Shelley whipped the cover from the first easel with a theatrical flourish. On the board were several grainy photos from a security camera of a white minivan, clearly showing the license plate.
“I’ve already run the plates,” Shelley said emotionlessly. “The car is registered as your wife’s personal vehicle. Note the timestamp on the photos. This was taken as you pursued Cassidy and me after our meeting at the Archive.”
“That proves nothing,” Chastain blustered, but I noticed he was sweating a little.
“Since you’re a board member, you knew the museum door code, so you didn’t have to pick the lock when you tried to find the box in the acquisition room,” Shelley continued, with a gaze that gave no quarter. “I was able to pick up a partial fingerprint from Alistair’s car door that wasn’t his. It wasn’t in the police database, but then again, I don’t imagine you’ve ever been arrested, so it wouldn’t be on file—yet.”
Chastain was growing red in the face. “I’ve had enough,” he said, and started to rise.
Shelley’s gaze stopped him. “Your family was able to silence Peter Studebaker, but with the internet, it’s not quite as easy anymore. Sit down.” Chastain glowered, but he sat.
“Your great-grandfather didn’t approve of Marie’s choice of suitors,” Shelley went on. “He wasn’t used to being disobeyed. So after a particularly vicious argument, he decided to throw a scare into her,” Shelley said. “He tossed a small bottle of alcohol with a burning wick through the window, expecting it to frighten her into listening to him, maybe even push her into Jacob’s arms as her rescuing hero.”
Shelley unveiled a photograph of the threatening note with a snap of the wrist. Next to it was a second photo of an old ledger page. “I’m a trained expert in handwriting analysis. But just to be sure, I sent these two examples to a friend of mine who specializes in such things for the FBI. We are both one hundred percent certain that these two specimens were written by the same person.”
She turned to Oliver Chastain. “The ledger was undeniably written by your great-grandfather. And the evidence shows that the letter threatening Marie Chastain was written by the same person—her own father.”
“This is ridiculous,” Oliver Chastain fumed.
“Your great-grandfather was appalled that his little trick to frighten Marie went so badly wrong. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt about being heartsick over starting a fire that killed one person and injured another. I’m sure he also feared prosecution for the murder, should the truth come out. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real reason why Marie’s father committed suicide.”
“You can’t prove that,” Oliver Chastain snapped.
“I just have,” Shelley replied with a smug smile. “I think the family knew—or strongly suspected—the reason for your family patriarch’s suicide. But after examining the evidence, there’s another story that you don’t know—one that will be disclosed tonight for the first time.”
Shelley whipped the cover from the third easel. “Marie Chastain did not die in the fire that night. The remains recovered belonged to Jacob Whitley.”
Everyone stared at Shelley. “That’s impossible,” Oliver Chastain said. “Jacob Whitley lived to be an old man up in the New York mountains.”
Shelley gave him a confident smile. “Someone using Jacob’s name did indeed live several more decades in seclusion. But it was not Jacob Whitley. Observe,” Shelley said, pointing to the display.
“Here is a sample of Marie Chastain’s writing from her diary. And here is a sample of a letter ostensibly written by Jacob Whitley to Rebecca after the fire.”
“They don’t look anything alike,” Oliver Chastain protested.
Shelley looked at the samples. “No, they don’t. Nor does that letter supposedly by Jacob Whitley look remotely like the large number of documents historically confirmed to have been written by him before the fire.” She wheeled on Chastain like the prosecutor in a courtroom drama.
“That’s because Jacob Whitley never made it out of that burning room,” Shelley said. “It was the melted Saint Gaudens that gave it away. The temperature at which gold melts is the same temperature at which a human body is cremated. Jacob Whitley had just completed a lucrative business deal the morning of the fatal fire. The record shows he was paid in twenty-dollar gold pieces—Saint Gaudens, the ledger specifies. He had one of those gold pieces in his pocket when the room around him went up in flames.”
Shelley strode back and forth, smacking the poster boards with a wooden pointer for emphasis as she passed. “It all comes back to why Marie and her father argued so violently, why her refusal of an arranged marriage would have moved a solid community leader to extreme measures. It wasn’t mere stubbornness. Marie had done something her father found unforgivable.”
She stopped in front of the final exhibit and pulled the cover free. “Marie and Rebecca were lovers.” Chastain looked like he was going to argue, but Shelley steamrollered over him.
“Look at this photograph, taken after the fire, when Rebecca was in New York with ‘Jacob,’” she said. “Now look at the heights of the people in this photograph, taken here in Charleston before the fire.” The photo of the three laughing friends made the contrast clear. “Marie Chastain was shorter than Jacob, but taller than Rebecca. Now note the height differences in the New York photo.”
Once Shelley pointed it out, I could see it immediately. Rebecca was closer in height to the man in the later photograph than the real Jacob. “And Exhibit B, the letters,” Shelley said, wheeling to point toward the prior board.
“It is possible to disguise one’s writing by using the nondominant hand,” Shelley said. “But computer analysis is nearly impossible to fool. Both the computer and my FBI expert agree—the letters after the fire written to Rebecca were, in fact, penned by Marie Chastain.”
It all made sense. That was why ‘Jacob’ had refused local treatment except from Rebecca before returning to New York. Why Marie—as Jacob—walked with a limp to hide the height difference, and bandaged her face, claiming disfigurement. As Jacob Whitley, Marie Chastain laid claim to a fortune that made her independently wealthy, with no close family to gainsay her. The Adirondack home and her reclusiveness ensured her privacy. No doubt the handful of loyal servants were well compensated for their silence. Playing the roles of dutiful nurse and long-suffering cripple, Marie and Rebecca could live out the rest of their lives together without interference.
The man’s silhouette, the one I keep seeing. Is it Jacob, wanting the true story of his fate acknowledged, or Marie in her disguise, demanding that her family recognize her chosen partner after all these years? Maybe both.
Oliver Chastain sat still and silent. The color had drained from his face, and his hands gripped the chair arms white-knuckled. “Now that you know, what do you intend to do about it?”
Shelley regarded him coldly, like a hanging judge. “That all depends on you, Mr. Chastain. If you intend to make trouble for Alistair with the museum directors or endanger his employment, then I imagine the internet would find Marie’s story deliciously juicy and relevant.” She paused. “On the other hand, if you stop stalking people and breaking into cars and buildings and swear to make no trouble—now or later for Alistair and the museum—or for Cassidy and Teag—we can all agree to leave the matter in the past.”
“That’s blackmail,” Chastain grated.
Shelley shrugged. “No, that’s business. What’ll it be, Mr. Chastain?”
Oliver Chastain swore under his breath. “All right. I promise I will not retaliate against Alistair or the museum, or against Cassidy or Teag.”
“Or me,” Shelley added.
Chastain glared. “Or you. Or anyone. Just give me the damn box of junk and your word that the story doesn’t leave this room.”
We all made our promises. Shelley reached behind the podium and withdrew the old box. This time, I felt no sadness from its presence, only a sense of justice and satisfaction, long delaye
d. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Chastain.”
Shelley Holmes always had the last word.
Automatic Sherlock
BY
Martin Rose
A slip of the knife, thought Dr. Jovan Watson, and this machine will be my ruination.
One robotic hand angled, like a painter’s, the scalpel throwing light back into Watson’s face. The eyes, mercury coated and feeding images through a digital recorder. The face itself, fashioned from old Russian armor Watson had acquired through a shadowy middle man. He didn’t ask where it came from. The plates formed a mechanical face of infinite ridges. Watson had not engineered the Sherlock for its appearance, however; he had built the robotic surgeon in the hopes of creating a new kind of doctor, a doctor who could operate in any extremity, a doctor who would be unmoved by the trauma of patients, or the fatigue of endless surgery. Infallible, absent the unpredictable nature of human passions. Its steady hand unshakable, its dead calm never to rattle.
All the Sherlock needed to do to prove it was excise the tumor growing in the lady’s throat. Long years of smoking had exacted their toll on Lady Tanya, a distinguished actress of yesteryear. She was prostrate and etherized, her head tilted back to reveal her vocal cords through a bloodless opening, delicate muscle and tissue framed as beautiful as a moth’s wing in the surgical light. The tumor grew like a button mushroom in shape and size.
The Sherlock’s arm rotated, stuttered, straightened. It blinked, and then lowered its knife in a measured descent to the mushroom tumor. Oxygen and ether pumped, steady as a clock, in the background. Watson could not hear his own heart, nor feel the sweat erupt over his brow.
The scalpel arced in the opposite direction.
“Nyet!” Watson hissed, and then remembered he had programmed the damn thing in English. Regardless, in any language, he knew the universal feeling of failure as the Sherlock aimed for the vulnerable vocal cords, and with a quick kick, Watson stomped on the remote on the floor.
The robot died. Blue light behind the mercury-laden eyes extinguished and the entire framework of the robot collapsed in on itself with a sputtering, high-pitched whine.
A pile of junk.
The Russian government’s grant money had been flushed down the drain in what amounted to ten years of research in robotics. Watson shut the robot into his office and slammed the door in frustration, and promptly endeavored to forget about the whole thing entirely.
• • •
For several months, Jovan Watson did forget.
It was easy to let the heap of metal plates and wires collect dust in the corner of his office where it sat like a sphinx, eyes growing dull and the metal increasingly lackluster. Teaching his students at the First Pavlov State Medical University at Saint Petersburg occupied his time, until a first-year student stumbled in without knocking.
Papers kicked up off Watson’s desk in the draft.
“What, Pytr?”
The boy gulped. “There’s a dead body on the floor.” His eyes were red-rimmed. Drinking again, Watson thought with disapproval.
“There’s always dead bodies on the floor, we’re doing exams today—”
“Then consider this one a pop quiz,” Pytr snapped, and dragged Watson by his sleeve to the open floor of the exam room. Students were gathered in a loose circle, and they parted to let him through.
A young boy—Chinese, thought Watson, as he kneeled on the linoleum. Beside the young boy, his star student, young Alyona, thinking at light speed while her reticent fellows lagged behind her reaction time, had already cleared his mouth and windpipe and struggled to drive breath back into his lungs. Watson worked with her, reaching over to pump the boy’s chest in the rhythms of basic resuscitation. He heard the sound of a fresh gurney clattering into the room with paddles, but by then Watson knew what Alyona did not—the boy was dead, and was not coming back.
Grim-faced, he pulled her away. She acquiesced, sitting back on her heels, breathless and sweaty with exertion. He mopped his brow with a tissue and demanded answers. They told him the Asian boy had blundered in, speaking broken Russian. His English was no better. With his face pale and his hands trembling, the students agreed the boy had looked like all the pictures in the textbook of someone whose body was failing and swiftly approaching death. He came seeking the hospital and wandered into the university instead, and then, he fell down dead.
Unnerved, they called the politsya. Watson canceled classes. He reminded himself to give Alyona extra marks this period for going above and beyond her duties and, for the first time, retired to his office without even looking at the crumpled hunk of metal in the corner as the robot stared, baleful, at the flooring.
Watson opened his drawer and retrieved a bottle of vodka, and after a moment of consideration, poured a glass for himself and one for the robot on the other side of the desk. While he drank his portion, he wondered aloud who the boy had been, how he had ended up in the school with so little knowledge of the area, and why he had been alone. It left him shaken and disturbed, and he wondered if Alyona was ready for the daunting life of a medical doctor that he had retired from.
Well, enough of this, he thought to himself, and then plucked up the second glass.
By the third glass, he got to thinking, as he sometimes did, that he should start working on the Sherlock again. If the Sherlock were operational, it could have been there when the boy wandered in. It could have been faster than Alyona, even, diagnosing the boy in mere seconds and making all the difference between life and death.
It was never too late to take up the dream again. And why not? Merry and inspired with drink, Jovan set down his empty glass and wheeled his chair over to plug in the robot, stabbing the prongs into the outlet.
The robot lurched into life.
Well into a blissful drunkenness and floating through a vodka wonderland, Jovan reeled back with the force of the rising robot, spinning and attempting to regain balance in his chair.
“Watson,” the robot stated, its eyes flaring like the inside of an aluminum can, spirals of metal. “You’re bloody drunk.”
Watson leaned forward and stared at the robot. Did the eyes seem irritated? The way a man’s does when they are narrowed and the eyebrows are drawn inward? Watson couldn’t remember programming it for that.
“You didn’t,” the robot responded.
So drunk, Watson amended, his interior thoughts were coming out of his exterior mouth.
“You hired the drunk student to do it. I’d advise you to rethink giving him responsibility in the future. The boy is made pliable by his addiction. You need a level of trust from your students that such a person can’t supply when he is so compromised.”
Watson attempted sobriety by sheer force of will. He failed.
“You didn’t speak like this before. I had you turned off!”
“I had nothing worth saying until now, and besides, I was in standby mode. That’s hardly the same as turning off your TV set, you know. Now, what do you propose to do about the Chinese boy?”
“What kind of question is that? There’s nothing to do—and since when do you get to ask the questions? This is preposterous. I made you; if anyone is going to do any interrogating here, it’s going to be me.”
The Sherlock stretched out its hand, an exquisite work of art, each finger joint articulated to give the imitation of life as it crooked a finger into one of Watson’s empty liquor glasses, tipped it toward its metal button nose, and then abandoned it.
“Did you just sniff the air?” Watson asked. “And did you do so condescendingly?”
“The only thing being thoroughly worked over in this room would be that vodka bottle in your drawer. There are much better things to do with our time, and we should discover what events led to the unfortunate tragedy of a certain foreign visitor.”
The machine unplugged itself. The glow of a white-hot ring indicated its hard disc, spinning in the cushioned area of its heart, its memory strips seated in its skull of old and welde
d armor. The backup battery seated in its guts supplied energy as it swung ’round, the fine motor movements hiccupping in spots before smoothing out, to face Watson.
“Now, where is the boy?”
Watson kept his seat, fingers clamped around his glass. “They’ve taken the body, of course. What, did you plan to interrogate the dead?”
The Sherlock tsked and spun past Watson, straight out of the room and into the hall. The doctor abandoned his drink and stumbled after it, the robot fading from view down the passage. He had time enough to snatch his coat before running after the machine, yelling, about how there was little they could do now that the boy was dead, it wasn’t programmed for this, and there were classes and exams to see to.
• • •
Watson couldn’t be sure what Pytr had programmed the Sherlock to do—perhaps the boy had thought it would be a fine bit of fun in his moment of golden drunkenness—but a half an hour later, they arrived at the Krasnosel’skii morgue, Prospekt Veteranov, just behind the City Clinical Oncology Dispensary. Watson breathed fast and hard with his hands on his knees from tracking the Sherlock from the train station. The machine, immune to human needs like sleep and hunger, had proved elusive and difficult to keep up with. Watson leaned down to catch his breath while the machine tapped one foot.
Dear God, thought Watson, was the damnable thing impatient?
Not only was the machine impatient, it was arguing with both the morgue manager and a clean-suited woman with a badge dangling about her neck. Her name tag read G. Lestrade.
“Explain yourself!” the woman demanded.
Before Watson regained his wind, breathing through what he could only describe as the revolting smell of decaying bodies and spoiling blood, she yanked him upright by the collar. Watson dangled in her grip, flailing, hands out, to prove his defenselessness.
“He’s mine,” Watson stuttered. “I mean, he’s an it, it’s a machine for the university! For robotics surgery!”
“What is this machine doing meddling in the city morgue? Do we not have enough problems? Last month it was a caviar bust, this month blasted robots? Take your trash out of here, sir—”
Thirteen Authors With New Takes on Sherlock Holmes Page 24
