In London, a man sat reading under a painting of a butterfly. For every action . . .
However inconsequential it may seem . . .
There is an equal and opposite reaction in the River of Time that flows endlessly through the universe. However unseen and utterly disconnected it may seem.
Every day, in Rio de Janeiro, late in the afternoon, there occurs a torrential downpour. It only lasts a few minutes, but the wet, like bullets, spangs off the tin roofs of the favellas beneath the statue of Christ the Redeemer. On this day, at the moment nothing was happening in the Gibson Desert, the rain did not fall; the Avenida Atlantica was dry and reflective. Pernambuco had hail.
Later that day, a trumpet player in a fusion-rock band in Cleveland, Ohio heard from a distant cousin in Oberlin, who had borrowed fifty dollars for a down payment on a Honda Civic ten years earlier and had never bothered to repay him. She said she was sending a check immediately. He was pleased and told the story to his friend, the lead guitarist in the group. Four hours later, during a break in that night’s gig, sitting in just a club, y’know, a woman unknown to either of them drifted up between them, smiled and inquired, “How are ya?” And in the course of a few minutes’ conversation both the guitarist and the trumpet player recounted the unexpected windfall of the stale fifty dollar repayment. They never saw her again. Never.
Even later that day, a hanging ornament from a 4th Century BCE Dagoba stupa originally from Sri Lanka, missing from a museum in Amsterdam since 1964, was mailed to a general post office box in Geneva, Switzerland stamped STOLEN PROPERTY ADVISE INTERPOL. Stamped in red. Hand-stamped. At the Elephant Bar of the Bangkok Marriott, a Thai businessman was approached by the bartender, extending a red telephone. “Are you Mr. Mandapa?” The gentleman looked up from his gin sling, nodded, and took the receiver. “Hello yes; this is Michael Mandapa . . .” and he listened for a few seconds, smiling at first. “I don’t think that’s possible,” he said, softly, no longer smiling. Listened, then: “Not so soon. I’ll need at least a week, ten days, I have to . . .” He went silent, listened, his face drew taut, he ran the back of his free hand across his lips, then said, “If it’s raining there, and it’s monsoon, you will do what you have to do. I’ll try my best.”
He listened, sighed deeply, then put the phone back in its cradle on the bartop. The bartender noticed, came, and picked up the red telephone. “Everything o-kay?” he said, reading the strictures of Mr. Mandapa’s face. “Fine, yes, fine,” Mr. Mandapa replied, and left the Elephant Bar without tipping the man who had unknowingly saved his life.
Somewhere, much earlier, a man stepped on, and crushed beneath his boot, a dragonfly, a Meganeura.
The next morning, at eight a.m., four cars pulled up in front of a badly-tended old house in Fremont, Nebraska. Weeds and sawgrass were prevalent. The day was heavily overcast, even for a month that usually shone brightly. From the first car, a Fremont police cruiser, stepped a man wearing a Borsalino, and from beside and behind him, three uniformed officers of the local police force. The second car bore two Nebraska State Troopers; and in the third car were a man and a woman in dark black suits, each carrying an attaché case. The fourth car’s doors opened quickly, wings spread, and four large men of several colors emerged, went around and opened the trunk, and took out large spades and shovels. The group advanced on the house, the Sheriff of Fremont, Nebraska leading the phalanx.
He knocked on the sagging screen door three times.
No one came to the closed inner door. He knocked again, three times. An elderly white woman, stooped and halting and gray, dusted with the weariness of difficult years, opened the inner door a crack and peered at the assemblage beyond the screen door. Her tone was midway between startled and concerned: “Yes?”
“Miz Brahm?”
“Uh, yeah . . .”
“We’re here with a search warrant and some legal folks, that lady and gentleman there.” He nodded over his shoulder at the pair of black suits. “They’ve been okay’d by the Court to go through your propitty, lookin’ for some books your son took to sell on eBay or whatever, for a lady back East in New York. Is Billy here?”
“Billy don’t live here no more.” She started to close the door. The Sheriff pushed his palm against the screen door, making an oval depression. “I asked you if Billy was here, Ma’am.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“May we come in, please?”
“You g’wan, get offa my property!”
At the same moment Miz Brahm was ordering the Sheriff of Fremont, Nebraska off her porch, in Mbuji-Mayi, near the Southern border between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, a representative of Doctors Without Borders found his way to a small vegetable garden outside three hut-residences beyond a wan potato field. He carried two linen-wrapped packages, and when a nut-brown old man appeared at the entrance to the largest hut, he extended the small parcels, made the usual obeisance, and backed away quietly. Miz Brahm was still arguing with the Nebraska State Troopers and the men with shovels, and the duo in black suits, but mostly with the Sheriff of Fremont, Nebraska, nowhere near Zambia. There was, however, thunder in the near-distance and darkening clouds. The air whipped frenziedly. A drop of rain spattered on a windshield.
The argument would not end. Inevitably, the officers of the law grew impatient with diversionary answers, and yanked the screen door away from its rusted latch. It fell on the porch, Miz Brahm tried to push the front door closed on the men, but they staved her back, and rushed in. Shouts, screaming ensued.
A hairy, unshaven man with three pot-bellies charged out of a back hall, a tire iron doubled-fisted behind his head; he was yowling. One of the state troopers clotheslined him, sending him sprawling onto his back in the passageway. Miz Brahm kept up a strident shrieking in the background; one of the attorneys–when attention was elsewhere–chopped her across the throat, and she settled lumpily against a baseboard.
“That ain’t Billy,” Miz Brahm managed to gargle, phlegm and spittle serving as consonants. “Thas his broth-er!”
One of the troopers yelled, “Let’s get ’em both!” He pulled his sidearm and snarled at the downed tri-belly, “Where’s yer brother?”
“You ain’t gonna take neither of ’em!” screamed the old lady: a foundry noon-whistle shriek; she was pulling a rusty hatchet out from behind a chifferobe. The trooper kneecapped her. The hatchet hit the linoleum.
Four hours later two of the men with shovels, who had been stacking and restacking magazines, digging out rat nests and spading up rotted floorboards, found Billy hiding in the back corner of the last storage quonset behind the property. He tried to break through the wall, and one of the laborers slammed the spade across the back of his head. The search went on for the rest of that day, into the next, before the attorneys were satisfied. The weed-overgrown property was a labyrinth filled with tumbling-down shelves and closets, bookcases, cardboard boxes piled so high that the ones on the bottom had been crushed in: vintage pulp fiction magazines, comic books in Mylar sleeves, corded sheaves of newspapers, and the forty-seven pieces Billy had cozened out of the old woman Back East.
The next day, the entire family was in custody. At the same time, but eight hours later by the clock, Greenwich Mean Time, the man in London who had been reading “The Red-Headed League” closed the book, looked long at the wonderful painting of an ancient butterfly above the mantel, smiled and said, “Ah, so that’s how it all comes together. ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico.’ Clever.”
This story is dedicated to the memory of my friend, Ray Bradbury.
THE ADVENTURE OF MY IGNOBLE ANCESTRESS
by Nancy Holder
It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .
. . . that sometimes mysteries can’t be solved.
My parents were killed on a vacation to Rome to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. They’d been so excited. “Still in love,” my mother told me on the phone. “I wish that you . . .”
And then she’d
trailed off, because I’d already told her that somehow the love gene had skipped a generation. I had my work. I was a New York Times bestselling author, and that was enough.
They were shot in an alley on the way back from a nice meal. Robbed. They had invited me along to Rome (I am—I was—their only child, and we were close) but I didn’t go because I had a book deadline, and I had waited too long to get started. Procrastination probably saved my life.
After my parents were murdered, I dropped everything and devoted myself to their case. I spent an incredible amount of money on private detectives and false leads. I got scammed a dozen times. A year passed, two, three. I never finished that book. My editor stopped asking about my progress. My literary agent suggested that a break would be good for both of us. I still had some cash left at that point, and I decided to make it last until I woke from this terrible nightmare. Money from royalties would come in the way it always had.
While that was true up to a point, the amount I received decreased every year as readers moved on. But I could not move on. Nothing I did made a difference. No one came forward with a name or a reason. No case-breaking clues were found. Still, I didn’t give up. I badgered the Roman police, I exploited all forms of social media, and I kept up the heat.
That was how Blackfield Carpenter, an English law firm, linked me, Nancy Holder the horror writer, to a Victorian-era banker named Alexander Holder. It turns out that I’m a descendant of this man, the closest one, in fact.
And Alexander Holder was a client of Sherlock Holmes.
Dr. Watson described Alexander’s case in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet.” I had never heard of it, but as soon as I was contacted, I read it right away. It was riveting stuff, and I wished there were a Sherlock Holmes in my time. Surely he would have solved my parents’ murders by then.
Blackfield Carpenter explained that, while there was little cash included in the inheritance, I was now the owner of “Fairbank,” Alexander’s large Victorian house. Unfortunately (from their point of view), it was the subject of a court case. Five years previous, Fair Estates, a housing development company, had bought up a vast tract of land in southern London. Fairbank sat inside the perimeter, and the developer argued that they owned the house as well and had every right to demolish it, which they planned to do.
A group called the Holmes Trust, dedicated to preserving buildings and memorabilia connected to the Great Detective, had filed a lawsuit to stop them. During the bitter legal battle, Fairbank had been set on fire—arson was proven—and although the stone house had been saved from complete destruction, it was in bad shape. Ironically, around then the British economy had tanked and the developer walked away from the project altogether.
Now the Trust wanted to meet with me to discuss various “schemes” to restore the house. I figured they didn’t realize I was nearly broke, and I didn’t tell them otherwise. I didn’t exactly want the world to know that the happy-looking woman in the photograph on the dust jackets of my (aging) novels was no longer the “wildly successfully bestselling author” she had once had been. So I responded vaguely and diffidently, but they were happy that I had responded at all. As far as they were concerned, the game was afoot.
My British lawyers wanted me to come to England to take possession of the house. The Holmes Trust was even more eager to meet me in person. Nothing was happening in Rome–nothing had happened, ever–but it was still very hard for me to leave. I had a panic attack just thinking about it. I knew I wasn’t being rational. I knew I had put everything on hold, allowed this single event to take over my entire life. I had lost friends, my career. I just couldn’t seem to move on because of my obsession—the awful feeling that if I didn’t remain vigilant, justice would never be served. I wrote horror; I wrote about terrible things—or I had—and I knew that sometimes, the monster wins.
Then it dawned on me that the Holmes Trust might be interested in purchasing Fairbank from me. That would mean more money for the battle. I flew to London and rented a car, and from there drove through bucketing rain to Streatham, in South London, and found myself in a wasteland of moved earth and concrete foundations, all that was left of Fair Estates. And there stood Fairbank itself, a blackened heap surrounded by a chain link fence and forbidding KEEP OUT signs.
Sections of the two-story structure stood intact, and as I waited for the security guard to answer my text and let me in, my imagination wandered through the rooms, replaying the crime that had taken place inside those very walls.
I’d already signed a million forms and taken legal possession of the property, and the representative from Blackfield Carpenter and a security guard were happy to see me as they drove up and found me waiting for them in my car. The rain was pouring so hard I could barely make out their faces.
The cold was bone-chilling. I began to rethink my romantic idea of spending the night in the house as I gathered up my sleeping bag and suitcase. My black umbrella collided with that of the lawyer from Blackfield Carpenter as he took my suitcase. I could see my breath.
“It’s haunted, y’know.” The guard grinned as he unlocked the padlock on the front door. “You can hear footsteps. Crying sometimes.”
“I see,” I said, and despite Rome, I actually managed a faint smile. It would be nice to be haunted by something else.
“Some say it’s Alexander Holder, grieving for his lost niece, Mary,” he continued. He looked at me expectantly.
“I know the story,” I replied. “Mary conspired with her lover to steal the Beryl Coronet from Alexander. It was being held as collateral for a loan.”
“Yes. Sir George Burnwell was the paramour. Sherlock Holmes set everything to rights,” said the young solicitor from Blackfield Carpenter. “The coronet was returned to the ‘highest in the land’, assumed to be the Prince of Wales. The bank received the prince’s loan payment of fifty thousand pounds plus interest, and Holder’s honor remained intact.”
I said, “And Alexander reconciled with Arthur, his son, whom he had falsely accused of the theft.”
“And Mary and Burnwell were never seen nor heard from again,” the solicitor added.
“Hence the ghostly grieving,” I said.
“Hence,” he replied, and the door creaked open.
We three entered Fairbank. The Holmes Trust had gone to some effort to make the place habitable—mostly cleaning—and they had purchased some flashlights, a battery-powered lantern, and a heater for me. On a hexagonal inlaid table, they had placed a crystal vase filled with red roses and beside it, a fruit basket. I offered an apple to the lawyer and the guard but both turned me down. There was no other furniture; the Trust had lent me the table. What had been retrievable had been taken to the Sherlock Holmes wing of the British Museum, although I could request the return of any items I wanted.
I literally walked through Dr. Watson’s narration of the crime as we explored the dank old house. There was the window where naive Mary Holder had passed the beautiful coronet to the evil and dashing Sir George Burnwell. There, the kitchen door where Lucy Parr, the maid whom Mary had half-heartedly tried to pin the crime on, had snuck out to see her sweetheart, Francis Prosper, the one-legged greengrocer. Upstairs, I inspected the ruins of Mary’s room, which she had fled as soon as she realized that Sherlock Holmes would find her out. Next, the equally decrepit room of Arthur, son of the house, falsely accused of the crime. Because he was deeply in love with the real thief, his cousin Mary, he had refused to defend himself. Chivalry had landed him—temporarily—in irons.
And then there was the blackened, smoky chamber of the mercurial Alexander Holder himself, who had nearly given himself a stroke during the affair.
Sections of the ceiling were draped with plastic sheeting, not too effective against the downpour. The house was charred, damp, and moldy; I wondered how on earth Fairbank could ever be restored to its former glory.
We discovered that below-stairs had the driest rooms, although plenty of walls were wet and mildewed. During Mary Holder
’s time, the house had a typically large staff: four maids had slept in the house; the two male servants, groom and page, had lived elsewhere. With the help of “my” two men, I arranged my heater and lights and unrolled my sleeping bag. After I assured them I’d be fine, and promised to call if I needed anything, they left.
Rome to London is a short flight, but emotionally, I had traveled leagues. I kept panicking. I just knew that because of my absence, a clue would be overlooked, a confession, ignored. I was aware that I had post-traumatic stress disorder, and I was obsessive. I had strong sleeping pills that I hardly ever took because I was afraid I would miss a call. It was the middle of the night in all of Europe, so I dry-swallowed a pill and crossed my fingers. Sometimes they worked, and sometimes they didn’t. As I drifted off, I told my parents good night. I always did. And then I cried.
I always did that, too.
So when I woke up to the sound of sobbing, I wasn’t surprised. But after a few seconds of coming out of my medicated hangover, I realized that this crying wasn’t coming from me.
Thunder and lighting crashed over an echoic, low moaning. The sound was grief-stricken, a keening; then across the room, by the glowing orange light of my ceramic heater, I saw the profile of a woman cut out against the wall. It wasn’t my shadow. I caught my breath and lifted my flashlight into the dark corners. There was no one else in the room to cast the silhouette.
The crying grew louder.
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes Page 23
