A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(61)

“Watson.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry I picked a fight with you,” Holmes said sleepily. “But you should know that I had a good reason.”

“I know, I was being an idiot.” I really didn’t want to do this now, I didn’t, but I would if I had to.

“No. It wasn’t your fault.” Her voice was fading into a thin whisper. “The note said you’d be killed if you stayed, so I fixed it. I was horrible until you went away.”

I sat straight up into the dark, but Holmes was already asleep.

HAD IT BEEN ANY OTHER DAY IN THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE, and I’d been told something like that, I would have stopped sleeping altogether.

But that night, I was out in the space of ten minutes. It wasn’t that I felt particularly brave, or that I’d resigned myself to my violent, rapidly approaching death (though that wasn’t a bad plan, really). My body had just proved itself physically incapable of handling more terror. Enough, it decided, and shut the whole thing down.

I woke as the first rays of sun crept into the room. More precisely, I woke to a toddler-shaped eclipse.

“Hi,” he said, placing a sticky hand square on my mouth.

I removed it carefully, sitting up. “Hello,” I said. “How did you get in here?”

Holmes’s bed was rumpled and empty, the door wide open.

“I like ducks.” He looked disconcertingly like pictures I’d seen of myself as a child. Guileless eyes, wild dark hair. My mother used to say I could get away with murder, and looking at him, I believed it.

For the record, I’d never resented my half brothers for anything that happened between my father and me. They were little kids, and none of it was their fault.

Besides, he was pretty cute.

“I like ducks too,” I said, and scooped him up to take him downstairs with me. Thankfully, I wasn’t inexperienced at talking to babies—I had a whole mess of little cousins. “What’s your name?”

“Malcolm,” he said in a shy voice. “Your name is Jamie.”

“That’s right.” I bounced him a little as we walked into the kitchen.

“It snowed!” he yelled, pointing out the back door at the expanse of white lawn.

I wondered what the wreckage of the sciences building looked like this morning. Our destroyed lab open to the air, all shrouded in white. With a strange pang, I wondered if Holmes’s collection of teeth survived.

Abbie turned around from the stove where she was making pancakes. “Oh no, Mal attack! Sorry about that. I wanted to let you sleep in.”

I shrugged, juggling Malcolm to my other arm. “It’s okay, he was just saying hi. Have you seen Holmes? I need to find her, and kill her.”

She gave me a dubious look. “In the family room, with your father and Robbie. He’s showing her the cat.”

“I didn’t know you had a cat,” I said, trying to make conversation. I did, in fact, know they had a cat. I was really hoping to get one of those pancakes.

Abbie frowned and didn’t offer me one. “It’s skittish and hates everyone. Robbie spent the last hour trying to find him for her.”

“Come along,” I singsonged to Malcolm, “we’re going to meet Miss Charlotte, who thinks that keeping Mister Jamie in the dark is a fun, fun game.”

In the family room, my father and Holmes were examining a piece of paper they’d laid out on the coffee table. The cat—a handsome tabby—was purring on her lap.

“But it hates me,” the small boy at her feet was saying plaintively. “Why does he like you?”

She looked down at him, considering. “Because I have a bigger lap for him to sit on. Wait ten or so years, and then he might like you better.”

Robbie burst into tears.

“Right,” my father said. He took Malcolm from me and grabbed Robbie by the hand, leading him from the room as he sobbed. “Let’s see if your mother has finished with those pancakes.”

Holmes hardly noticed. She whipped out a tiny magnifying glass and leaned over the paper. “Watson, come here and tell me what you can make of this.”

“Is it going to explain why you kept direct communications from our stalker a secret from me, choosing instead to inflict some serious psychic damage with the end goal of getting me to leave you to deal with a bomb all by yourself?”

“Yes.” She didn’t even look up. “Come here.”

She’d squared the note in the middle of the table. As I approached, I saw that she’d laid a sandwich bag between it and the wood.

Holmes handed me a pair of latex gloves. “They were in your stepmother’s first-aid kit,” she said by way of explanation. “Go on. What do you see?”

I read it aloud.

IF YOU KEEP DRAGGING JAMES WATSON

INTO THIS HE WILL DIE TO





TONIGHT


HE DOESN’T DESERVE IT THE WAY YOU DO

THIS WON’T STOP UNTIL YOU HAVE LEARNT YOUR LESSON

“A grammar error,” I said. “‘To,’ instead of ‘too.’ Spellcheck wouldn’t catch that. And learned is spelled the English way. ‘Learnt.’”

She gestured impatiently. “What else?”

“Well, it’s a death threat. Though they seem to like me more than they like you.” Gingerly, I lifted the note by its corner. It was square, cut from regular printer paper, thin to the touch. There was a crease down the middle, probably from where Holmes had put it in her pocket. The ink was black. I held it up to the light, but I couldn’t see anything special about the rest of it.