In the Company of Sherlock Holmes

by Leslie S. Klinger

  Things weren’t so good at home. Lisa’s ever more desperate efforts to jump-start a life had drained and hollowed her out and some days she found it hard to get out of bed. The rest of them chipped in to shop, walk the dog, and run errands. Portia, who’d just gotten her driver’s license, was especially solicitous, even driving across town to get Lisa’s favorite Lebanese food.

  Bill told Lisa about his raise. He was glad Moriarty had sworn him to secrecy. Lisa wouldn’t want to hear about him analyzing the buying patterns of thousands of pregnant women across America when her womb remained empty.

  Helpless to make things right for Lisa, Bill turned to what he could control.

  Project Sherlock’s 87% success rate might be high enough for Moriarty, but that meant 13% of their pregnant guests slipped through the cracks. Bill began to stay later at work, manipulating variables, writing new programs, casting a wider net. The work was painstaking, meticulous and exhausting and Bill envied the real Sherlock his 7% solution, “so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind.”

  One night when he’d knocked off early at 10 p.m., Bill was opening a bottle of zinfandel when Lisa walked in, looking glum. He got another glass down and poured them each one.

  “I shouldn’t,” Lisa said, twirling the stem and sniffing the ruby liquid longingly.

  Why not? Unless there’s something you’re not telling me, it’s not like you’d be harming a fetus, Bill thought.

  But Bill knew it was part of her regimen to encourage procreation: no booze, very little caffeine. Healthy eating. Exercise.

  “Oh, I might as well,” Lisa said, lifting her glass. “You know, sometimes I think . . .”

  Then she stopped, because Bill had fled the kitchen and was hurrying upstairs, muttering to himself.

  “For heaven’s sake, Bill, I can’t even talk to you anymore, you’re always working. Hello! This is your wife, your family calling. Wake up, Bill.”

  But Bill was already at his desk, feverishly sketching out a new algorithm. Alcohol! Caffeine! Consumption of both would drop among pregnant women. But conversely, they might buy more decaf coffee and herbal tea. Bill worked into the night, integrating these new markers.

  When he ran the numbers again, his prediction rate rose seven-tenths of one percent.

  He began to scrutinize his own family.

  When he commented on the gray lace mantilla spreading across the crown of Lisa’s usually glossy black hair, she frowned and said that hair dyes could be absorbed through the bloodstream. A week later, he saw a bottle of henna in the bathroom. After reading the ingredients, he googled “natural hair coloring” and tinkered more with his calculations.

  Watching Portia “like” a band on Facebook, he realized that tracking the “likes” and sites visited by newly pregnant women would give him more pieces of the puzzle.

  Bill’s prediction rate inched up, but perfection eluded him.

  He yearned for a program as pristine as Fermat’s Theorem, as all-encompassing as E = MC squared. He sought no less than the golden ratio of pregnancy prediction.

  He became a man obsessed, staying at the office til midnight, working at home all weekend. And the number kept rising: 95%, 97%, until he hit 99.3%. Try as he might, he couldn’t crack that last seven-tenths of one percent. At last, he decided that further refinements were probably impossible, not to mention statistically insignificant.

  He had to stop before he made himself crazy.

  More crazy, that is.

  Soon thereafter, Moriarty called him in and told him that Landmart had created a new position for him—Director of Analytics & Forecasting. With it came a fat promotion, a corner office, and his own staff.

  Bill hurried home, elated to tell Lisa. They’d be able to go to Europe this summer and put aside money for each girl’s college tuition. They’d be able to afford another round of fertility treatments.

  In the foyer, he stopped to look through the mail. A few bills, more college brochures for Portia. The usual circulars, junk mail, and catalogs. His eye caught the familiar Landmart logo. Because of course, the Gleasons were Landmart guests too. A feeling of pride suffused him at what he and the team had accomplished. And how much he enjoyed his job. He made a good living, and even if it meant long hours, it allowed him to provide for his family. He might have trouble communicating his affection for them, but he loved them. He’d do anything for them.

  Bill picked up the Landmart catalog and leafed through it. Its hotshot art director had won awards for bold design and ad copy that invoked deep subconscious anxieties but also reassurances that buying these products would propel you into the luxury lifestyle depicted in the catalog.

  Bill saw an ad for a tractor lawnmower and one for a kitty condo. In between was an ad for a baby crib.

  He turned the page. Next to ads for bookshelves and potting soil was an ad for prenatal vitamins.

  Something flickered in his heart and he flipped the pages faster.

  A crock pot, a pup tent, skis, and a baby monitor.

  Paper towels, brightly colored throw rugs, scented candles, and disposable diapers.

  Every couple of pages, subtle as hell but also clear as a bell if you’d been in on the conception, if you’d sat through the gestation at endless design meetings, arguing about color and font size and how to manipulate a pregnant woman’s subconscious.

  Duvets, toasters, and baby strollers.

  Bill heard a ringing in his ears.

  It couldn’t be.

  “Hi hon,” Lisa said.

  She walked up to kiss him and he grabbed her.

  “Lisa! You didn’t tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “The good news!”

  She disengaged herself and stepped back. “What news? What’s wrong, Bill? You sound really agitated.”

  She began to pat his shoulder in a way that usually calmed him down.

  He couldn’t look at her. Instead, he addressed the vase of tiger lilies on the entryway table.

  “How long have you known? Was it that day it was storming outside, with all the lightning and the thunder? There was something special about . . .”

  “Known what?”

  “I can see why you wouldn’t want to say anything to get our hopes up after the mis . . .”

  He caught himself.

  “Oh, honey,” Bill said, “I know how badly you wanted this. I’m so happy.”

  He picked up her up and twirled her around.

  “Bill,” she squirmed. “Put me down.”

  He tried to speak but the words locked up inside and made him hyperventilate.

  “Are you having some kind of fit?”

  The tenor of Lisa’s voice caused Portia, who was at the dining room table studying with a friend, to look up from her AP Physics book.

  Bill got ahold of himself. He had to respect Lisa’s wishes to keep the news quiet. So he hugged her again and whispered in her ear.

  “How far along are we?”

  Hand across her mouth, Lisa backed away in horror.

  “What gave you? . . . I would have told . . . I’m not . . . pregnant,” she hissed out the last word between clenched teeth.

  Stunned, Bill looked from his wife’s agonized face to the brochure on the foyer table.

  Project Sherlock predicted pregnancy in Landmart guests with 99.3% accuracy. It extrapolated based solely on facts, on logic. It was impeccable. He, Bill, had made it so.

  Snatching the brochure off the table, he stabbed at the images.

  “L-l-l ook! . . . Ads for b-b-baby things. That’s what I’ve been working on. The top-secret program I couldn’t talk about. The raise. It’s . . .”

  Lisa was shaking her head and whispering “no” over and over.

  Upstairs, a door slammed.

  Bill’s head jerked up.

  Dos.

  Fifteen years old going on twenty-three. Always posing and voguing in the mirror, obsessed with boys.

  If Lisa wasn’t pregnant, was
it possible that Dos, his boy-crazy little girl, had gone and gotten herself . . .

  No!

  Bill refused to follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion.

  And yet, the data didn’t lie. He knew that. Though there was that pesky 7%. Yes that’s what it had to be. His family fell into the statistically insignificant minority.

  Bill almost cried with relief.

  In the dining room, Portia and her classmate were somehow managing to study. Funny how life went on, despite the complete meltdown of his orderly, logical life.

  But what if Project Sherlock wasn’t as sound he had claimed? With his swagger and his hubris. His haughty dismissal of those peons in art and marketing. His insistence that only numbers told the truth. Was Project Sherlock flawed in some basic way? Was Landmart funneling huge amounts of money into something that would never pay off? In which case, maybe his career was about to go down the drain.

  Bill had to go upstairs immediately and review Sherlock’s analytics, piece by infinitesimal piece. It might take weeks, but if there was a flaw in the program, by God, he’d find it. He’d fix it, then he’d run diagnostics. He’d correct the error.

  But first, he owed Lisa an apology. Lisa, his beautiful wife, who looked like she was about to cry.

  Unable to look into her eyes, Bill focused on the two heads in the next room bent over their textbook. How the streetlight shining through the window—at a 75 degree angle, he calculated—caught the red highlights in Portia’s hair and turned the short tousled blond hair of her companion to gold. Bill searched his memory for the boy’s name. He’d seen this particular boy before, but he was so bad at matching up faces and names. He’d have to ask Lisa.

  Lisa, whose voice broke through his reverie:

  “Bill? Are you even listening? Have you been drinking?”

  She reached for the catalog but fumbled. The catalog hit the floor, falling open to reveal a plump, photogenic baby sitting in an ergonomically correct high chair.

  And as Bill stooped to pick it up, he suddenly remembered the name of the boy sitting next to Portia. It was Zach. He was on the swim team. He was one of the gang that Portia hung out with.

  Then he noticed something else.

  Under the table, where no one could see, Portia and Zach were holding hands.

  Bill straightened and stood there, swaying.

  He rewound his memory and saw Portia coming home after doing the marketing, Landmart bags dangling from each hand. Good, conscientious Portia, who volunteered to shop for her mother who was ill in bed after a fertility treatment. Or more recently, with depression. Portia, who always did her schoolwork, who managed her time wisely, who planned ahead, who was destined for a wonderful college.

  They’d added her to their Landmart credit card this year so she could shop for what she needed.

  What she needed.

  Bill began to sprint up the stairs like a madman, leaving his wife in the foyer, thinking he’d lost his mind.

  Upstairs, he slapped the computer out of hibernation and began to tap out the Ride of the Valkyries on the desk.

  Lisa came up behind him. She leaned into him, placed her hands on his shoulders.

  “Talk to me, hon,” she said, her voice soft and pleading. “You’re scaring me.”

  Bill whirled in his chair.

  “Oh, Lisa!”

  And then in a calm voice, he sketched out the entire project. How he’d slaved at improving his prediction models for pregnancy. The catalog on the floor of their foyer. How he’d seen Portia’s hand under the table, gripped tightly with the boy’s. And above it, the curve of a belly that hadn’t been there before, that he and Lisa had been too busy and obsessed with their own problems to notice.

  “Portia? Do you really think it’s possible?” Lisa said wonderingly.

  “Of course not. There’s a mistake somewhere,” Bill muttered. “I must be wrong. I have to be wrong.”

  He paused.

  “Because if I’m wrong, then everything is still all right.”

  “What if she really is pregnant?” Lisa said.

  Her voice was thick and dreamy and her eyes were suffused with the warm memory of cradling soft mewling helpless mammals. “Portia’s baby! Our grandchild. We could raise it here. She could still go off to college. It’s not an ideal situation. But it could work. We’d make it work. People do it all the time.”

  Bill groaned.

  “Lisa, how can you be so calm and rational about this?”

  He turned back to the screen, which was taking forever to boot up, and in the pauses between flickering images, he saw the two of them silhouetted against the dark screen, him slumped in his chair, and Lisa behind him, hands resting on his shoulders, her face uplifted, radiant and beautiful. Expectant.

  The image was so dramatic, so strange, and yet familiar, that he thought he’d seen it in a dream, his wife’s yearning for a child suddenly answered, but in this most statistically improbable of ways. He saw himself stumbling out of bed at 3 a.m. to answer hungry cries, changing diapers, wiping pureed peas off a tiny chin, and the entire tumultuous experience roared through him, filling him with horror and love and confusion and exhaustion. He couldn’t do it again. But then Lisa pressed against him, her limbs warm and pliant. His heart swelled with love for his wife and his family. Whatever form that family might take. And as they leaned into each other, the space between them dissolved, and he felt more connected to her than he had in years and he knew that somehow it would be all right. Then Lisa shifted and the cold air rushed between them. The safe feeling vanished. Bill felt the stable, orderly life he’d worked so hard for rise up like the chimera it had always been and leave his body.

  And as he waited for the pillars of gleaming data to scroll across the screen, Bill put his head down on the keyboard and cried:

  “Please Lord, just this one time, let Sherlock be wrong.”

  BY ANY OTHER NAME

  by Michael Dirda

  “How could you? Just how could you?”

  Jean Leckie looked up at Arthur Conan Doyle, the tears streaming down her cheeks. The couple were seated in a quiet corner of an ABC Tea shop in Camden Town. Her companion, dressed in handsome tweeds, appeared perplexed.

  “Dearest, sweetest love. Please don’t cry.”

  “It’s easy enough for you to say. Don’t you care about my feelings?”

  “I adore you.”

  “Save that for Touie, you hypocrite. You clearly adored her enough to make your marriage, your happy marriage the subject of this!” Jean brought out a book from her capacious handbag and slammed it on the table.

  Arthur quietly picked up the small volume and looked at the cover: A Duet, by A. Conan Doyle. The pretty but distraught young woman continued:

  “Nothing to say for yourself? You look as though you’d never seen it before.”

  “Darling, A Duet came out years ago. I can hardly remember anything about the book.”

  “Really? And I suppose you don’t remember this either.”

  She reached into her bag again and tugged out a thick bundle of paper, each page covered with neat handwriting.

  “What’s that?”

  “So soon they forget. You gave this to me as a gift. It’s the manuscript to that charming portrait of the happy marriage of you and Touie, and of your domestic bliss together, a bliss suddenly threatened by”—another round of sobs—“a scheming Other Woman. Now who, you might ask, could that female demon, that evil succubus, that Lilith be? Could it just possibly be Miss Jean Leckie, the unhappiest woman in England? And to think I believed all your declarations of love, to think how long I’ve been waiting . . .”

  “Uh, Jean.”

  “What? You . . . you toad, you viper. What?”

  “This is all ancient history, sweetheart. Why are you bringing it up now?”

  “Well, darling,” replied Jean coldly. “I finally read the book. I was afraid to earlier, but felt that I should if we were going to. . . .”


  “Jean, please don’t cry.”

  “Arthur, this book makes it impossible for us to marry.”

  “What!”

  “Yes, Arthur, I would always live in the shadow of the love you depict so tenderly in these pages. I couldn’t bear it. And who knows, Touie’s spirit could be watching us right now. Her invisible presence could be hovering nearby.” She glanced around the tea shop.

  Arthur Conan Doyle slumped resignedly in his chair, then seemed to pull himself together and finally said: “Jean, I ought to have told you this long ago. I don’t know whose marriage that book portrays but it has nothing to do with me or Touie—or us.”

  Jean began to laugh, then stopped.

  “What are you saying? Next, you’ll be claiming that you aren’t the well-known author A. Conan Doyle.”

  “Actually, I’m not.”

  “Liar.”

  “No, really, I’m not. And I didn’t write A Duet, my dove.”

  “Your name is on the title page.”

  “My name is on lots of title pages. While I’m not absolutely positive, I think A Duet is actually by Grant Allen, the chap who brought out The Woman Who Did.”

  “But what about this manuscript?”

  “You may have noticed that there aren’t any corrections, erasures, or revisions to any of the pages.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s because I simply copied it out from the book.”

  Three months later:

  “So A. Conan Doyle is a Strand house name. I should have guessed.”

  Zebulon Dene—clubman, journalist, and occasional consultant to Mr. Sherlock Holmes—blew smoke from his cigarette and leaned back into his favorite red leather settee. Outside the bow window of the Amnesiacs’ Club—where anything could be said and nothing would ever be remembered, not even in a court of law—he watched the passersby hurrying to the nearby underground station.

  “Yes,” he continued, “I should have guessed long ago. Nobody could write that much, in so many different styles. But how did it come about?”

  Herbert Greenhough Smith, editor of the Strand Magazine, took a sip of brandy. “I suppose it was because of Watson. He came to me with these wonderful accounts of his adventures with Holmes, yet was clearly uneasy about using his own name on them. It wouldn’t do, he said, for a medical man to be scribbling fiction, not if he was to be taken seriously as a doctor.”