A Study in Charlotte

This segment focuses heavily on identifying potential suspects. James starts interrogating Dobson’s friends during rugby practice. However, he’s injured badly enough that he’s sent to the infirmary. There, he questions Nurse Bryony and tries to find a sample of protein supplement that might contain arsenic. These efforts don’t produce helpful results. James then visits his creative writing teacher, who asks unusually detailed questions about Charlotte’s methods. While this raises James’s suspicions, he can’t prove anything against his teacher.

During all these episodes, Charlotte is again less than forthcoming with information, emphasizing the theme concerning the gap between Mind and Heart. While James now trusts her implicitly, he still voices his irritation at once again being treated like a pawn: “Look, I’m happy to question her, but next time, I want to be in the loop. Otherwise I’m just going to build my own chessboard and let you move me around it” (164).

James is functioning as the heart element of the partnership when Charlotte retreats too far into her own mind. He even asks his father for tips about how to take care of a Holmes. Not surprisingly, he receives an 11-page memo on the care of Holmes family members. Taking a caregiver role foregrounds not only James’s function as the heart of the team but also his stabilizing influence as the ordinary member of the duo. He’s still convinced that he brings little to the mix beyond the ability to do as Charlotte tells him. Thus, when he discovers that someone, possibly even Tom, set up surveillance equipment in his dorm room, he’s baffled as to why anyone would consider him important enough to watch:

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 (214).

James later learns that he’s important to the murderer for another reason: He’s an innocent in the murderer’s game of cat-and-mouse with Charlotte. Bryony tries to get James out of harm’s way in the note she sends her adversary. HE DOESN’T DESERVE IT THE WAY YOU DO (228). The clear implication is that Charlotte is being punished for something. The note suggests that James isn’t simply a pawn in her game. He’s a worthwhile human being who doesn’t play with other people’s lives.

At this point, the novel’s focus shifts back to the theme of Fiction Versus Reality. The killer assumes that Charlotte uses her intellect to manipulate and baffle others for her own amusement. This is fiction without personal consequences. The crimes that the murderer orchestrates are intended to place Charlotte’s own life on the line. This is reality, and the personal stakes are high. To some degree, James begins to realize the difference between the two when he visits Elizabeth in the hospital. She nearly died because of the killer’s grudge against Charlotte. He says to himself, “I’d come to apologize. It was why I hadn’t brought Holmes. Apologizing was the kind of thing that made her break out in hives” (161). Elizabeth’s injury would simply be collateral damage to Charlotte but would weigh on James’s conscience.

The reality of personal danger finally hits home to Charlotte when she finds a bomb in the science building and a note from the killer warning her to get James away. As characteristic of her behavior throughout, Charlotte doesn’t share her reasoning with James. Instead, she picks a fight with him to get him to leave the building. To her credit, Charlotte seems fully willing to take the blame for treating crime-solving like a game. James notes, “It was a death threat. The horrible weight of what Holmes had done yesterday fell back on my shoulders. ‘So after you received it, you chased me out, and then…waited for someone to come by and kill you?’” (230-31). The text doesn’t yet reveal why Charlotte feels enough self-loathing to willingly place herself in the line of fire.