A Study in Sherlock

Sheila could not let this pass. “I use black-and-white composition books like Harriet M. Welsch in Harriet the Spy.”

She took the cap, though, to be nice. Grown-ups thought they were always watching out for children’s feelings, but Sheila believed it was the other way around just as often. Sheila was tender with her mother, who was sensitive in her own way, and indulgent of her father, who was dreamy and absentminded, usually lost inside whatever film he was editing. He had worked on some very famous films, but he worked in an office, no closer to the movie stars than Sheila was when she watched a movie on her computer, so no one at school thought what her father did was cool. Her mother was a lawyer, which definitely wasn’t cool. It wasn’t uncool. It just was.

Sheila sometimes went to her father’s workplace, all the way downtown, on Canal Street. This usually happened on school holidays that her mother’s law office didn’t recognize as holidays or during the summer because of what her parents called child-care chaos. They had a lot of child-care chaos the summer that Sheila was eleven. On these days, Sheila and her father took the 1 train, which irritated her father because it was a local, but she liked all the extra stops. There were more people coming and going. She tried to make up a story about each person in the car. They tended to be sad stories.

Her father worked at a big Mac computer and it was always exciting—for the first half hour or so. Sheila would even start to think that maybe she would be a film editor. She enjoyed her father’s lectures about the choices he had, how he sometimes had to find the film that the filmmaker failed to make, that it was like trying to cook a meal with only what was already in the pantry. But it was slow, tedious work. She eventually got bored, wandered to the lunchroom where the bagels were set out, or asked if there was a computer she could use, or played games on her father’s phone. Most often, though, she pulled out a book, usually a mystery or something with magic.

“You’re on a crime spree,” her father joked. But she was not an indiscriminate reader of mystery books. She started with Encyclopedia Brown and tried very hard not to cheat by looking up the solutions in the back, but some of the clues were awfully small. (How was she supposed to know that Southerners called the Battle of Bull Run the Battle of Manassas?) She read books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, which were sort of like mysteries, and Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret, the sequel, which she liked even better. Despite her deerstalker cap, she did not read Sherlock Holmes. Nor did she read Nancy Drew. Sheila hated Nancy Drew, who reminded her of a girl in her class and not just because she had red hair. Like Nancy Drew, Trista had two friends, Caitlin and Harmony, whose job seemed to be to advertise her wonderfulness. Oh Trista, they would moan, you are so smart, you are so pretty, your clothes are the best. They said this over and over again and somehow it all became true. When it wasn’t, not in Sheila’s opinion.

Sheila talked to her father about Trista and her friends because her father was interested in why people did the things they did, whereas her mother said such conversations were merely gossip, which she forbade, along with Gossip Girl. Her father said it was psychoanalysis and that gossip was fine, anyway, as long as it didn’t become like the Gossip Game in The Last of Sheila, a film that he particularly liked. Sheila pretended to like it, too, because it seemed important to her father. He needed her to like The Last of Sheila, Paths of Glory, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Magnificent Ambersons, Miller’s Crossing, and Funny Bones. So she did, and she never told him that Funny Bones was very scary for what was supposed to be a funny movie and that she didn’t understand what anyone in Miller’s Crossing was talking about, no matter how many times she watched it.

“It’s like this Trista has her own PR firm,” Sheila’s father said.

“Puerto Rican?”

“What?”

“That’s what they call the Sharks in West Side Story. PRs.” Her father had shown her the film on television, telling her to look at the color of the sky as Tony walked through the alleys, singing of Maria. He was critical of the editing, although it had won an Oscar, according to the white-haired man, the one who talked after the movies on that channel. “Awards don’t mean anything,” her father told Sheila, yet his awards—none of them Oscars—were framed and hanging in his office.

“Oh, I meant public relations. You know, people who are hired to tell other people how great people are.”