Next to it was the only fiction in the entire bookcase: a handsome leather-bound set of Dr. Watson’s Sherlock Holmes tales. The whole series, from A Study in Scarlet to His Last Bow. Their spines were all broken like they’d been read a million times.
If I was harboring any doubts about my part in this investigation—and to be honest, I’d had some Titanic-sized ones ever since we broke into Dobson’s room—seeing those well-thumbed books made me feel better. I belonged here, I thought, with her, as surely as anyone belonged anywhere.
As weird as here was.
Because there was just so much else crammed in that space, and any one part of it would have made her Prime Suspect #1 in Every Murder Ever. One wall was plastered with diagrams of handguns, obscured by a hanging set of giant bird skeletons. (A vulture peered knowingly at me, its eyehole bullet-black.) The tatty love seat against one wall was spattered in what had to be blood, dripped, most likely, from the riding crops hung above it. There were sagging shelves filled with soil samples, blood samples, what looked like a jar of teeth. Beside the jar was a violin case, a lone bastion of sanity.
I fervently hoped that I was the only visitor she’d ever had to this lab. Or else she was most definitely going to jail.
“Watson,” she said, gesturing to the love seat with a set of tongs, “sit.” I grimaced. “The blood’s all dried,” she added, as if that helped.
It was a measure of how tired I was that I obeyed her. “How goes—whatever you’re doing? What did you find, anyway?”
“Twelve minutes,” she said, and busied herself with her chemistry table.
I waited. Impatiently.
“I don’t like to hypothesize in advance of the facts,” she said finally. “But what I have found suggests that our killer wasn’t leaving anything to chance. He used at least two methods of poison, maybe three.”
“Poison?” I asked, unable to hide the relief in my voice. I knew nothing about poison; there was no way I could be accused of killing Dobson.
But Holmes could.
I swallowed. “I thought you were a sophomore. You haven’t had chemistry yet.”
“Not here,” she said, holding a pipette to the light. “But I was privately tutored when I was younger.”
Of course she was. I thought again of what my mother had said, that the Holmeses drilled their children from birth in the deductive arts. I wondered what else Holmes had learned up there in their vast, lonely Sussex manor.
She cleared her throat. “How to defend myself. How to move silently through a room, how to locate every possible exit within seconds of entering a space. Entire city plans, beginning with London, including the names of every business on every street, and the fastest way to get to any of them. How, in short, to be always aware of what everyone is doing and thinking. From there, you can reason to why they do the things they do.” For a moment, her eyes went dark, but her face cleared so quickly I decided I had imagined it. “And I was taught all the other subjects one learns in school, of course. Is that enough of an answer?”
I had no idea how to handle these conversations, where the questions were picked right out of my head. “It sounds incredible,” I said honestly, “but I don’t know if I’d want to always know what other people are thinking. Where they come from, what they want. Where’s the mystery in that?”
She shrugged her shoulders with a nonchalance I didn’t quite believe. “I suppose few people hold up to the scrutiny. But my family’s business was never in maintaining mysteries. It’s in unraveling them.”
I wanted to ask her more questions, but I was exhausted. I caught myself smothering a yawn. “What time is it?”
“Eight,” she said, and eye-dropped a clear substance onto a slide. “Any minute now, there’ll be a campus-wide text saying that classes are off because of the murder. We can skip the optional counseling, I’m sure.”
“Wake me up in two hours.” I had to curl up small to fit on the sofa. As I pulled my jacket up to my chin, I caught Holmes’s pale, considering eyes for the briefest moment before she looked away.
I WOKE UP TO A STALE TASTE IN MY MOUTH, SWEAT COOLING on my forehead. In my pocket, my phone let out the three-note sigh that meant that it was dying. For a horrible second I had no idea where I was. I looked up into the pleated ends of Holmes’s riding crops, and remembered. It shouldn’t have been as comforting as it was.
“That’s been going off now for an hour,” Holmes said from across the chemistry set. She was more undone than she’d been before: her jacket was rucked up to her elbows, and her hair was a spider web of frizz from the heat in our cramped quarters.
“And you didn’t wake me up? What time is it?”
“You’re wearing a watch.”
“What time is it, Holmes?”