“Horrible.” He leaned in to the woman next to him. “This is one of my best students,” he said, pointing to me. “Jamie, this is my friend Penelope. She’s keeping me company tonight.”
I didn’t know that Mr. Wheatley had even liked my writing. Everything I’d turned in, my poems especially, came back to me in a mess of green ink. But I’d been working hard to revise them into something better, and it was nice to know my work was paying off.
“It’s lovely to meet you.” I shook hands with Penelope. She had a sort of standard art teacher look to her, with her curly hair and loose-fitting dress. A nice counterweight for Mr. Wheatley, I thought, who always buttoned his shirts up to his collar.
“She’s a writer friend from New Haven,” he said. “A poet. She teaches at Yale. Jamie might be someone you’d want in your freshman workshop, in the not-too-distant future.”
“Oh, is this the one you were telling me about?” she asked Mr. Wheatley, who went a bit pale. “The murder investigation? Dr. Watson’s descendant? So, do you write mysteries too, Jamie?”
“Not really,” I lied, as I processed the rest of what she’d said. She’d heard about the police’s suspicions about me. “You’ve been watching the news coverage?”
Mr. Wheatley pulled at his collar.
“Oh, the media’s moved on by now,” she said. “But Ted’s on top of it. He knows details they haven’t even released to the press!”
While I was trying to make sense of this, Holmes appeared, proffering a pair of chocolate-covered marshmallows on a fondue stick. An olive branch, I thought. She seemed to have forgiven me my awkwardness, so I took mine with a thank-you smile.
“Hello,” she said to the adults. I made a round of introductions.
“Penelope was just saying that Mr. Wheatley’s in the know about all that Dobson stuff,” I said, a bit obviously. I wished we’d set up hand signals for this kind of situation, or that she was actually telepathic. There was a good chance that she could have deduced my suspicions just by looking at me, but I didn’t want to take the chance.
“Oh?” she asked, her face perfectly blank.
“Yes, ah”—Mr. Wheatley cleared his throat—“I should do another walk around the room. Penelope?” She smiled politely at us, her interest already elsewhere, and the two of them glided away.
“Well, you cocked that up rather badly.” Holmes drifted back onto the dance floor. So much for an olive branch. I pulled the second marshmallow off the stick and bit into it hatefully.
I WANDERED THE BALLROOM FOR A WHILE, FLOPPING DOWN finally at an empty table. The dance was coming to a close, and the DJ had put together a long set of slow songs to end the night. The floor was thick with couples that would be social-media official by the morning. I was surprised, and then less surprised, to see Cassidy and Ashton swaying together, so close their foreheads touched. Randall, Dobson’s roommate, danced the whole set with the little blond freshman. He kept his hands low, grabbing at the fabric of her red dress. In his giant arms, she looked as small and inconsequential as a snack cake.
I felt vaguely sick.
“Okay.” Lena plopped down next to me. “Jamie. You look, like, super pathetic.”
“Where’s Tom?”
“Playing poker.” She pursed her lips. “Go talk to her.”
“She’s dancing with Randall,” I said, being difficult on purpose.
“Jesus, come on. Charlotte’s sitting outside, alone. You guys are just sad without each other. There’s like this obvious empty space next to you.” It was poetic, for Lena. She stood and offered me a hand.
“Are you asking me to dance?” I asked.
She cocked an eyebrow. I let her haul me to my feet. And she dragged me all the way across the ballroom and out the front door, where she gave me an unceremonious shove into the night air.
“Bye,” Lena trilled, and disappeared.
Holmes sat on a bench by the entrance, staring out across the dark quad at a particular copse of trees. It was where I’d faced down Dobson, I realized. It was the last time we’d talked before he died.
She was shivering. I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
“Thank you,” she said, not looking at me.
A little notebook was open on her lap, her fingers splayed across its pages.
“Is that the thing you took from the sedan last night?”
Holmes nodded.
“And you brought it with you?” I sat down next to her cautiously, the way you’d sit next to a bomb. I had questions. I didn’t want her to hide the notebook away before I got a chance to ask them.
To my surprise, she didn’t. “I didn’t think I’d get to it,” she said, and went on, her voice strange (was Holmes nervous?), “I played a few rounds of poker, but it wasn’t sufficiently distracting. It was me and Tom and one of the chaperones—the school nurse. Tom spent the entire game staring at Lena’s butt across the room. So obvious. Everyone is so obvious. For example, that school nurse? She wishes she were a doctor. She misses her boyfriend, who has blond hair and an earring, whom she’s been with since high school, and who doesn’t like her as much as she likes him.”