A Study in Sherlock

“Could I have someone like that? Instead of a babysitter? Could you hire someone to tell people I’m great?”

Her father laughed. But Sheila was serious. She had not had a good year in fifth grade and she was dreading sixth grade. She was not sure a vintage GO CLIMB A ROCK T-shirt could solve all her problems, although she hoped it would be a start. But how much easier it would be if someone would go to the school and tell everyone she was great. Sheila the Great. There was a book by that name, a Judy Blume, but it made her sad, because the Sheila in that book was so clearly not great.

However, Sheila did not realize how bad fifth grade had been until her parents received a call from the school, suggesting they come in for a conference before the new school year began. “Just to make sure we’re all on the same page as far as Sheila’s behavior is concerned.” She knew this because she picked up the extension in her parents’ bedroom and her father caught her.

“Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves,” he said.

“It’s part of my job. I have to know things. That’s how I found out what was happening to your newspaper. I heard the super complaining to the doorman that people were subscribing to newspapers and leaving them downstairs for days at a time, so he was just going to start throwing them away if people didn’t come down and get them by nine.”

“I’m down by nine.”

Sheila gave her father a look. “Almost never. You leave for work at ten or eleven and, most nights, don’t come home until after my bedtime.”

He gave her a story by Saki, which apparently was related to what her mother drank from the little carafe at the sushi place. The story was about a cat, Tobermory, that learned to talk and told everyone’s secrets and the people then plotted to poison him. They didn’t get a chance—he was killed in a fight by another cat—but that didn’t worry Sheila. She knew how to get around being poisoned. You just made sure that someone else tasted your food first. She also decided that if she ever was allowed to have a cat, she would name him Tobermory and call him Toby for short. She thought about changing the name of her stuffed white-and-gray tabby, which had been passed down to her by her mother, but it didn’t seem right, changing someone’s name when he was so old. Her mother was fifty, so her stuffed animals must be … almost fifty. Sheila had wanted to change her own name. Last year she had asked if she could be Sheila Locke instead of Locke-Weiner. She argued that a girl should have her mother’s surname, that it was good for women’s rights. Her mother said such a change would hurt her father’s feelings, that he had managed to grow up with the same name and all Sheila had to do was remind people, politely, that it was pronounced whiner.

Like that was so much better.

After solving the case of her father’s missing newspaper, Sheila felt she needed more work. She put up a small note, advertising her services, but the super scolded her and said such postings were not allowed in the hallways. Her family’s building had lots of rules like that, almost more than school. For example, no delivery people were ever allowed past the lobby, which was part of the reason that all those newspapers ended up on a table and then got thrown away by the angry super.

People in the building were always stressing that this rule was very good for the kids because they could come and go throughout the building and their parents would know that they would never meet an outsider. But there weren’t that many kids and Sheila wasn’t friends with them anyway so she would have gladly traded that rule for having Chinese food brought right to the door with everybody already in pajamas. There was nothing cozier than eating Chinese food with her parents with everyone already in pajamas. But because someone had to go downstairs to fetch it, they never ended up doing it that way. Besides, they seldom ate dinner as a family because her father worked late. He said he couldn’t help being a night owl. Sometimes her mother ate with Sheila; sometimes she drank a glass of wine while Sheila ate dinner by herself. They had a formal dining room, but it was rare for them to eat in there because it was so formal. They were not formal people, her father said. They all preferred the little breakfast bar in the kitchen, which was bright and cheerful.