With all my time spent in Sciences 442, the outside world grew more and more strange. Sometimes, spending a day in Holmes’s lab made it feel like a bunker we’d stocked against a nuclear apocalypse and moved into before it happened. When Tom texted me to ask who I was taking to the dance, I found myself blinking hard in the lab’s dim light, trying to remind myself that I could actually emerge into the unirradiated world and go.
But I didn’t have a date, and told myself I didn’t want one. When I thought about the dance, I kept imagining it taking place at some other Sherringford: one where spending an evening with the most fascinating girl I knew meant disco balls and shitty music, not Bunsen burners and bloodstains. One where going out into a sea of my classmates would be something other than absolute torture. There was no way to forget I was a murder suspect when people I didn’t even know still stopped talking every time I walked into a classroom. Dobson’s room was still roped off with yellow police tape. His former roommate Randall still tried to trip me in the hallways. My teachers all either handled me like glass or ignored me, except for whispery Mr. Wheatley, my creative writing teacher, who pulled me aside to say he was happy to listen if I ever needed an ear. I thanked him, though I didn’t take him up on it. He was just offering because he was a nice guy. Even so, it felt good to have someone acknowledge, sanely, what was happening to me.
Because the truth of it was I was terrified. I kept expecting to wake up dead. Someone out there had it in for Holmes and me, and we had no idea who it was. More accurately, I had no idea who it was. I had the sinking feeling that Holmes did, but she sat on her suspicions with the smug languor of a cat on a pillow.
“I refuse to theorize in advance of the facts,” was her response.
“So then let’s go get some facts,” I said. “Where do we start?”
She drew her bow over her violin, thinking. “The infirmary,” she said finally.
Her plan was to see if Dobson, in the throes of arsenic poisoning, had tried to get help with his symptoms before his death. At first, I was a bit surprised that this was our next move. She’d done the tests and confirmed the poison’s presence herself—why did she need to dig up more evidence that it had killed him? We knew it had.
But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Detective Shepard had completely dismissed Holmes’s claim that we were being framed. Every time I stepped out of the sciences building, I saw the plainclothes policeman he’d stationed by the front door. I caught him going through the Dumpster outside my dorm. Holmes told me she’d woken one morning to find a team, on a ladder, examining her dorm room’s window from the outside. She was more shaken than she seemed, I could tell. From her stories, and from the phone calls she still took regularly from her contact at Scotland Yard, I knew that Holmes wasn’t used to working outside the law. Though she didn’t say it out loud, I knew that she wanted to maneuver us back into the police’s good graces. Having the school nurse corroborate our evidence would be a good first step.
“She likes you,” Holmes said dispassionately as we walked toward the infirmary, a small, squat addition to Harris Hall, with a few overnight beds and a dispensary. Every time I’d been there in the past (cut-up hands, busted nose), I’d been taken care of by the same nurse. I’d never thought she was anything but businesslike with me.
“She likes me fine, I guess,” I said. “So that’s the plan? I fake some kind of injury, get her sympathy and her attention, and while she’s busy, you go rooting around through her records?”
Holmes blinked at me. “Yes,” she said, and pushed the door open.
The waiting room was empty. The nurse was finishing a game of Sudoku at the front desk. “Can I help you?” she said, without looking up.
“I’m back,” I offered apologetically, holding up my hands. “These were hurting again, and I was kind of worried I might’ve broken something.”
“Poor thing.” She had a lilt to her voice that was oddly appealing. “And your girlfriend is here for moral support?”
I glanced over at Holmes, who managed a tearful smile. “I don’t know if I can watch,” she whispered. “I’m just so worried about him. I think I have to wait out here.”
The nurse put a reassuring hand on her arm. “I won’t do anything horrible to him, I promise. You can’t leave him now. Come, come.” She steered me and Holmes both back to the consulting room, where she poked at my hands (which did, in fact, hurt), said that they were healing just fine, handed me some Tylenol, and dismissed us. The whole visit took about five minutes.
“Well,” Holmes said, scowling at the door behind us. “That usually works a bit better than it did.”
I smirked. “You might have to work on your caring girlfriend routine. Is that it, then? No records?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll break in around midnight and get what I need. It’s just tedious having to dismantle the security cameras again.”
“Why didn’t you just break in in the first place?”
Her smile flickered. “You seemed so eager to do something. I thought I might as well include you.”
“Um, thanks?”
“But tonight I’ll go alone. You’re about as stealthy as a lame elephant. See you later.” She patted me on the shoulder and took off down the path, leaving me behind, both charmed and insulted. The side effects of hanging around Charlotte Holmes.