Holmes had no such hesitation. “Hold my bag,” she said, and immediately fell to her hands and knees. I jumped back about a foot. From what seemed like thin air, she produced a penlight in one hand, a pair of tweezers in the other.
“Did you order some sort of spy kit online?” I asked, irritated. I’d had barely an hour of sleep, and, to be honest, I was trying hard not to give in to a lurking sort of terror. Anyone could come in at any moment and catch us tampering with the crime scene for a murder I’d sort of wanted to commit.
And then there was Holmes. While I stood there, shaking with fear, she was efficient, cool-headed, working swiftly to get us absolved. I thought once more about the two of us racing through a runaway train and smothered a laugh. In reality, she’d make a clean escape while I’d trip over my own feet and get hauled away for waterboarding.
“Be quiet,” she whispered back. “And pull one of those specimen jars from my bag, I’ve found something.”
I took a small glass bottle from her backpack and undid the stopper, then crouched so she could tip the tweezers in. Through the glass, the sample looked like a sliver of onion skin; as I examined it, she added another piece, and a third. She pulled up a bit of the carpet and tucked that into another jar, and used her piece of wire to poke around under the bed, dislodging a number of pens, an old toothbrush, some odds and ends. She inspected a glass of milk by his bed and the old-fashioned slide whistle beside it. With one gloved finger, she traced an invisible line from a high vent down the wall to Dobson’s pillow. Then she looked up, sharply, at the ceiling, and I heard her counting—why, I wasn’t sure. Every small noise sounded to me like our inevitable imprisonment, and my heart hammered in my ears.
She bent to examine Dobson’s pillow and gestured me over. The indentation that his head had made was still visible. “Is that spit?” I whispered, pointing.
“Excellent.” She scraped at it with the edge of her tweezers. I’d said it just to make her laugh, but I warmed at the compliment anyway. “Jar,” she said, and I handed her one.
“I don’t see any blood,” I said, and she shook her head. There wasn’t any to see, not anywhere.
Outside the door, I heard footsteps—more than one set—and people talking. To my horror, I heard the edges of my name, of Dobson’s. Above the din, a grizzled voice said, “Is this the boy’s room?”
“We need to go,” I told Holmes, and for a second she looked like she was about to protest. “Now,” I said, pulling her to the window—I swear I saw the doorknob begin to turn. Without waiting, I lowered myself down the outside of the building, then jumped the rest of the way.
The second my feet hit the ground, my fear broke open into exhilaration.
I heard the window shut with a snap. Holmes landed behind me, and I spun her around by the arm.
“Were you seen?” I asked breathlessly.
“Of course not.”
“Holmes,” I said, “that was brilliant.”
That flicker of a smile again. “It was, wasn’t it. Especially for a first effort.”
“A first—you hadn’t done that before.”
She shrugged, but her eyes were gleaming.
“You had us break into a crime scene to steal evidence—something that could make us look even more guilty than we do already—and you’ve never done that before?” If I sounded a bit shrill, it was because I felt a bit shrill.
Holmes had already moved on. “We need to get to my lab,” she said, pulling her shoes from her bag, “without arousing any suspicion for why we’re together. Do you want to split up and meet there in twenty? Sciences, room 442.” She tossed my sneakers to me in an elegant, underhand lob. “And take the long way, will you? I want to get there first.”
SCIENCES 442 WAS A SUPPLY CLOSET.
A big one, but still.
When I walked in, Holmes was already bent over her chemistry set. It was the real deal, the kind I’d only seen in movies—tall beakers, and big fat ones, smoke coming off of the strange green substances inside. Bunsen burners all lit like a row of stage lights. This setup had pride of place in the middle of the room, and she’d lashed a pair of desk lamps to a neighboring bookshelf for light. That bookshelf was filled with a collection of battered-looking textbooks, everything from Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Gray’s Anatomy to huge tomes with names like The History of Dirt and Baritsu and You. There was an entire shelf just on poisons. At the bottom, I spied the famous biography of Dr. Watson, the one my mother had told me was too scandalous to read. (Which meant I had read it immediately. Apparently, he was really, really . . . popular with girls.)