Baker Street Irregulars

by Michael A. Ventrella

  “Well,” Sherlock muttered under his breath as I leaned back in my chair. “I’ve graded his exams…” I shook my head quickly, and he settled back into silence.

  “Were either of these people one of the teachers?” Lester asked.

  Benjamin shook his head. “Nope,” said Sarah, simply and surely.

  “Well, thank you both for reporting what you saw,” said Lester. He released the children but bade us stay in our chairs.

  “Listen, Mr. Holmes, I’d appreciate you looking into this for us.”

  “Oh, come on, Lester. Kids play pretend all the time, convince themselves it’s real. I’m sure this is nothing more than a case of overactive imaginations.”

  “Regardless,” Lester held up his hand to preempt the rest of Sherlock’s inevitable rant. “I don’t want word getting out that we’re doing nothing about the possibility of strange adults prowling around the school woods. Do whatever it is you need to do to satisfy yourself that your initial perceptions are correct.”

  • • •

  The clock read 5:59 a.m. It took me a moment to realize the sharp rapping that woke me was neither my alarm nor someone repeatedly cracking eggs over my head, as my dream would have had me believe. I hauled on the sweatpants that lived in a crumpled pile at the bottom of my bed and hurried to the door.

  “There’s been a murder.” Sherlock stood in a dark coat, a coffee in each hand. In the safety lights of the hallway he looked almost excited.

  “There’s been a….what? I’m sorry, what?”

  “A murder. At Baker School. You’ll need to put on better pants. I’ll wait.”

  In a confused pre-dawn haze, unsure I wasn’t still dreaming, I prepared myself for a day at school. Though if what he had told me was true, there would be no class today. Last night, when he came by for a few rounds of chess, he’d told me nothing in the woods was out of the norm. But now he was staring at the ceiling as I locked up. I could almost see through his hair and skull to the suspicions sparking across his brain. I accepted my coffee, and we got into my car in silence.

  “Sherlock, who—” I started, but he interrupted with a sharp “No.” He remained silent as we pulled into the parking lot of the Baker School. A rainstorm had blustered through town over the weekend and knocked most of the remaining rust and honey leaves from their trees, ringing the school with bare bony branches. The lot was littered with police cruisers and the sleek vehicles of the administration, nothing like the toothpick-straight lines of teachers’ cars I was used to upon my arrival. An ambulance had pulled right up to the playground, sunlight just starting to dapple the scene.

  We approached feeling like trespassers. Principal Lester stopped pacing and waved us over.

  “John, what are you doing here?” he asked, though he didn’t seem all that interested in the answer.

  “He’s a useful sounding board,” said Sherlock. “Why did you need me? There’s very obviously no way to keep police out of this one.”

  “I think it will be prudent to have someone involved in this awfulness who has the best interests of the school at heart,” he said. He craned his neck in an attempt to see around the visual blockade of officers surrounding the scene.

  Sherlock marched in the direction of the playground. I jogged along behind him. He shouldered his way through the throng of officers and examiners until he reached the person in charge.

  “Sherlock Holmes.” He extended his hand. Each syllable solidified in the cold November air. “I’m the emergency liaison for the school and would appreciate every detail you can give me.”

  The detective shook his hand. “Mr. Holmes, I’m Margaret Adams. I don’t usually share details with civilians, but so far you know what I know. A woman was found dead in a tube slide this morning at around 5:45. Your football coach found her on his early morning run and called it in. No ID, no one yet seems to know who she is.”

  “We have a football team?” Sherlock murmured to me over his shoulder as Detective Adams turned away. I nodded. “Well, that’s ridiculous. The research on concussions alone—”

  “Sherlock,” I prompted him to turn back to the matter at hand. He regained the attention of the detective.

  “May I look at the body?” he asked.

  “And what qualifications do you have to do that?”

  “Him, I meant.” He pulled me to the fore. “May he look at the body?”

  “Medical expert representing the school.” I extended my hand for a shake. “John Watson, registered nurse, six years as an army medic.”

  She scrutinized me, deemed me worthy, and said, “Just don’t touch anything.”

  I nodded and moved forward, Sherlock at my side.

  She had been pretty, in a manufactured kind of way. Her big blonde hair had fallen a little in the morning dew, creating softer ringlets around her shoulders. The streaks of neon pinks and greens and blues of the blouse underneath her sleek black blazer were almost too bright to look at in the midst of the muted late-fall colors that surrounded her. Her green eyes stared cold, up to where the sun had just risen above the thinning tree line.

  “Do you have any thoughts on when she might have died?” Sherlock asked me. He kept his eyes on the body.

  “Um, sure…” I said. “I might…” I squatted down next to the end of the slide, where she was now laying almost parallel to the ground. “There’s not much I can tell without touching her, but, well, by the marks on her neck I’d say she was strangled. And see here,” I hovered my finger over the bottoms of her feet. “They’re darker, redder. Blood had enough time to pool here before the police moved her to a more horizontal position. So she had to have been dead before ten last night. To be safe, I’d say more between six and eight p.m., since it was cold out.”

  “Very good, Watson. Is there anything else you can tell me about her?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “They don’t know who she is yet, where she’s from, what she was doing here.”

  “Excuse me!” he called out to Detective Adams. She and a subordinate joined us at the slide. “You should start canvassing for anyone who knew a recently engaged teacher from North Carolina in New Hampshire for an education conference.”

  “How can you know that? There was no ID, and I told you not to touch the body,” Adams snapped.

  “Please. Sherlock. I know you have your little game you like to play where you read people, pretend you know all about them, but this is not the time,” I said.

  “It’s not a game, and this is the time. I’m giving the police valuable insight toward who this woman is,” Sherlock returned coolly. “Her blouse and blazer have slipped off of her shoulder and show fresh tan lines. Could be just returned from vacation, but I doubt it as that brand of top, Lilly Pulitzer, is particularly popular down south. Also, here, where her pants have hiked up, there is a small tattoo of a devil face.”

  “Satan stuff?” I interjected.

  “More likely a Duke University fan. You don’t get your mascot tattooed on your ankle and then move very far from home. Here’s her bag, monogrammed, another popular accoutrement for ladies in the South. It spilled as it fell down the slide ahead of her. A shopping list: sweet tea, yams, okra. Clearly preparing to cook her host a down home meal as a thank you. Also, pencils, erasers, red pens. She’s a teacher; I recognize the tools of the trade. Her thumb has a slight smudge of dry erase marker, her pinky has a pink highlighter mark. There’s a national teacher’s conference happening in Manchester this week. I was invited to lecture but declined to attend. She’s likely in town for the conference. Though someone lured her away from the city to meet her end here on an elementary school playground.”

  We stood in stunned silence. I’d never seen my friend’s abilities on such ferocious display.

  “The…the new engagement?” stammered Adams.

  “Her engagement ring still fits a little large. It swiveled on her finger as she fell and if you crouch you can see a slight gap between her skin and the untarnished metal. Meaning, of
course, that the engagement is new and she didn’t have time to get the ring adjusted before travelling.”

  “I have to admit, that’s compelling. I’ll have people check out the conference, see if they’re missing someone of her description. Interesting work, Mr. Holmes,” said Adams. Holmes nodded, less in thanks and more in agreement.

  “Sherlock,” I said, as Adams walked away. “That was—”

  “Yes, I know.” He’d started pacing around the playground, winding around slides and glancing between monkey bars. He swung himself up to the highest platform, the one that fed the slide on which our southern teacher rested.

  “Watson,” I heard his voice hiss through the bright red tube slide adjacent. “Watson, look up here.” I bent and poked my head inside. A bright flash of light sparkled in my pupils. Sherlock had snapped a picture of something streaking down the side of the slide, running about three feet along one of the seams.

  “What is it?” I asked, a little too loud.

  Adams shouted from the cluster of officers. “Hey! As impressive as you seem, Mr. Holmes, you are now tampering in a crime scene. I need to ask you both to leave.”

  Holmes leapt from the high platform. We murmured apologies and set off for my car after confirming with Lester that classes would be cancelled for the day.

  “What did you find in the slide?” I asked, once we were settled in the warmth of my vehicle.

  He pulled up the image on his phone and handed it to me. “Seemed to me like a stripe of crayon,” he said. “A stripe of green crayon.”

  • • •

  We ate a quiet dinner that night. The call had come in that the dead woman was, indeed, from North Carolina, in town for the conference. Her name was Ivy Morton, and her fiancé had been contacted. Holmes just stared into the fire after that.

  At nine o’clock, he rose to return to his apartment. I shook his hand, unsure of what else to do.

  “It’s my fault, you know,” he said, fingers grazing the door handle.

  “How is that even possible?” I asked.

  “It’s all connected, somehow. And I disregarded it as stupid children complaining about stupid imaginary problems. But children notice things. They really see the world around them because their brains haven’t yet told them to discount what they don’t want to know or don’t want to understand. I pride myself on noticing things, but I didn’t see that these children were telling me the truth, giving me everything I needed to prevent a murder.”

  “Sherlock, you couldn’t have known.”

  He shook his head, clearing out the last cobweb of self-pity. When he looked up at me again the sharp lines of his face were cut with determination. “Goodnight, Watson.”

  • • •

  Classes resumed the following day. We tried to keep the horror of what happened from the children, but, as Sherlock said, they notice. They could feel the creeping pall that had fallen over the school, could read in the ashen faces and lowered voices of teachers that unpleasantness was in the air.

  By lunch, every child knew that a woman had died on the playground, though the hows and whys varied. In the second grade, the boogeyman was responsible. The fourth graders chalked it up to a bad fall down the slide. The sixth graders had all convinced themselves a serial killer was on the loose, and each one of them could be his next vulnerable victim.

  Lester was preoccupied with Adams and her team most of the day. They were questioning the staff, reasoning that Ivy could only have come to the school to meet with one of the faculty. Sherlock and I got our interviews out of the way early. Apparently, the previous day’s display of school solidarity removed suspicion from our shoulders.

  “Something isn’t right,” Holmes grumbled as he played with the wrapping on one of my disposable thermometers. His students were in art class, drawing pictures of how the current atmosphere made them feel.

  “Well, of course everyone is out of sorts.” I was filling in students’ charts. I’d had three reports of stomachaches so far today, and two minor panic attacks.

  “No, that’s not what I mean. The police are questioning all of our teachers, but…” He tossed the wrapper on the floor, a mere foot from the trashcan. “But I just can’t imagine one of them doing it.”

  “I don’t believe anyone would like to think someone they know could commit murder,” I said. “Are you going to pick that up?”

  “That’s not what I mean, either. I think there are plenty of idiots on the staff who could be so governed by their emotions that they would strangle someone to death in the heat of the moment. Present company excluded, of course.” He made no motion to pick up his trash, so I slid from the other side of the desk with a sigh. “But could they really be so stupid as to just leave the body at their place of work? Not even bother trying to move it somewhere? Even the woods would have less obviously pointed to someone within this building.” He was staring at the fluorescent lights shimmering from the ceiling.

  “So you think someone is being framed?”

  “No, I think someone is being narrow-minded. I think we need to look outside the school.”

  “We?”

  “Yes! We are, after all, still engaged by Lester to solve this problem.”

  “Lester engaged you,” I said. “I have anxious children to attend to.”

  “Fine.” He stood and sent my stool crashing into the wall. “I need a doctor’s note. I’m going to be out sick for the rest of the day.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked, pen in hand.

  “I’m going to that conference,” he said, with a devious smile. “But first, I need to visit the drama club.”

  • • •

  A tapping on my door that evening roused me from my accidental fireplace slumber. A glance through the peephole revealed a tall blond man, in wireframe glasses and a tattered blazer, leaning against the banister. It seemed too late for a salesperson, and it wasn’t an election year. I cracked the door, keeping the chain fixed on the inside.

  “Can I help you?” I asked. There was something familiar in his cheekbones.

  He hit his consonants hard in a Midwestern drawl. “Sure, sir, I was hoping you could point me in the direction of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment?”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “Something like that,” he replied.

  “Sorry,” I lied. “I only know him in passing. He lives somewhere in this building, but I can’t be more specific.”

  The accent lifted and my friend’s voice echoed out of this stranger’s visage. “Well done, John. I appreciate you not giving me up. You never know what kind of psychopath might try to gain entry into my abode.”

  I should have been shocked by his transformation, perplexed and concerned by his assumption that psychopaths may be after him. Instead, I unchained my door and let him in.

  “Just came from drinks with a few folks from the conference,” he said, removing his wig.

  “Why the subterfuge?” I inquired, settling back into the chair from which I was awakened.

  “People know me, John.” I rolled my eyes at his lack of modesty. “I mean, I was asked to speak at the conference. If word got around that I was there, possibly sniffing into what happened at the school, and if one of the conference goers was responsible, the game would be up.”

  “Should I ask how you learned to put on so convincing a performance?”

  “Oh, I minored in Theater Arts as an undergraduate,” he said dismissively. This was not surprising. A man of many interests, by the age of thirty he had also earned two bachelor’s degrees—one in the study of human bones, the other in abnormal psychology—and master’s degrees in soil science and optics. He had also completed a dissertation on how olfactory senses can trigger repressed memories in middle-aged men who had particularly embarrassed themselves one time in middle school.

  “So, what did you find at the conference?”

  “I learned that Miss Ivy Morton was attending for the fifth year in a row from a small but well-ranked
grade school in suburban North Carolina. I learned that she had been staying with a teacher friend, and that she was supposed to put together a large southern feast the night she was killed as a thank you, doubling as an apology for being unusually ‘flaky.’”

  “Flaky how?”

  “Late for dinner plans, skipping lunches and sessions altogether. Quite unusual behavior, according to my sources.”

  “Strange. Did any of them say she knew people at this school, in this town? Was anyone associated with the Baker School there? ”

  Sherlock shook his head.

  “It’s a rather out of the way spot for someone to choose if they have no ties to it.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Sherlock agreed. “I’m starting to doubt that anyone at the conference murdered Ivy Morton.”

  “So one of our teachers, then?” I shivered, despite the fire.

  Sherlock shook his head again. “I don’t quite think so…” he murmured to the flames. But rather than look dismayed at a lack of progress his eyes were shining and alert, darting left to right as though reading the shimmering embers.

  • • •

  “Mr. Watson!” Sherlock thundered into my office the next morning, Bobby Simmons in tow. “I am commandeering your office.”

  “And may I ask why?” I finished wrapping Amelia’s elbow and sent her back to gym class. Etiquette had never been Sherlock’s strong suit. On that first day of term five years ago, the seasoned Baker School teachers had been eager to parse and subsequently categorize us newcomers. As we settled into the gleaming auburn wood of the teacher’s lounge for lunch they began their ritual round-robin challenge to expound upon why they dedicated their lives to education.

  “I love children.”

  “I want to mold the minds of the future.”

  “I want to help kids navigate the complicated paths of growing up.”

  And then came Sherlock. His first half-day of corralling fifteen ten-year-olds had already produced a slight twitch in his right eye.

  “I am a brilliant man. Some would say I’m far too smart to be wasting my time teaching arithmetic and reading,” he had said, impervious to the affronted looks being cast about the table. “But years of interacting with general humanity have lead me to one conclusion. My intellectual gifts must be used to improve the minds of the next generation, lest we devolve as a society into the slime of the eukaryotic pool from whence we came.”