“Were you popular?” she asked her mother, twirling the cap on her index finger. “When you were my age?”
“I was kind of in the middle. Not popular, but I had lots of friends.”
“Were you pretty?” Her mother was one of the old mothers at her school and although there were quite a few old mothers, she was one of the old-old mothers.
“I didn’t think so, but I was, actually. I had shiny hair and such a nice smile. When I see photographs of myself from that time, I could kick myself for not realizing how pretty I was. Don’t make the same mistake, Sheila. Whatever age you are, you’ll look back ten years and you would kill to look like that again.”
“I don’t want to look like I’m one years old. I was fat and I had no hair.”
Her mother laughed. “Later, I mean. At thirty, a woman wants to look as she did at twenty, so on and so forth.”
Sheila had shiny hair and she supposed her smile was nice, but that was not enough, not at her school. Things must have been simpler in her mother’s times. Then again, she grew up in Ohio.
Sheila spent entire days in the closet and her babysitter didn’t care. The summer babysitter was old, a woman who didn’t want to go anywhere and had to visit the doctor a lot, which is why there was so much child-care chaos. Sheila found she could hear whatever her parents said in their bedroom, if she crept into the closet late at night after a bathroom run. They talked about her at times. It was neither good nor bad, so her father wasn’t exactly right about eavesdroppers. Her parents were worried about school. They talked about bullies and clicks. Trista’s name came up. Trista was a bully, for sure. She was the worst kind of bully, the kind that had other people do her bullying for her. Her hair was shiny, too. So shiny hair was part of being popular, but it wasn’t the only thing that would make a person popular. In her composition book, Sheila began working on a list of things required for popularity and came up with:
1) Shiny hair
2) Nice smile (no braces. lip gloss?)
3) Good clothes
4) Being nice to most people but maybe mean to one person
5) To be continued
She continued to search the walk-in closet. Her father saved everything. Everything! Single cufflinks, keys to forgotten places and key rings with no keys, coasters, old business cards. He had a box of Sheila’s baby clothes, nothing special, yet he kept them. It was embarrassing to see those stupid clothes, especially the Yankees onesie. Girls shouldn’t wear baseball onesies.
But it was in her mother’s jewelry box, the one that Sheila was never, ever supposed to touch, that Sheila found the heavy engraved card with her father’s name and a woman’s name and an address downtown, on Chambers Street. She did not know her father had been in business with a woman named Chloe Beezer. Sheila had never met Chloe Beezer, or heard her father speak of her. The card was pretty, cream-colored and on heavy paper, with a thin green line around their names. Beezer—what an ugly name. A person would have to be very pretty to survive such a name.
There was a photograph clipped to the back. Her father, with a mustache and longer hair, tilted his head toward a woman with blond hair. They were somewhere with palm trees, bright orange drinks in front of them, an orange sky behind them.
“Dad, who was Chloe Beezer?” she asked him on the 1 train, coming back from his office. It was the final week of her summer vacation and the train was hot and smelly.
“How do you know that name?” he asked her.
“I found a card, with her name on it and yours.”
“Where?”
Why did she lie? It was instinctive. Instinctive lying was part of the reason that Sheila was in trouble at school. She took things. She lied about it. But how could one tell the truth about taking things? How could she explain to anyone that Trista’s billfold, which had a pattern of gold swirls and caramel whorls that reminded Sheila of a blond brownie, had seemed magical to her. A talisman, a word she had found in books by E. Nesbit and Edward Eager, writers her father insisted were superior to J. K. Rowling. If she had a billfold like that, she would be powerful. And she was very considerate, which is probably why she got caught: she removed the money and the credit card and the other personal items and put them back in Trista’s purse, taking only the billfold. Trista’s family was rich-rich. A billfold meant nothing to her. She would have a new one in a month or two. Whereas Sheila’s family was comfortable, according to her parents. Except in their dining room, which made them all uncomfortable.
She was not supposed to snoop. But she also was not supposed to go into her mother’s jewelry box, which sat on the vanity that separated her father’s cluttered side of the closet from her mother’s neat, orderly side.
She decided to admit to a smaller crime.
“I found it in a box you had with cufflinks and other old stuff.”
“You shouldn’t be poking around in other people’s things, Sheila.”
“Why? Do you have secrets?”
“I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Do you want me to go in your room and search through your things?”
“I wouldn’t mind. I’ve hidden my composition book. You’ll never find it.” If there was a lesson to be learned from Harriet the Spy, it was to maintain control over one’s diary, not that Sheila’s had anything juicy in it. “Who was Chloe Beezer?”
Her father sighed. “You know, I think, that I was married once before. Before your mother.”
She did know that, in some vague way. It had just never been real to her.
“The card was something she made when we got married and moved in together. We sent it out to our friends. We didn’t have a wedding, so we wanted our friends to know where we had set up house.”
“Was she Beezer-Weiner?”
He laughed, as if this were a ridiculous question. “Chloe? No. No. She wanted no part of Weiner.” He laughed again, but it was a different kind of laugh.
“Did she die?”
“No! What made you think that?”
“I don’t know. Did you get divorced?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s an odd thing, Sheila, but I don’t really remember. We married quickly. Perhaps we didn’t think it through. Are you ready for school next week? Don’t we need to make a trip for school supplies?”
She knew her father was changing the subject. She let him.
But once at home, she had to know if her mother was aware of this extraordinary thing about her father. “Did you know Daddy was married before?” she asked her mother when she came home. “To someone named Chloe Beezer?”
“Yes,” her mother said. “I did know that. You did, too. We told you, years ago.”
“I might have known, but I guess I forgot.”
Her mother looked at her father, who was reading his Wall Street Journal at the breakfast bar. Because he had to come home early with Sheila, they were going to have takeout from City Diner. “Why is this coming up now?”
Before Sheila could answer, her father said: “She found an old piece of paper in a box of my stuff. I told her she should respect our privacy more and she said she would. Right, Sheila?”
“Right,” she said, although she didn’t remember agreeing. “And a photograph. There was a photograph paper-clipped to it.”
“Do you want sweet potato fries, Sheila?” her mother asked.
“Yes, with cinnamon sugar.”
That night, as her mother put her to bed, Sheila was thinking about lying. She wasn’t supposed to do it even when it made sense. But what about when someone else repeated one of her lies? Her father was the one who said she found the card in his boxes, but it had been in the jewelry box, which she was specifically forbidden to touch. Didn’t her mother remember it was there? It was right on top, in clear view. She would see it tomorrow morning. Her mother went to that box every workday, pulling out golden chains and silver bangles. Her mother was very particular about her jewelry. She spent more time on selecting jewelry than sh
e did on making up her face. “An old face needs an ornate frame,” she said, laughing. It was an old face, even as mother’s faces went. Sheila wished this wasn’t so, but it was. She could see that her mother had been at least medium-pretty once, in the same way that she had been medium-popular. But she wasn’t pretty now. It might help if she were. Trista’s mother was pretty.
“Mom, I went into your jewelry box.”
“I figured that out, Sheila. That’s okay. It’s good you’re being honest about it with me. That’s the first step. Telling the truth.”
“Why did you have that card?”
“What?”
“The card, with the photograph.”
“Oh, you know how hard it is to keep things in order sometimes.”
Yes, on her father’s side of the closet. But her mother’s side was always neat, with shoe boxes with Polaroid pictures of the shoes inside and clothing hanging according to type and color. Everything was labeled and accounted for on her mother’s side.
“Daddy thought it was in his boxes.”
“It probably was.”
“Do you snoop, too, Mom?”
She didn’t answer right away. “I did. But it’s wrong, Sheila. I don’t do it anymore.” She kissed her good night.
Two days later, Sheila disbanded Sheila Locke-Holmes. She left the deerstalker cap on a hook in her closet, put her almost-blank notebook down the trash chute, and took apart the utility belt that she had created in homage to Harriet the Spy. She told her mother that she would like to wear the charm bracelet, after all, that charm bracelets were popular again. She wore it to school the first day, along with her mother’s T-shirt. Sixth grade was better than she thought it would be and she began to hope she might, one day, at least be medium-popular. Like her mother, she had shiny hair and a nice smile. Like her father, she was dreamy and absentminded, lost in her own world. There were worse ways to be.
Sheila’s mother was not dreamy. She did not indulge conversations about why people did what they did. She did not stop movies and show Sheila the color of the sky or explain how Dr. Horrible could go down wearing one thing and rise up wearing another a second later. But she was sometimes right about things, as Sheila learned with each passing year. At thirty, Sheila would sigh with envy over her twenty-year-old face. At forty, she would look longingly back at thirty.
She would never yearn for that summer when she was eleven. Whenever someone brought up the time that she wore the deerstalker cap and started her own detective agency, she changed the subject but not because she was embarrassed. She could not bear to remember how sad her mother looked that night, when she confessed to snooping. She wanted to say to her mother: He saves everything! It doesn’t matter! She wanted to ask her mother: Why did you take the card? Did you want him to know you took it? Why did you put it somewhere you would have to see it every day? She wanted to ask her father: Why did you keep it? Do you miss Chloe Beezer? Aren’t you happy that you married Mommy and had me? What was in those orange drinks?
But all these things went unsaid. Which, to Sheila’s way of thinking, was also a kind of lying, but the kind of lying of which grown-ups approved.
Laura Lippman purchased a deerstalker cap in London when she was fourteen and still owns it, although she will never be an expert in all things Sherlock Holmes and, in fact, made a really embarrassing error about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work in her Tess Monaghan series. A New York Times bestseller and winner of several awards for crime writing, past president of the Mystery Writers of America, she has published sixteen novels, a novella, and a collection of short stories. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CONCERT PIANIST
Margaret Maron
The bell rang at two o’clock precisely that early April afternoon and when my maid showed him into the parlour, my caller was, as I expected, Dr Watson. Although heavy mourning had somewhat gone out of style for men, he still wore a band of black velvet on the sleeve of his brown tweed jacket, which indicated to me that his grief for Mrs Watson had not fully abated despite the months that had passed.
“So good of you to come,” I said.
“Not at all, Mrs Hudson.” He handed Alice his hat and stick. “Indeed, I should have called upon you sooner. Your kind expression of sympathy upon my Mary’s passing touched me immensely, and I—” He broke off and looked around the parlour with undisguised pleasure.
“So many changes in my life and yet nothing has changed here.”
I smiled and did not correct him. Whilst he lodged here before his marriage, Dr Watson had taken tea with me several times. Mr Holmes had joined us here but once before his tragic end, yet I daresay he would have immediately noticed my new curtains. In most respects, a very noticing man, Mr Holmes.
Tea had been laid in anticipation of the visit, and when my guest was seated in the chair on the other side of the low table, I poured steaming cups for both of us and passed the scones, still warm from the oven.
“I suppose you have let his rooms to a new lodger?”
“Not as yet,” I replied, offering him gooseberry jam.
“After all this time?” He was clearly surprised. “You have left your best rooms vacant for nearly three years?”
I nodded.
“Forgive my presumption, Mrs Hudson, but does this not represent a financial hardship?”
“Perhaps not as much as you may think, Doctor. Mr Holmes had paid through the end of his year before he left London. Moreover, after your marriage, he insisted on raising that rent to compensate for the damages.”
“Damages?”
“Chemical burns on the carpet, dirty finger marks on the wallpaper from those street urchins who were up and down the staircase at least once a fortnight, and surely you have not forgotten how he used a pistol to inscribe the queen’s initials in my beautiful oak overmantel?”
(To be quite honest, when I heard the shots, I was almost as upset as Mr Powell, a bookkeeper in the City, whose sitting room was directly overhead and who immediately gave notice.)
Smiling, the doctor spread jam onto a bite-sized piece of scone and assured me that he had not forgotten.
“I have twice written to Mr Mycroft Holmes to ask what should be done with his brother’s personal effects. In response to my first letter, he came, looked at the mass of books and papers, and said he simply could not deal with it at the time. He claimed pressing affairs of government, but I suspect that a disinclination for physical exertion is the true reason he insisted I take his cheque for another year’s rent.”
“You say you wrote twice? Did he not reply the second time?”
“Indeed he did reply, Doctor. Another cheque for another year. I fear that he does not accept his brother’s death and wishes everything to be left as it was in the event that Mr Holmes—our Mr Holmes—should ever return. I understand and I sympathise. I, too, mourn the loss, but turning my house into a memorial is more than I can bear. Mrs Jamison shivers every time she passes that door. You ask if this has been a financial hardship? No, but it has been an emotional hardship, sir.”
Tears blurred my eyes and I fear my voice trembled.
Dr Watson patted my hand in manly consternation. “My dear Mrs Hudson! Shall I ring for your maid?”
“Please don’t.” I dabbed my eyes and apologised for my lack of control, but he waved my apology aside and made sure my cup still held tea, which he urged me to drink.
“You are quite right to be troubled. You should not be asked to continue this morbid arrangement. I confess that I, too, have had difficulty in accepting our friend’s death, yet I have not been daily reminded of our loss as have you. Shall I speak to Mr Mycroft Holmes on your behalf?”
“Oh, Doctor!” I exclaimed. “If only you would! Surely he will listen to you, a man who held his brother in such esteem. I’ve had a new carpet laid and the overmantel repaired even though the cabinetmaker was hard-pressed to match the central panel. Were Mr Holmes’s personal possessions removed, Alice and I
could give the rooms a good cleaning and perhaps have a new lodger settled in by the first of May.”
Assuring me he would call on Mr Mycroft Holmes the very next day, Dr Watson accepted a cream biscuit and the rest of the hour passed in pleasant reminiscences of the past.
“I do miss the adventuring,” he said wistfully, when he rose to go. “I find that medicine is so much duller than detection that I have considered selling my practice and perhaps going to America.”
I hardly knew what to say. We moved out into the vestibule, but before I could hand him his hat and cane, the bell rang long and loudly.
The fashionably dressed young woman who stood there with her hand still on the bell pull seemed startled to have the door opened so promptly.
I myself stared in surprise at the pale face beneath that pert straw boater. “Elizabeth?”
“Oh, Aunt, please help me! Mr Holmes—is he still with you? I must see him at once!”
Before I could gather my wits, she greeted my guest by name. “It’s Dr Watson, isn’t it? Benissimo! If you’re still here, then surely Mr Holmes is, too? Someone wants to kill me.”
“My dear girl!” Dr Watson gasped.
“Kill you?” I exclaimed.
When last I saw my niece, she was a child of twelve. My late brother had lived and worked in our native Edinburgh and while his widow, a woman of Italian parentage, settled his affairs there, she had sent Elizabeth to stay with me a month.
During that visit, Mr Holmes had several times required the services of his ragtag “Baker Street Irregulars,” and Elizabeth had been so curious about their business with my lodger that even though he frightened her, she trailed them upstairs one evening and hid behind a chair to listen as they rendered their report. When he charged them with the task of following a certain lady, Elizabeth revealed herself and begged to be allowed to help.
The boys had sneered, but Mr Holmes considered her dainty dress and determined chin, then silenced them with a look. “You chaps have followed our quarry to a milliner’s shop twice this past week, but we do not know what she does there nor to whom she speaks. This young lady can enter the shop without exciting suspicion. If your aunt will allow it, Miss Elizabeth, I myself will escort you to the shop’s location and wait for you to come out.”
A Study in Sherlock Page 19
