“We found your prints there, Charlotte.”
“Aaron used to deal out of that room. Why aren’t you listening to me? If you found my prints there, anywhere, I’m sure it was on the inside of the door or on the wall, not actually on any of the fake-serial-killer things pinned to it, and that they’re at least several months old.”
“So is that why you were down there? Trying to destroy the things you forgot to touch with your gloves on? Innocent people usually don’t give as many excuses as you do.”
“You’re asking why you found me in the room I went directly to, knowing you were following me—the room that only the most wretched Sherringford students have reason to know about. The room that I decided to style like a network television art director. So that I could destroy paper records that I left there in my own handwriting.” She snorted. “I won’t insult your intelligence, Detective Shepard, by reminding you who my family is. Not to trade on my blood, but on my training. I am not an idiot. And I didn’t kill Lee Dobson, or attack Elizabeth Hartwell. I’m sure that when she’s fit to speak, she will tell you exactly that.”
“She’s suffered a traumatic brain injury,” Shepard said gravely. “We don’t know yet how much she remembers. But with all your training, I’m sure you knew that would be the result when you clobbered her with that tree branch.”
“Fine. Call my parents. Call Scotland Yard. I have contacts there. They’ll tell you that I help people.”
“You should have called us, Charlotte.” The sound of a chair scraping back. And then a final blow. “By the way, what was Jamie Watson’s part in all this? Your accomplice? He’s clearly not the brains of the operation.”
“Hey!” I yelled again. I did not want to hear this. “Hey! Anybody!”
“Don’t cater to my vanity,” she snapped. “You’ll find I do that well enough on my own.”
“Your accomplice,” he said again, louder, “until you needed a fall guy. Someone to stay and swing for all of this when your rich mommy and daddy smuggle you out of the country on a private plane.”
At that moment, I was in the awful position of thinking something that I desperately didn’t want to believe.
Thought: The police set this up, this weird, “accidental” eavesdropping, so that when Holmes admits she’s been using me all this time, I’ll flip out and confess to her doing everything. I’d seen Law & Order. I knew how this worked, how they divided suspects, got them to tell on each other. But they were wrong. There was nothing to tell.
Except.
What if the police were right?
What if she actually did kill Lee fucking Dobson and decided, for a lark, to drag me along, pretending to solve the crime that she committed? What if Holmes was so unnerved by someone calling her a murderer because she was, in fact, a murderer? What if, in the time between stomping away from me and Mr. Wheatley at the punch table and when I found her on the bench, she clobbered Elizabeth Hartwell on the head and stuffed that plastic jewel down her throat? What if she really did elaborately off Dobson in an act of cold-blooded revenge? What if—oh God—what if our friendship was just a sick footnote in her sick reenactment of these stories? Holmes and Watson, together again, playing out “The Blue Carbuncle” on the dark Sherringford quad. Only, instead of hiding the stolen gem in a goose’s craw, we stuffed it down a girl’s throat to make her choke to death.
“Jamie Watson,” Holmes said evenly, “is far smarter than you think. He isn’t my accomplice. He’s no one’s accomplice. And he isn’t guilty of anything.”
He isn’t, she said. Not the both of us.
I didn’t feel any better. Not even when the door swung open to let in my haggard father, who took one look at my face and said, “Right, we’re going home.”
ON THE WAY OUT, MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT NEITHER Holmes nor I were being charged with a crime. The police didn’t have enough evidence to hold us; everything they had right now was circumstantial, so the best they could do was question us. “It’s good they didn’t get around to you,” he said, then looked at me hard and told me, like he was imparting great wisdom, to always remember to request a lawyer.
Usually, I hated that my father didn’t act like a father. Most days, I would’ve traded him and his enthusiasms for the most boring authority figure on the block, but tonight, I was just happy to be spared a lecture and tears.
My father is picking me up from the police station in the middle of the night, I thought, and he mostly just seems kind of excited.
“I’ll pull around the car,” he said at the entrance. “Once we get home, you’ll need to sleep. I could only get you a day’s reprieve. They want you back for more questioning after dinner. Shepard’s keeping his Sunday-night appointment.”