But there was a crowd gathered at the end of the hallway: guys from our floor, mostly, but our gray-haired hall mother was there as well, and beyond her was the school nurse and a knot of policemen in caps and uniforms. I pushed through them until I found Tom, staring blank-faced at a door wrapped in police tape. It stood open about an inch, and beyond it, the room was dark.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“Dobson,” Tom said. When he finally turned to face me, I saw the frightened look in his eyes. “He’s dead.”
I was shocked to realize he was frightened of me.
The guy behind me said, “That’s James Watson, he’s the one who punched him,” and the buzz around me ratcheted up to a roar.
Mrs. Dunham, our hall mother, put a protective hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right, James,” she said, “I’ll stay here with you.” Her glasses were askew, and she’d thrown a ridiculous silk robe over her pajamas; I hadn’t known that she stayed nights in the dorm, or that she even knew my name. Still, I was fiercely glad she was there, because a man in a button-down shirt broke away from the policemen and crossed straight over to me. “James, is it?” he asked, flashing a badge. “We’d like to ask you some questions about tonight.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” Mrs. Dunham said. “He’s a minor, and you need his parents’ permission to question him without a guardian present.”
“He’s not under arrest,” the man insisted.
“All the same,” she said. “Sherringford policy.”
“Fine.” The detective sighed. “Do they live close by, son?” He produced a notepad and pen from his trouser pocket, like this was Law & Order.
Well. It kind of was.
“My mother lives in London,” I said, and my voice sounded strained even to my ears. Tom’s stare was hardening into something like a glare. Behind him, a boy who lived next door to me was quietly crying. “My father lives here in Connecticut, but I haven’t seen him in years.”
“Can you give me his number?” the detective asked, and I did, pulling out my phone to read out the digits I’d never once called myself. He said some other things about staying put, and getting some sleep, and them coming by to see me in the early afternoon, all of which I agreed to. Did I have a choice? He gave me his card: it read Detective Ben Shepard in a businesslike font. He didn’t look much like the other policemen I’d seen, on-screen or otherwise. On first glance, he gave an impression of grocery-store averageness, but as I stared at him, holding his card, I saw that his face had an unusually eager cast to it, like a dog eyeing a lofted ball. He didn’t look like he had a tragic past, some murdered mother or brother that drove him to become a detective. He looked like someone who played video games with their kids. Who did the dishes without being asked.
That impression of goodness unsettled me more than if he’d been a mustache-twirling villain. Because it was clear that Detective Shepard thought I was the bad guy.
He gave me what was meant to be a reassuring smile. Then he left, him and the other policemen, and everyone else milled around for another few minutes until Mrs. Dunham sent them back to their rooms. They shoved past me. All of them did, Harry and Peter and Mason and even Tom, wrapped in his ubiquitous sweater-vest. The looks they gave me were uniform. Outsider, their faces said. Killer, you deserve what’s coming to you.
Mrs. Dunham offered to make me some cocoa, but I had no idea what I’d say to her, or to anyone, so I said thanks but no thanks, I’d just go to sleep. As if sleep was even a remote possibility.
Tom wasn’t in our room. He’d probably decided to sleep on someone’s floor, I thought. He was afraid of me now. In a flash of rage, I picked up my pillow to chuck it across the room—and stopped cold. If someone heard me on a rampage, it wasn’t going to help my case in the slightest. It was this anger that had gotten me into this mess in the first place, I reminded myself, and squashed the pillow against the bed instead.
Anger, and Charlotte Holmes.
When I snuck back down the hallway, the yellow tape over Dobson’s door caught the light like a mirror, one I refused to look too closely into. I kept moving.
I made it all the way to Lawrence Hall before I realized I didn’t have her number. Her phone number, or her room number—in fact, I was only vaguely sure she lived in this dorm. The rows of darkened windows stared down at me as I struggled to make a decision. Any moment now, the sky would start to brighten. Lights would begin to go on. The girls who lived here would shower and dress and gather their textbooks on the way out the door. How far would they get before they heard that one of their classmates had been murdered? How long would it take for them to start believing I’d done it?
I didn’t even know what I’d say when I found her. What possible reason did she have to believe I was innocent? The last time she saw me, I was beating the daylights out of the victim.
My sense of purpose dissipated like a sputtering balloon, and I sat down on Lawrence’s front steps to get my head on straight. Campus was silent and dark, except for the lights of the emergency vehicles that crowded around Michener.
“Watson,” the voice hissed. “Jamie Watson.”
Holmes stepped neatly out of a small stand of trees; I hadn’t seen her there at all. In fact, I didn’t think that I was meant to, as she was dressed in head-to-toe blacks: trousers, gloves, a pair of dark sneakers, a jacket zipped all the way to her chin, even the backpack slung over her shoulders. Her face was a pale moon against all that darkness, her lips compressed in anger until she opened her mouth to say something that, from her expression, I didn’t want to hear.
So I spoke before she did. “Hi,” I said, in my usual stupid way. “I was looking for you.”
Her eyes widened, then narrowed, and I watched her rapidly recalculate something in her head. “This is about Dobson.”
I didn’t bother to ask how she knew. She was a Holmes. But I must’ve looked surprised enough for her to fill in the gaps. “Look, Tom texted Lena, and Lena texted me. Relatively straightforward. Unfortunately, I was wearing this when I heard”—she indicated her outfit with a frustrated hand—“and so I decided to stay away from the dorm so that nobody would see me. It’s bad form to be dressed as a burglar on the night of anyone’s murder, much less that of someone you hate.”
“Oh,” I said. “What were you actually burgling?”
A quicksilver smile flitted across her face. “Pipettes,” she said. “I went to go work in my lab after night check.”
“You absolute nerd,” I said, laughing, and her smile came back, and stayed. Incredible. “You have a lab? Wait, no. Later. Because Dobson’s dead, and we’re easily the prime suspects, and we’re laughing.”
“I know.” She scrubbed at her eyes with her hands. “Do you know, at first I thought you came here to accuse me of it.”
My eyebrows must’ve shot up into my hair. “Absolutely not—”
“I know,” she said, cutting me off with a searching look. I felt as if she were X-raying me. Her eyes flickered from my face, to my fingers, to my beaten-up Chucks. “But I told him I would kill him. I should have been your primary suspect. And I’m not.”