There was a commotion outside the door. “Who did you let in to see my daughter? A friend? What’s his name?” I didn’t hear the police officer’s reply. Hastily, Elizabeth rubbed her board clean and then started writing something else.
Elizabeth’s mother barged into the room, her arms full of Chinese food. “Don’t tell me,” she said in a dangerous voice. “You’re Jamie Watson. You’re the one that found her.”
She might have said found her, but it was clear what she meant was attacked her. Elizabeth’s eyes seized on mine.
“No,” I said, extending a hand. “I’m Gary. Gary Snyder.” He was a poet we were reading in Mr. Wheatley’s class, one I vigorously hated.
“And what exactly are you doing here, Gary Snyder?”
Elizabeth tugged on her mother’s sleeve. She held up her whiteboard: a half-completed tic-tac-toe game.
Charlotte Holmes would have been proud.
Her mother deflated. “We’ve just been so worried, sweetie,” she said, and burst into tears over her daughter’s bed.
I took that as my cue to leave. I think I have some leads, I texted Holmes in the elevator.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to find Detective Shepard waiting for me on the sofa in Sciences 442.
“So, next time, tell me when you’re planning on pulling something,” I said, hanging up my jacket. “Her parents were conveniently gone? Oh, Elizabeth couldn’t talk to the detective, but she could easily talk to me. What, did you wait until I stepped out the door and then had the hospital cafeteria closed?” The last was directed at Holmes.
Across the room, she poked at her vulture skeleton until it spun in circles. “For the record, I merely waited until you left and then had Emperor Kitchen offer free takeout to all the families in the ICU. I’ll make Milo pay for it. I told you he’d go either today or tomorrow,” she said to Shepard. “You should trust me more often, you know. I am the world’s foremost Jamie Watson scholar.”
“Look, I’m happy to question her, but next time, I want to be in the loop. Otherwise I’m just going to build my own chessboard and let you move me around it.”
“Stop being dramatic, and tell us what happened,” Shepard said, sounding like he wanted to get out of 442 as quickly as possible. I couldn’t blame him—Holmes had lit up her jar of teeth from behind, probably in anticipation of the detective’s visit. It was, I thought, her version of hanging fairy lights.
I filled them in. Shepard made a low growling noise. “‘Give my regards to Charlotte Holmes,’” he repeated, shaking his head. “I need to talk to John Smith again. He won’t confess to the attack. Only to dealing drugs, and then he only gives me information he wants me to use against you, Charlotte.”
Holmes touched a finger to the skeleton’s nose, stilling it in its orbit. “Something else is going to happen if our attacker doesn’t get what he wants,” she said. “Someone else is going to get hurt.”
“What does he want?” I said. “Us locked up, no key. I don’t see how he’s going to get that. Unless Shepard puts us away for show.”
“No.” She frowned. “I need unfettered access to the campus, not to be rotting away in some cell. We need to figure out the connection between the man you’re holding and the man he claims he is. I need to make a plan.”
“We need to make a plan,” Shepard said.
So we did.
Holmes and I began by retracing our steps through the access tunnels, back to the police-cordoned storage room. John Smith’s footprints still ended at its door, a literal dead end. But Holmes refused to give up. We covered what felt like miles of territory that night, her coursing ahead, me yawning clandestinely behind my hand.