A Study in Sherlock

Yes, on her father’s side of the closet. But her mother’s side was always neat, with shoe boxes with Polaroid pictures of the shoes inside and clothing hanging according to type and color. Everything was labeled and accounted for on her mother’s side.

“Daddy thought it was in his boxes.”

“It probably was.”

“Do you snoop, too, Mom?”

She didn’t answer right away. “I did. But it’s wrong, Sheila. I don’t do it anymore.” She kissed her good night.

Two days later, Sheila disbanded Sheila Locke-Holmes. She left the deerstalker cap on a hook in her closet, put her almost-blank notebook down the trash chute, and took apart the utility belt that she had created in homage to Harriet the Spy. She told her mother that she would like to wear the charm bracelet, after all, that charm bracelets were popular again. She wore it to school the first day, along with her mother’s T-shirt. Sixth grade was better than she thought it would be and she began to hope she might, one day, at least be medium-popular. Like her mother, she had shiny hair and a nice smile. Like her father, she was dreamy and absentminded, lost in her own world. There were worse ways to be.

Sheila’s mother was not dreamy. She did not indulge conversations about why people did what they did. She did not stop movies and show Sheila the color of the sky or explain how Dr. Horrible could go down wearing one thing and rise up wearing another a second later. But she was sometimes right about things, as Sheila learned with each passing year. At thirty, Sheila would sigh with envy over her twenty-year-old face. At forty, she would look longingly back at thirty.

She would never yearn for that summer when she was eleven. Whenever someone brought up the time that she wore the deerstalker cap and started her own detective agency, she changed the subject but not because she was embarrassed. She could not bear to remember how sad her mother looked that night, when she confessed to snooping. She wanted to say to her mother: He saves everything! It doesn’t matter! She wanted to ask her mother: Why did you take the card? Did you want him to know you took it? Why did you put it somewhere you would have to see it every day? She wanted to ask her father: Why did you keep it? Do you miss Chloe Beezer? Aren’t you happy that you married Mommy and had me? What was in those orange drinks?

But all these things went unsaid. Which, to Sheila’s way of thinking, was also a kind of lying, but the kind of lying of which grown-ups approved.

Laura Lippman purchased a deerstalker cap in London when she was fourteen and still owns it, although she will never be an expert in all things Sherlock Holmes and, in fact, made a really embarrassing error about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work in her Tess Monaghan series. A New York Times bestseller and winner of several awards for crime writing, past president of the Mystery Writers of America, she has published sixteen novels, a novella, and a collection of short stories. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CONCERT PIANIST

Margaret Maron

The bell rang at two o’clock precisely that early April afternoon and when my maid showed him into the parlour, my caller was, as I expected, Dr Watson. Although heavy mourning had somewhat gone out of style for men, he still wore a band of black velvet on the sleeve of his brown tweed jacket, which indicated to me that his grief for Mrs Watson had not fully abated despite the months that had passed.

“So good of you to come,” I said.

“Not at all, Mrs Hudson.” He handed Alice his hat and stick. “Indeed, I should have called upon you sooner. Your kind expression of sympathy upon my Mary’s passing touched me immensely, and I—” He broke off and looked around the parlour with undisguised pleasure.

“So many changes in my life and yet nothing has changed here.”

I smiled and did not correct him. Whilst he lodged here before his marriage, Dr Watson had taken tea with me several times. Mr Holmes had joined us here but once before his tragic end, yet I daresay he would have immediately noticed my new curtains. In most respects, a very noticing man, Mr Holmes.

Tea had been laid in anticipation of the visit, and when my guest was seated in the chair on the other side of the low table, I poured steaming cups for both of us and passed the scones, still warm from the oven.

“I suppose you have let his rooms to a new lodger?”

“Not as yet,” I replied, offering him gooseberry jam.

“After all this time?” He was clearly surprised. “You have left your best rooms vacant for nearly three years?”

I nodded.

“Forgive my presumption, Mrs Hudson, but does this not represent a financial hardship?”