A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)(7)

Mrs. Dunham offered to make me some cocoa, but I had no idea what I’d say to her, or to anyone, so I said thanks but no thanks, I’d just go to sleep. As if sleep was even a remote possibility.

Tom wasn’t in our room. He’d probably decided to sleep on someone’s floor, I thought. He was afraid of me now. In a flash of rage, I picked up my pillow to chuck it across the room—and stopped cold. If someone heard me on a rampage, it wasn’t going to help my case in the slightest. It was this anger that had gotten me into this mess in the first place, I reminded myself, and squashed the pillow against the bed instead.

Anger, and Charlotte Holmes.

When I snuck back down the hallway, the yellow tape over Dobson’s door caught the light like a mirror, one I refused to look too closely into. I kept moving.

I made it all the way to Lawrence Hall before I realized I didn’t have her number. Her phone number, or her room number—in fact, I was only vaguely sure she lived in this dorm. The rows of darkened windows stared down at me as I struggled to make a decision. Any moment now, the sky would start to brighten. Lights would begin to go on. The girls who lived here would shower and dress and gather their textbooks on the way out the door. How far would they get before they heard that one of their classmates had been murdered? How long would it take for them to start believing I’d done it?

I didn’t even know what I’d say when I found her. What possible reason did she have to believe I was innocent? The last time she saw me, I was beating the daylights out of the victim.

My sense of purpose dissipated like a sputtering balloon, and I sat down on Lawrence’s front steps to get my head on straight. Campus was silent and dark, except for the lights of the emergency vehicles that crowded around Michener.

“Watson,” the voice hissed. “Jamie Watson.”

Holmes stepped neatly out of a small stand of trees; I hadn’t seen her there at all. In fact, I didn’t think that I was meant to, as she was dressed in head-to-toe blacks: trousers, gloves, a pair of dark sneakers, a jacket zipped all the way to her chin, even the backpack slung over her shoulders. Her face was a pale moon against all that darkness, her lips compressed in anger until she opened her mouth to say something that, from her expression, I didn’t want to hear.

So I spoke before she did. “Hi,” I said, in my usual stupid way. “I was looking for you.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed, and I watched her rapidly recalculate something in her head. “This is about Dobson.”

I didn’t bother to ask how she knew. She was a Holmes. But I must’ve looked surprised enough for her to fill in the gaps. “Look, Tom texted Lena, and Lena texted me. Relatively straightforward. Unfortunately, I was wearing this when I heard”—she indicated her outfit with a frustrated hand—“and so I decided to stay away from the dorm so that nobody would see me. It’s bad form to be dressed as a burglar on the night of anyone’s murder, much less that of someone you hate.”

“Oh,” I said. “What were you actually burgling?”

A quicksilver smile flitted across her face. “Pipettes,” she said. “I went to go work in my lab after night check.”

“You absolute nerd,” I said, laughing, and her smile came back, and stayed. Incredible. “You have a lab? Wait, no. Later. Because Dobson’s dead, and we’re easily the prime suspects, and we’re laughing.”

“I know.” She scrubbed at her eyes with her hands. “Do you know, at first I thought you came here to accuse me of it.”

My eyebrows must’ve shot up into my hair. “Absolutely not—”

“I know,” she said, cutting me off with a searching look. I felt as if she were X-raying me. Her eyes flickered from my face, to my fingers, to my beaten-up Chucks. “But I told him I would kill him. I should have been your primary suspect. And I’m not.”

There were a lot of answers to that not-question: I’m a Watson, it’s genetically impossible for me to suspect you or, In my imagination, you weren’t ever a villain, you were always the hero, but everything I came up with sounded flip or cute or melodramatic. “Like you said, you can take care of yourself,” I told her, finally. “If you’d murdered him, I bet there would be twenty witnesses who saw him put the gun to his own head.”

Holmes shrugged but she was clearly pleased. We sat there for a minute; in the distance, birds started calling to each other.

“You know,” she said, “that bastard has hit on me in every disgusting way since the day I arrived. Shouted at me, left notes under my door. He slapped my ass in the breakfast line the weekend my brother was visiting.” She shook her head. “It took some persuasion on my part, but Dobson wasn’t immediately napalmed. Or made the target of a drone hit. Actually, Milo quite wanted to play the long game, wait a few years and then just disappear him from his bed, make it look like aliens. Or so he said. He was trying to cheer me up. . . .” She trailed off; it was clear she’d said more than she meant to. “I should still be mad at you.”

“But you aren’t.”

“And we shouldn’t be talking about Dobson like this.” She got to her feet, and after a second’s hesitation, offered me a hand up.

“I didn’t think you’d be so respectful of the dead,” I told her. “Just a few hours ago, he was alive and kicking, and practically begging to be napalmed.”