I couldn’t help it; I started snickering. Holmes graced me with one of her quicksilver smiles. She’d wiped most of the mascara from under her eyes and taken off her wig, but she was still done up like a Christmas tree. It was disconcerting, being able to see the thin gauze of persona laid over the real thing.
“There are at least fifty people in this restaurant eating breakfast at two in the morning,” she said, sipping at her water. “All under the age of twenty. And forty-eight of them didn’t have it this morning, including Will Tillman, the freshman across the room who is never at breakfast and who is, in fact, most likely here to buy drugs. Why on earth is this place so popular? I don’t understand.”
“That’s because you’re a bit of a robot,” I said fondly, and she rolled her eyes. “So, are you the only one who can go incognito, or do I get to wear the disguise next time?”
“Do you have one in mind?” she asked, clearly struggling to take me seriously.
“I don’t get to pull a Hailey on the new girl students?”
She snorted. “Even if I wasn’t done pursuing innocent fourteen-year-olds, you really are just not pretty enough for knee socks.”
“Well, I do a really good impression of a mindless rugger.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Thank God. You should tell your therapist that rugby does nothing whatsoever to alleviate your very real anger issues.”
“Not my therapist. My school counselor.”
She hid a smile. “All the same. You really should take up boxing, or fencing—”
“Fencing? What century are you from?”
“—or solving crimes.”
“Are you prescribing me your company, Doctor?”
“Detective, you can read me like a book.” She lifted her glass, and I clinked mine against it.
I was suffused with a sense of well-being. The restaurant was warm, and warmly lit. Someone in the kitchen was making us pancakes. And I was sitting across from Charlotte Holmes.
I felt at home enough to ask her something that had been nagging at me for a while. “Right, so I have a question. Tell me if I’m out of line.”
She tipped her head.
“My parents . . .” It took me a minute to find the right words. “Well, my grandfather very notoriously sold his inherited rights to the Sherlock Holmes stories to pay off his gambling debts. We’re just not important anymore. At least, we’re not in the public eye. We might be trotted out for the occasional press op, but my father does transatlantic sales—which is a lot lamer than it sounds—and my mum works in a bank. The Holmes family, though . . . I mean, you guys have been Yard consultants for generations. So why aren’t they helping us? Where are they?”
“In London,” she said. Before I could protest her flip answer, she held up a hand. “In London, where they’ll stay. They won’t interfere.”
“But why not?” I asked her. “Have you told them not to?”
“No.” Holmes slumped against the back of our booth, rubbing the crook of her left arm. “Do you remember when I told you I’d been taught at home until I came to Sherringford? Did you ever find it strange that I came here in the first place?”
“I didn’t, actually,” I told her. “I assumed your family had tossed your room for drugs, found out about your habit, and sent you to America to do penance. When Lena told me tonight that your parents had cut you off, it more or less confirmed it.”
Holmes blinked at me. Then she started laughing, a rare and surprisingly unwelcome sound. The waiter brought our food, and I’m sure we made quite the sight: Holmes giggling into her hands, me glaring at her across the table.
“Tell me the funny part isn’t my solving a mystery on my own,” I said, stabbing at a sausage.
She managed to compose herself. “No,” she said. “I’m laughing because I was a fool to think you wouldn’t. You’re entirely right, of course.”
“And they cut you off because they thought you’d use the money to buy drugs?”
“No,” she said again. “They cut me off because I wasn’t fit to be their daughter.” She dipped a finger into her water, tinkling the ice cubes. “In their eyes, my vices got in the way of my studies.”
I looked at her, so thin and angular and sad, so surprised at herself every time that she laughed, and I wondered what it would have actually been like to grow up in the Holmes household. Long velvet curtains, I thought, and libraries filled with rare books. A hushed fight always happening the next room over. Charlotte and her brother made to wander around the house in blindfolds, listening at doors for practice, scolded for any emotional attachments except to each other. It sounded like a movie, but it must’ve been hell to live it.