“Tell me,” I coughed, in an attempt to stall her. “Dobson. How?”
“Poor thing,” she said. “I’d come over to check your vitals, but I think little Charlotte here might react poorly to my hands on you. A shame. You know, this orthomyxoviridae surrexit nigrum virus doesn’t have a precise countdown clock. It isn’t a bomb. Really, you could croak at any time. So I’ll honor your last wish.” She put a hand to her heart in apparent sincerity. “I’ll do that. Isn’t that how all those stories always end? The hero explaining everything to his hapless confidant? You are a Watson, after all, so let’s stick with tradition.”
Holmes wasn’t listening, it was clear. Her eyes were fixed on Bryony’s boots. Slowly, her hand stole over to her brother’s, and she took it. For comfort, or for another reason, I wasn’t sure. So I clamped my eyes on Bryony, giving her the captivated audience she obviously wanted.
“Lee Dobson. Nasty thing, wasn’t he? One of my first patients back in September, with a mean case of thrush. He had to come in for a follow-up, and I think he thought . . . well, you know. Attractive older woman, lusty young man. He was trying to impress me. Asking all these ‘oblique’ questions about narcotics, opiates. For a friend. They always say it’s for a friend. How does someone react to heroin? As opposed to morphine? To oxycodone? Did they go nonresponsive? At what dosage? How pliable were they? Were they still able to have sex?”
Holmes’s shoulders went stiff, her jaw set. Part of her was listening, after all. Beside her, Milo’s expression was set in a determined blank.
“Oh, I was happy to oblige him and answer his questions. I had no qualms about it. Because how many other students at this school could be depraved enough to do drugs of that caliber? I knew I wasn’t pointing him toward the innocent. Why, yes, I told him, your friend will be euphoric. So happy, so lazy, so unwilling to move. They should be careful, I said. Terrible things can happen to girls when they’re that high. He thanked me profusely. Nearly wrung my hand off. And I had the satisfaction of knowing that I was sending our little whore here exactly the man she’d been asking for.
“And after that he kept coming back. It was clear he was infatuated with me. You can see why, of course.” A smile crept over her face like a poisonous fog. “I can see you are, too, Jamie, from the way you look at me. I knew it the day that you got into that tussle with my Lee, the starry-eyed look on your face. Don’t be ashamed. I did pageants, you know. Won quite a few prizes. But no. No, I was talking about Lee Dobson and that protein powder.
“Because the two of you had more or less marked him for dead. Charlotte had made her disgust for that poor boy so loudly clear, and, you, Jamie, had made an attempt to kill him. No, don’t look at me like that—you would’ve beaten him stupid, and all for him saying things about your Charlotte that were true. I got all of it from Dobson in the infirmary. How he’d tried to warn you about what a slut she was. He was doing you a favor! And look at how he repaid it. Poor thing marked himself for death at that point. From my own experience”—here she huffed, like a disappointed grandmother—“I know that Charlotte is utterly ruthless. She would’ve taken him out eventually, especially with such a besotted baby mastiff like you by her side. I was doing him a favor, really. At least I got rid of him in a humane way.
“It wasn’t hard to start dosing him with arsenic in his protein powder. A little bit at a time, building the dosage each day—I made him come to me to take it, of course. And then I had a blank page to write my story on, once he was dead. You know, I loved Dr. Watson’s tales when I was young. It was so much fun to get to do a reenactment. I nicked a brand-new copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes out of the library and made a dorm visit that night—came up through the back stairs. I’d asked Lee to prop them open for me. Had a surprise for him, I said. He probably thought he was going to get laid. I knew his roommate was on that rugby tour; he’d told me, so eager to get his hands on me. Well. By the time I arrived, he was dead. They called me to help comfort the students, after.”
She studied a nail. In a flash, I remembered seeing her there outside Dobson’s door, patting my sobbing hallmate on the shoulder. I swallowed the bile that had risen in my throat.
“Of course, I had help with the snake.”
Holmes started. “What help?”
Bryony clucked her tongue. “Speaking out of turn,” she said, and for the first time, I heard a trace of anger in her voice. “But I’ll play along. Still haven’t thought through the consequences of your actions, have you? Well, birds can’t change their feathers. Here’s a quick education: when you orchestrated my fiancé’s downfall—all for the crime of loving me—you ruined my life. You ruined. My life.” She took a step closer to the two of them, almost inadvertently. When she moved, I saw the gun she’d holstered underneath her puffer coat.