The brown-sugar color of Holmes’s violin brought it all back to me in a rush, and I stood there, transfixed, watching her run through a scale before beginning to play. The bow stood out against her dark hair; her eyes were closed. The song was both familiar and alien, a folk melody punctuated by bursts of gorgeous dissonance. Though I was standing only a few feet away, the distance between us stretched like the hundred years between Sherlock Holmes playing for the king and my hearing it—that remote, that distant.
I must have listened for a long time before she stopped playing, and I realized that I was standing frozen with my hand on the doorknob, like a fool.
“Watson,” she said, letting the violin drop to her side. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She turned away from me, and began to play again.
four
AFTER I AVOIDED ALL MY CALLS FOR ANOTHER DAY, MRS. Dunham came by my room and politely told me that if she had to speak to my panicked mother one more time, she would very publicly set herself on fire. So, that Thursday, I had to endure my mom’s histrionics and my sister Shelby’s thousand questions (“What happened? Are you okay? Does this mean that you can come home?”), a call that went on for hours. I told neither of them that I’d been invited to my father’s house for dinner; I still hadn’t decided if I would go.
Things settled down between Tom and me. Or rather, Tom’s good nature won out over his suspicions, and after a day of uncomfortable silence, he came over to my desk while I was writing. I’d been scribbling down everything I could remember since Dobson’s murder—times and dates, names of poisons, those things of Dobson’s that Holmes had cataloged with her hands. I was thinking of making a story of it, and when Tom peered over my shoulder, it was easy enough to try it out on him.
Or to try out the version that wouldn’t get either Holmes or me expelled.
Sherringford had released a statement referring to Lee Dobson’s death as an accident—an “accident with a snake,” which came off much more bizarre than terrifying. It was their attempt to reassure parents that our campus was safe, but students were still being dragged home in droves. Our hall, in particular, had an emptied-out feeling to it—for two days running, there was no line for the shower, no music blaring from behind closed doors.
Into that silence, the reporters appeared.
One day, they weren’t there. The next, they were everywhere, crawling all over the quad with their cameras and flashbulbs and strident voices. They lay in wait after our classes, putting sympathetic hands on our shoulders and pointing the lenses into our faces. Most of the students ignored them. Some didn’t. One day, during lunch, I watched the redheaded girl from my French class crying delicately into a camera. Her headshots, she sobbed, were on her website if they needed them. I guess I couldn’t blame her for using the press; the press were using her, too.
That same reporter took a particular shine to me.
Following me from class to class, murmuring words of sympathy before launching into questions like Do you really think Lee Dobson’s death was an accident? and Is it true you keep a snake in your dorm room? From the logo on the cameraman’s kit, I knew they were from the BBC. I would have known it anyway from the reporter’s plummy accent and haughty chin, the very image of some grown-up Oxbridge wanker. He’d been sent across the pond to try to get some dirt on the Holmeses; I was sure by the way he kept turning the conversation back to Charlotte. Somehow, he’d gotten ahold of my class schedule, and for days he waited for me between classes, his cameraman always towering behind him.
The worst was the afternoon I thought I’d gotten away clean. The two of them were talking to a townie on the sciences building steps as I came out the front door. “Yeah, man,” he was telling them, “I’ve heard the stories too. I have a lot of, uh, friends who say Charlotte Holmes is the head of this messed-up cult and James Watson is, like, her angry little henchman—”
I hurried past them, head down, but the reporter charged after me, calling my name, reaching out to pull on my arm.
I whipped around, ready to deck him. The cameraman stepped forward eagerly, training his lens on my face.
“See what I mean!” the townie said. I got a good look at him, this time. He was around thirty years old, with mean little features and thick blond hair. Tom had pointed him out to me as the campus drug dealer—I’d seen him lurking around campus at night.
Apparently these days he had more credibility than I did.
“Back off,” I said quietly, and put my collar up. They let me walk on alone, but we all knew they’d be back the next day.