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# A STUDY IN AMBER

(Book 1 of Holmes and Holmes)

by

P. J. Humphrey

Copyright 8 2015 by Phyllis A. Humphrey

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval systems now known or henceforth invented, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, blog, website or broadcast.

## Special Smashwords edition

This ebook is part of a series called Holmes and Holmes. This first book is provided free and you are welcome to share it with others. Additional books in the series, although reasonably priced, are _not_ free and restrictions on their dissemination will apply, as described in the front matter.

# Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks to Fern Field Brooks, Emmy-winning TV producer and dear friend who, a few years ago, suggested a Sherlock Holmes series. I hope she likes what I did with her idea.

Also, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate my grandson Rob Humphrey for creating the covers I wanted for the books in this series. But I can give you his contact information in case you are an author in need of a cover – or just anyone in need of a great graphic design. Contact him at rhartdesign@gmail.com and see more of his work at http://www.coroflot.com/rhrobartdesign.

# Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Other Titles by this Author

Dear Reader

# Chapter 1

My name is Sheridan Holmes and I'm the great-granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes.

You needn't laugh. I can prove it. Sort of. I mean, I'm not illiterate. I graduated from college. Stanford, no less. So I know people think Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the nineteenth century. However, it's no secret that he based Holmes on a real person, a doctor he knew from medical school. According to Conan Doyle's stories, Holmes never married or had any children, but in reality he did admire a certain woman, and he was even engaged briefly. Although he claimed he didn't understand women and often felt he couldn't trust them, nevertheless, he remained always courteous and sympathetic.

He could have had an affair with someone, but, if he had, they might have had to hush it up for some reason. Besides, in those days, having a baby out of wedlock was always—as they used to say in England—a "sticky wicket." But I digress.

Back to my being related. Clue number one. My name is almost the same. But whether his name was really Sherlock Holmes or not isn't that important. However, it points to his being my great-grandfather. I was adopted, and the name was given to me by my adoptive mother, Fenella Bowen. Yes, the Hollywood actress. She says she was in the throes of a divorce at the time and starring in yet-another television remake of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES when the adoption came through. She said it amused her to give me that name.

Of course, my adoptive grandmother, Tessa Reynolds, who, by the way, lives downstairs in this same restored San Francisco Victorian house where I'm writing this, insists that isn't true. She says the adoption was a private one, and the name suggested by the doctor who delivered me. He said the birth mother insisted he couldn't reveal how she happened to get pregnant and by whom. The doctor would know, but he's dead. How convenient.

Tessa says at one time she did know all the details about Holmes's son and grandson, and, hence, how I came to be, but—due to her advancing age—she can no longer remember.

Hogwash! Okay, she's eighty-six and sometimes needs help carrying in groceries or reaching high shelves, but she keeps up a schedule that makes beavers look lazy. Her mind is still as sharp as ever, or else why would she write two romance novels every year that actually get published and whose royalty checks paid for this house as well as the trip to England she gave me for my graduation present a few years ago?

Clue number two. Holmes lived at 221-B Baker Street in London and this house is on Baker Street in San Francisco. Tessa chose the house, over the dozen or so others she could have picked, because of the address. I'm convinced she wanted me to learn my true heritage, and bought the house as another way of drawing it to my attention.

Clue Number three: Starting at age five, I voluntarily began to read every Sherlock Holmes story, and by age twelve I could even solve puzzles that stumped many grownups. However, school took up most of my time until recently; and then, while on vacation in London, I visited the museum, formerly Holmes's digs at 221-B Baker Street. I made notes of absolutely everything in the sitting room—that's what they call living rooms there—so I could duplicate it in my apartment here.

In fact, on a September afternoon, I was doing that very thing when Mark Watson, the building maintenance man, knocked on my door. Tessa told me they call him "Doc" Watson, because he can do or fix anything, from helping her move her computer desk closer to the window, to making the quirky electricity in this old building work. I'd never met him before, but that day, as I struggled with boxes of stuff I'd bought for my apartment, he offered to help me unload.

At Tessa's description, I'd visualized him as fiftyish or even older, but this man could certainly pass for mid-thirties. He was tall and muscular, with thick, wavy dark hair and brown eyes. He wore a beige sweater over a plaid shirt and jeans, and his shoes were heavy work boots. We didn't shake hands because both his arms were in use surrounding a large cardboard box.

"I'm Watson," he announced in a pleasant, deep voice. He entered, set the box down on the Victorian sofa in the room and pulled out one of the objects inside. "Where do you want Napoleon's bust?"

"On the fireplace mantle." I pointed and he put it there.

His right hand now free, I stretched mine forward to take it. "Thank you for coming. I'm Sherry Holmes."

He smiled, and I noticed he had a great smile, even white teeth, and a firm jaw.

"Nice to meet you. Your grandmother, Mrs. Reynolds, said you were moving in. Glad to help."

He peered into the box again. "You've got a lot of old-fashioned junk in here, if you ask me."

"It's supposed to be old. I intend to decorate this room to look like the one I saw in London, Sherlock Holmes's sitting room."

"Mrs. Reynolds says you think you're his great-granddaughter."

So Tessa had been gossiping about me already. Writers often talk too much. She even writes book-length letters to newspaper editors.

"I know you and Tessa—excuse me, I mean Mrs. Reynolds—are good friends because you help her all the time, and you can believe her. How do you think I got my name? She knows I'm a descendant."

"But your mother, who comes to visit Mrs. Reynolds sometimes, said you were an orphan and she adopted you."

"Of course she did, but she knew who my real great grandparents were, so she named me Sheridan Holmes."

"She told me she simply obeyed a last-minute whim."

"You mustn't believe everything _she_ says. She changes her mind depending on what film she's involved in. I love my mother, but I sometimes think she's a Dr. Phil program waiting to happen."

"So giving you the name makes you a descendant of Holmes?"

"There's more. I have a mind just like his, and I'm going to be the next great detective."

He gave a short laugh and winked. "I've read those stories too, you know. Just because I work with my hands doesn't mean I haven't read a book or two. When those stories were published everyone considered Sherlock Holmes the greatest detective of all time. No one, not that Hercule Poirot or—since you're a woman—Miss Marple, could touch him."

"I agree with you, but, since I have his genes, it's possible I have some of his ability for detecting as well. And, when I'm older, study forensics, and learn more about specialized things like poisons and tobacco ash, I might be as good."

He scoffed. "Yeah, learning about tobacco ash will come in handy."

"I was just making a point. You know what I mean."

Watson grinned but didn't go back to unpacking the box. Instead he gave me a quizzical look and crossed his arms over his chest. "So, you're a good detective, are you? Good at observing and analyzing?"

"I like to think so."

"Okay, tell me about me. Like Holmes always did with strangers who came to him."

"Fine." I crossed my arms too and slowly walked around Doc where he stood between the fireplace and the sofa. I couldn't help noticing his taut muscles and broad shoulders, but I stuck with a more professional assessment.

"First of all, before you saw me and helped with my box, you were doing some gardening in that small plot of weeds they call a backyard behind the house."

He glanced down at his shoes. "I scraped the dirt off before I came inside."

"Not quite all." I pointed to a bit of mud on the edge of his right shoe. "Furthermore, you've been trimming the azalea bushes because there are bits of leaves stuck to your sweater." I picked off a tiny green one and showed it to him. "Up here on your shoulder where apparently you couldn't quite see to brush it off."

"What else?"

"The bulges in your sweater, there at your waist, indicate you have some tools—plumbing tools perhaps—in a leather belt."

He nodded. "Very good. What else do you know about me, something your granny didn't tell you, I mean."

"Well, you're an educated man. Your speech and the fact that you've read a lot, means you haven't been a laborer forever."

He laughed. "Well, I already told you that much, didn't I?"

"True, but I'll go even further. You asked where I wanted you to place the bust. Not many ordinary Americans would recognize it as Napoleon. I think you were once a schoolteacher. In fact, your manner suggests you were a high school or even a junior college teacher. Why did you give it up?"

He chuckled. "You win. I was a teacher."

I'm afraid I gloated a bit.

"The answer to your question might not be what you expect. Teachers still don't get paid what they're worth, but money isn't important to me. I could afford to wine and dine pretty ladies with the salary they paid me." He gave me a look that said I might be next on his "pretty-lady" list.

"However, I wanted to be my own boss, so I gave it up and started work as a janitor."

"Yet, you're not a janitor now. Tessa says you do lots more than that. She says you do all kinds of work for her and the other owners of the old Victorians in this neighborhood."

He looked surprised. "Did she tell you that?"

"Yes, but you wanted me to tell you what I've deduced about you, and I've decided you're an entrepreneur. You started your own business and signed up many landlords in the area."

"You think I'm an entrepreneur, do you?"

"Yes, because the breast pocket of your shirt contains a small supply of what are probably business cards."

He patted his pocket. "Okay, you are observant, but good enough to call yourself a consulting detective?"

"No, not that." I moved to the large desk in the corner, pulled out my sign and handed it to him. White, with black letters in a nineteenth century font, it was ten inches by two inches. "Here's my sign. I want you to install it in the vestibule downstairs, next to my name."

He read what I'd printed on the sign out loud. "'S. Holmes, Private Investigations.' How can you do that? Don't you have to get a license or something? You'll need _some_ credentials."

"Don't worry. I'll get them. I plan to go to the police academy and work my way up to detective. Maybe even get a job with a private eye. I have to work some place anyway. Clerking in the bakery doesn't pay very well, and, besides, I'd get a couple of years' practice first."

Watson gave me another skeptical look, so I went on. "I'll do whatever I have to, but becoming a cop or assistant private eye takes so long. I thought I'd try to establish myself first, maybe get a head start with the sign. Advertising is so important, and, since I need a sign anyway, it doesn't cost anything."

"So long? Why are you in such a hurry? What are you anyway, twenty-two? Didn't you just graduate from college?"

"That was three years ago and I'm twenty-five now. I don't want to wait until I'm as old as Sherlock Holmes."

"So, you're one of those modern girls who want everything fast, faster or ten minutes ago."

"I have a motto, 'The things that come to those who wait are the leftover junk from those who got there first.'"

He chuckled. "How are you going to get any business? I've been working in this area for four years, and I've never seen anyone who looked like he might want to hire a detective."

"Of course I don't expect to get any walk-in traffic."

"Advertise then? Yellow pages?"

"Nobody does that anymore. I'll use the Internet. Twitter, Facebook, my own website."

He nodded. "Figures."

I took small pictures out of the box. "Can you hang these for me?"

Proving my earlier deduction had been correct, he pushed aside his sweater and produced a small hammer. He dug into his pocket for nails.

He grinned at me again. "See, I did a bit of deduction myself. I figured you'd want some of these pictures hung."

After I told him where they should go, Doc hung four small pictures and one medium-sized one within a few minutes. He peered into the cardboard box again.

"There's lots of small stuff in here, but I think you're going to run out of space. The room looks cluttered to me, but I guess folks liked that a hundred years ago." He planted his hands on his hips. "Did Sherlock Holmes like a cluttered room, do you think?"

"Probably he never noticed his surroundings because he focused on his thoughts. However, in his stories, Arthur Conan Doyle depicted him as a somewhat messy man so far as his personal belongings were concerned."

Doc wandered around the room. "I see you have a violin."

"Yes, I found it in a second-hand music store, and I plan to take lessons one of these days."

"And this little box has the word 'poison' on it."

I rushed over to it. "I bought that in the Holmes museum. Obviously, it's not the original, but I wanted to have something like that, along with the chemistry set and all those bottles that might have held mysterious concoctions."

"Where'd you get all this furniture?" He pointed to the horsehair sofa, two velvet-covered chairs, a round table in the center, and a roll-top desk.

"From the thrift shop run by the Faith and Love Homeless Shelter. I volunteer in their store two mornings a week."

"I've seen the place. It's awfully big."

"It has to be. People donate all sorts of stuff. Not just unwanted clothes, which I help sort out when I'm there, but tools, baking pans, glassware, china, appliances, and, yes, furniture as well." I hadn't even mentioned my three large wooden bookcases crammed with old volumes I'd rescued from other thrift shops, garage sales, and bookstores going out of business.

I tugged his arm gently. "Be a dear and go downstairs now, hang my sign and bring up another box or two. I don't want this job to last all night."

Watson shrugged and went off, while I pulled out dozens of tiny bottles and placed them on the tall narrow shelves in the corner. He brought up the last box and left, and I found places for candle holders, letter openers, and several pens.

I had just tucked two small ink wells into a pigeon-hole on the roll-top desk when I heard a voice behind me.

"What in the world do you think you are doing?"

I turned and swallowed a scream.

There, not three feet away from me, stood a tall, slender man wearing a patterned coat with a shoulder cape and a soft deer-stalker cap.

I managed to squeak out, "You're...."

"Sherlock Holmes, of course."

Actually, he looked a little like Michael Caine.

#  Chapter 2

Normally a garrulous person, I couldn't speak.

"Young lady, did you hear what I said? What are you doing here?"

"I live here," I managed to blurt out.

"Don't be absurd. It is I who live here. This is my flat, and I want to know why you are in it."

Suddenly forced to explain, I had to think for a moment. I didn't believe he was British actor Michael Caine, who was, as far as I knew, still alive. But Sherlock Holmes? The man wore the very clothes I'd expect Holmes to wear, and his words conjured up nineteenth century speech. Had I inadvertently made the great detective materialize? I decided to await further developments.

"Well, unless the world has gone crazy within the last few seconds, this is my flat on Baker Street in San Francisco."

"San Francisco? Impossible. I live in London."

"Not impossible at all. You see, I visited your flat in London last year, and I decided to decorate mine the same."

"In San Francisco? What on earth for?"

I debated explaining all over again—as I seemed to be doing regularly these days to any number of people—how I came to want to reproduce Holmes's famous digs, but he interrupted me.

"Who are you, and why are you dressed that way?" He pointed to my jeans. "You're wearing trousers!" He made it sound as if I were a half-naked dancer from the Follies Bergere.

"Yes. This is the twenty-first century, and women have been wearing pants for about eighty years."

"The twenty-first century?" That news sent him—not to collapsing on the sofa as I would have expected, but—to the window. He pushed aside the drapes and looked out at the view. His head turning from side to side, he glanced down at the asphalt pavement bordered by concrete sidewalks, the Victorian-style houses across the street, and the cars parked at the curb. Apparently a car drove by just then.

"My word. A motor car. A very strange motor car. What has happened?"

I pointed to the sofa. "Why don't you sit down, Mr. Holmes, and let me explain?"

Instead, he strode to the door leading to the stairs. "I shall call Mrs. Hudson and ask her. And where is Doctor Watson, pray tell?"

Apparently suddenly realizing what I'd said and that he'd have to deal with me, he turned. "Did you say twenty-first century?"

"Yes, several years into it as a matter of fact."

"I remember the twentieth century. I retired to become a bee-keeper."

"Were you alive in nineteen-twelve, the year Titanic sank? People all over the world commemorated the hundredth anniversary of that."

Finally, he removed his hat and coat, hurled them toward the sofa and sat in the armchair closest to the fireplace. He looked down at the floor, staring at the carpet's Oriental design, and sighed. "It is as I feared."

"What did you fear?"

"I had been asleep, I believe, and when I woke I found myself in my old rooms. Yet they weren't the same. They were crowded with people. Strange people looked through my books, touched my belongings. I told them to stop. I told them to get out, but they ignored me as if I were invisible."

I broke the short silence. "What did you do?"

He rubbed his forehead, as if that would restore his memory of the next moment.

"I don't really know. I closed my eyes, and I remember thinking, 'I want to go home,' and the next thing I knew... I opened my eyes and saw you."

I took the chair opposite him. "I suspect you've been asleep for a good many years."

He seemed to accept the situation. "But why wake up now? Why here?"

"Because..." I didn't really know, but then a thought came to me. "You wanted to go home, so you've been transported to the next best thing, a flat that looks like home to you."

"I find that a bit far-fetched."

I shrugged. "Perhaps nobody else decorated a flat to look like yours during all that time."

He rose and paced the floor, apparently becoming used to the idea and beginning to assert himself.

"Very well." He turned to me. "Now that I've come home, I should be obliged if you would leave."

His words shocked me at first, but I recovered quickly. "Sorry, but I can't do that. I live here now and have nowhere else to go." Of course, I could move in with Tessa again, but she'd lose her writing room. Or back with my mother in Los Angeles, but only over my own dead body.

"Speaking of which," I said aloud, "however much it looks like home to you, you don't own this flat or this building, and I do. Or, rather, my grandmother owns the building, and it's in San Francisco, remember?"

He sat down, closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead again. "And this is really the twenty-first century?"

"I can show you a calendar if you like. I have one in my office." I pointed toward my bedroom door.

"Where have I been all this time?"

"Uh... dead?"

"I've already thought of that, but why have I returned from the dead at this time? Am I a ghost? Do I look like a ghost to you?"

"I don't know what ghosts are supposed to look like. In the movies—"

"The what?"

"Oh, you don't know about movies, do you? Let me put it this way. People who have seen ghosts tend to describe them in one of two ways. Either they're formless, white cloud-like things, or else they're transparent and you can put your hand right through them."

"I believe they're described that way in books, as well." He glanced down at himself. "I don't believe I'm either of those. Do I look like a white vapor to you?"

"No, you look like a sturdy man."

"Am I transparent? Could you put your hand through me?"

I reached out and grasped his arm. Quite solid. "No, you're a real person as far as I can tell."

He rose and paced some more. "There's one other thing. The people in my flat in London ignored me. Is it possible they didn't see me?"

"Perhaps, but I see you. I can touch you, and we're talking together."

"Yes, but what if only certain people can see me? You, for instance, because you've decorated your flat to look like mine?"

Obviously, the man's brain suffered no damage during his ninety-some years of being dead, anyway.

"I suppose it's possible. We'll know soon enough."

I said the latter because Holmes had left the hall door open, and I heard footsteps on the old wooden stairs. Slow footsteps. Not Doc. I rushed to the doorway to help Tessa.

"Tessa, you shouldn't have come up all this way."

In her strong voice she put me in my place. "Stop treating me like an invalid. It's only seventeen steps, and a landing halfway besides. I wanted to see with my own eyes what you've done up here."

"What about your own _knees_?"

"My knees are fine, and the day they're not I'll have them replaced." She walked about the room as if showing me her knees still worked, even though not as good perhaps as in the days she often bragged about, when she did the Jitterbug to "One O'Clock Jump" by the Count Basie band.

Actually, I couldn't see her knees because she always wore either long pants or a long skirt. She often told me she preferred to wear those with the low-heeled shoes she needed these days. That day a blue and white striped sweater topped her navy blue skirt, which went well with her naturally-curly, unnaturally platinum blonde hair. Luckily, although she might only be my step-grandmother, I too had curly hair, but mine was brown, not "Bashful Blonde" from a drugstore bottle.

Tessa surveyed everything through her reading glasses, and then gave me the rolled-up newspaper she held in her hand. "I've brought the _Chronicle_ in case you want to read it."

I took the newspaper from her. "Do you see anything of interest in my apartment?"

"Just a lot of old junk. I like period furniture myself, but this looks more like the rear corner of a rundown resale shop."

She hadn't seen Holmes. Apparently he'd assumed correctly, and not everyone could see him.

He spoke up. "I fear I'm invisible to her as well. You're all alone in this, my young friend."

"'Doc' Watson might see you. He's our maintenance man."

Tessa said, "Of course he's our maintenance man, but why would he want to see me?"

"I wasn't talking to you, Tessa. I was talking to Sherlock Holmes."

Holmes said, "Dr. Watson is here? Are you telling me he has returned from the grave as well?"

Tessa gave me a stern look. "It's one thing to redecorate and hang out a detective shingle, but if you're going to carry on conversations with imaginary people—"

"He's not imaginary. He's here."

"Who's here? Doc?" Tessa said.

"Who's here? Doctor Watson?" Holmes said.

I raised my eyes. Good grief. This couldn't be more awkward.

I guided Tessa to the armchair I'd recently vacated. "Sherlock Holmes is here. You can't see him, but I can."

"I may be old, but my eyesight hasn't given out yet. There's no one here but you and me."

"Let me explain. Holmes has awakened from...a long sleep and showed up here because this room looks like his flat."

"Showed up? You mean his ghost?"

"Madam, I am not a ghost."

"Let me explain," I said.

"You already said that."

"I was talking to him."

She squinted her eyes and leaned toward me. "You can talk to a ghost? Does he answer you?"

"Yes."

"Can I talk to him?"

"You can if you want to, but you won't be able to hear his answers. I'll be glad to repeat them, but apparently I'm the only one who can see and hear him."

"And Watson," Holmes said. "I'm certain Watson will be able to do it."

"Maybe not. Our Watson is not a doctor and is much younger."

Thank God Tessa has a quick mind. "You're talking to him again, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Darn. I've waited all my life to see a real ghost, and now you get to and I don't. It isn't fair." After a lengthy pause, she added, "Did he say something else?"

"No, not now."

"What's he doing? Is he playing the violin or smoking his pipe?"

"No, and I hope he doesn't smoke anymore. If death has any redeeming features, one of them ought to be it kills our bad habits."

"They didn't consider smoking unhealthy in the nineteenth century. All the men did it."

"Some people knew the health risks but didn't have any scientific evidence at the time."

Tessa whispered, "Does he know what year this is and we're in San Francisco?"

"Yes, I've filled him in on those things."

"Where's he going to stay?" Leave it to a romance novelist to wonder about sleeping arrangements. In her books, the characters do the mattress mambo more often than they eat.

Holmes answered the question. "I've been thinking about that as well. If you're the only person who can see me, I'll have the devil's own time renting a flat or booking a hotel room." He thrust a hand in his coat where he probably kept a billfold of some kind. "Assuming my money is of any use in this country."

"You can stay here. There are two bedrooms."

"I knew it!" Tessa did a slow-motion version of leaping from her chair, pulled my head down near hers and whispered in my ear. "Does he look like Jeremy Brett or Robert Downey? How old is he?"

"Too old for me and too young for you."

She frowned and returned to her chair. Like a dedicated novelist, she prepared herself to take part in a true-life adventure and accepted the situation. "I thought you might be too tired to cook tonight so I ordered dinner from the corner deli. They'll be delivering it any minute. I assume there'll be enough for three."

## * * *

We sat around the large table in the center of the room, but Holmes declared being a ghost had apparently taken away his appetite, so he sat still while Tessa and I ate deli sandwiches and potato salad. Just as well too, since seeing food picked up and then disappearing into thin air might have sent Tessa into cardiac arrest. She reacted wide-eyed when he pulled his chair close to the table.

Holmes also had very little to say. I began the conversation by telling Holmes my full name, but he only guffawed loudly.

I turned to Tessa. "Tell him. Tell him how you know I'm his great-granddaughter."

She stiffened, as she usually did when about to be contrary. "I know nothing of the sort. Anyway, I refuse to talk to a person I can't see. Ask your mother to explain it. Perhaps she can see ghosts."

Tessa said the last with a smidgen of sarcasm. For some reason I didn't understand, family love skipped a generation. When Tessa and Fenella meet, I suspect they don't chat, they wield blunt instruments.

I sighed and finished telling my own version of how I got my name. Then I remembered something and scowled at him. "In fact, I'm really upset. You had an opportunity to reveal the name of the woman who would've been my great-grandmother, but you didn't."

Holmes raised his voice. "Heavens, I could not do that. One does not damage the reputation of a lady of culture and breeding if one may avoid it."

"Are you saying that you had an affair with a woman of social prominence? Perhaps even of royalty? Those stories about you indicated such people came to you for help. Was that the problem?"

While I spoke, Holmes only nodded his head from time to time.

"Then you believe me," I said.

"Whether your scenario is possible or not, I cannot say, and I refuse to mention names or divulge private matters."

I put on a solemn tone. "You mean governments might have fallen, empires toppled?" He didn't answer and, after thinking about that for a few seconds, I doubted its relevance. At least at that moment.

After another long pause, I changed the subject. I filled Holmes in on the present condition of the world, thanks to the newspaper Tessa'd brought up and a few magazines. I also introduced him to some modern conveniences, like microwave ovens, computers and television. After he adjusted to the vision of people moving and speaking out of a relatively small box on a stand, he liked the idea of having a television set in his bedroom, vowing to watch every motion picture ever made, besides getting the news of the day.

"It will be a means of learning what is happening today and, from films, what has happened in the past."

"I'll rent them from Netflix, and we'll start with films made in the nineteen twenties. You can even watch movies made from the stories Doyle wrote." I laughed. "With luck, you'll get to see at least nine actors who have portrayed you."

Tessa poured tea for me and spoke toward the place she probably assumed Holmes sat. "Since you won't be able to go anywhere, at least you'll have something to do."

Holmes groaned. "You're right. My mind will be stifled. How shall I continue to use my brain when I'm invisible and cannot investigate crimes or go where I please?"

"Well, how did you find out about cases to solve before? The clients came to you, didn't they?"

Apparently not wanting to be excluded from the conversation, Tessa spoke up again. "Doc put your little Private Investigations sign in the vestibule, but I think it's unlikely to bring any customers."

I cleared away the dishes from the table. "I'm going to design a website to offer my services and use the Internet."

"You were going to pretend to be me?" Holmes asked.

"No, I'll be myself. As I said a little while ago, since I'm your great-granddaughter, I naturally inherited some of your detecting genes."

"Genes?"

"DNA. Oh, never mind, I'll explain it to you later."

He snickered in that wonderful way of his. Or rather as various actors had portrayed him. "I'd very much like to see you solve a case by yourself. I'm sure I'll have watched at least a dozen films before you solve even one."

"Is that a bet?"

"You desire a wager, do you? Done."

"I haven't much money, so what do you want if I lose?"

"I haven't any American money either. Shall we just make it a friendly test of your talent?"

"If I come up with the truth before the police solve the case, will that suit you?"

"Fair enough."

We shook hands and I told Tessa what he'd said.

"He's right, you know. You may not even find a proper case in thirty days, much less solve one."

"The newspaper. They're always reporting crimes. If there's an unsolved murder in the city, I'll work on that. I won't need a client. I'll just solve the case to Mr. Holmes's satisfaction."

Holmes retrieved the newspaper and hurriedly went through it, scanning the pages as if he'd taken a speed-reading course. "Here," he announced at last. He handed me the paper folded to show a news item about a dead body. "Solve that."

#  Chapter 3

The newspaper carried the story on page two. I read the short article out loud, starting with the headline, " _Man Shot Dead in Vacant Apartment_ ," before setting the paper down on the table. "They don't say much, do they? Only that he's a man and he's dead."

Tessa spoke first. "Probably because the coroner hadn't examined the body yet."

"If I heard correctly," Holmes said, "they gave an address where they found the body, did they not?"

"A vacant apartment in a three-story building."

Tessa grabbed the paper again. "It's on Lyon Street. That's just around the corner."

"Do you think it's the same place?"

"They don't give a specific address, just that it's in the three hundred block, but it must be close. We should go there right away and make sure." She got up from the table, as if she'd hike over there all by herself if necessary.

"Tessa, what are you thinking?"

"That I'll go with you, of course."

"You'll do nothing of the kind." I lifted the cover of the roll-top desk and picked up my "detecting" pouch. I'd prepared it weeks before, and it contained a pair of plastic gloves, magnifying glass, small but sharp scissors, a spiral notepad, both pencil and pen, and little envelopes to hold whatever useful items I might find. See, I took my new occupation seriously.

I stuffed it in the side pocket of my shoulder bag hanging near the front door. "If I'm supposed to be the detective who solves this case, I'm the one who'll go over and check it out."

"And I," Holmes said. He too, had risen and strode toward the sofa where his hat and coat lay.

"What did he say?" Tessa asked.

"He wants to go with me," I told her.

"But he doesn't know this neighborhood, and I do. I might even know the landlord of that building."

Holmes shrugged into his coat. "Your grandmother is a charming person, but surely this is a matter for experts." He frowned. "I would go alone, except that she is correct in that I do not know the area. However, I will accompany you. The fact that no one else can see me might even be an advantage when it comes to snooping into other people's indiscretions."

Her gaze bouncing between my face and a spot near the fireplace, Tessa hurried on. "What's he saying now?"

"That he intends to come."

"Then there will be three of us."

"No, Tessa. Your continued ability to climb stairs notwithstanding, I think three of us is too many for this caper."

"But no one can see him. To anyone else, there'll just be the two of us. Besides, we live in this neighborhood and won't attract attention."

By that time, Holmes had opened the door to the hallway and seemed headed for the stairs. I grabbed my poncho and bag from the hook near the door and went after him. When I got to the landing, I found a strange sight. Holmes leaned against the wall, his head hanging forward onto his chest. He was asleep.

"Omigod." I stopped dead in my tracks.

Tessa, right behind me, bumped into my back. "What's the matter?"

"It's Holmes," I managed to say.

"What about him? Did he go downstairs? Has he gone on without us?"

"No." I stood at the side of the sleeping detective and shook his shoulder. No response. Louder. "Mr. Holmes." I shook him harder and, happily, he didn't fall over.

"Is he still here?" Tessa asked. "Why are you staring at the wall like that? Where is Sherlock Holmes?"

"He's right beside me. He's asleep."

"Asleep?" She paused. "All right, Sherry. If you really don't want me to come along, just say so. I can handle rejection. God knows I suffered enough of that thirty years ago trying to get my first books published."

"It's not that. I'm telling you the truth. Holmes suddenly fell asleep." I straightened up, pushed Tessa back out of the way, and grabbed both of Holmes's hands. Slowly, I pulled him away from the wall. He shuffled. Good, his feet could move. Slowly, I led him back into the flat and toward a chair.

His eyes snapped open. "Why are you just standing there. Let us be on our way. The game's afoot."

He tried to push past me to go to the door again, but I managed to stop him. "You can't go outside."

"What do you mean? Is there some danger?"

"Please sit down for a moment while I tell you."

"If you insist."

I thought it best to get the truth out at once. "You fell asleep. The moment you stepped out of this apartment you went into a deep slumber. Standing up."

He stared at me for a long moment. His agile mind apparently not only understood what I'd said but its implications.

He slumped into the armchair. "It's true then. I'm only conscious when in my familiar surroundings." He sighed so deeply I shivered.

He glared up at me with a strange look on his face. "Do you have a pistol?"

"No. Why?"

"If you did, I would suggest you shoot me at once and put me out of my misery."

It took me a moment to decide how to answer. "But if I were to do that, we'd have no one at all to solve the case we planned to check out."

His head drooped forward again, but then he shrugged and a light smile turned up his lips. "You're right. I am only good for solving crimes, but I am very good indeed at that, so, as long as I am awake, I must continue to do so."

Once more he removed his hat and turned his head when Tessa reentered the room.

"Tell your grandmother I shall not be accompanying you this evening, and she will have to be my eyes and ears."

Since I planned to do that very thing myself, I didn't repeat it, but I told Tessa Holmes would stay behind sitting by the fireplace and I'd let her go with me just this once.

After stopping at her apartment, where Tessa pulled on a woollen jacket, we left the building and walked to the corner of the street. There we turned right, crossed and went to the following corner and made a left turn.

It didn't take long before I recognized the building which I assumed had been the site of the discovery of the dead body. To my surprise, no yellow police tape surrounded the area, nor did any police cars wait at the curb. Three pedestrians stood nearby talking quietly among themselves. Occasionally one would point or glance up at the building in question.

Doing my own glancing upward, I saw light shining from two second-story windows. Inasmuch as the windows bore no curtains, I could see the upper part of a room, but the view consisted merely of bare walls dimly lighted by a trio of naked bulbs in a ceiling fixture. No doubt 25-watt bulbs, the landlord trying to lower his electric bill.

Tessa pointed. "That's it."

I grabbed her hand and pulled it down. I repeated something she herself told me a couple of decades before. "It's not polite to point." I resorted to a whisper. "Let's not let everyone else know what we're doing." She winked and grinned.

We walked slowly down the sidewalk, turned the corner and stopped. Slightly concealing myself behind a bush, I looked back at the watchers, wishing they'd soon go away.

Tessa hovered next to me. "What do you see?"

"I'm hoping those people will go back home. They look as if they might."

"Do you want me to get rid of them?"

I stared at her. "And just how do you propose to do that?"

"I can pretend to try to sell them something. Or give them a flyer like those religious people hand out."

"You aren't carrying any religious flyers."

"But if I did... I'm just saying, that sort of thing always works to get rid of people. Once in nineteen-sixty..."

I didn't hear what she said next, because I turned back to the street and, sure enough, the people had gone. "You're off the hook, Tessa. They went away."

Keeping a wary eye out for any other onlookers, we strolled back to the house I'd already begun to think of as the "murder house." It was tall and narrow, like most of the old houses in that neighborhood, but not covered, like Tessa's, in any overhangs, ledges, designs, or fancy scrollwork.

"They've taken the gingerbread off." Her tone made it clear she disapproved of the building's straight, modern look.

"They did that a lot back in the fifties," she added. "In fact, back then they not only took off all the fancy wood trim, some owners painted them battleship gray."

"Really?" I couldn't imagine solid gray when I could see colorful blue, red, and yellow trim on so many houses these days. "Why?"

"It was cheap. They bought up surplus navy department paint from World War Two." She walked in time to her commentary. "Then in the sixties, people began to appreciate all that beautiful wood carving and preferred houses that still had it. Some owners of modern ones actually hired companies to put the gingerbread back on."

I tried to ignore Tessa and stared at the house. The second floor windows revealed the lights still blazed.

The history lesson apparently over temporarily, Tessa came forward and grabbed the handle of the door at street level. "Look, the door's not locked."

"Tessa," I stage-whispered, "don't do that."

"Why not? We want to go inside, don't we?"

"Yes, but we can't just barge in."

"Well, the lights are on, so someone's up there, and we can ask permission when we arrive."

Holding tightly to the banister, she preceded me and we left the narrow, empty vestibule and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Next to the stairs which continued their rise to the third floor, I saw a tiny hallway with two doors. The larger one on the right wasn't locked and, in spite of a diagonal band of yellow police tape, it stood open and a man came through it.

Needlessly tall, quite bald, and wearing over-sized black-rimmed glasses, he was so skinny he looked like a lamp post with eyes. When he spied us, he stopped and stared.

"Mr. Kostitch." Tessa craned her neck to look up at him. She loses an inch in height every year. "How are you?"

He squinted before giving us a blank look.

"Tessa Reynolds." She tried to stretch herself taller but to no avail. "Remember me? I own a building like this on Baker Street."

He only adjusted the glasses perched on his nose, which magnified his sight, and stared some more.

"We met at a neighborhood meeting a few months ago. The one about allowing a Starbucks coffee shop to open up on the next corner."

Kostitch's stony face broke a little and exhibited what might pass for a smile. "Yes, I remember now. Good evening."

"This is my granddaughter, Sheridan Holmes." Then, getting right to the point, she grinned and patted the man's arm. "We heard you had a commotion here today. A dead body found in your vacant apartment." She gave him a playful scold. "You naughty boy. What have you been up to?"

He protested in a strong voice. "It's none of my doing. Flat's been empty for weeks. Went in because the tenant upstairs claimed he heard a gunshot. Didn't believe him of course. But I went in and there's this... this man lying there."

"Anyone you knew?" I asked.

"Of course not. The police came at once. They've taken him away now, thank goodness."

Tessa used her wiles on the man again. "May we go inside and see? I've never been in a place where a murder happened." As she spoke, she moved toward the door, almost elbowing the landlord out of the way.

"No, I don't think you should." He leaned into the room and apparently hit the light switch because the lights went out.

"Just for a minute, dearie," Tessa said.

After a shrug, Kostitch moved aside and let us enter before him.He flipped the switch again and the large empty room became only slightly brighter, even though the bulbs in the ceiling fixture had no shade or other covering. At least it made searching the place a little easier.

Not that one could see very much. I'd previously decided the room was empty, and then I realized there were not only no window coverings, but no furniture of any kind. The walls—no doubt the current shade of apartment white—were also bare, although a few nails protruded to indicate where a picture or two might have hung. A fireplace took up space on the end wall, fronted by a fake-marble fender about two feet high. A large rug lay on the floor in front of the fireplace, making a dingy area of color on the dark brown of the hardwood floor. Scanning further, I saw two doors, one to the small entry hall we'd just used and one to the rest of the flat.

I decided to ask the landlord the questions that raced through my mind. "So you found the body?"

"Yes, miss. Right in the middle of the floor."

"Is there blood on the carpet? I should think a gunshot wound that killed someone would leave a lot of blood." I bent over to examine a place close to the hearth. "This damp spot might have been a blood stain, and it looks as if someone tested it for blood. Is that true?"

"I don't know. The policemen didn't tell me."

I pulled out my detecting kit and used the pencil inside to make notes. "Police or detectives?"

"Well, first a policeman in a uniform came, and then two detectives followed. They showed me their identification. After that a lot of other men came and also a woman. They examined the body, I guess. I couldn't really see what they did."

"Did you stay in the room?"

He pointed. "In the corner. No one asked me to leave so I stayed. The woman took a lot of pictures."

I paused, wondering if Mr. Kostitch might have learned something useful. "How old a man do you think he was?"

"The dead man? Forties, I guess. Don't know his height, but he wasn't fat."

"Did he wear a coat?"

"No, just a suit coat, shirt, tie, you know."

"Did you hear what the detectives or the other examiners said?"

"Sometimes." He hurried on. "I didn't eavesdrop, but, like I said, I stayed in the corner. So many going in and out, I wanted to keep out of their way."

"Did they find any identification on the dead man?"

"Yes, they pulled out a wallet from his pocket, said there was money still in it, so he hadn't been robbed."

"Did you hear his name or address?"

He scratched his head. "Andrew. I think I heard Andrew. But maybe it was a last name, Andrews."

I scribbled the name on my notepad. "No address?"

"They said he didn't live in San Francisco."

"Any idea where he did live?"

"No, but he had a suitcase, so maybe he stayed in a hotel."

My voice rose. "He had a suitcase? You saw that? What did it look like?"

"It wasn't close to the body but in the corner of the room. One of those black ones with handles and wheels. Everybody has them. The detectives took it away when they left."

Kostitch frowned, looking as if he were tired of answering my questions and regretted he'd let us enter. Had there been a chair in the room, Tessa might have camped there to get off her feet. Instead, she sat on the marble fender. She pulled Kostitch down next to her.

While Tessa kept up a running stream of conversation with the landlord, I went through the second door and found a short hall leading to one bedroom, a kitchen and bathroom, all just as empty as the living room except for attached fixtures. The rooms smelled of ammonia or some other cleaning product, and I left quickly. What a disappointment. Even the great Sherlock Holmes would have trouble finding clues in such a place.

Finally, I stepped into the tiny hall on the landing and glanced up the stairs leading to the upper floor. I wondered if I ought to talk to those tenants. After all, they had heard the gunshot and called the police.

I decided Holmes expected me to interrogate people, so I trudged up the stairs and knocked on the apartment door. A thirty-something blonde woman opened it almost at once. She wore jeans and a baggy sweatshirt that read, " _Speak When I'm Listening to You_."

I obeyed, although I fibbed. "I'm a friend of Mr. Kostitch," I began, but she interrupted me.

"Oh, I'm glad you came up." She reached for something behind her. "Would you give this to him?" She held out a backpack and kept going. "My husband found it on the stairs when he went down after we heard the gunshot."

Staring at the backpack in her outstretched hands, I asked my most important question. "Did you hear only one gunshot, or more?"

"Only one. I didn't even think 'gunshot' at first, but Eli... that's my husband... said it was right away. He yelled, 'Call the police,' and started down the stairs and I dialed nine-one-one."

I could tell she didn't like talking about the murder, probably had to answer a lot of questions by police and reporters earlier, so I quickly took the backpack from her.

"Later, Eli handed that to me because he thought it was mine."

"Are you sure it isn't yours?"

"Yes, mine is smaller and a different color, but Eli, like a lot of men, isn't good with colors."

What I now held in my hands was a man-sized dark gray backpack, and I deduced immediately that the person who fired the shot must have dropped it when he ran out of the building. I couldn't wait to see what was in it.

"Will you give it to Mr. Kostitch for me? Tell him I'm sorry." She gave me a tiny smile and closed the door firmly, as if glad to see the end of that whole episode.

Since Kostitch and Tessa still sat in the living room, I headed for the kitchen which, thanks to a fluorescent fixture in the ceiling, held sufficient light.

Grateful Tessa kept the landlord busy, I placed the backpack on the kitchen counter, unzipped it and found men's clothing and a toiletries kit. The smaller pocket held a few items, including a newspaper clipping and a small photograph. I pulled my cell phone from my purse and took pictures of them. I finished and was replacing all the things inside, when Kostitch found me.

"Here, what're you doing?" He came forward and grabbed the backpack. "Where did you get this? You didn't bring it in."

"I... the lady upstairs gave it to me just now. She said her husband found it on the stairs. Is it yours?"

"No. It must have belonged to the dead man, and the police didn't see it. I'll have to give it to the officers tomorrow."

While Kostitch finished replacing the items into the sack, I returned to the living room and took some pictures of the stain on the rug, in case it was blood. I also used my scissors to snip a few rug fibers and put them in one of my envelopes. The landlord glared at me and herded us to the exit.

I thanked him and helped Tessa down the stairs. As we said goodbyes on the sidewalk, Kostitch locked the outer door and frowned some more. "Don't tell anyone I let you up there."

"No, of course not. Thank you again."

Tessa and I retraced our steps to the corner and returned to Baker Street. As we walked, she told me about how, in the mid-seventies or thereabout, the city offered to sell old houses for three hundred dollars each and move them to a different site.

I stopped walking and turned to her. "Only three hundred dollars for an entire three-story Victorian house? And they would move it and install it somewhere else besides?"

"Not exactly. They stipulated you had to prove you had thirty thousand dollars available in order to bring the building up to code."

She continued to walk, and I followed. "That's still a bargain."

"It was more money in those days. Thirty thousand hardly buys an old garage today. Besides, that didn't include whatever the buyer might need to spend to restore the place. Some of those old houses were in terrible shape."

"However, it seems to me—" I stopped mid-sentence because we'd reached Tessa's house and, standing at the front door, stood a policeman.

#  Chapter 4

I climbed the steps and, apparently hearing or seeing me, the policeman turned around.

"Excuse me, officer, is something the matter?"

"You live here?" He spoke in a strong, authoritative voice.

"Yes." I pointed to Tessa, who had remained on the sidewalk staring at the black and white police car double-parked in the street. "My grandmother, Mrs. Reynolds, owns the building and lives on the ground floor."

The cop came down off the steps at the same time I did. "Anyone else?"

"I live on the second floor and a single gentleman on the third." When he didn't comment, I repeated my question. "Is there a problem?"

"We responded to a call about excessive noise coming from the building."

"Noise?" Whatever had caused the police to be called had stopped, because I heard nothing unusual. "What kind of noise?"

"Loud music."

I paused and looked around and so did he.

"Well, it seems to have stopped now." I no sooner said the words when the sound of a violin playing some loud, staccato music interrupted me. A rendering of what I recognized—although I couldn't name—as a classical piece.

"There," the cop said. He turned as if ready to climb the stairs again.

I waved my arm. "That must be my house guest. He probably got bored. I shouldn't have left him alone, but I'm back now and he'll stop playing." In fact the music stopped again that very minute.

Once more the cop turned toward the street. "Well, see that he does. And if he must play loud music, be sure it's not after nine o'clock. If it happens again, I'll have to issue a citation."

"Thank you, officer. It won't happen again."

When the officer slid into the police car next to his partner and they drove off, Tessa joined me and we climbed the steps together. I said goodnight at her door, but she insisted on coming up to my apartment.

"I want to see Sherlock Holmes playing the violin."

"But you can't see him, remember?"

"I could hear the violin. Why can't I hear him?"

"I'm sure I don't know, but the violin didn't show up the same time Holmes did. I bought it at a second-hand music store." We'd reached my door by then and entered.

Holmes greeted us with a scowl and an accusation. "If you had to add a violin to all the other items you said you copied from my digs, you might at least have procured a better one. This sounds like a hyena's mating call." He replaced the violin where I'd originally put it, on a small table in the corner.

"I'm sorry it doesn't meet with your approval, but I can't afford a Stradivarius."

"I'd have been happy with a Maggini, Guarneri or Amati. However," he went on quickly, "I doubt I shall have much time for playing any violins when you tell me I must watch dozens of films on that machine in my room."

"I'm not forcing you. I should think you'd want to. If I had returned to earth a hundred years later, I'd certainly want to know what people had been up to while I was gone."

"In this interim, I suspect the answer will be, 'no good,' but I'll reserve judgement until I know more. So far, however, I must admit I'm impressed by your modern conveniences."

Tessa apparently noticed that the violin, after magically appearing in midair, put itself on a table, and clutched my arm. "What is he saying?"

Holmes, as if responding to her question, immediately changed the subject again. "Unless of course, the adventure you set off upon an hour ago has provided something of interest." He strode to the sofa and sat, arms resting along the back and a smile on his lips.

I hung up my poncho, pointed Tessa to a chair, and sat next to the round center table, on which I placed my detective kit.

Tessa didn't sit, however. She smoothed her skirt and then strode over to the floor lamp and examined it under the light. She waved me to come closer. "Look, Sherry. There's a stain on my skirt. I must have got it when I sat on that fireplace fender."

I peered at the place she indicated and rubbed my finger over it. "Not soot. I wonder if it might be blood."

Tessa agreed. "I'm sure it is. The dead man might have struck his head on that sharp marble edge before falling on the rug. You said you found bloodstains on the carpet."

Holmes frowned again. "I see your grandmother is playing detective as well."

"I think she's right. It's quite possible the man did fall against the fender and gash his head." I opened my detecting kit and pulled out the envelope with rug fibers. "I took some samples of the bloodstains on that carpet, and we can compare them to the stains on Tessa's skirt. If they're the same..."

Holmes laughed. "Bravo. You two have done very well." He rose and paced the room. "I believe it was in 1878, the year I met Watson, that I discovered an infallible test for bloodstains. At the time, dried blood could not be distinguished from rust stains or fruit stains. However, I had found a reagent that was precipitated by hemoglobin and nothing else."

He smiled broadly and then resumed his seat.

I watched Tessa return to her chair. "I'm sure you made a great discovery, but in the more than a hundred years since then, scientists have certainly improved their own methods for detecting blood."

"One would hope so." Holmes waved a hand. "However, let us not get too far ahead. The newspaper account said a neighbor called the police due to hearing a gunshot. If the dead man had been shot, surely there would have been a great deal of blood on the carpet, not the small amount you noticed." He rubbed a hand over his chin. "Tell me from the beginning what you learned tonight."

"Very well." I took a deep breath and reported all that had happened at the house where the dead body was found. Tessa interrupted me from time to time and said things like, "Don't forget to tell him about..."

When I reached the point where I talked to the neighbor and acquired the backpack, Holmes leaned forward and rubbed his hands together. "Ah, the plot thickens."

"I took the backpack into the kitchen..."

Holmes interrupted me. "A backpack, you say. Could you describe it for me, please?"

"It's a soft-sided bag, made of some kind of sturdy material, but lightweight. It has straps on each side which one can slip over the arms and carry it on his back. Backpack," I repeated.

"From your description, I assume it's what I would have called a knapsack."

I smiled. "Possibly."

"Do go on."

"I opened the backpack, er, knapsack, and looked inside. I had already searched the smaller zippered pocket when the landlord interrupted me. He insisted it belonged to the dead man and must be given to the police."

Holmes rose and paced the floor. "What a dolt. Of course it did not belong to the dead man."

"How can you be so sure?"

"You said he owned a suitcase which they found in the room. Why would he not take the backpack in with him as well? Or leave both items in that hall? No, the backpack belongs to the murderer."

I had already considered that possibility because I knew what else it contained, whereas Holmes did not, but I didn't tell him that.

"What a pity you had to give it up." He stopped pacing. "However, you said you looked inside. Tell me everything you remember about it."

"I can do better than that. I can show you." I confess I felt a little smug. As I returned to the vestibule to get my purse, I continued my report. "First I found a photograph of a young woman."

Holmes snorted. "Aha. I suspected a woman lay behind this crime. They usually do. Love of a woman or love of money are the chief motives for most crimes."

"I had already thought of that," I told him and returned to the sitting room. I repeated his words for Tessa's sake, especially as she hadn't been with me when I opened the backpack in the kitchen. "It was dark gray and had two zippered pockets, the smaller one on the outside. The larger part held a change of men's clothes and a toiletries kit. You know, toothpaste, toothbrush, razor."

I looked meaningfully at Holmes. "In the smaller pocket I found a newspaper clipping describing the finding of a woman's body in an abandoned well." Before Holmes could comment, I added, "It occurred to me that the body is that of the woman in the photograph."

He cocked his head and stroked his chin. "Perhaps. Perhaps not. It's possible. However, it is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement. Describe the items in more detail, if you please."

"Of course. I took pictures of everything with my cell phone." I took the phone from my purse and held it out to Holmes.

Back in the nineteenth century, I doubt anyone saw a puzzled look on Holmes's face very often, but now his eyebrows shot up, his eyes widened and his mouth opened. He stared at the phone for several seconds before taking it.

"You say this is a telephone? Surely it's some sort of miniature photographic device."

"No, it's a phone that can be used as a camera."

"We had telephones in my day, young lady. They had mouthpieces and ear pieces, and wires connecting them to a wall outlet where..."

I interrupted him. "We still have something similar, called a 'land line.'" I went to the desk and showed him a portable telephone in its holder. "It works on a battery which gets recharged in the holder it sits in. The holder, as you see, has a wire leading to an electrical outlet."

Holmes approached and stared at it. "And you can both listen and speak into this little thing?"

"Yes. As for the wireless one you're holding, frankly, I'm not a tech nerd..."

"A what?"

"...so I can't explain how it works. I only know that it does. Something to do with..."

"No, no." He interrupted me again. "Don't tell me. I will take your word this is a telephone which also takes pictures, and that is enough."

He stared at the cell phone and turned it around in his hands. "As I told Watson when we first shared rooms together, I cannot fill my head with useless information."

"What useless information? What did Watson tell you about?"

"The solar system."

I'm sure my voice rose. "The solar system?" I took a breath and repeated it in a softer tone.

"He thought I ought to know the earth goes around the sun."

"Surely you knew that."

"Probably. Nevertheless, I said to Watson, 'Now that I know it, I shall do my best to forget it.'"

"Really?"

Holmes resumed his pacing while he spoke. "You see, I believe that at birth a person's brain is like an empty attic, and you have to stock it with what furniture you need. If you put in too much, it will become jumbled up or something vital may be crowded out."

He stopped pacing and gave me a stern look. "Depend upon it, for every addition of knowledge you acquire, you will forget something that you knew before."

He paused and glanced at the phone in his hand again. "I am not interested at the moment in why this device works as you say it does. Simply show me the pictures you have taken." He returned it to me.

I led him back to the sofa and we sat next to each other. However, when I attempted to show him the pictures I had taken, I found I couldn't access them. I stared at the phone until the realization dawned on me.

"Omigod. It's the same model, but this isn't my phone."

#  Chapter 5

"Not yours?" Holmes asked. "Do you mean other people own these devices as well?"

"Almost everyone."

His gaze shot up to the ceiling momentarily and then he shrugged again. "If it is not yours, to whom does it belong?" He answered his own question. "The murderer?"

My thoughts returned to that moment in the kitchen of the flat in Kostich's building. I'd been returning things to the backpack when the landlord burst in and took it from me. Since I held the cell phone in my hand, I simply dropped it into my large purse. But which cell phone? Mine, with which I'd been taking pictures, or the one I'd found? In other words I took a picture of a cell phone with my cell phone.

"Do you mean," Holmes asked, "you have lost all the photographs you say you took of the contents of the knapsack?"

I rose from my seat and, having retraced my movements in my thoughts, hurried into the hall and pushed my hands into the pocket of my poncho. My fingers curled around my missing phone. When Kostich approached me, I had apparently simply dropped mine into my pocket and then, in the confusion, put the murderer's into my purse.

"Here it is," I said. "I have the pictures."

"Let me see them."

I turned to him. "But what about this other phone?"

"Let us not get ahead of ourselves. The murderer is gone and we have plenty of time to examine his device later."

I decided he was probably right, and, anyway, I wanted to do things his way in order to learn how his mind worked.

Before I resumed my seat next to him, I took the magnifying glass out of my detective kit and brought it with me. Using my own phone, one by one I scrolled through the shots I'd taken and explained what they were.

"This is the outside of the backpack. It's dark gray and has one large interior space, and a small pocket on the side."

The next shot showed the small photograph I'd found inside, a photo of a pretty young woman. I handed the magnifying glass to Holmes and he used it to scrutinize the picture but made no comment.

I scrolled to the next. "And here is a shot of the newspaper clipping. It's beginning to fray along the folds, but I managed to read enough to recognize it as an article about a body found in an abandoned well."

Holmes focused the glass on that as well. "Man or woman?"

"Woman. As I said earlier, I think it might have been the woman in the photograph."

"And the location of this well?"

"It doesn't say specifically. It names a small town which apparently the newspaper's readers would recognize."

Tessa spoke up. "What a shame. That old well could be almost anywhere in the country."

Holmes frowned briefly. "Let us not give up so soon. What was the name of the newspaper? Was the clipping you saw large enough to include the upper edge of the page?"

I saw where this led. "You mean most newspapers contain the name of the city in their title."

Holmes smiled. "Very good. I see you are at least somewhat observant."

I resented his inference, but read off the name from the top of the page. "The _Chicago Tribune_."

"Excellent, but do continue. What else?"

"A flyer announcing 'A Mystery and Magic Workshop' to be held here in the city. The date and place were circled in red, as if Mr. Andrews or his murderer, or both, attended."

"That is significant, I believe."

"Why do you think so?"

"Because our victim arrived with a suitcase and, according to the building landlord's report, the man didn't live in the city. Perhaps he came to town specifically to attend the workshop."

"Do you think he might have been a magician?"

"Perhaps. However, let us carry on. What other objects did you find?"

I scrolled quickly through several shots of scraps of paper. "I'm afraid these may not be useful. They're only receipts from purchases the man made and places he'd been to."

Holmes wanted to see them anyway, and spent several minutes with the magnifying glass on one in particular. "I see a company name and some numbers. What does that mean?"

I retrieved the phone and magnifying glass to scrutinize the shot more closely. "It appears to be a credit card receipt. That means..."

"A credit card?"

"Oh, you don't know about credit cards, do you? They didn't exist in your day."

Tessa obviously wanted to participate even though she couldn't see what we looked at. "Credit cards let people buy things and pay for them later, usually at the end of the month. They're mostly issued by banks."

"I have a banking account." Holmes's look turned into a frown. "That is, I had one, but it's probably gone by now."

"As I started to say, this is more important than anything else. It's from a hotel here in the city, one he might have stayed in overnight. It might give us the man's name."

"Do you mean the murderer's name is on this scrap of paper?"

I stared at it again. "Whoops, I'm afraid not. The paper appears to have been torn and the portion that would have had his name and credit card number is missing."

"Look at the rest of those scraps you photographed. Perhaps the remainder is among them."

I scanned everything but didn't find the piece I wanted. "I see receipts from restaurants and half a ticket from that Magician's Conference, but that's all."

Holmes leaned against the sofa back and closed his eyes. After a few seconds, he opened them again. "We must take this search in a different direction. We have the man's telephone device. If these things are as clever as you seem to think, perhaps it will supply the name for us."

"That's a good idea." I picked up the other cell phone and turned it on. "It might not be too difficult, since he doesn't seem to have installed a password."

"A password? How does one use a password on a telephone?"

"Someone wanting to use the phone must type in a special series of letters and numbers beforehand."

"Like a secret code?"

"Exactly."

"And you don't know how to do that?"

"I know how it works, but if he installed a password, I wouldn't know the special letters and numbers he used."

Tessa chimed in again. "Watson would." She beamed.

"Doctor Watson knows the password in the telephone?" Holmes asked.

I grinned. "As I said before, our Doc Watson maintains these old Victorians, and, although he can fix almost anything that goes wrong in them, I don't think he can pull a computer password out of his tool belt. Luckily we don't need one."

"If you did, he could figure it out, I'm sure," Tessa insisted. "Besides everything else, he's often fixed my computer when I didn't know what I was doing and made it crash."

"Crash?" Holmes asked.

"That's a term for when the machine suddenly stops working and you haven't a clue why." I shrugged. "Computers can be very temperamental."

Tessa chimed in again. "But Doc Watson would be able to figure out the password, if it had one. Why don't we call him anyway?"

By that time, I'd already pressed a lot of icons on the screen, but hadn't found the name of the phone's owner or anything useful. I glanced at my watch. "It's almost eleven. We can't call him now."

"Of course we can. He won't be in bed yet, and I have his number on my speed dial." Tessa pulled out her own cell phone and pressed the number before I could stop her.

She moved closer and let us hear her side of the conversation. "Doc, it's Tessa. Can you come over right away? We need your expertise." Pause. "No, my granddaughter's apartment." Pause. "Thank you."

While we waited the few minutes for Watson to arrive, I explained more about him to Holmes. "He is not _your_ Doctor Watson. He's a young man and never went to medical school or served with the British army in Afghanistan." Which reminded me that I actually knew a young man who'd been with the U.S. Army in a more recent war in Afghanistan. But, again, I digress.

Holmes sighed and crossed his arms over his chest, as if thinking of ways to dispute my words.

Still trying to get information, I clicked "Contacts" on the killer's cell phone and scrolled through a bunch of names.

Watson opened the downstairs door and bounded up the stairs. He greeted Tessa with a kiss on the cheek, then turned a smiling face to me. "What's up?"

I gestured toward the sofa. "Do you know my guest?"

He looked around. "What guest?"

So much for my wondering if Doc might be able to see Holmes. "Never mind." I pointed him to a chair at the table, sat in the opposite chair and handed him the second cell phone. "Do you know how to get someone's name from his phone?"

"You mean am I a good hacker?"

"You don't have to break in. I've already opened it. I have an important reason for needing some information in this one."

He shrugged and took it from me. "So what is it you want to know?" He turned it over in his hands, and then I thought I heard it ring.

Yet Doc didn't put the phone up to his ear or do anything to it. Instead, he stood, pulled his own cell from his belt and answered that. "Watson here. What's your problem?"

Naturally, I didn't hear the other end of the conversation, but it appeared he took a maintenance call from one of his clients.

"Be right there," he said next, and beelined for the door. "I'll let you know if I won't be back soon."

As he swung past Tessa, she grabbed his jacket sleeve. "Who is it? Anyone I know? What's wrong?"

Watson stopped at the doorway. "Mrs. Foster. She has a flood in her kitchen. Water everywhere." Then he pounded down the stairs.

I hurried over to Tessa. "Do you know Mrs. Foster?"

"She lives in the last house on this block, the one with the pink front door."

Holmes hadn't moved a muscle and I turned back to him and explained. "It looks like we won't get any help tonight."

His mouth turned up in a wicked smile. "Perhaps. But I suggest you try to retrieve the murderer's device. Your Doc Watson has run off with it."

Once again, Holmes had been more observant than I. It took me a few seconds to realize Watson had apparently clipped his own phone on his belt again, but forgot he held the one I'd handed him. I gave the table a quick glance, but it wasn't there.

"Oh my gosh, I'll have to follow him. I can't let that phone out of my sight."

I grabbed my poncho off its peg and raced down the steps, calling, "Watson, wait!" But he'd already fled down the stairs and out the door. I threw my poncho over my shoulders and stepped onto the front porch. Watson sprinted down the sidewalk to my left, and I called to him again, but he didn't answer.

I groaned. Since Tessa had told me where Watson was headed, I decided I needn't run and merely walked at a fast pace. I caught up to him at Mrs. Foster's building. Apparently he waited for someone to answer his ring and press the button to unlock the front door.

"The phone," I said. "You walked off with the cell phone I wanted you to look at."

He glanced at his hand. "You're right. Sorry." He stared at the screen. "Try 'Home.' Lots of people put their land line phone number in there. Worth a try." He gave it back to me just as I heard a click on the door latch and he could go inside Mrs. Foster's building. "See you later."

"Right." I turned around to retrace my steps. Walking slowly, I did as Watson had suggested and, sure enough, a phone number appeared opposite the word 'Home.'

I'd gone about halfway back when I had an eerie feeling someone walked behind me. I'd been too busy finding my way to the land-line telephone number I wanted and failed to pay attention to my surroundings. I whirled around, but my follower must have ducked behind a tree. Cold chills crawled up my spine. Should I continue on my way home—where only Tessa and a not-available Holmes awaited—or go back to the pink-door house where I'd find Watson? But only if Mrs. Foster buzzed me in.

I didn't do either. Suddenly I felt something hard dig into my back.

"I have a gun," a male voice informed me. "Don't turn around and I won't hurt you."

#  Chapter 6

"Who are you?" I didn't look behind me, but my legs had turned to jelly.

"I just want what belongs to me. I want my backpack."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Ever since childhood, I'd denied knowing anything I was asked about in case I were the guilty party. Which was probable in my overly-curious youth.

"I know you have my cell phone and I'd left it in my backpack, so that means you have it, too."

Smart man, but I don't give in easily. "What makes you so sure I have your cell phone?"

His tone had become gruff and serious. "Because I put a GPS in it and I tracked it to you."

A GPS in his phone? I knew that to be possible, so I'd have to admit I had it. Sooner or later.

"I don't have your backpack." I resisted the urge to turn, but I raised my voice. "The building landlord took it and is going to give it to the police."

"Damn!" He paused. "Keep your back turned and spread out your arms so I can see."

I stalled a moment. I opened my poncho with both hands, hoping the folds of the thing, along with the darkness, would conceal the phone in my hand. No such luck.

He grabbed my arm and snatched the phone away. "I was right. This is mine."

I played dumb. "I don't believe you. Who are you, anyway?"

No answer.

"How did you come to leave it in that flat?" Still no answer, and I didn't move. I'm cowardly that way. But then I heard running footsteps. I turned in time to catch only a glimpse of a man sprinting down the street. Damn!

I returned to the house and climbed the stairs to my apartment. Holmes looked anxious, but Tessa wasn't there.

Reading my mind, Holmes said, "Your grandmother has retired for the night, but I shall remain if you have something of interest to report."

As briefly as I could, I described what had happened, how the murderer forced me to return his phone and then disappeared again. I glanced at my watch. "Its almost midnight. Why don't we retire and I'll tell you more about it in the morning?"

He stared upward for a moment and clasped his hands behind his back. "Very well. I suspect you know you will lose the wager we have made, and that is why you are in no hurry to explain. Tell Mrs. Hudson I will have tea in the morning. Good night."

He disappeared through the doorway into the hall and soon I heard the door of the guest bedroom close.

## * * *

Holmes did not have tea the next morning after all, there being no Mrs. Hudson to bring it to him. However, I'd become addicted to tea during my visit to England, so, when he entered the sitting room where Watson and I sat at the table, I was drinking tea and serving coffee to Watson. Holmes didn't even mention tea. He looked the same as he had the night before, apparently requiring neither tea nor a change of clothes. I was learning a lot about ghosts.

He paced the floor, the only exercise he might get in his present condition, and stopped in front of the fireplace. "Satisfactory or not, tell me what occurred last night. Did you retrieve the murderer's telephone device?"

"Yes and no."

Watson interrupted me. "Are you speaking to Holmes?"

"Yes." I had spent thirty minutes before Holmes emerged from his room, not just sharing croissants with Watson but explaining about the way the ghost of Holmes had entered my life. So Watson merely listened to me and stared, as I did, toward the fireplace.

I told Holmes about Doc returning the cell phone to me and how the murderer—or whoever he was—put a gun in my back and took his phone away from me.

Holmes's face bore a puzzled look. "How could he possibly know you had it and where you were?"

I turned to Watson. "He wants to know how." I explained some more. "As I said before, you can't hear Holmes, but he can hear you."

Watson spoke as he might have while explaining things to a group of students when he taught schoolchildren. "The man told Sherry he had a GPS in his cell phone, which could be remotely activated and reveal its whereabouts if he lost it."

"A GPS?" Holmes approached the table. "What the devil is a GPS?"

"He wants to know what a GPS is," I said to Watson. "Remember he has over a hundred years of technology to catch up with."

Watson sighed before beginning. "GPS stands for Global Positioning System, and it enables us to know our exact position anywhere in the world."

Holmes seemed thoughtful for a long moment, then spoke in a loud voice. "My word! That is truly amazing."

"However, you don't want to know how it works," I said, reminding him of his disinterest in the solar system and other scientific discoveries.

"On the contrary. I do not wish to clutter up my mind with unnecessary details, but the ability to locate someone anywhere in the world is a tool any detective should rejoice to own."

I repeated his words to Watson.

"Oh, but it's not that simple." Watson then went on to explain about the satellites orbiting the earth which send signals to devices that are designed to receive them. "And you can't just find someone if he doesn't want to be found."

Holmes paced some more, no doubt absorbing the information. "If one cannot track a fugitive via this method, then what practical good is it?"

"It's very practical," I insisted. "Today almost every new automobile is equipped with one, and it will tell the driver which routes to take in order to reach a specific destination. They have built-in maps, too, so you don't need a paper map in order to get where you want to go without getting lost. A recording with a woman's or man's voice gives turn-by-turn instructions."

Holmes sounded a bit sarcastic. "Admirable, I'm sure."

Watson, having apparently warmed to his topic, went on, explaining how the system developed, about the twenty-four satellites and their orbits and the accuracy of GPS receivers.

As if reluctantly accepting the explanation, Holmes dropped heavily into the arm chair. "Very well. I grant you this GPS is a remarkable device, but our task is to find a murderer and you say we can't find him, even with the device, if he doesn't wish to be found."

I repeated that to Watson, and then added. "Thanks, by the way, for suggesting I try pressing 'Home' on his phone. That worked."

Holmes leaned forward. "What worked? Are you saying you found the man's name in that device?"

"Not his name, but something almost as good. His home telephone number." I confess I smirked a bit at this point. "And Watson, here, turned that number into a name and address."

Watson took up the explanation. "There's a reference book called a Reverse Telephone Directory which can do that if you know how to access it."

Holmes rose and came to the table quickly. "You say the directory told you his name and where he lives? Then why are you sitting here so calmly? We must tell the authorities and go there at once."

I turned to Watson and told him what Holmes said.

Doc shifted in his chair. "Well, not exactly. I do have his last name, which is Parton, but I'm waiting for the service to give me the rest. The public really isn't supposed to have access to these things, but hackers have done it and some companies also sell the information."

Holmes turned about and did more pacing. "I see."

I took a final gulp of tea and spoke to Holmes. "Even if we get an address, we won't necessarily want to go there. Or even tell the authorities."

"I quite understand." He turned and gave me a self-satisfied look. "If the American crime investigators are anything like the British ones, they will use information to their own advantage and claim to have discovered it themselves."

He paced again, gaze unfocused, as if, in his mind's eye, he remembered a different place and time. "I recall an incident in which Inspector Lestrade accused me of murdering a detective because his superiors assumed I had given him information and then held a grudge because he failed to give me credit for it." He snorted. "What rubbish!"

"I believe I read that in one of the stories Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about you."

"Personally, I do not care who solves crimes, so long as they are solved. However, since you found this particular bit of information, it's up to you to decide if you will share it with the authorities."

I removed the cups and dishes from our places and put them on a tray at the edge of the table. "I don't care, either, but, in my opinion, we don't really know this man is the murderer, or even if a murder occurred at all."

"You mean because of the lack of sufficient blood?" Holmes said.

"Exactly. You and I both remarked on it last night. Tessa having found bloodstains on her skirt after sitting on the hearth fender, along with the few stains I found on the rug, made me wonder. I lay awake for a time last night thinking about it."

I turned to Watson while I explained. "Surely if the dead man had been shot there should have been a lot of blood."

"Yeah, according to the television and movie crime shows I've seen, there would be."

"Yet," I continued, "Mr. Kostich, the landlord, claimed the neighbor reported 'a gun shot,' not 'several' gunshots."

"Aha," said Holmes, drawing near. "That is significant. And, in my experience, even a single shot can cause the victim—Mr. Andrews, you say?—to bleed copiously."

"But suppose Andrews had fallen," I said, "perhaps during a fight with the other man, and struck his head on the marble fender, thereby leaving a small amount of blood, some of which Tessa found on her skirt."

Holmes stared at me with a serious look. "Can you get into that flat again? Will Mr. Kostitch allow it?"

I knew exactly what he proposed. If Andrews had not been shot at all, the bullet from that gun must be somewhere else. "When Tessa and I went there the evening before, we hadn't seen a bullet or bullet hole, but the room being so dim, we saw very little. Without my magnifying glass, I might not even have noticed the small patch of blood on the carpet."

"Take a torch this time," Holmes said. I knew he meant flashlight, "and search for a bullet in the fireplace or possibly the wall next to the fireplace."

"If he won't let me in..."

Watson interrupted."I just happen to have a pass key." He smiled. "Because he's one of my customers."

I frowned. "I don't think it's a good idea to just sneak in without permission."

"What if he doesn't give permission?" Doc said.

"Well, in that case, maybe."

"But we'd have to do it at night."

"What do we have to do at night?" The question came from Tessa who had entered, as usual, without knocking first.

"We've been talking about going back to the murder scene and looking for a bullet or bullet hole."

"Goody. I'll go too. And it will be at night? Even better."

"You won't be coming with us this time," I told her. "Watson and I will do it."

She groaned. "How can I be useful if you won't let me go?" With a sigh, she sank into an armchair.

Holmes had settled in the chair by the fireplace again and stroked his chin. "In the meantime, what other leads do you intend to pursue toward the solution to this puzzle?"

I took the tray into the kitchen, giving me time to think about what so-called leads we had. When I returned to the sitting room, I had one idea at least.

"That newspaper clipping. The _Chicago Tribune_ is a well-known newspaper and it's possible libraries carry copies of it in their microfilm files."

Tessa got to her feet. "I can do that. I'm very familiar with our library. Heaven knows I used those old microfilm files for research many times. That was before Google." She looked toward Holmes, as if he knew what she was talking about.

"Yet, do they have the exact newspaper we want to see?" Nevertheless, I decided to take her up on her offer. "All right, you can come with me. You're familiar with the library files, so it will save time, and I know what to look for in the newspaper."

Holmes spoke up. "And I? What am I allowed to do? I don't even know what you are talking about. What is a microfilm file and why is it in a library?"

"You know the word "micro" and you know "film," so microfilm is a small reproduction of a piece of film produced by a photograph. It's a method to store thousands of pages of newspapers, and other material, without taking up acres of space." I paused. "While Tessa and I are gone, Watson can explain it to you."

"Oh, no," Watson said. "While you're doing that, I'll go check on Mrs. Foster and make sure the cleaning squad I sent over last night has done its job." He almost galloped toward the door.

"Relax in your room," I told Holmes, "and watch an old film from the 1930s. It's time you started to catch up. And if you get tired of that before we return, play the violin. It's daytime and no one will complain."

He grumbled and disappeared down the hallway to his room. Tessa and I put on coats, gathered our purses, I put my notebook into mine, and we headed off for the library.

Tessa quickly found the same newspaper article I'd seen a bit of in the backpack. In addition she found an article from the following day's paper with a picture of the woman. It appeared to be similar to the picture I'd also found in the backpack, although not identical. Tessa reached toward the printer, which was attached to the microfilm reader we used, to copy the picture, when I noticed a small sign on the wall.

It read, " _For newspapers under three months old, you may print from our data base, using our computer or yours._ "

"Tessa, I thought you said you were familiar with the library. Look here, this says you could have accessed the data base from your computer and printed it from your own printer."

Tessa looked uncomfortable for a moment and read the sign herself. Then she brightened. "It says, 'under three months old.' I've never needed anything that recent."

I shrugged and waited while the printer did its work. The

result was grainy and not very clear, but the picture of the woman was good enough for my purposes. The article also mentioned her name.

I gasped when I read it: Adele Parton Andrews.

#  Chapter 7

"Tessa," I said loudly enough to earn the frown of a librarian. I lowered my voice to a husky whisper. "Tessa, do you realize what this means?"

"Do I realize what 'what' means?"

"The woman's name, of course. According to the follow-up article about finding the woman's body in the well, the reporter apparently learned who she was, Adele Parton Andrews."

Tessa's forehead wrinkles rose. "Andrews? The same as the dead man?" She changed her puzzled look to a smile.

"Exactly. What else do you notice?"

"Her middle name, Parton, is the same as the man whose cell phone you gave to Watson last night."

"Bingo!"

The librarian gave me another stern look, so I gathered our papers and other belongings and steered Tessa toward the door. As we walked out of the building, I elaborated. "'Parton' was either the woman's maiden name or her previous married name."

"You mean you think she was married to the dead man, Andrews, but might be the mother of Mr. Parton, the man we think tried to kill him?"

"I suppose that's possible, but I lean more toward thinking she was Parton's sister."

Tessa grinned. "You're probably right. In that picture she looks too young to be his mother."

We'd reached the place where we'd exited from the bus that morning, and I turned to Tessa again. "Will you be all right going home alone? I need to get to my job." I glanced at my watch. "I'll be a little early, but maybe I'll earn brownie points with my boss and he'll give me a raise." Until I actually signed on with the police department, I needed to earn money in order to indulge my penchant for Starbucks coffee and Nordstrom shoes.

"Of course I'll be okay. I've done this a hundred times before."

Like me, Tessa didn't drive a car in the city, so I kissed her on the cheek and handed her the tote-bag I'd brought to hold the material we gathered in the library. "When you get back, go to my apartment and give these to Mr. Holmes."

"How do you expect me to do that when I can't even see him?"

"Just leave the papers on the table in the sitting room and he'll find them. He's smart enough to come to the same conclusions we did."

"Okey doke." Tessa loves to use expressions from generations past, and I laughed as I always did.

My bus arrived before hers, so I waved goodbye, hopped aboard and dropped my fare in the coin box. Finding a seat behind the driver, I settled in for the short ride to the bakery where I worked on weekday afternoons. My four hours consisted of slicing bread in the slicing machine, selling pastries, and, if necessary, helping make sandwiches or delivering them to the patrons sitting at small tables in the back of the shop.

Getting paid to work there seemed like icing on the cake—you should excuse the pun—because I enjoyed it. The shop's name _, Grain D'Or,_ is French and means "Grain of Gold," or "Golden Grain" in English, and they made several kinds of bread every day, including long, crusty _baguettes_ , to say nothing of croissants, some filled with chocolate, and other tasty treats. Their cinnamon-raisin bread was to die for, especially lavishly coated with unsalted butter, which I did when I brought some home to Tessa's flat before I moved upstairs.

The shop was busy every morning, but, as lunchtime neared, the crowds increased, and we were kept hopping selling the sandwiches which had been made earlier and making new ones according to the customers' orders. The smell of freshly baked bread, hot chocolate and coffee, together with the sparkling clean look of the shop, made it a joy, not a job, for me. I washed my hands, donned a large white apron, and plunged in.

## * * *

When I returned to my flat later that afternoon, Holmes was waiting for me. He sat at the round table with the papers Tessa left for him spread out on the top, and my magnifying glass in his hand.

"Your grandmother has been here and gone. She dropped these on the table, announced in a loud voice that she'd been instructed to leave them and then hurried out again, as if I were an Upper School principal who might strike her with a ruler at any moment."

"You must admit your being invisible to her presents a challenge. We're not used to ghosts of any kind, much less one so formidable when alive."

"Nevertheless, you must sit down and listen to my interpretation of what you have brought to me."

"In a moment." I hoisted my packages. "I've brought some wonderful sandwiches from the bakery where I work, and stopped at the deli on the way home for vegetable soup to go with them."

"I say, isn't that more or less what you ate last evening? Do you not cook in that sleek room you call a kitchen? Do you not roast a fowl from time to time or a rack of lamb?"

"Not if I can help it. The soup will provide me with my quota of vegetables, and the sandwiches are made with turkey and Swiss cheese. Together with the fresh fruit in my refrigerator which will be dessert, I think I have a balanced meal at hand."

Holmes said nothing, and I continued. "My mother, the actress, doesn't cook, but Tessa does, or used to anyway. For Thanksgiving dinner, she always roasted a turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce and all the other American trimmings, and ended with her delicious pumpkin pie. At Christmas, she'd serve a spiral-sliced ham, sweet potatoes in a pineapple glaze and end with fruitcake she'd made the week before."

I finished my last sentence striding into the other room where I placed my goodies on the counter. When I returned to the sitting room, I saw Holmes had found my old fashioned goose-neck lamp, plugged it into the outlet and turned its light on two photographs on the table top. I sat down near the light.

Holmes handed me the magnifying glass. "Observe, if you please, these photographs which, I have no doubt, are of the same woman."

"Adele Parton Andrews," I said with a smile.

"Just so."

"And do you agree with my suspicion that she was Parton's sister and Andrews' wife?"

"It would seem you are correct in that assumption, but we will leave that to be determined at a later time. Meanwhile..."

"Meanwhile what?"

"Please focus the glass in your hand upon these pictures."

"They're undoubtedly the same woman, although the pictures seem to have been taken at different times."

"The one you saw in the man's knapsack and photographed with your little camera seems to be somewhat more recent than the one the newspaper reporter found, possibly from a university collection."

"You mean like a Yearbook."

"Or a commencement announcement, if the lady finished her studies."

I gave both photos my attention for a few minutes. "I agree with you."

"Do you notice anything else, other than the similarity of the shape of the woman's face, her eyes, her mouth, the arrangement of her hair?"

"Those all seem similar, but the clothing is different. Although the photographs are both head shots, in the first she appears to be wearing a dress with a white or light-colored collar, and in the second a dark jacket."

"Something else. Come, come, you must be more observant if you wish to become a good detective."

I stared at both again, and finally it hit me. In both pictures the woman wore a necklace on a chain around her neck. The chain being fine and the pendant small, to say nothing of the limitations of taking photographs of photographs, no wonder I hadn't noticed it earlier.

"The necklace," I said. "In both pictures she seems to wear the same necklace."

"Describe it to me please."

"I did so, although, not being a person who cares very much for jewelry, my description no doubt lacked substance.

Holmes supplied it. "The chain is probably sterling silver rather than gold and the pendant is made of amber."

"Amber? How can you be so sure?"

"I once did a study on the various kinds of precious and non-precious stones used in jewelry."

Of course. I should have guessed he'd done that.

"Amber," he continued, "is not considered a precious stone, but when cut and polished, its qualities of color and variation from lightest yellow to deepest orange make an attractive adornment. Observe how the stones have been placed in a silver setting to resemble..."

I finished his sentence. "...a curled-up, sleeping cat."

"Bravo. I believe you are correct."

I rubbed my eyes. "Or, might it be..."

"Our first impressions are the right ones," Holmes said. "It appears the jeweler found a stone that resembled a cat and used it for the pendant rather than, perhaps, fashion smaller stones into a flower or other object."

"It's very pretty." I paused. "Even if we're right, how does that help us find Parton?"

"All in good time. We must give the matter more thought."

He rose and faced the door, as if anticipating someone entering the room. Soon enough, I heard a knock, and when I called, "Come in," Watson appeared once more.

"You have a sixth sense when it comes to finding free food," I joked.

He left the door open and glanced around, as if looking for someone.

"Tessa isn't here," I told him.

"No, I just saw her downstairs. She says she'll be up directly. I wondered if..."

"Yes, Sherlock Holmes is here. If you move a foot to your left you'll bump into him."

Watson glanced left but hurriedly moved right, stopping at the table where he set down the day's newspaper and boldly picked up the photos Holmes and I had been looking at. "This is the woman they found in the well, right?"

"Right." I told him how Tessa and I had gone to the library and found a second newspaper account of the dead woman. "We think she was Parton's sister and married Andrews."

Watson looked up. "He kill her?"

"We don't know."

"Gives Parton a reason to murder Andrews, doesn't it?"

"We don't know that for sure, either."

Watson opened the _Chronicle_ to the third page. "Today's paper says the medical examiner isn't finished examining Andrews' body but he had a broken neck as well as a gash in his head."

"A broken neck?" I repeated. "I suppose that could have been the cause of death as much as falling and striking the marble fender in front of the fireplace."

"I guess so. I haven't seen the place in weeks. Are you set to go there tonight so we can look for the missing bullet?"

"I haven't phoned Mr. Kostitch to ask if we could come back."

"Well, don't. If he says 'No,' and we go anyway we're guilty of trespassing. I can just say I wanted to check the appliances, because it's my job to make sure they work okay."

Holmes chuckled and sat on the horsehair sofa. "I see Americans have not lost their independent spirit."

"So," Watson continued, "shall we have some dinner, play a game of cards with Tessa and then go over to the flat when it's late enough?" He laughed. "Could Holmes make up a fourth for cards?"

At that, Holmes rose from his seat and stretched himself to his full height. "I shall be happy to join you, but your friend may regret asking, inasmuch as I am a champion at Whist."

## * * *

For those of you who don't already know, Whist is a very old card game using the usual fifty-two cards in a deck and played by four people, two of whom may—or may not—be partners. It's so simple, compared to Contract Bridge which evolved from it in about 1925, that Tessa taught both Watson and me within a few minutes. And I enjoyed it. Plus Holmes's boast came true, and he scored more points than the rest of us.

Admittedly, both Watson and Tessa became a little flustered when cards seemed to rise and return to the table as if by magic, so perhaps his skill wasn't his only weapon.

At ten o'clock, Tessa returned to her own flat, I put away the cards, and Watson and I prepared to leave on our quest. I took my detective kit plus a flashlight, and Watson fastened his tool belt in place at his waist. Not a gun, but perhaps a weapon of sorts.

We walked silently in our soft-soled shoes and saw no one on the streets. At the murder house minutes later, Watson unlocked the door at street level, and, after we noiselessly climbed the stairs, he unlocked the door to the empty apartment. Once inside, my skin began to crawl, as if some unseen enemy watched us. I shivered. The silence went unbroken, even by a car driving by on the street below. I clutched Doc's sleeve, glad for his company.

We went immediately to the far wall, and Watson shone the flashlight inside and around the fireplace, including the hearth and its marble fender. I had told Doc earlier that we'd save the chore of sifting through ashes for last, in hopes we'd find the bullet we sought without having to do that. Nevertheless, we both wore gardening gloves just in case it became necessary.

Starting at the lower left corner of the wall surrounding the fireplace, Watson made a slow sweep with the flashlight's beam of light. Nothing. He next focused above the fireplace, and then down the right side. Still nothing. Since the circle of light remained relatively small, he started a second sweep of the wall six inches farther away from the actual fireplace. About halfway up, he stopped. I crept closer and stared at the dark spot he pointed to. I'd never seen a bullet hole in a wall before, but I decided that might be what I saw.

"Is the bullet still in there?" I asked.

"No. It looks like the police have already dug it out."

"Even if they hadn't, I suppose we shouldn't tamper with evidence. It's enough to know that it had been there and not in Andrews's body."

"You're right, but now that the police have the bullet, and the newspaper reported the medical examiner said Andrews died from a fall and a broken neck, why do they keep saying he was shot?"

Watson shrugged. "I don't know. Unless there were actually two gunshots instead of one."

"You think the newspaper got it wrong?"

"Very possible. Newspapers are struggling these days and cut reporters' salaries, so the good ones probably left. Or have bigger fish to fry."

Doc turned off the flashlight, and the room turned black.

"Wait! I can't see. Keep the light on at least until we get down the stairs."

Watson put his hand over my mouth and whispered in my ear. "We're not alone. Someone's in the hall, trying to open the door."

#  Chapter 8

A feeling like ants crawled up my arm, and my throat tightened so I couldn't say a word. Which would be inadvisable anyway.

I clutched Doc's arm and pressed myself into his broad back. With my body partly attached to his, he backed up into the room toward a dark corner. I could hear myself breathing too loudly but didn't think it wise to stop altogether.

After a few more scratching sounds, the door opened and a dark figure entered. By peering around Doc's shoulder, and with the faint light coming from the uncurtained window facing the street, I managed to see enough to learn a tall man had come in. He closed the door behind him and slowly advanced toward the fireplace. I thought he held a flashlight in his outstretched hand, although not turned on, but when he passed us, I decided he held a gun of some kind. Perhaps—assuming the person in the room with us was Parton—the very one he used to fire the shot at Andrews a few days before.

I expected, now that Parton had passed our hiding place and couldn't see us, Doc would maneuver us to the door for our escape. Instead, he shook off my hand, followed the intruder and lunged at him from behind.

Immediately both men dropped to the floor grappling, grunting and swearing. My contribution, I think, was screaming, until I remembered the upstairs tenant had heard the gunshot Friday night and might call the police. Although I first thought I didn't want the police to come and find us, I then considered the possibility the police would arrest Parton and the case would soon be solved.

I didn't have long to think about that alternative, because the two men had regained their footing and struggled for possession of the gun. I seemed to block them. Their thrashing around resulted in my being struck by flying fists and elbows and the next thing I knew, I hit the floor with a thud and felt pain in more joints than I knew I had. I also tasted blood, because my face, especially my lips and teeth, made touchdown first.

As soon as I could, I rose to my knees and crawled to a neutral corner. The men continued to fight, but it didn't take me long to realize Doc got the worst of it. I decided, due to watching his moves, that Parton had had either Asian martial arts or some sort of military training. He moved with both speed and agility and soon had Doc on his back, panting and groaning, near where I lay.

Finally Doc reached out to the other man, grabbed his ankle and sent him sprawling too. The gun flew across the room, and Doc scrambled to his feet and dove for it. Parton did a swan dive of his own, landing on Doc's back, but by then I'd managed to get to my feet and sprang toward them. I missed and once more struck the hard floor, this time knees first.

Parton, apparently surprised to discover he had two of us to battle, seemed to lose focus. Then with a quick glance at each of us in turn, he whirled around, sprinted to the door and crashed out of the room.

I thought Doc would follow him immediately, but he didn't. Instead he came to my side and helped me up.

"He's getting away," I squeaked.

"It's okay. Are you all right?" He held me tightly in his arms, and his tool belt squashed my midriff. Nevertheless, I managed to squirm away.

"Did you recognize him?" Doc asked. "Is he same guy who took the cell phone away from you the other night?"

My brain felt fuzzy, and I blinked and stammered. "I think so, but I never saw him. I had my back to him, and he had a gun." I suddenly remembered. "What about the gun?"

"I hoped you had it." He held up empty hands so I could see.

"How would I have it?"

"It sailed across the room and I thought it might have gone in your direction."

"Sorry."

"Actually I don't care if he gets away. The point is, darlin', are you okay?"

I almost didn't register the "darlin'," but when I did, I decided it he probably used the word for any woman whose name he couldn't remember at the moment. "So..."

"So, it'll be all right. If we had the gun, we could turn it over to the police. And, if he bought it legally, they might be able to trace it and arrest him."

"What about the bullet in the wall, the fact Andrews had a broken neck instead of a gunshot wound?"

"Attempted murder then." He shrugged and wiped at the blood on my mouth. "Are you still bleeding? Do you want to see a doctor?"

"No, I'm fine."

In spite of the fight with Parton, Watson still wore the gardening gloves, which were obviously too tight for his large hands, and he pulled one off with effort.

Apparently satisfied I wasn't badly injured, he retrieved my gloves, found where he'd left the flashlight and turned it on. He swept the room with its glow, as if making sure we left no incriminating evidence behind.

"Let's get out of here."

Back at my own apartment, Holmes greeted us with curiosity and asked the first question. "Did you find the bullet?"

"The bullet struck the wall next to the fireplace, but it's not there anymore. Someone, probably the police, dug it out."

Then I excused myself to wash my hands and face in the bathroom and examine the cut on my lip. It had stopped bleeding but, somewhat swollen, made me look like a native of some African tribe in an old Hollywood movie. Except that my hair and complexion were not dark enough to pass a screen test for the role.

Meanwhile Watson, having heard my part of the conversation, told Holmes about finding the bullet hole. He added that Parton had shown up, gun in hand, and gave a brief account of the fight that ensued.

When I returned to the sitting room with a cold wet cloth on my mouth, Holmes insisted we give him a blow-by-blow account of our run-in with Parton.

"I believe you are correct in assuming the man was Parton, probably returning to the scene to retrieve the knapsack he left behind. I need details, so describe him please. His height, approximate weight, clothes. What type of boots did he wear?"

I relayed these questions to Watson, and, one at a time, we described Parton as well as we could.

"The room was dark and he wore dark clothes," I said. "I couldn't see him very well."

Watson did a better job, but then he'd been closer to Parton during the skirmish and might even have been able to identify the scent of his shaving lotion if necessary. "I suspect he's been in the military and trained in hand-to-hand combat."

I removed the cloth from my face for a moment. "But you held your own with him."

Doc grinned. "I was the champion wrestler on my team in college." He pointed at me. "Then you jumped in, so we were two against one."

I raised my voice, but it came out a little muffled. "He can't have been scared of me."

"Maybe not, but he might have had second thoughts about shooting a woman, so that's why he ran out."

"He ran away?" Holmes asked.

"Yes, and we didn't follow him, so I'm afraid we lost him."

Watson repeated, for Holmes's benefit, what he'd told me about hoping I had somehow picked up the gun so we could turn it over to the police.

Holmes strode across the room, hands clasped together behind his back. "What do you intend to do next?"

I repeated the question and Watson said, "We haven't decided yet."

"It is of no consequence. True, you might have used the gun as a means of drawing him out of hiding. He would not want you to turn it over to the authorities and tie him to the crime."

While I repeated that to Watson, Holmes moved to the chair near the fireplace and sat. "However, while you were gone, I thought of a different means of getting the man to come here. One cannot draw correct conclusions about a crime unless one has all the facts. Therefore, I need to question the man and gain the necessary information."

"You want him to come here?"

"Yes. How else may I question him?"

"How can you question him at all, even if he comes, when he will probably not be able to see or hear you?"

Holmes raised a hand. "Elementary, my dear. I will tell you what questions to ask, just as we've been doing with this young man and your grandmother."

"I see. You say you think you know a way to lure him here for that questioning?"

"Indeed. I based my 'lure,' as you call it, on the incident of the necklace worn by the woman in the photographs, the one we assume might have been Mr. Parton's sister."

"The necklace? We don't have the necklace. We only saw it in the photographs."

Watson had been listening and watching me, and apparently followed my conversation with Holmes to some extent. "Necklace?" he asked.

The pictures had been moved to the roll-top desk earlier that evening while we ate dinner and then played Whist, so I removed them and put them on the table for Doc. I pointed to the necklace.

"Okay, I see that she's wearing it in both photographs."

"I believe that is significant," Holmes said, "and I planned to propose we tell Parton we have the necklace."

"Even though we don't?" I asked.

Holmes looked smug. "A certain amount of subterfuge is often obligatory in the investigation of a crime. You may remember that in several cases Mr. Doyle wrote about, it sometimes became necessary for me to wear a disguise and pretend to be someone else in order to learn the truth."

I repeated that explanation to Watson, and Holmes continued.

"If we had the man's pistol, we could, of course, use that instead, but now the falsehood about having the necklace will be useful."

"So you're saying," I said for Watson's benefit as well as Holmes's, "that we should attempt to contact Parton and offer to return the necklace we saw in the pictures if he will just come here to be questioned by you."

"Since he will no doubt be unable to see me, it will be necessary for you to ask the questions, and therefore my name need not be mentioned at all."

Watson spoke up again. "And just how are we supposed to contact Parton? We don't even know where he lives."

"In my day," Holmes said, "we would have contacted him via the personal advertisements in the newspapers. One would write a notice such as, 'If the owner of the amber necklace wishes to see it returned, will he please respond to Mr. Jones,' or some such name."

"And did that work?"

"Most assuredly. Everyone read the Personal columns and we received two newspaper deliveries every day."

"Two newspaper deliveries a day?" I repeated. "In the first place, hardly anyone reads newspapers these days, much less has one delivered even once a day."

Holmes sighed. "I fear you modern people have abandoned a very sure method of communication."

Watson's voice contained a little sarcasm. "We don't need newspapers anymore. Most people rely on television news programs to tell them what's going on, and the Internet can satisfy their needs instantly twenty-four hours a day."

Holmes rose and paced the floor. Except for his footsteps, the room remained silent for a few minutes. "Very well, how do you communicate with someone in these times? Do you use that telephone camera device?"

"Yes, of course." I smiled even though my mouth still hurt. "We may not know where the man lives, but we have his telephone number. We can call him."

"And if he is not at home to receive your telephone call?"

"We'll leave a message. Most people have telephone answering machines that will record a message and then play it back when the owner turns it on later."

Holmes swirled around and gave me a smile. "Then that is what we must do." He returned to his seat, crossed his arms over his chest and his legs at the ankles, and grinned, as if the ball were now in our court and we must act at once.

I sighed. "I think you're right, but even if he has an answering machine, there's no guarantee he'll have it on, or that he'll listen to his messages any time soon."

"It's still worth a try," Doc said. "I'll leave the message, tell him we've got this, er, thing belonging to the dead woman, and if he wants it he must come here to pick it up."

Holmes smiled again. "Excellent." He tilted his head toward the ceiling. "All will be well if he heeds the message." Then a frown replaced his smile. "I do wish we knew his address. The post would be much more efficient."

"Efficient? You mean snail mail?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Snail mail is what we call letters delivered by what you call the post, because it is as slow as a snail. A letter might take days..."

"Or weeks," Watson added.

"Surely not. Letters are delivered in England three times a day."

"Perhaps they used to be a hundred years ago," I said, "but probably not anymore. Here in the U.S. we only get mail once a day. And soon they may be only on weekdays. Our postal service is considering discontinuing Saturday deliveries."

Holmes rose from his chair. "What are you saying? According to that machine you installed in my room, you Americans landed a man on the moon, but you cannot deliver mail on Saturdays?" He stomped across the floor. "And that was forty years ago. What have you done lately if not improve the mail service?"

When I repeated that to Watson, he laughed out loud. Then he stared at the place he apparently assumed Holmes might be standing. "We don't need snail mail anymore. We have telephones, e-mails and Skype."

"Stop," I told him. "Holmes has a remarkable brain, but let's not overload it all at once." To Holmes I said, "I think it would be wise if you took your journey into the past hundred years a little slower."

He made a scoffing sound and headed for his room. "If you succeed in having Mr. Parton at your door within twenty-four hours, I shall withdraw my remark."

Doc and I groaned almost in unison.

#  Chapter 9

Watson made the telephone call from his own cell phone, because we decided a man's authoritative voice would be best. Especially since the two had fought over the gun. And yes, we delivered the message by way of an answering machine.

The next day Doc took care of his clients, I went to my job at the bakery as usual, and Holmes took turns watching a documentary on his television set and scratching away on the violin. Tessa did not appear all day, although like Watson, she did just before eight in the evening in case Parton received the message and decided to obey the summons. She carried a small notebook and pen in her hand, as if planning to take down everything she heard and use it in one of her novels.

By a quarter to eight, we all assembled in my sitting room like a gathering of murder suspects, reminding me of old

Nero Wolfe mysteries I devoured as a child.

Holmes looked directly at me. "Before the man arrives and reveals the facts, if he does indeed show up and tell them to us, I think an explanation is in order."

"What explanation?"

"The solution to the puzzle. Do you not remember our wager? You were to solve the case and prove you are a true detective." He smirked.

The solution? I cleared my throat. "Very well. Here is my opinion of how the man died and who's to blame."

Holmes leaned back in his chair and crossed one ankle over his knee.

"In the first place," I began, "the newspaper headline read, 'Man shot to death in vacant apartment.' Since the crime scene was nearby, Tessa and I went over to investigate."

"Yes, yes," Holmes said. "We know all that. Go on."

"After this investigation, I came to the conclusion the dead man, Andrews, died from a fall in which he struck his head on the marble fender in front of the fireplace, causing his neck to be broken." I paused.

Watson asked the next question. "Why did he fall?"

"I believe he and a second man in the room, probably Parton, held a lengthy argument. I think the second man had a gun and threatened Andrews with it. Perhaps the argument deteriorated into a fight and that resulted in two things, the gun being discharged and Andrews falling even though he hadn't been shot."

"Go on," Holmes said. "Why did the two men fight?"

"Well..." I rose and paced the floor while thinking. "It would appear that they fought over a woman. The picture and newspaper clipping I saw in the backpack we found were of a woman named Adele Parton Andrews. Since we had learned that Parton owned the backpack, I deduced that the woman was the sister of Parton and the wife of Andrews."

Tessa popped up from her chair as if she were a student in class. "I helped with that part."

"Yes, you did. Thank you, Tessa."

"So why did they fight?" Watson repeated.

I crossed to him and spoke softly. "This next explanation is just intuition on my part, but the newspaper account says the authorities found the woman in a well and that certainly suggests foul play. I think Parton thought the husband, Andrews, had something to do with it."

I turned to the others. "I mean, people don't usually fall into wells accidentally, or choose one in which to commit suicide. She didn't die peacefully in bed, or in a hospital of some disease. Someone killed her and dumped her body in that well, and I don't blame Parton for thinking Andrews did it."

"Bravo," Holmes said, and he clapped his hands together.

I didn't know whether he congratulated me for having deduced the real truth, or said it sarcastically, as he often did with Inspector Lestrade in the Doyle stories. Did he have a totally different interpretation of the evidence, and I'd be ridiculed in front of everyone?

I didn't find out, because, at five minutes past eight, my doorbell sounded.

I hurried to the wall buzzer and pressed it to let our visitor come up. In the light of the several lamps I'd turned on in my sitting room, I observed a young man of at least six feet, with a sturdy frame and a pleasant face topped by thick brown hair cut very short. He wore a uniform, and I assumed it was an Army uniform, but couldn't identify what branch.

We introduced ourselves, except for Holmes, of course, and while Tessa, Parton and I settled into chairs near the fireplace, Watson took the sofa. Holmes sat at the round dining table, his chair facing us.

After a few seconds of silence, Parton turned to Watson, as if expecting him to make the first move, but Watson referred him to me.

"I'll be asking most of the questions," I said.

Parton looked around. "What about the...? The message said you'd return the necklace if I came."

"All in good time. Let's get acquainted first. This is my apartment, and, as you know, Mr. Watson and I were inside the flat on Lyon Street where a Mr. Andrews, er, died a few nights ago."

I took a breath before continuing. "Although I didn't actually see you that time, you and I also met when you put a gun in my back and asked for the return of your backpack and cell phone."

"I remember," he said, "but you told me you didn't have my backpack."

"I didn't. I still don't. However, before the landlord of the building took it away from me in order to turn it over to the police, I looked inside and saw several items which eventually led us to you."

"I didn't kill Andrews," Parton blurted out next.

"We know you didn't shoot him. The latest newspaper articles indicate he died of a broken neck and a severe blow to his head." I paused again. "However, you did fire a gun at him. It missed, but the neighbor upstairs heard it and called the police."

"I went back for my stuff, but the police were already there, and I had to pretend to be just a drunk stumbling down the street in order to get away."

Holmes didn't give me any questions for the man, so I continued asking my own."Why did you go back last night?"

"I was still looking for the backpack. I'd dropped it in the hall outside the flat when I ran out, but it wasn't there any more, so I went inside and..."

"Yes," Watson added, "and ran into Miss Holmes and me."

"What were you two doing there?"

"Looking for the bullet you fired. It apparently missed Andrews and lodged in the wall, and the police found it. We saw the marks where they dug it out."

"So they know I didn't kill Andrews."

"Yet it's attempted murder, isn't it?" Watson said.

"I guess if you'd given my gun to the police..."

Watson interrupted again. "But you know we didn't."

"Luckily I got my hands on it before you did." Parton wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "Still, your message said you have an amber necklace that you'll return to me. Why did you think I lost an amber necklace?"

"We'll tell you," I said, "but we want to know the truth first."

"What truth?"

"Why you wanted to kill Andrews."

Parton shifted in his chair. "I don't understand. You're not the police, but I did see a sign next to your doorbell downstairs that said, 'Private Investigations.' Is one of you a private eye, and if you are, who hired you to find me?"

"I'm studying to be one," I admitted. "That is, I plan to, but this case... Well, if you must know, it's because of a bet. We knew a body had been found in that flat, and had a bet that I could identify the murderer before the police did."

"A bet?" Parton repeated, in a voice that indicated he thought it ridiculous. Which, at that moment, I agreed with.

I quickly changed the subject. "So my grandmother, Mrs. Reynolds..." I pointed to Tessa. "...knew the landlord and he let us in. The body had been removed by then." My tone dropped. "One thing sort of led to another."

"You mean about finding my backpack?"

"The couple upstairs found it, and, when I said I'd hand it over to Mr. Kostitch, they gave it to me. I used my cell phone and took some pictures of the contents before Kostitch took it from me."

"So that's how you got my cell phone."

"I didn't intend to keep it, but it accidentally got in my purse." That sounded so lame, I wanted to melt into the floor.

"Is that how you got my home phone number?"

"Yes," Watson answered, "but not your address. Where do you live, by the way?"

"If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you."

"We know your area code, and that means you live in Chicago."

"Chicago's a very big city."

"We also know your last name."

"You didn't get that from my cell phone." Parton got up and paced the floor. "You're not the police, so I don't have to tell you anything."

"Unless you want to know about the necklace."

He sat down again. "Okay. So you went to that flat last night just to snoop around?"

"To look for the missing bullet. We found the hole in the wall, and then you came in, and you know the rest."

Holmes spoke at last. "Ask him about the pictures."

I complied. "We found a picture in your backpack as well as a newspaper clipping about a young woman whose body was found in a well near Chicago. It's the same woman, isn't it?"

Tessa jumped in. "She was your sister, wasn't she?" Tessa had pulled out the notepad, which now contained scribbles that resembled the Gregg shorthand she'd learned in high school and once explained to me.

Parton frowned. "Yeah. How did you find that out?"

"At the library," Tessa said.

I took over. "The San Francisco library carries copies of the _Chicago Tribune_ , and we not only found an article like the one you tore out, but a follow-up article with another picture of the woman and her name. By that time we knew your name was Parton, so it wasn't a big stretch to figure out Adele Parton Andrews might be your sister and that she might have been married to Andrews."

Parton lowered his head and wiped his cheek with his arm, as if hiding tears. "Yeah."

After more silence, while I let him recover, I went on. "The picture we saw in your backpack is very similar to the one the newspaper printed the next day and identified as the woman found in the well. In both photos she's wearing a very unusual necklace that Holmes...that is, we... think is made of amber and resembles a curled-up sleeping cat."

Parton glanced over at me and a tiny smile lifted his lips for a second. "How did you get hold of it?"

Since we didn't, I couldn't answer that, so I hedged. "We just want the facts. We know now that Andrews died because of his fall on the marble fender. In fact, Tessa got blood on her skirt from that same place. And we know you shot at him, even though the bullet went wild. What we don't know is why you wanted to kill him."

Parton took a deep breath and looked up at me. "I'll tell you why, and then I'm leaving."

"No problem," Watson said.

I looked at the others and saw them nodding their heads.

Parton took another breath. "Okay, but it's a long story."

Holmes rose from his position by the table and advanced to the sofa. He sat at one end, leaned his head against the back rest and closed his eyes. However, he managed to speak to me.

"So long as I still have time to watch _Pygmalion_ before I retire at midnight. I saw Mr. Shaw's play in London and am overjoyed to know it has been made into a film." He grinned.

#  Chapter 10

Parton stared at his hands in his lap for a few moments before beginning. "As I said when I came in, my name is Parton. It's Lawrence Parton and Adele was my sister, my twin sister, actually.

"As you can imagine, we were very close physically and emotionally. Our relationship became even more pronounced for two reasons. First, our parents had no more children, and, second, our mother died when we were only five years old. Our father, we were told later, suffered from grief, became an alcoholic and could no longer take care of us.

"One aunt, who had never married, took us into her home in a suburb of Chicago where we lived until we were eighteen. Aunt Emily was kind enough but had no parenting skills, and we were as happy to leave as she was to see us go.

"We wanted to go to college so we found one we both liked, but I won't tell you which one, and got an apartment off campus so we could be together."

Watson had begun to roll his eyes, and I suspected he thought something incestuous went on. Parton squashed that idea right away.

"Our mother had taken out an insurance policy and the money stretched enough to cover living expenses, plus we both got scholarships and part-time jobs. We liked being together and Adele and I took turns cooking and cleaning up. She found a boyfriend very soon, and I had my pick of pretty girls for Saturday night dates." He paused and shook his head, as if remembering.

"That lasted the whole year, and then I got the stupid idea of joining the Army Rangers."

"Doesn't sound stupid to me," Watson said.

"I didn't think so at the time, but if I hadn't done that, Adele might be alive today." He wiped a tear from his face before continuing.

"You see, I did it for the wrong reasons. Guys always teased me about living with my sister. Made me feel like some kind of sissy. But Adele okayed anything I wanted to do, and she had a great boyfriend I thought I could trust to take care of her. So I signed up and went to Georgia for training. They didn't let me come home very often, and we couldn't afford flights back and forth to visit."

He paused again and I poured a glass of water for him from the pitcher I had placed on the table earlier.

"Then Adele's boyfriend got a football scholarship to a really good college and left town."

"Did Adele find another boyfriend?" Tessa asked.

"Yeah, you guessed it, but not right away. She just worked and studied and went to school for the next two years. She adopted a kitten from the humane society so she wouldn't be so lonely, and that Christmas I sent her the necklace with the amber pendant that resembled a cat. She said she loved it and wore it all the time." He looked around at us. "You can see why I'd like to have it back."

I confess I found tears filling my eyes and wished we really had the necklace so we could give it to him.

"After I was sent to Iraq, Adele finally met someone else. She told me all about him in the e-mails she sent or when we could talk on the phone."

"That was Andrews?" Watson asked.

"Right, Gerard Andrews. He seemed really good to Adele at first and wanted to marry her right away, but I asked her to wait until I could come home and meet the guy." He took a long gulp of water. "He had learned how to be a magician and wanted them to go on the entertainment circuit together. She would be his assistant. You know, the pretty girl who hands the magician things and gets sawn in half, or seems to."

"So did she do that?" Tessa wanted to know.

"No, she never did. She gradually lost interest in him, and later she confessed to me that he really wasn't such a nice guy after all. Insensitive to the animals he used in his acts, Adele said. She thought he also abused the birds and rabbits he worked with. Then her cat disappeared, and Adele thought Gerard had either let it out one freezing cold night or deliberately killed it."

Parton took another deep breath. "Suddenly I stopped hearing from her. I couldn't reach her by phone or e-mail. I asked for an emergency leave so I could try to find her, but my C.O. reminded me I'd be out in three more months so I should just be patient." His last words were almost incoherent. "I never saw her again."

Tessa broke the silence in the room by crying into a soggy handkerchief, and I had to blow my nose. Parton rested his head on his arms, which he braced on his knees, and Watson went over to the table and poured a glass of water for himself.

Holmes, on the other hand, seemed unaffected. "Ask him about the picture."

I assumed he meant the newspaper clipping about the woman in the well, so I waited only a little longer before I broached the subject. "When I looked in your backpack, I saw the newspaper clipping you saved. How did you know the woman in the abandoned well was your sister?"

"The police told me Adele and Andrews were married," he mumbled, not looking up. "They were separated at the time and the police thought someone else strangled her and then dumped her in the well."

"Yet you thought Andrews did it?"

"The police had no proof he did. He didn't even get arrested. I can't talk about that...it hurts too much."

Watson returned to his seat. "Okay then. Tell us how you and Andrews ended up in a vacant flat in San Francisco."

"Because of the flyer for the magician's seminar that I saw in your backpack?" I asked.

Parton looked up, took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. "I found out where Andrews lived and went there, but he'd moved out just the day before, told the landlord he was leaving town."

"What did you do next?"

"I looked up magician's stuff on the Internet, found out about the seminar here. I didn't know for sure he'd go to it, but it was a chance I had to take."

I persisted. "So he did go there. Did he recognize you? Did he know who you were?"

"Adele had never shown him a picture of me. Anyway, if she had, it would have been in my uniform and I look a lot different in civvies."

"So you went to the seminar..." Holmes prompted, and I repeated that to Parton.

"Yes, I found him. I introduced myself to him with a fake name, told him I wanted to be magician too, acted like I needed his help."

Watson spoke next. "And he fell for that?"

"Yeah, especially after I took him to a bar for drinks. We were real buddy-buddy by the time I drove him to the apartment."

"How did you know it would be vacant?" Tessa asked.

"I'd done my homework beforehand. I scoped out the place, pretending I wanted to rent it, and managed to make a duplicate key."

Tessa's voice rose. "You know how to do that?"

"It's easy." He paused. "The hard part was getting up the nerve to kill him when we got inside. I had to tell him then who I was and why he had to die. He didn't admit he strangled her. He only said they'd had a terrible quarrel, but I could tell he lied." His voice rose. "Why throw her body in a well if he didn't kill her?"

After a long pause, he went on. "I knew I should do it right away, but when I didn't, he saw my hesitation and took advantage of it. He grabbed for the gun and we struggled until I shoved him backward and the gun accidentally went off. He fell on top of that marble fender in front of the fireplace and then dropped onto the floor."

Parton had risen and held his arms in front of him, as if reenacting the fight scene. Suddenly his hands dropped and he collapsed back in the chair again. His shoulders slumped and tears rolled down his face. He looked as if he were reliving a moment in the past. His words came out forced and scratchy.

"I killed a man. He stood in the doorway of his hut and his wife came running toward me, screaming. I didn't know Arabic. I didn't understand her words. The soldier behind me shot her."

I stared at Parton in shock. Could he be reliving an experience that took place in Iraq?

"I can still hear that woman's screams in my head almost every night."

The room erupted into motion. Watson, Tessa, even Holmes, rose to their feet and came toward the table. Watson, Tessa and I took glasses and drank some water, as if we had never been so thirsty before. My throat seemed parched, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Holmes filled the silence. "Is that all?"

After I swallowed some water, I repeated the question to Parton.

"You know the rest. The tenants on the floor above apparently heard the gunshot and called the police as well as the landlord. He came running up from his flat on the ground floor just as the upstairs folks came down. Then I heard sirens and police cars. I got out as fast as I could."

Tessa asked, "What will you do now?"

"I have to go to Seattle for thirty days' debriefing and then I'll be discharged. I know now that war is hell. My four years are up, and I'm not reenlisting." He paused. "Maybe I'll stay in Seattle. I don't like Chicago, and San Francisco might be too hot for me. In case the police find me like you did."

Watson came close and shook Parton's hand. "I wish we had Adele's necklace to give to you, but we don't."

He shrugged. "It's okay. I didn't really believe you had it. My aunt had Adele buried before I could come home, so maybe she knows where it is. I hope my sister is buried with it."

He wiped his face with the back of his hand, took a last glance around the room and then went out the door.

## * * *

After Parton left, I made a pot of coffee and brought out the chocolate-covered custard eclairs I'd bought at the bakery. Our mouths soon decorated with chocolate and custard, we finally talked about what we'd learned that evening.

Watson licked custard from his lips. "Do you realize we had the wanted man here and we just let him go?"

"Wanted by whom?" I asked. "As Parton said a little while ago, we're not the police, and, at least according to the news, they don't have a suspect on their radar."

"My friend, Mr. Kostitch," Tessa said, "gave that backpack to the police. If they have it, they could learn what we did."

Holmes spoke up then, and I repeated his words to the others. "If they're clever enough to work it out, the local police, like my old friend Lestrade, will claim all the glory for themselves." A sly grin spread across his features. "However, I have a feeling Mr. Parton is safe from prosecution."

"I hope he is, poor man," Tessa said. "I'm going to be Dr. Watson to Sherry's 'Holmes' and write a story about the case."

Watson laughed and said at least he didn't have to do it.

Holmes, the only one of us without a custard mustache, looked smug. He turned to me."I do believe you have won our wager. We do not know what the police think, but in my opinion, you solved the case of the amber necklace."

"The Case of the Amber Necklace?" I repeated.

Tessa squealed. "Oh, that will be the title of my story."

"What did I win?"

"Now that I think of it," Holmes said, "we never mentioned a prize. What would you like as a reward?"

"I'd like an amber cat."

"I'll buy one for you tomorrow," Watson said.

Holmes held up a hand. "Not a real one. Unless being dead for a hundred years has changed me even more, I believe I am allergic to cat hair."

"So you're going to continue to live here in San Francisco? In my apartment?"

He looked around the room for a moment. "It would appear I do not have a choice."

THE END

#  Other titles by Phyllis Humphrey

Holmes and Holmes Series

Book 2 – THE SIGN OF FIVE

Book 3 – THE RED HERRING

Romance Novels

COLD APRIL - A love story set on the Titanic

THE ITALIAN JOB - An Italian backdrop for a novel of romance, jealousy, and old questions that need to be resolved.

NORTH BY NORTHEAST – On a sightseeing train trip, a jewel heist and a kidnapping give a schoolteacher and a mysterious passenger more excitement than they bargained for.

ONCE MORE WITH FEELING – A female San Francisco stock broker deals with a handsome new client, his eccentric twin aunts and an insider trading scandal.

SOUTHERN STAR – Written with co-author Carolann Camillo, the novel takes the reader on a yacht trip in the Bahamas, where anything can happen. And does.

STRANGER IN PARADISE – The manager of a Hawaiian hotel is about to lose her job because of a handsome stranger. And then a tsunami strikes the island.

FREE FALL – Can a woman who's afraid of heights fall in love with a skydiver?

FINDING AMY – Romantic suspense in London and Paris
Dear Readers,

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Thanks much,

Phyllis Humphrey, aka P. J. Humphrey and Phyll Ashworth
