A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)

What came next I can only describe as a fugue state. I’d understood what it was to lose myself in the past, when I’d been in a rage, but this time the feeling was coupled with crippling fear and violation. Someone had seen me get dressed. Someone had seen me sleep. And though I couldn’t find a microphone on the camera, I was sure that this someone had also recorded every word I’d said.

So there had to be an audio recording device, as well.

I tore the books off my shelf, dumped out my desk drawers, went through every pocket of every pair of trousers hanging in my closet. I took my Swiss Army knife and cut open my mattress, not caring about the fine I’d have to pay, and searched every inch of it with my bleeding fingers. I got on my hands and knees and pulled up the carpet in our room inch by inch, using the knife to help me along. I cut open the curtains, then looked down the hollow rod that held them up. And I adamantly ignored the noise in the hall that had now increased to a fever pitch—a fist was pounding on the door, and a voice that sounded like Mrs. Dunham’s shouted Jamie, Jamie, I know you’re in there, but I’d already shoved Tom’s desk chair under the doorknob and thrown the deadbolt. It was easy to turn the volume for the outside world all the way down, what with the screaming panic in my head.

When all was said and done, I’d come up with two electronic bugs, each the size and shape of my thumbnail. One had been affixed to the wall-facing side of my headboard. The other I found on the bottom of my desk chair. I held them in my cupped hands, striping them with blood. Their data must have been sent to the transmitter wirelessly, because they weren’t attached to anything with any cords that I could see. I set them down on my desk in a neat line, along with the camera, which I’d yanked the cord from. Then I threw them into a pillowcase. If they were still transmitting, the spy on the other end would be looking into a black screen.

I heard a buzzing sound. Was it from blood loss? Not unlikely. My room looked as if some howling, wounded beast had ripped it up with its claws. Everything I owned was on the floor, a good deal of it tracked red from my hands, and I hadn’t even searched through Tom’s things yet. I’d been able to control myself that much, to wait until he returned, but there was still the problem of the bugs. What to do with them? I thought, woozily, that I should call the detective. I should call Holmes. Come to think of it, there was still shouting in the hall. Was I imagining it?

My name: Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.

“Go away,” I hollered, and eased myself down into the chair. I was beginning to feel the cuts on my hands, the glass that I’d pushed still further into the skin with each new thing I’d rifled through or discarded. I should go to the infirmary, I thought, but I didn’t want to tip off anyone—anyone who hadn’t already heard the commotion, that is—and Nurse Bryony was still sharing space with Mr. Wheatley on my no-fly list.

I hunted through my shaving kit for a pair of tweezers, put a T-shirt between my teeth, and got down to the business of pulling out the glass. It wasn’t sanitary, God knows, but it also hadn’t been a good day for making decisions. You don’t seem to have a lot of good ones, Tom had said. He wasn’t wrong. I nearly bit through the cloth trying not to scream, but I didn’t manage to keep myself from crying. It wasn’t so much from sadness or pain as acceptance of the impossible, a great well of this is wrong bubbling up all at once. I wondered absently if the transmitters on my desk were picking up the sound. One more shameful thing in with all the rest. I resisted the urge to smash the audio bugs like the insects they were—I’d need them as evidence, after all.

What I didn’t understand was why they’d bugged my room. Who was I, anyway? I wasn’t the extraordinary one. I was Jamie Watson, would-be writer, subpar rugger, keeper of the most boring journal in at least five states. I couldn’t even get people to call me by my full first name. If I was important, it was only as a conduit. Holmes’s only access point.

What information had I revealed, unwittingly, in this room? What had I given away?

With a growing sense of horror, I realized that I’d given away plenty, even some that day. Mr. Wheatley; the faked concussion; the search through Bryony’s things: I’d said all of it out loud. I’d spent the week after the murder telling Tom about all our suspicions and our findings, what we’d found in Dobson’s room. I’d even bitched about August Moriarty. God, how stupid could I have possibly been?

By now, I was sure they knew I’d found their bugs. I needed to get over to Sciences 442 and sweep our lab, see if Holmes could trace the signal. If she couldn’t, I knew that Milo could, and I knew he wasn’t more than a phone call away.

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