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IT WAS LATE DECEMBER IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND, AND though it was only three in the afternoon, the sky outside Charlotte Holmes’s bedroom as as black and full as it would’ve been in the Arctic Circle I’d forgotten about this, soford School, even though I’d grown up with one leg on either side of the Atlantic When I thought of winter, I thought of those reasonable New England nights that arrived punctually just after dinner, disappearing intoblue by the tihts were different They cae for the next six months

It would have been better, all told, if I’d visited Holmes for the first time in the suland’s southern coast, and from the top floor of the house they’d built you could see the sea Or you could if you happened to own a pair of night-vision goggles and a vivid iland’s December darkness would have put me into a mood all by itself, but Holmes’s familyfor lightning to break the sky above it or for so out of its cellar, mad scientist in hot pursuit

The inside didn’t dothat I was in a horror movie But a different kind of horrordark unconed to be sat on White walls hung hite abstract paintings A baby grand lurking in a corner In short, the kind of place that vampires lived in Really well-mannered vampires And everywhere, silence

Hol heart of that cold house Her bedroo and books, books everywhere, organized alphabetically on shelves or tossed on the floor with their pages flung open In the room beside, a chemistry table croith beakers and burners Succulent plants, twisted and knobbled in their little pots, that she fed afrom an eyedropper ("It’s an experi to kill the kills them") The floors were scattered with papers and coins and busted cigarettes, and still, in all the endless clutter, there wasn’t a single speck of dust or dirt It hat I’d come to expect from her, except for maybe her stash of chocolate biscuits and the entire hardbound Encyclopedia Britannica, which she kept in the low bookshelf that served as her nightstand Apparently Holarette in hand Today was volume C, the entry "Czechoslovakia," and for so the whole of it out loud to me while I paced back and forth in front of her

Well Thereabout anything real

While she spoke, I tried to avoid looking at the Sherlock Holmes novels she’d stacked on top of volumes D and E They were her father’s, filched from his study We’d lost her own copies in a bo with her cheood deal of my trust in the huirl she e irl I’d so badly wanted to know

In the last few days, we’d soed to retreat backwards from our easy friendship, back to that old territory of distrust and unknowability The thought made me sick, made me want to climb the walls It in to fix it

I didn’t do that Instead, in the grand tradition of our friendship, I picked a fight about so completely different

"Where is it?" I asked her "Why can’t you just tell me where it is?"

"It wasn’t until 1918 that Czechoslovakia liberated itself froarian Empire and became the country as we knew it in the twentieth century" She ashed her Lucky Strike on the coverlet "Then, a series of events that transpired in the 1940s--"

"Holmes" I waved a hand in front of her face "Holmes I asked you about Milo’s suit"

She battedwhich the state did not precisely exist as it had before--"

"The suit that definitely won’t fit me That costsme wear"

"Until that particular territory was ceded to the then–Soviet Union in 1945" She squinted down at the voluers "I can’ton this page the last time I read it"

"So you reread this entry a lot A little Eastern Europe before bed Just as good as Nancy Drew"

"As who?"

"No one Look," I said, growing i me to ‘dress for dinner,’ and that you can say those words with a straight face because you greith this level of unbearable suffocating poshness, and I don’t know, maybe you like that itEvery word out of my mouth today was crueler than I wanted it to be "Okay, fine," I said, backtracking, "so I’ a very American panic attack, but your brother’s rooon--"

"Please Milo has better security than that," she said "Do you need the access code? I can text hies it rele" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">