A Study in Charlotte(87)

And the message was going to be my dead body.

I staggered out the front door and down the steps. The next two students were waiting for the officer to fetch them, and one of them stepped forward to help me.

“Don’t touch me,” I said, holding up a hand. “I might be contagious.”

Because that was the worst of it. Nurse Bryony could have made me into some kind of bomb. A patient zero that could take out the whole eastern seaboard. I needed to get inside, away from everyone, and I had to start making a plan. My parents couldn’t know. There was nothing they could do. I wondered if my father would still find all this crime-solving fun after he identified my corpse at the morgue.

No. I wasn’t going to die. I was sixteen years old. I was going to be a writer; I was going to go to college, get a flat in London, or Edinburgh, or Paris. I’d get to know my stepbrothers. Oh, God, I didn’t want my little sister to be an only child. I didn’t want to leave Charlotte Holmes with a controlling family and a brilliant mind and a dead best friend. I didn’t want to imagine her life without me. Maybe it was selfish to think that way, but I couldn’t imagine mine without her.

The sky was open and blue, guileless in its beauty. And the snow everywhere, blinding. The light was beginning to prick at my eyes, and I rubbed at them with the back of my hand. This had to be psychosomatic, I told myself; it had to be in my head. The denial working its hand around me. I can’t possibly be dying, I thought, and tried to believe it.

One foot, then the other. Where was I going? I’d walked, I remembered, up the hill from town. The distance was impossibly far. I’d sit for a minute, catch my breath. If I could just arrange my suitcase—there.

Holmes told me that, when they found me, I’d passed out in a snowbank.

They bundled me into the back of Milo’s town car, her and her brother and his Greystone mercenaries. Blankets. Something hot to drink. Holmes rubbing my chilled hands between hers, strangely smooth and firm. “No,” I’d managed to say, “the blood, it’s contagious,” and then I saw that she was wearing latex gloves.

She knew.

I was racked with chills, and still cold sweat beaded on my forehead before trickling down my face. My mouth burned, my teeth tender to the touch. I couldn’t swallow. My throat didn’t work. Holmes held a bottle of water to my lips and tipped it, gently, into my mouth. I tried to pull off my shirt, thinking, in my delirium, that it was a straightjacket, and she stilled my hands. All the while Milo watched me from behind his glasses, taking copious notes on his phone. On what, I didn’t know. I was a specimen, I thought wildly. I would be experimented on until I died.

When we got to our destination, Peterson had to carry me up the stairs over his shoulder, like he’d rescued me from a burning building. And then there was a bed, with sheets still warm from the dryer, a table beside it. Peterson returned to that table again and again with pill bottles, clean rags. Someone brought in an IV drip and put it into my arm.

What was real? I didn’t know. Milo came in, in a suit and watch chain; he lit a pipe by the window, staring broodingly out over the rooftops. My dog Maggie was there, too, though she’d died when I was six. But she put her shaggy head on my mattress and looked up at me with big wet eyes, telling me in silent words what my sister Shelby was reading that week (A Wrinkle in Time), how much my mother missed me. My hands were made of lead; I couldn’t ruffle her ears the way I wanted. Good dog, I wanted to say. Where have you been?

Bryony came in through an invisible door and put her arm around Milo’s waist. They talked as if I wasn’t there.

“Lead him up to the mountain and put the dagger to his throat,” Milo said in his sonorous voice.

“I thought we were done with goats. I thought we only made offerings of sheep.” Still, Bryony smiled into his face. He kissed her like they were in a movie, dipping her back in his arms.

Stop, I yelled, stop, but she was at my bedside, with a pillow pressed down over my face to keep the words inside my mouth. And then she was gone, and Milo was, too, and I was alone.

I didn’t trust anything that was happening to me—Where was Holmes? For that matter, where was I?—but I was so overwhelmed by a wave of exhaustion that I let myself be carried away by it, all the way to sea.

When I woke—when I fully woke—night had fallen. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed things I hadn’t before. There was a dim lamp by my bed, its mouth turned away to throw a white circle on the wall. Beside me, a machine counted out my pulse, reading it from a plastic clip attached to my index finger. My hands had been re-bandaged, expertly this time. I felt present in my body, in a way I hadn’t since I opened that closet door.