“You recorded her confession,” the detective had said, weakly.
Holmes smiled. “My brother did, but yes, I thought you’d like this. Though I gather you’ll have some difficulty finding Bryony Downs, née Davis. Milo has—what’s the term? Oh, that’s right—disappeared her.”
“Holmes,” I’d hissed. Wasn’t that supposed to be a state secret?
“What?” She was clearly enjoying herself.
The detective was not.
“Oh,” I’d said then, remembering. “I guess there’s something I should probably tell you about my creative writing teacher.”
“Is there anything else?” Shepard had snapped, when I finished speaking. “Missile codes, maybe, that you happened to pick up? No? Good.” He’d left in a huff, slamming the door behind him.
“I rather doubt we’ll be invited to assist with solving future murders in the sunny state of Connecticut,” Holmes had sighed. “More’s the shame.”
Lena came by, too. In her bright coat, she perched at the end of my father’s armchair and caught us up on all the gossip I’d missed. (Tom had come with her, but Holmes had barred him at the door.) She and Tom were still together, she told us. Holmes forced her mouth into a smile that morphed into a real one when Lena asked if she could come visit over the holiday. “For a few days in January,” Lena had said carelessly. “I’ll be coming through on my way back to school and I thought it’d be fun to tell my pilot I needed a long layover. We could hang out!”
We both agreed. I always did like Lena, after all.
On the quieter afternoons, when no one came by the house, I found myself sorting through my journal from the last few months, looking at the notes I’d made, the crackpot theories I’d had as to Dobson’s murderer, the list of possible suspects that seemed so laughable now. To these, I added sketches of scenes. The jar of teeth on Holmes’s laboratory shelf. How her eyes dropped closed as she danced. My leather jacket around her shoulders. The way my father stood so nervously as I walked toward him for the first time in years. It all began to form a story, one I wanted to continue, one thread at a time, onward without a visible end.
Maybe Charlotte Holmes was still learning how to pick apart a case; maybe I was still learning how to write. We weren’t Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. I was okay with that, I thought. We had things they didn’t, too. Like electricity, and refrigerators. And Mario Kart.
“Watson,” she said, “you don’t need to pretend that you’ve forgiven me.”
This came out of nowhere. “For what?”
“For—for what I did to August. For me not telling you the whole truth, again. You know, in the future, stop me when I think I’m being clever. Because I’m shooting myself in the foot. If we’d both had all the facts at the beginning of this mess—”
“If,” I said. “That’s a big if. Look. I’ve forgiven you. You have my implicit forgiveness, you know, even when you’re driving me crazy.”
“You got dragged into this because of me,” she said. “Nurse Bryony was making me do my penance. She used you to get to me.”
“So the next crime will have nothing to do with either of us. It’ll be a very benign car theft. In another country. A warm one. We’ll solve it very lazily, lie on the beach between interrogations. Drink margaritas.”
“Thank you,” she said, very seriously.
“Don’t thank me, you’re buying the plane tickets.” I stretched out on the couch with my head in her lap. “Fiji is expensive.”
“I don’t want Fiji. I want home.” She put her hands in my hair. “Jamie.”
“Charlotte.”
“Do come home soon. It won’t be London without you.”
“You never knew me in London,” I said, smiling.
“I know.” Holmes looked down at me with gleaming eyes. “I intend to fix that.”
Epilogue
AFTER READING WATSON’S ACCOUNT OF THE BRYONY DOWNS affair, I feel the need to make a few corrections.
Perhaps more than a few.
First off, his narrative is so utterly romanticized, especially as regards to me, that the most efficient way of breaking down its more metaphorical misconceptions would be in a list.
To wit:
1. When I speak, I don’t sound like Winston Churchill. I sound like Charlotte Holmes.