A Study in Charlotte(86)

“So you bugged our room.”

“He had me do it. Ordered all the stuff online. The mirror was the worst, replacing it. But yeah, I’d get you to talk and then I’d review the files when you were gone, write everything down, pass it along to him. But—look at this. He’s never going to pay me now.”

“Why?” I asked him again. I’d thought Tom was my friend. He was one of the only constants in my life, his irrepressible grin and his motor mouth and his ridiculous sweater-vest. We watched stupid videos on his computer at night. We ate each other’s candy, borrowed each other’s shampoo. He was the first person who was nice to me when I came back to America, miserable and alone.

“I was doing you a favor,” he repeated, like he was trying to make himself believe it.

“Time, boys,” the officer boomed from the doorway. I slammed the door in his face and bolted it. I was going to get an explanation even if it got me arrested.

“Tell me why.”

“Lena’s family goes to Paris every summer,” Tom said quietly, as the policeman hammered on the door. “She invited me. And she . . . she expects things from me. Dinners out. Presents. You know her dad’s a big oil tycoon out in India. They have a housekeeper. She has her own plane. And I’m here, from the Midwest, on scholarship. Do you know what that feels like? He was going to give me ten grand!”

I couldn’t wring out an ounce of sympathy for him. “Seriously, what do you think Lena will say when she finds out how you got that money? Jesus Christ, everyone at this fucking school acts like they’re so rich and half of them aren’t, not even close. When are you going to realize that? What do you think all those people are doing at Holmes’s poker game every week, wagering all their money? Here’s a solution. Get the hell over yourself. Tell Lena the truth. God, she’s actually a decent person, do you think she’d really care?”

“I didn’t expect you to understand it. You’re a show dog with a pedigree. I’m just someone that escaped from the pound.” He shook his head. “It’s not like I hurt you or anything. You’re my friend. I was doing you a favor. It was going to make you famous—”

“Open up the door! Open it up!”

I was disgusted with him, disgusted with Sherringford, with the bullshit and the jealousy and the backstabbing. Furious, I grabbed the handles of my closet doors, ready to throw the rest of the stuff in my suitcase and get the fuck out of Dodge.

Something bit into my skin.

I looked down, stupidly. My hands were so cut up and bandaged that I could hardly tell what had happened. There. A pinprick of blood near the knuckle of my index finger.

I didn’t think anything of it. Not until I gripped the handle with the bandaged part of my hand and flung open the door.

Clothes and shoes and the rest of my life’s detritus all in a jumble on the closet floor. On the back wall were three giant, jagged lines in marker.

YOU HAVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS TO LIVE

UNLESS SHE GIVES ME WHAT I WANT

XOXO CULVERTON SMITH

Culverton Smith. The man behind Sherlock Holmes’s poisoned ivory box.

I stared back down at my bleeding knuckle. Behind me, Tom raised his iPhone with one shaking hand, and took a picture.

I RIPPED THE INFECTED SPRING FROM THE DOOR HANDLE. Took my phone from the desk (dead), and its charger. Picked up my suitcase. The whole time Tom was loudly pleading his ignorance—this wasn’t me, I wouldn’t do something like that—like the swine he was until I grabbed him by the shirt with one hand.

“This is what you can do for me,” I snarled at him. “Deal with the cop.”

His eyes were focused on the pinprick of infected blood on his shirt. “But what should I say?”

“Make something up. You’re good at that.”

As I stalked down the hall, I heard Tom’s half-assed babbling. “It’s my fault,” he was saying to the policeman, “it’s my fault, let him go.”

I made it to the front doors before my legs began to give out under me.

Bryony Downs had won. She’d taken “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” and turned it back on us with deadly earnest, not knowing that Charlotte Holmes had used that same story to clear our names. I had no idea what she’d dabbed that spring with, but my brain was supplying a cavalcade of answers. Spinal meningitis, I thought, or malaria. I used to want to be a doctor; I’d wanted to treat the scariest diseases, and now I couldn’t stop running them through my head. Milo was right. She had to be working with the Moriartys; how else could she have access to this sort of thing? She was a puppet, and this was a message directed at the Holmes family.