Sherlock Bones 2: Dog Not Gone!

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  He made it all sound so matter of fact.

  “Sadly,” he said, “or perhaps not so sadly, the Secretary refused to go along with the you-choose-a-pill-first routine and he physically attacked me. I was therefore forced to do away with him in a different way which I can’t say I minded that much, given he’d been the one responsible for the death of my beloved Lucy’s adopted father. I stabbed him.”

  There was something about his next pause that made it clear he was coming close to the end, in more ways than one.

  “Later,” he said, “after both of the villains were dead, I thought I’d get away. But then a group of puppies came along. Their leader, a pup who introduced himself as Waggins, asked if I was Jefferson Hope and, when I said that I was, he told me a cab was required at 221B Baker Street. I thought it might look too odd, a cabdriver refusing a fare, so I came. And there you had me.”

  Yes. There we had him.

  “But there’s still one thing I don’t understand,” I said.

  “And that is?” Mr. Hope said.

  “You have given decades of your life, even sacrificing your health, and for what? Revenge?”

  “You know, Dr. Catson,” he said, his gaze moving to a corner of the room, a faraway look in his eyes as though he might catch one last glimpse of the past there, “before the day I met Lucy, I didn’t believe in love, let alone at first sight. I didn’t believe in it until it happened to me. But that day when I came upon her in trouble on her horse, and our eyes met? I knew I would never want to be without her again, and that she felt the same way about me. And then to lose her, before we could even be married? It was like I died then myself.”

  A part of me, having heard his tale, felt profound sympathy for the man. What would it be like to love someone like he had loved Lucy? What would it be like to hold on to that love for decades, over time and great distance, keeping only her in his mind as he sought to avenge her?

  As I say, a part of me felt pity. And yet another, bigger part, remembered what Mr. Javier had said as we left the house earlier to come to the station:

  “No matter how good his reasons, you cannot just go around killing for revenge. No one should be allowed to do this.”

  The turtle was right.

  Having made his full and complete confession, Mr. Hope had no further need of us. As he had also signed a copy of that confession, the public human police had no further need of us either. So we were unceremoniously dumped out of the side door of the station without so much as a thank-you or a hail of a cab for us.

  “Do you think Moriarty is responsible?” I asked.

  “For what?”

  “For Jefferson Hope being in a state of dying. Do you think the squirrel could have something to do with it?”

  “I do not,” he said. “You really must stop seeing the squirrel everywhere.”

  “Easier to do if he’d stop popping up everywhere!”

  “He does not pop up everywhere! Besides, you’re a doctor.”

  “True,” I said. “I suppose, when we all met Jefferson Hope for the first time, we thought, ‘Skinny man!’ plus ‘And now he’s trying to escape out the window!’ But chances are, he was already dying then. In some ways, I think he’s been dying since he lost Lucy.”

  “It’s a nice night,” Bones said, turning up his snout to sniff the clean air. “We can walk.”

  Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one who normally had sixteen naps a day but today had yet to have any. He wasn’t the one with a limp from the Cat Wars.

  He must have seen me struggling to keep up, for he stopped and said, “Oh! Would you like a lift?” And then he did a shocking thing: he offered me a ride on his back.

  A part of me was actually tempted. I don’t care for riding in horse-drawn carriages, as I’ve said, but then I don’t usually know those horses. I did know Bones, however. Or at least, I was starting to.

  But my pride would not let me accept. So I simply said, “If only you would slow that haphazard walk of yours, I think I can just manage to keep up.”

  I said this, of course, a little irritably. Heaven forbid the dog should get the idea I might actually be starting to not wholly mind him.

  “As you wish,” he said.

  We carried on walking, but – to the dog’s credit – a bit more slowly this time.

  I did not thank him.

  “Well, I think this is all just wonderful!” he burst out after a surprisingly companionable bout of silence.

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Would I ask if it were?”

  “It’s only this, my dear Catson: At last – at long last! – we finally know all of the why behind everything Jefferson Hope did!”

  I thought on this. And, as I thought, I remembered something from the end of our first case together, which had really turned out to be this case too. It can be found near the end of my writing in Case File #1: Doggone, but for convenience sake I shall recount it here.

  “But you said,” I said, “after you first caught Jefferson Hope and I asked you why he did it, that the why didn’t matter. That is what you said.”

  “Ah, it didn’t then, but it does now, now that we do know. Have you never heard the phrase, ‘that was then, this is now’?”

  “I didn’t then,” I said wryly, “but I have now.”

  We walked on.

  The puppies and Mr. Javier may have been eager when we first left to hear everything that happened with Jefferson Hope. But that eagerness did not extend to waiting up several hours for our return. So, we found them all asleep in the living room when we arrived home: turtle and puppies all happily tangled together in one big reptile/canine heap.

  Nor had they wakened by the time the dawn broke and, with it, the sound of the early edition of the newspaper hitting the door downstairs.

  When we’d first arrived home, the dog needed to roll around on his back for a while on the floor as he sometimes feels compelled to do, and I asked him to do so in his bedroom, so as not to wake the others. In reality, I’d wanted to make another telephone call outside of his hearing.

  After he rejoined me, the dog and I had stayed up all night talking: about Jefferson Hope, about the previous cases Bones had worked on, about life itself. Now the dog looked at the sleeping turtle, no doubt hoping he’d wake to retrieve the paper, but the turtle was out cold.

  “I suppose that I shall have to get my own paper this once,” the dog said.

  “And I suppose I shall have to make us tea,” I said, padding off toward the kitchen.

  “You can do that?” the dog said, incredulous.

  “How do you think I managed during the Cat Wars?” I said. “You don’t imagine I’d drag poor Mr. Javier into battle with me, do you?”

  He still looked surprised and so I felt compelled to add:

  “I, my dear Bones, am a feline of many talents.”

  “Oh, look!” Bones said, snapping open the newspaper as I pushed in the tea trolley.

  All around us still lay sleeping puppies plus the turtle, but I found that I didn’t mind. Just this once, I didn’t mind having a full house at all.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” I said, pouring.

  “The early edition is reporting that Mr. Jefferson Hope died in the wee hours, but that before doing so, he gave a full confession, cleaning up any loose ends concerning the double murder not too long ago.”

  I stood for a moment of silence at word of Jefferson Hope’s passing. Then:

  “What else does it say? Does it say that the confession was specifically made to you and I at the prisoner’s request?”

  “Don’t be absurd!” the dog barked a laugh.

  Absurd? Me?

  “They’ll never give us any credit! Not in their papers!” He stopped laughing long enough to say, “Of course, I don’t imagine Inspector Strange or Inspector No One Very Important will be pleased either.”

&
nbsp; “No?”

  “No. After all, the prisoner died before trial – where is there any splash in that?”

  “Why should they get any credit or newspaper coverage anyway?” I demanded hotly. “Unless you include their wisdom in knowing they needed to consult you in the first place – you did it all!”

  Oh my goodness. Did I say that out loud? Had I just defended the dog?

  “I do thank you,” he said, “for this surprising, but of course wholly earned, display of loyalty.”

  Oh my goodness. Apparently I had!

  “Giving credit where credit is due,” he said, “that doesn’t matter to the likes of them. But due to your great display of loyalty, I shall give you the gift of explaining a few things about detecting that should prove useful to you as we proceed along in our business.”

  I was already sorry I’d ever opened my big mouth.

  “Most people,” the dog explained in an annoying instructional tone (it was pretty much how he sounded all the time), “think forwards. They think: Well, if this happens now, this is logically what will happen next. But to be a great detective, you must be able to think: If something has happened, what was the cause? Essentially, you must be able to reason backward until you arrive at the beginning.”

  “Can you provide an example?” I asked, half hating myself for my own curiosity.

  “What could be easier?” he said, pleased. “Take for example, Jefferson Hope. In his case, once I saw the first body and realized it had been murder, I moved in time directly backward from the body. From the body, I moved backward in time, outside of the abandoned building. There I found the tracks of a cab and two pairs of footprints: one tall, based on length of the stride; one not so tall. Since the dead body was not so tall, I concluded that I must look for the tall one as the murderer. I knew that having some idea of the motive would help me find the killer. It wasn’t a robbery – there were still items of value on the dead body plus that gold ring in the room. But I did know from the ring we found that there was a woman involved. Since, er, John Smith did have identification on him, I asked Inspector No One Very Important to look into his background in the United States of America. Inspector No One Very Important being the sort of inspector he is, he, of course, neglected to do so. So I did it myself. That is when I learned of, er, John Smith’s marriage to Lucy Fur, and her subsequent death soon after, and further learned that, er, John Smith had taken out a protection order against one Jefferson Hope. From there it was easy to conclude that Jefferson Hope was likely the tall man as well as the driver of the cab. Once a cabbie, always a cabbie – or at least for a little while, for it would have appeared too strange for him to suddenly stop. I sent Waggins and Company to ask for Jefferson Hope at every cab service in the city, and there you have it.” He wiped one paw against the other. “Case closed.”

  “Except,” I pointed out, “that while waiting to close your case, another man, the Secretary was killed.”

  “Details.” He waved this off. “Jefferson Hope would have gotten to the Secretary regardless of how quickly anything else went. He was that determined.”

  Backwards reasoning, forward reasoning, circular reasoning: honestly, it seemed to me like he had used it all.

  “Oh, look!” he said as he continued scrolling through the newspaper. “Another item in the paper!”

  “What does this one say?” I asked.

  “It is an interview with the Superintendent, the head of all the police. In it, he praises Inspectors Strange and No One Very Important for their diligent police work. In fact, he calls that work wonderful. He also states that the double murderer Jefferson Hope, now deceased himself, was originally apprehended in the home of Sherlock Bones and Dr. Jane Catson.”

  My name should be first in that sentence, I thought. After all, it’s my name on the deed.

  “The Superintendent also said,” Bones said, “that if the dog and cat played their cards right and listened to the likes of the inspectors, they themselves might one day be halfway decent detectives.”

  “Halfway decent? Halfway decent?” I was outraged on my own behalf; his too, come to think about it. “And that is why I never read the papers!”

  Then I surprised him by laughing.

  “What is so amusing?” he said.

  I tapped the lower corner of the newspaper. “For such a good detective, I believe you were so distracted by the banner headlines that you missed this small article over here.”

  He followed my pointing paw to the small headline we could now read together:

  BONES AND CATSON, CONSULTING DETECTIVES, GET FULL CONFESSION FROM HOPE

  “That looks just as nice as I thought it would,” I said, pleased.

  The dog gaped at me, incredulous. “How did you – ”

  “Elementary, my dear Bones. I called in a favor from a cub reporter I know at the newspaper.”

  “A cub reporter?” For once, he was struck dumb.

  “Yes, and by that,” I said, “I really do mean cub. He’s a young bear. I doubt they’ll keep him long once he starts getting too big for the newsroom.”

  “But how did you – ”

  “Just because I don’t bother reading the newspapers much, it would be illogical to assume I wouldn’t know anyone who works for one. I simply phoned up the cub while you were rolling around in your bedroom – he works the late-night desk – and I told him what I wanted him to put in there.” I admired the small headline again. “I think it’s going to be good advertising for our business, don’t you?”

  “I – ”

  “Oh, and about those business cards.”

  “Business cards?”

  “That’s right. I phoned and ordered them yesterday while your little puppy friends were going bonkers over the takeout menus. The cards should be here in about two weeks, the stationers said.”

  Not long afterward, I did ask him:

  “Will it always be like this? If there are more cases, will I think one is complete only to find out later there is still much to be learned? Like a second half?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “Will they all be two-parters?”

  I was thinking about the Case Files I was writing down, but I could hardly tell him that.

  “To be on the safe side,” he said, “I would answer: You never know, my dear Catson. But realistically speaking: That is highly unlikely. I suspect, in our future, our cases shall be self-contained one-parters, in the main.”

  That relieved me somehow.

  But then a new thought occurred to me.

  “Way back in the beginning of yesterday, which was such an incredibly long day, you sighted that squirrelly squirrel, your nemesis, Professor Moriarty. And then of course you lost sight of him. Somehow, though, at the time, I thought he would figure into this tale. And yet, he has not, even though I did catch him spying through the bay window. Do you think he still will someday?”

  “All I can say, my dear Catson, is watch and learn. Watch and learn.”

  How annoying.

  Then I thought of my own thoughts about squirrels yesterday:

  Devious. Highly intelligent. Incredibly organized. Deceptively adorable to humans. Not to mention, you never quite know what nefarious things one might be hiding beneath a bushy tail.

  On top of all that, Moriarty was supposed to be a criminal mastermind.

  With a villain like that, one who had infected this last case with his presence throughout even though he hadn’t necessarily done anything yet, how could he not appear in a mystery one day soon?

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I wish to thank the following people for their help along the way:

  Georgia McBride, for being a visionary publisher … and not just because we sometimes share the same vision!

  Laura Whitaker, for being a visionary editor … and not just because we sometimes share the same vision!

  Everyone at the visionary Georgia McBri
de Media Group – you’re still rock stars.

  My Friday night writing group plus my cat Yoyo, who’s grown so comfortable with you all – finally! – that now he takes his own chair.

  Greg Logsted: writer, husband and friend.

  Jackie Logsted, daughter and the best reason to keep writing: so you stay proud.

  Readers everywhere, but particularly readers who read Book 1 and have come back for more.

  LAUREN BARATZ-LOGSTED

  (Photo Credit: Jackie Logsted)

  Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of over 25 books for adults, teens and kids, including The Sisters 8 series for young readers which she created with her husband and daughter. She lives in Danbury, CT, with that husband and daughter as well as their marvelous cat, Yoyo.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9