“Yes, Mrs. Dunham,” I said unhappily. I was horribly ripe—I hadn’t showered since before rugby practice—and starving, and ragged at the edges from my all-night vigil, and I just wanted to be left alone.
She bustled around, gathering extra blankets for my bed and picking Tom’s clothes up from the floor. “I got special permission for an after-hours visit, if you’d like to see Charlotte.”
“Thanks. I don’t really need anything else,” I said, because she was genuinely sweet, and she wasn’t showing any signs of leaving.
“I love that you two are friends,” she said. “Those stories were my favorite when I was younger.”
I smiled tightly at her. It was terrible, the way my stomach contracted at that sentence. I’d used to love hearing people talk about the Sherlock Holmes stories, and now I couldn’t help making anyone who mentioned them to me into a suspect. “They were mine too.”
When Tom returned, he was juggling a sandwich, a pair of apples, and a cup of hot cocoa. “There you are,” he said, arranging it all on my desk with a flourish. “I heard you ate it pretty hard at practice. Incredible catch, though, according to Randall.”
I tore into the sandwich. “How are you? How are things with Lena?”
“She’s good. What’s Charlotte paying her off for? Lena’s, like, rolling right now.”
“That’s from poker,” I said, mouth full. I wanted to leave the investigation behind at least long enough to get through dinner.
“Well, are you and Charlotte still prime suspects?” he asked, pulling over a chair.
I shrugged. It hurt to. “Can we talk about something else? What did I miss in my history class? I got all my other assignments.”
His face fell. “Nothing really,” he said, and waited, as if he expected me to cave and tell him all about my adventures. I wished he knew how stressful and humiliating those adventures actually were. It wasn’t my job to educate him on that, though, so I let the conversation die, crunching into one of the apples he’d brought. Eventually, Tom gave up on me.
Holmes swung by an hour later. Thankfully, I’d had a chance to shower. “How’s the patient?” she asked as she perched on the edge of my bed.
I was always suspicious of Holmes in a good mood. “Has someone else been killed?” I asked, only half-joking.
She smiled at me. “Better. Try again.”
Without turning around, Tom tugged out one of his earbuds, then the other. I don’t know why it annoyed me so much, his clumsy attempt at spying. Maybe I was done being grist for the gossip mill. I lifted an eyebrow in his direction to tip Holmes off, but she’d already noticed. She whipped out her phone.
“I’ve got a date,” she announced, texting furiously. My phone lit up silently on the bed between us, and I craned my neck to see. Apparently Wheatley’s brother keeps snakes in NJ.
“Where’d you find the guy? Craigslist? The sewers?” Any missing? I texted back.
Shepard’s running it down. “Funny. You’re funny. Look, I thought tomorrow you could help me write a poem for him. Maybe show it to Mr. Wheatley tomorrow after class, get his opinion?” Interrogate him.
Why don’t you? “Love poems? It sounds serious.”
“Oh, quite. He’s dreamy.” Because you’re his student. He doesn’t know me. She swung her legs off the bed. Furtively, she fished a chocolate bar out of her coat pocket and slid it onto the desk. It was a Cadbury Flake; she must’ve ordered it online. I don’t know how she knew it was my favorite. “Feel better,” she said, smiling crookedly at me, and then slipped out of the room.
Tom stuck his earphones back in with a sigh.
So you didn’t find anything on Nurse Bryony? I texted her.
No. Sciences 442 at lunch. I heard her footsteps retreating down the hall. We’ll make a plan for Wheatley then.
I LINGERED BY MR. WHEATLEY’S DESK AFTER CLASS, WAVING an inquisitive-looking Tom on to his next class. I had a free period at the end of the day, so I wasn’t in a rush.
Wheatley was talking to one of our class’s better poets, a shy, small girl who wrote exclusively about communing with nature in her native Michigan. As I waited, he gave her a series of book recommendations in his meandering, sleepy voice, and she scribbled them down. Our journals were identical. I tucked mine discreetly back in my bag, feeling a little cliché, and tried to focus on remembering the strategy that Holmes and I had hammered out at lunchtime.
Finally, he turned to me. “Ah, Mr. Watson,” he said to me. “What can I do for you?”
I shuffled my feet. “I wanted to talk to you about my poems,” I told him. “I’m having some trouble putting them together. They’re a lot harder than stories. I was wondering if you had any books I could borrow to do some outside reading.”