Holmes ducked into the dining hall to make us sandwiches while I waited by the door. I was surprised that she would remember to eat, as I’d been too upset to realize that I was starving. We were both, I think, too overwhelmed by our internal weather to pay much attention to what was happening outside. This time the stares and whispers as we crossed the quad didn’t bother me. How could they? I had so much more to worry about. Up at Sciences 442, Holmes produced a ring of keys, and let us in.
“How did you con them into giving you a lab?” I asked, thankful for a neutral subject to discuss.
“My parents made it a stipulation of my acceptance,” she said. Around us, the lab was as strange and dark as we’d left it. “Sherringford was quite eager to have me, and so they agreed. On my transcript, the work I do here is listed as an independent study.”
I smirked. “In what? Murder?” She wrinkled her nose at me.
For those few minutes, I’d forgotten about Dobson, but the sight of the battered love seat brought it crashing back. I watched her watch me remember, and with a gust of energy, she slammed the door shut.
“It didn’t happen here,” she said matter-of-factly. “It happened in Stevenson. Yes, I generally do oxy here, when I do downers, so that was an exception. Yes, it was immensely upsetting; yes, I do get upset. No, I’d rather not tell you the details. I don’t want you to know the details. I didn’t kill him, and I didn’t hire anyone to kill him. I had nothing to do with his death. As I’ve told you before, I can fight for myself. So stop looking at me like I’m an object for your pity.”
“I don’t pity you,” I said, stunned. She turned to the wall, but I could still see her close her eyes, count backward silently from ten.
“No,” she said, without turning around. “You just choose to feel all the things that I can’t, or don’t. It’s overwhelming. We’ve been friends for less than a day.” She paused. “Though I suppose we’re neither of us very normal.”
No one had considered me anything but normal, before this. Though I was sure that hadn’t been the case for her.
After a long minute, I sat down on her disgusting couch. “Here is your lunch,” I said, picking up the sandwiches from where she’d dropped them on the floor. “Normal people eat lunch, and so, for these five minutes, we are going to be normal. After that, you’re free to tell me who’s framing us for murder.”
She flopped down beside me. “I don’t have the who yet,” she said. “Not enough data.”
“Normal,” I warned her. “At least try.”
I wolfed my sandwich down, even though it was pastrami and lettuce on white bread, full stop. No condiments. It was the kind of sandwich only a posh girl with a personal chef and the appetite of a hummingbird would have made, and so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. For her part, she ate a listless bite or two, eyes fixed on the middle distance.
“What do normal people talk about?” she asked me.
“Football?” I hazarded. She rolled her eyes. “Okay. Did you see that new cop movie?”
“Fiction is a waste of time,” she said, pulling a shred of lettuce out of her sandwich and nibbling on its end. A snail. She ate like a snail. “I’m far more interested in real events.”
“Like?”
“There was a positively fascinating series of murders in Glasgow last week. Three girls, each garroted with her own hair.” She smiled to herself. “Clever. Honestly, I didn’t even leave the lab as it unfolded, I was so taken with it. I called in some tips to my contact at Scotland Yard, and she wanted to fly me out to investigate. Then this happened.”
“How inconvenient,” I said.
She, of course, ignored the sarcasm. “It was, wasn’t it?”
“Okay, normal lunch is an abject failure,” I said, “so just get on with it. Why are we being framed?”
“You’re asking the wrong questions,” she said, tossing the sandwich on the floor as she stood. I picked it up and put it in the trash. “We’re not on who, or why, Watson, we’re still working out how. You can’t theorize in advance of facts, or you’ll waste everyone’s time.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, because I didn’t.
I swear, she nearly stamped an impatient foot. “Fact one: Lee Dobson tormented me for an entire year before assaulting me on September 26. Fact two: you and Dobson got into an altercation on October 3. Fact three: Dobson was murdered on Tuesday, October 11, close enough to both incidents to link them all together. When his toxicology reports come back, they’ll prove that Dobson was a victim of gradual arsenic poisoning, that it began the night you first punched him, and that the doses increased in amount until the night he died. I’m sure that his roommate and the infirmary will testify to the attendant headaches, nausea, and so on.”
“Jesus Christ.” I stared at her. “Arsenic? Don’t tell me you have access to arsenic.”
“Watson,” she said patiently, “we’re in the sciences building, and I have the keys.”
I put my head in my hands.
“He was holding a copy of your great-great-great-grandfather’s stories. They’ll also find that, last night, Dobson was the victim of a rattlesnake bite, perhaps even shortly postmortem while the blood was still warm. Remember the scale that I found on Dobson’s floor?” Stooping, she pulled a book from the bottom of her bookshelf and tossed it to me. I was startled to see it was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. “No? How about the glass of milk on his bedside table? Or the vent above his bed? Come on, Watson, think!”
I blinked down at the book in my hands, not quite believing what she was implying. “You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, I’m quite serious. They’re re-creating ‘The Speckled Band.’”
“The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is one of my great-great-great-grandfather’s most well-known stories; it’s definitely the most frightening, and also the most riddled with factual errors. As so many of his tales do, “The Speckled Band” opens in 221B Baker Street, with a shaken woman asking for help. Her sister had died two years before in the middle of the night under mysterious circumstances, and now Helen Stoner, Holmes’s client, has been moved by her patently evil stepfather into that same bedroom, weeks before her wedding. During their investigation, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find that the bed in that room is bolted to the floor. Beside it, a bellpull trails down from a vent above that opens into the stepfather’s study next door. There, Holmes finds a saucer of milk, a leash, a locked safe, and, during their stakeout, an Indian swamp adder—the speckled band of the title—that Evil Stepfather is using to kill his stepdaughters, controlling the snake with a whistle and tossing it into the safe when he’s finished.
John H. Watson might have been many things—a doctor, a storyteller, and by most accounts a kind and decent man—but he clearly wasn’t a zoologist. There’s no such thing as a swamp adder. And the idea that Sherlock Holmes deduced its existence from a saucer of milk is ridiculous—snakes have zero interest in milk. They also can’t hear anything but vibrations, so they wouldn’t hear a whistle. But they do breathe, so a snake couldn’t survive in a locked safe.