A Study in Charlotte(85)

All the blood had drained from his face except for two bright spots of color, one on each cheek. His eyes had gone all pupil. He blinked rapidly, staring at the floor.

“Tom?” I said, as gently as I could. I hadn’t meant to scare him this badly.

He jerked his head up to look at me. “When did this happen?”

The phrasing caught me off guard. Not what, but when. “The night we were evacuated,” I said cautiously.

“Was it Nurse Bryony?”

I startled, then remembered that I’d told him about my concussion and the infirmary. “I don’t know.” It seemed the safest answer.

He went a shade paler and nodded to himself, as senselessly fast as a bobblehead doll.

“Five minutes,” the policeman called.

“Hey,” I said to Tom, “I promise I’ll explain later, but can we—”

“Where are they?” he asked in a snarl, shoving me into the door of my closet. His cheerful, bright American face looked like an ugly mask. “Where the fuck are they, Jamie?”

It was like the floor fell open below us.

I shoved him off me and kept him there, an arm’s length away. Tears welled up in his eyes as he struggled against my grip.

“What the hell are you talking about?” But I knew exactly what he was talking about. I just wanted to hear him say it. Admit that he’d bugged our room. Confess that all this time, his friendly gossip mongering was a cover for collecting information for Bryony Downs.

“Oh my God, he’s going to kill me.” Tom stopped fighting me off. He fell back, gasping, throwing his hands up over his face, and I felt a flare of satisfaction.

That faded as quickly as it came. He?

The dealer. The Moriarty dealer.

“Two minutes,” the policeman said. “Cut the dramatics and finish packing.”

“Talk fast,” I said, pulling my suitcase out from under the bed and yanking armfuls of clothes from the dresser.

“I never even got anything good,” Tom said, as if to himself. “Nothing conclusive. Charlotte even stopped coming to the room. You two were always hunkered down in her fucked-up little dungeon.”

“I just— I can’t deal with this right now.” I grabbed the novels from above my bed and dropped them on top of my clothes, one, two, three, like grenades. Textbooks, soap. I had to get in my closet but Tom was still slouched in front of it.

“Move,” I said to him, but he stared up at me stupidly, and the bovine look on him eroded the last of my temper. “I swear to God I will break your neck if you don’t move. I might break your neck anyway. You were spying on me, Tom? On top of all the other awful shit happening—you had to make it worse? I never did anything to you.”

“He offered to split his advance with me,” he said. “He already sold it, you know, he’s in the middle of writing it now. It’s going to be huge, and he’s going to have all this money, he’ll be famous, he’ll finally be able to teach somewhere better than this shithole—his friend Penelope is going to get him a job at Yale—”

I stared at him, at his horrible lying mouth. “Wheatley? You’re full of shit. The dealer told you to say that.”

Tom went to his desk and, opening the bottom drawer, pulled out a battered legal pad. The top page didn’t have any writing on it. Not actual writing, no—someone had painstakingly colored in the indentations made by the words written on the page above. Skeletons in her office he says starrily as if he’s in love with death as much as her. Lines and lines of florid prose. He wears the glasses of a Beat philosopher from the 1950s but his face is all Cornwall smooth. When they dance they do not touch.

They were Mr. Wheatley’s notes from our meeting, when he’d so impressed me by interrogating me and then handing over what he’d written down. I remembered the piece of cardboard he’d stuck below the top page. The top two pages. I’d thought at the time that he was worried his ink would bleed through, but he had just been making himself a copy.

“He was sure you were guilty,” Tom said, almost like he was pleading with me. “Back in October, I was waiting for an appointment with him to talk about my story, and I heard him say it to another teacher inside his office. You. Guilty. And I told him, no, you weren’t, and it was actually this great story, you and Charlotte Holmes solving crimes, that you two were totally boning like Bonnie and Clyde, the good-guy version. He had this idea for a book. True crime. With famous kids as the heroes. The public would eat it up. I’m a good writer, he told me that, better than you, anyway, even if my family’s not famous, and I’d do a good job helping, and you’d be happy about it in the end, when you saw how much attention it got you—” He cut himself off.