The World's Greatest Detective

by Caroline Carlson

  Mr. Abernathy’s admirers smelled like sweat and smoke and fancy perfume. Out of habit more than anything else, Toby scanned their faces as he squeezed past: some were anxious and others were excited, but none were familiar. This wasn’t a surprise: after three whole years, Toby had almost stopped believing that he might spot his parents’ faces in a crowd someday—his father’s eyes sparkling above his whiskers, his mother’s smile shining out from under a flowered bonnet or a big straw hat. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to stop looking.

  Some of Mr. Abernathy’s clients were looking back at him now, and a lot of them were scowling. There was still a thick wall of people standing between him and the detective’s house; he couldn’t see how he’d ever get to the front of the crowd. “Please let me through!” Toby said, turning sideways to fit himself into the space between a man’s buttoned-up stomach and a woman’s velvet elbow. “I’m not a client, I swear! I’ve got something important to tell Mr. Abernathy.”

  “So do the rest of us!” said the man with the buttons. He was twice Toby’s size, and he wasn’t budging.

  “That’s right,” said the woman in velvet. She glared down her nose at Toby. “I’ve been waiting here for hours, and you can very well do the same.”

  “Excuse me!” someone called, and the crowd went silent.

  The man in green had opened the door again. He stood at the top of the steps, and he, too, was looking straight at Toby. “Make way for that boy, please,” he said.

  Toby thought he’d heard the man wrong. “For me?”

  “Indeed.” The man clapped his hands together. “Move aside, move aside. Mr. Abernathy’s orders.”

  Reluctantly, the crowd parted. Their eyes lingered on Toby as he passed, and he wondered if this was how criminals felt when they were marched into the city courthouse for their trials. Finally, he reached the man in green. “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  The man in green bowed stiffly. “As I said, you may thank Mr. Abernathy. He noticed you from his office window when you arrived, and he has asked to see you next. You are Gabriel Montrose’s nephew, correct?”

  Toby had no idea what to do with himself. He had never been bowed to before. Were you supposed to bow back, or were you just supposed to stand there? Then he realized he hadn’t answered the man’s question, and he decided he’d better do that first. “Yes,” he said, “I’m Toby Montrose.”

  “Mr. Abernathy thought so,” said the man in green. He stepped to one side and held the door open for Toby. “Please come in.”

  This made the crowd on the sidewalk unhappier than ever. The man with the buttons grumbled, and the woman in velvet groaned, but as Toby stepped through the doorway, he hardly noticed the noise. Hugh Abernathy had asked for him! He didn’t understand quite how it had happened, and he almost couldn’t believe it, but he was about to meet the world’s greatest detective.

  Mr. Abernathy’s front hall was as wide as the entire ground floor of Uncle Gabriel’s house, with high ceilings and floors that were tiled in black-and-white stone. Standing on a gleaming white square, Toby felt a little like a playing piece in an enormous game of chess. He tried to smooth out the wrinkles in his shirt as the man in green closed the door and walked to Toby’s side.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Montrose,” the man in green said. Everything about him was neat and precise, from the cut of his emerald wool vest to the click of his moss-colored shoes on the tiles. “I am Mr. Peartree, Hugh Abernathy’s assistant.”

  “Oh!” said Toby. “I thought you were a butler!”

  Toby knew all about Mr. Peartree, of course, even though he hadn’t expected the detective’s assistant to be quite so green. In the Sphinx Monthly Reader, Mr. Peartree usually took care of the more routine parts of an investigation—studying train timetables, for instance, or compiling lists of everyone in the city who wore a certain shoe size—while Mr. Abernathy got to do exciting things like dressing up in elaborate disguises and exchanging gunfire with fugitives. During the Case of the Left-Handed Banker, which Toby had read about the previous evening, Mr. Abernathy had chased a band of robbers through the streets of Colebridge while Mr. Peartree, perched on a rooftop and serving as lookout, had dozed off and missed the whole affair. It was no wonder Toby had always thought of Mr. Peartree as a boring sort of person.

  The real Mr. Peartree, however, with his mint-green leather gloves and his perfectly waxed brown mustache, seemed much more interesting. “I’ve read all your stories, sir,” Toby added, scrambling to make up for what he’d said about being a butler. “I think they’re wonderful. Working for Mr. Abernathy must be an exciting job.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Peartree said crisply. “The work is constantly surprising, I’ll grant you that.” His mouth twitched under the curve of his mustache. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll take you to see Mr. Abernathy now.”

  Toby followed Mr. Peartree across the hall and up a wrought-iron spiral staircase. At the top of the staircase was another wide, high-ceilinged space, with doors leading in all different directions. As they passed by one doorway, Toby caught a glimpse of glass vials and test tubes laid out on a long table. Another door was latched with a padlock; a third door boasted a label that said SKULLS.

  Mr. Peartree must have noticed Toby’s eyes getting wider as they walked. “Mr. Abernathy likes to have every supply he might need for an investigation close at hand,” he said. “I imagine your uncle has a similar collection.”

  “Sort of,” said Toby. Uncle Gabriel’s collection of supplies was limited to the odds and ends in Toby’s bedroom and a few unsorted boxes he’d stashed under his desk in the parlor, but Toby didn’t want Mr. Peartree to think that Montrose Investigations was small or shabby. Truthfully, he was relieved that none of the doors in Uncle Gabriel’s house said SKULLS. “How did Mr. Abernathy guess who I was?” he asked.

  “I can promise you,” said Mr. Peartree, “it wasn’t a guess.” He stopped in front of a tall set of double doors and pushed the knobs inward. “As for his methods, however, you’re welcome to ask him yourself.”

  Toby walked forward into a room lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. He knew he shouldn’t stare, but he couldn’t help himself; even the city library didn’t store so many books in one place. There were medical journals and city directories, at least three full sets of encyclopedias, several volumes with titles written in languages Toby didn’t understand, and what looked like a lifetime subscription to the Sphinx Monthly Reader squashed into its own tall bookcase. The only wall free of books was the one directly across from Toby, where a man sat in a swiveling leather chair, looking out the window to the street below.

  “Mr. Montrose!” Hugh Abernathy turned around and unfolded himself from the chair. He looked just the way Mr. Peartree always described him in the Sphinx: golden-haired and clean-shaven, with a smile warm enough to put a murderer at ease. He was no taller than his assistant, and equally slim, but while Mr. Peartree faded away into the corner of the room, Mr. Abernathy seemed to fill every inch of it. “Toby, is it? I did my best to read your lips when you introduced yourself to Mr. Peartree, but I don’t always get these things exactly right. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Toby tried to remember what he’d planned to say to Mr. Abernathy, but it had all fallen out of his mind somewhere on the staircase or along the hall. That didn’t seem to matter, though, because Mr. Abernathy just kept talking. “Let me take a look at you,” he said, studying Toby at arm’s length. “Ten—no, eleven years old. Smart, I think, and responsible.” Mr. Abernathy narrowed his eyes. “Too responsible. You’ve been taking care of yourself for a while now, haven’t you, Toby? I’m very sorry about that. I wonder—have you spent much time with a strict aunt, perhaps? In any case, you’ve lived with Gabriel for the past three months, and you’re here to respond to the invitation I sent him. You were delayed by a terrier on the way here, but I won’t keep you long; I can see you need to get home quickly.” He stepped back and crossed his arms. “
Tell me: how’d I do?”

  Toby felt almost breathless. He knew Hugh Abernathy was brilliant—everyone knew that—but Toby had never imagined that anyone in the world could know so much about him. Even Uncle Gabriel had never made such an accurate deduction. “That was just like in the stories!” he said. “You’ve got to tell me how you did it, sir. How did you know about my aunt Janet?”

  “So it was an aunt after all?” Mr. Abernathy looked relieved. “I have to admit that was a hunch on my part. When a child has cheeks and fingernails as neatly scrubbed as yours, there’s always a fastidious relative in the background who’s given him the habit. Aunts are most common, in my experience. Sometimes it’s mothers”—Mr. Abernathy paused—“but I don’t think that’s true in your case.”

  “No, sir,” said Toby. “My mother is gone. Anyway, she never minded getting dirty.” During the planting season, she’d always been covered with smudges of soil, and Toby’s father had once threatened to sow carrot seeds behind her ears.

  Mr. Abernathy nodded. “You had me fooled for a moment with your size,” he continued, “but boys of ten are really nothing like boys of eleven, and I expect you’ll sprout up soon. Then there’s the matter of the fourth button on your shirt.” He took a pen from behind his ear and used the end of it to tap the button in question. “It fell off in the past, and it’s been fixed by someone with a pinch of improvisation and a bucketful of good intentions. If you’re mending your own clothes—and cutting your own hair, for that matter—you must be used to looking after yourself.”

  He didn’t say it unkindly, but Toby felt his cheeks flame up. He’d been really proud of that button. It had come off while he was chasing after Uncle Howard’s horses, and he’d spent hours working out how to knot it back in place. Unlike the lost horses, it had been one piece of trouble he’d actually managed to fix. “I hoped no one would be able to tell,” he said.

  “Most people won’t.” Mr. Abernathy slipped the pen back behind his ear. “But most people aren’t detectives. It’s my job to notice the small things of the world, the things that are usually overlooked. The animal hairs at your wrists and ankles, for instance.”

  Toby looked to where Mr. Abernathy was pointing. A few strands of Percival’s fur clung to the sleeves of his coat and the cuffs of his pants. “That’s how you knew about the terrier.”

  “As it happens, I’ve collected a number of fur, feather, and scale samples from animals around the world. It took me a decade to gather them and another six months to memorize them all.”

  In the corner of the room, Mr. Peartree raised his green-gloved hand. Toby had almost forgotten he was standing there. “I wonder,” he said, “how you knew the dog wasn’t the boy’s pet?”

  “Ah!” Mr. Abernathy beamed. “I’m glad you asked, Peartree. A less experienced detective easily could have leapt to that conclusion. But take another look at our friend Toby here.” He put his hands on Toby’s shoulders and spun him around slowly, as though Toby were modeling a new fashion. “If he owned a dog, its fur would be everywhere, not only on his sleeves and cuffs. Since it’s not, I knew his meeting with the wretched creature must have been brief. Recent, too, or he would have dusted himself off by now.” Mr. Abernathy let Toby go. “He’s a very tidy person.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Toby, hoping it was a compliment.

  “And his relationship to Gabriel Montrose?” Mr. Peartree asked.

  Toby had been thinking about this. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got that one figured out already.” He pointed to the pocket of his coat, where he’d tucked Mr. Abernathy’s invitation earlier that afternoon. It was sticking halfway out of his pocket now, with most of Uncle Gabriel’s name and address clearly visible.

  Mr. Abernathy laughed. While Uncle Gabriel’s laughter was booming and thunderous, Mr. Abernathy’s sounded more like a spring drizzle. “Well done, Toby,” he said. “I see I was right about your smarts, too. The letter certainly helped. To be honest, though, news travels quickly on the Row. I’d heard that Gabriel’s nephew had come to live with him. You look very much like he did when he was younger, and I recognized you right away when I saw you in the crowd.” Mr. Abernathy rubbed the bridge of his nose, where there was an almost imperceptible bump. Toby wondered if that was the spot where Uncle Gabriel had broken it.

  “Now that I’ve satisfied your curiosity,” Mr. Abernathy said, “I hope you’ll satisfy mine. What message has your uncle asked you to bring me?”

  Toby sucked in his breath. The detective may have praised his smarts, but Toby wasn’t sure a really smart person would lie to Hugh Abernathy’s face. He hadn’t done it yet; he could still turn around and go back to Montrose Investigations, where Uncle Gabriel would mutter about the bills and stare at his meager case files while Toby sat in the hallway, waiting to open the door for clients who never came. Toby could swear he heard the trouble rustling through the pages of Mr. Abernathy’s encyclopedias. He needed those ten thousand dollars.

  “It’s about the contest,” Toby said, “to choose the world’s greatest detective. Uncle Gabriel says—well, he says he’d like to enter.”

  “Really!” Mr. Abernathy frowned. “I’m pleased to hear it, naturally, but I’m frankly surprised. I thought Gabriel’s arm would need more twisting than that.”

  “He does have some requirements, though,” Toby said quickly, “and he says he won’t come unless you meet them.”

  “That sounds more like Gabriel.” Mr. Abernathy sat down in his chair. “You’d better go ahead and tell me what they are.”

  “Well,” said Toby, “he’s got to be allowed to stay alone in his bedroom all weekend to think about the case. He can’t have any distractions. He doesn’t even want to go downstairs for dinner. It’s all part of a new investigative strategy he’s trying.”

  “It doesn’t sound likely to work,” Mr. Peartree observed from the corner. “Won’t he want to interview suspects? Search for clues?”

  “That’s why he needs me!” said Toby. His throat felt dry and his feet felt damp, but he couldn’t ask for a glass of water or kick off his shoes; he couldn’t risk looking suspicious. This part of the lie was the most important of all. “Uncle Gabriel wants me to come to the competition with him. I’ll do the legwork, collecting clues and things, and I’ll bring it all back to Uncle Gabriel so he can think about it.”

  For the first time that afternoon, Mr. Abernathy looked baffled. “Let me make sure I’ve heard you correctly. Gabriel Montrose actually believes he can solve a crime—a crime of my creation!—by sitting in his room all weekend and thinking?”

  “Thinking very hard,” Toby amended.

  Mr. Abernathy cast his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head. “Fine!” he said. “Peartree, make a note of Detective Montrose’s requirements, as bizarre as they may be. I want him at this competition.” Then he looked at Toby. “I hope joining us at the manor won’t be too boring for you.”

  “I can’t wait for it,” said Toby. It felt wonderful to tell the truth again. “How could one of your mysteries possibly be boring?”

  There was another spring drizzle of laughter. “I don’t like to compliment myself too often,” Mr. Abernathy said, “but it is an awfully good case.”

  In the corner of the room, Mr. Peartree coughed.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “If Mr. Montrose has finished delivering his message, we should bring in the next client.” He stepped out of his corner, pulled a pocket watch from his emerald-green vest, and held it out to Mr. Abernathy. “We’re running well behind schedule.”

  Mr. Abernathy considered the watch. Then he pinched it between two fingers, lifted it from Mr. Peartree’s palm, and tossed it over his shoulder.

  Pieces of glass and clockwork flew everywhere as the pocket watch cracked against the floorboards. Toby put his arms up to protect his face from the wreckage. He expected Mr. Peartree to swear or shout, but the detective’s assistant didn’t seem all that surprised by the destruction of his watch. He only s
ighed, as though he were used to this sort of thing, and brushed a shard of glass from his lapel.

  Mr. Abernathy kicked up his feet. “There’s another problem solved,” he said over the sound of skittering cogs and popping springs. “As you can see, Peartree, time is no longer an issue. It’s a good thing, too, because our business with Mr. Montrose isn’t entirely finished. There’s still one more thing we need to discuss.”

  Toby had no idea what Mr. Abernathy was talking about, but he didn’t think it was anything good. Did the detective know he’d been lying? Was he going to pick Toby up and toss him over his shoulder, just like he’d done with the pocket watch? Toby imagined his own insides bursting out and bouncing across the carpet; it wasn’t a nice thought.

  “Come here, Toby,” Mr. Abernathy said. He tapped the arm of his chair. “Tell me about your parents.”

  Toby didn’t move. “My parents, sir?”

  “You said earlier that your mother is gone, and I assume your father is, too; that’s why you’re living with Gabriel.” He studied Toby’s face. “I have to admit I’m curious. What happened?”

  “They went to the seashore for a holiday.” Toby didn’t like talking about it, and he couldn’t imagine why Mr. Abernathy wanted to hear about it, either, but adults were always asking Toby questions like this, and he’d learned by now that it was easier not to argue. “They took a rowboat out into the cove one afternoon,” he said, “and a storm came up out of nowhere. My parents disappeared. The police think they drowned.”

  “But you’re not so sure, are you?”

  “What?” Toby stared at Mr. Abernathy. No adult had ever asked him that before.

  “I can tell from the way you speak about them. You say they’re gone, you say they’ve disappeared, but you never say they died. Was the rowboat ever found?”