursts Inspector Morton of Scotland Yard, who’s been waiting at the door, and Watson, who’s witnessed the whole conversation from the closet. Smith is hauled away to jail.

And Holmes? Not sick at all. He faked his symptoms. Starved himself for three days until he was skin and bone, then applied a convincing coat of stage makeup to make himself appear at death’s door. As for the box—well. He wasn’t in any danger. He reminds Watson that he always thoroughly examines his mail.

Charlotte Holmes had stripped the “Dying Detective” for details and rearranged them to make her own narrative, pulling Lena in on her scheme to sell the story. I wondered who the man in the ski mask was. Tom? Unlikely. Still, it was just the sort of story that our Sherlock-obsessed murderer would’ve seized on and used against us.

The part I couldn’t get over, that distracted me from even this show of Charlotte Holmes’s powers, was remembering how much my great-great-great-grandfather had trusted hers. Oysters, I remembered. Between the instructions he’d given Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes had been ranting, in his “hallucinations,” about oysters.

And his partner had still followed his directions exactly.

I thought about the piped-in interrogation in the police station. About the little notebook that still lay open between us on the table. About how my own doubts about Holmes’s innocence ran alongside my doubt that she could get us out of this mess.

She had just gotten us out of this mess. And no matter what my head wanted to tell me, I knew in my bones that she wasn’t a killer.

“I’m sorry I didn’t trust you,” I said to my Holmes, in a low voice.

She shook her head. “I needed your shock to be genuine for me to sell it.”

“I don’t mean about the details. I don’t need to hear the details.” I reached across the table to put my hand on hers. “I meant to say that I won’t doubt you again.”

I watched her catalog me. The planes of my face, the tilt of my head, how I sat in my chair, my fingers’ heat and the ruck of my hair: she took it all in, deduced from what she saw, and came up, in the end, with something she hadn’t expected.

“You won’t,” she said with flat surprise. “You really won’t, will you?”

Next to me, my father cleared his throat. I didn’t spare him a glance.

When Shepard returned from speaking to his team, we gave him the background on the Culverton Smith story. And he told us what we already knew. They had, in fact, found a spring loaded into the ivory box, poised to strike when it was slid open. That spring was coated in an infectious tropical disease; the police lab weren’t sure of its exact origin, but they guessed it to be Asia. Samples of this kind were tightly controlled, and so far, their search into local scientists who had requested access to them had ended in an absolute null.

(I asked Holmes, much later, how she got her hands on the sample. She said something about Milo, an ex-girlfriend at the CDC, and “catching as catch can.”)