Thirteen Authors With New Takes on Sherlock Holmes

by Michael A. Ventrella

  “We are swimming in very deep and very dark waters, my girl,” she said as she sat down on the trunk of a felled tree. I fetched a skin of water and encouraged her to drink.

  “Was I right in my reading of the murder?” I asked as I sat beside her.

  Frey gave me a sidelong look of cool appraisal. “You are not as dull as most,” she said. “You may even possess some genuine potential. You have moments of insight, Miri, and your skills of observation are improving.”

  “Then I am right?”

  “Hm? Oh, no, you were incorrect in virtually everything.”

  I sagged, hurt and embarrassed. Frey chuckled and patted my shoulder.

  “It’s not that bad, girl. I know senior investigators for the Office who would have seen half of what you thought you saw and understood only half of that.”

  “But—what did I miss?”

  “Let me tell you first where you showed promise,” said Frey. “You correctly observed that this man is not a laborer or craftsman. That much is obvious, not merely because of the lack of calluses on his hands but by observing his knuckles—which are not swollen from the damage of prolonged and repeated hard labor—and from his calves and feet, which are fine-boned. His spine is also very straight and his chest and arms are not heavily muscled. This man did not spend his life doing backbreaking work.” She paused. “You correctly noted that his lack of tattoos meant that he was not in any of the trading guilds, and you were correct in that he was of a nervous disposition by noting his habitual nail biting. In each of these things you were mostly correct. However, your assumptions faltered when you said that he was not a nobleman.”

  “But the beard?”

  “Beards are out of fashion with the noble born, girl, but those of high blood can still grow them. No, Miri, what we have here is a nobleman of some kind who has grown a beard in order to pretend he is something other than what he is. That is very curious. Under what circumstances might a highborn wish to disguise himself as a commoner?”

  “Perhaps he was disgraced and lost his fortune. Or he could have fallen in love with a serving girl and left his family and wealth behind so they could be together.”

  “Bah, you watch too much theater. Don’t disappoint me like that, Miri. Try again.”

  “He could have been stripped of his station and forced to work the fields. Wait…no, he would have been branded on the back of his hand.”

  “That was a better attempt, girl. Keep trying.”

  I pondered it for a while. The day was hot and the body stank. Above us, carrion birds kettled in the endless blue. The lady of the moon was visible in the daylight, half hidden by trailing wisps of cloud. I muttered a silent prayer for her to provide me with clarity of vision and insight.

  “A spy, perhaps?”

  She nodded. “We don’t yet know if that is the answer, but it fits the information more closely. Let’s keep it as a possible lead, but don’t stop there. Consider his fingernails.”

  “He was frightened and bit them down.”

  “No,” she said, “his nervousness was habitual. If you examine the flesh around the stubs of the nails you’ll see that there are layers of growth. That suggests that he has been biting his nails for a very long time. Nervousness is common to him. The beard is two or three months old and has been roughly cut. However, the ends of the beard are uniform in several sections. He had a longer beard and recently hacked at it, perhaps to give the impression that he is an unkempt commoner.”

  “But he had a longer beard before?” I asked.

  “Clearly. There are hairs caught in the threads of his shirt that are quite long. Those examples indicate the length of his beard prior to the recent roughening of his appearance. His clothes support this. They are filthy and they are stolen.”

  “I can see that they are dirty,” I said, “but, Mother Frey, how can you know that they are stolen?”

  “Because they are a local weave. See those faint red threads in the blend, here and here and here? That is an impurity of the cotton plant. All along the slopes of these mountains there are cotton farms, and the variety of red stash is considered something of a weed. The natural color of that variety weakens the overall yield. It is time consuming and expensive to sort it out, so the best-quality cotton is pure white. However, it is cotton and therefore worthwhile, so it is blended in with the second-best harvest for use in making clothes for farmers who work the lands. Now, we know that this man was not a farmer and these clothes are locally made. Given that he has recently roughened his appearance and is dressed in well-used local clothes, it is not too much of a reach to suggest that these clothes are stolen. If you were to canvass the farms you would probably find someone very upset that a shirt and trousers went missing from a wash pile or a drying line. And see there? Some of the dirt on the trousers and shirt is rubbed in, not earned through sweat. This man took rough clothes and dirtied them up to either disguise them or make them look authentic, or both. My guess would be both.”

  I shook my head and grinned. “When you explain these things it always seems so obvious, and yet…”

  Frey stopped me with a shake of her head. “Oh, dear little Sister Miri, my eyes see nothing that yours do not. But it is my habit to observe and consider, and then to extrapolate along lines of common sense and likelihood. My thoughts are theories, which I must always remind myself to accept as such rather than settle onto firm belief in the absence of absolute knowledge. A rush to judgment is a quality of a weak mind, and it is as great a fault as casual observation.”

  We sat quietly for a while. Birds chattered and gossiped in the trees and butterflies danced from flower to flower. It was always a marvel to me how nature continued to move forward and to be about its work of growth and beauty even in the presence of gruesome human death. I have walked through battlefields and picked flowers on the sides of mounds beneath which are the buried hundreds of butchered dead.

  “When will you tell me why we are here, Mother?” I asked. “We could not have come all this way for a single murder. And even if we were summoned to investigate this man’s death, it could not be the reason we were sent. He has been dead only a few days.”

  Frey took another sip of water before answering. “That is correct, though it took you long enough to think of it.”

  “No,” I said, “I knew right away that this isn’t the murder we were sent to investigate. I can infer that there was another one, but how are they connected? Was the first one another noble disguised as a commoner?”

  “No.”

  “Then who was killed before? And why call us? Shouldn’t the town constable be handling this? Or, if he was a spy, then the army’s investigators. Why contact the Office of Miracles? What is miraculous about this?”

  Frey gave my knee a squeeze and stood up. I could hear her knees pop as she straightened. She blew out a long breath. “Ach, there are bones buried in the ground younger and fitter than mine,” she muttered. I watched her walk once more over to the stone wall and examine it. Then she took a small metal pick from her pocket and scratched at the wall for a moment. I got up to see if I could help, but as I approached she shoved her hands into her apron pockets. “What is miraculous, you ask?”

  I glanced at her pocket but she pretended not to notice.

  “As you rightly observe, my girl,” she said, “this is not the first such murder. It is, in fact, the fifth.”

  I gasped. “The fifth? How is it no one has heard of the others?”

  “They have,” she said. “Of course they have. The constable of this town and the constables of two neighboring towns know of it. They were the ones who began this investigation, but they turned it over to the beadles in their parishes, who poked their own noses into it and no doubt polluted any useful evidence from the previous crime scenes. But at least one of them had the sense Lady Siya gave him to pass a request up the line to the regional council of priests, who in turn evaluated it and forwarded it to us. Politics.” She spat on the ground as she alway
s did when that word soured her tongue. “And fear.”

  “Fear of what? A killer running loose?”

  Frey snorted. “In these times? We are engaged in two wars and five border disputes, which collectively chew up the lives of ten thousand fighting men each year, and twice that many women and children who are caught in the middle of all that male greed and bloodlust. No, Miri, the church council would never have appealed to the Office of Miracles for anything as simple as common murder.”

  “Then why are we here?” I asked.

  She took her time answering. “Because,” Frey said at length, “the priests in the church and the headmen of the villages are afraid that something else has come to strike down the wicked.”

  “Why should priests be afraid of something that targets the wicked? Shouldn’t it be the guilty, the sinners who need fear?”

  She looked at me strangely. “That is exactly why the men of power are afraid, my girl.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They fear the wrath of the gods. They fear punishment. They believe that this man and the others have been struck down by something beyond the understanding of men. In the report forwarded to the Office by the council of priests they described these murders in an odd and telling way. They said that they believe the victims were struck down by the hammer of god.”

  “Which god?”

  “No,” she said, “that is not the question we should ask. It is not which god that need concern us. We must ask ourselves which hammer.”

  -2-

  We rode in silence into town. The church had no convent, so we stayed at a small inn. Because the church was paying for it, we found ourselves in a mean set of dingy rooms with one narrow bed and a stray mat on the floor. I had to chase a family of mice out of the fireplace and then lit a fire to scare the cold and shadows out as well. We ate in a corner of the common room, and I was aware of the stares we received. It was uncommon for women to travel alone, and rarer still for a pair of nuns to be abroad without a guard. Frey never appeared to be unnerved by the attention. I knew that she had several knives secreted about her person, and not merely the ones she used as tools. And there were lots of old stories about her, some of which were clearly tall tales while others had a ring of authenticity about them. I’ve seen her with a hunting bow and a skinning knife, and I’ve known her to walk into a crowd of men and stare them down, the smarter ones dragging the dullards out of the way. I’ve seen old soldiers assess her and then give her small, secret nods.

  Not that I was a fainthearted heroine from some romantic ballad. Even though my family fortunes crumbled after my husband died, I am a daughter of one of the old families. We’re taught sword arts, close-in knife fighting, and poisons before we’re taught to embroider and recite classics. And my own knives were within reach. One sharp for slicing and the other laced with the venom of the rose spider.

  We ate in peace and the men, sensibly, left us alone.

  We had finished a meal of roast finch and were starting in on the cheese board when a fat man in green came in. He had a beadle’s badge hanging from a cheap chain around his neck. He glanced around, spotted us, and hurried over, and after a quick evaluation of us addressed his remarks to me.

  “Mother Frey, I presume?”

  “You presume much,” I said. “I am a novice in the service of Frey, senior investigator for the Office of Miracles. Kindly remove your hat.”

  He stiffened, colored, and snatched a felt cap from his head as he swiveled toward the hunched, withered old woman beside me. I looked noble born, and Frey did not. It was not the first time she had been mistaken for my maid or a chaperone. The man sputtered an apology, and I saw the amusement twinkle in Frey’s blue eyes.

  “Sit down,” said Frey, kicking a chair out from under the table. “You’re Nestor the Beadle?”

  “I am, and again I offer ten thousand apologies for my—”

  “One will do,” said Frey, “and you’ve given it. I’m too old to listen to the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.”

  He tried to hide his confusion behind a fake cough. “I heard that you went out to where the man was found dead. I’m surprised you did not stop in town first to let me know you had arrived. I would have taken you out there.”

  “And done what, Nestor?” interrupted Frey. “Shown us the body? We managed to find it without wasting the time to come all the way into town.”

  “I—”

  “I’m pleased that you at least posted a guard at the foot of the road leading up to the murder scene.”

  “Of course, I—”

  “And you followed my instructions to leave the scene itself intact.”

  “About that. You sent those instructions weeks ago,” said Nestor quickly, racing to get the words out before he could be interrupted again, “but this man was only killed a few days ago. How did you know there would be another death?”

  “Because there were others before it,” said Frey. “It’s reasonable to assume a string of murders might continue. Just as it is reasonable to assume that we have not seen the last of these killings.”

  “You can’t know that,” protested Nestor. Then he leaned close. “Or have you consulted an augury?”

  I saw Frey’s mouth tighten. Unlike many in the church, she did not put much stock in any kind of spiritual predictions. Not once in the time I’d been with her had she consulted a seer, practiced sortilege, or participated in hepatoscopy. “Crime and murder in this world is best solved by science and investigation,” she once told me, “and not by mucking about in the entrails of a goat or throwing chicken bones on the ground.” Frey was often criticized for this, and more than once in her life she had been forced to defend herself from accusations of agnosticism and heresy. Those accusations, and the accusers, had been dismantled with cold efficiency by the woman who sat beside me.

  Does it mean that she believed? I don’t know; nor do I know if she doubts. What I know of her is that when it comes to matters of the physical world she relies entirely on things that can be observed, touched, weighed, measured, and tested. An odd practice for a nun, perhaps, but I long ago learned that the task of the Office of Miracles was to disprove claims of miraculous occurrence rather than the opposite. Only in cases of absolute failure to disprove the presence of the divine was our Office willing to ascribe an incident to the larger world of the spirit. Frey once confided in me that not once in all of her years has a case withstood the scrutiny of the Office’s most dedicated investigators.

  “I prefer to consult my own perceptions,” said Frey coolly.

  The beadle opened his mouth, paused, thought better of what he might have said, and snapped his jaws shut.

  “Now,” said Frey, “what can you tell us of this matter? Start at the beginning, please, and leave out no details.”

  Nestor steadied himself with a deep draft of the beer the barmaid brought over, and then he launched into the account.

  “As you know, there have been several strange deaths here in these mountains,” he began, his voice hushed and confidential, “of which this is the fifth in as many months. It began with the death of Jeks Kol, the town’s blacksmith. He was a good and righteous man. Levelheaded and fair, and very well liked throughout the region. A widower, but not bitter. He had quarrels with few and was a pillar of the community. In fact, he—”

  “When you say he had quarrels with ‘few,’” interrupted Frey, “do you speak with precision?”

  “Well, almost everyone liked and respected Kol.”

  “Again, I must press you on this. You say ‘almost.’ Was there anyone who did not like Kol? Anyone with whom he had a dispute or a fight?”

  “Not a fight, as you might say,” hedged Nestor, “but there was no love between him and the evangelist.”

  “Which evangelist? His name, Nestor. And of what church?”

  “Dimmerk is his name. He came here to Anaria three years ago. His family were merchants trading in all manner of goods, from fireworks
to iron ore and other bulk metals, but they lost their estates and all their lands during the treaties at the end of the first Plantation War. That whole part of the coast was ceded to the Khaslani. Dimmerk lost everything, down to the last stone of the family house, and they’d lived there four hundred years and more.”

  Frey nodded. It was a sad and troubling part of history that the Eastern Coastlands had always been a point of contention, with five separate countries making claims over it. The land was sacred to three of those countries and had been occupied for many generations by two others. It was also some of the most fertile rice-farming lands in the east. When the first Plantation War ended the politicians used it as a bargaining chip and ultimately turned it over to the Khaslani in exchange for three islands where certain rare spices were grown. It was a bad deal all around, because the Khaslani drove out many of the families who had lived there for centuries, and slaughtered many others. And it turned out that the spice-rich islands had been farmed to exhaustion. This led to vicious political fights and then, inevitably, to the second and current war. The Khaslani had fortified the coastal region and now held onto it with ferocity, repulsing many attempts to retake it. There were refugees from that troubled region in the convent, including some women who had been horribly used by soldiers on both sides of the war.

  “I’ve been all through the Coastlands and do not know the name Dimmerk,” mused Frey. “Is it his birth name or family name?”

  “He is one of the Fells. Last of them, except for a few cousins,” said Nestor.

  “Ah,” said Frey. “They were a contentious lot. The men, at least. And unlucky. I remember when their fireworks factory blew up and took half the seaport with it. They say that debris was thrown half a mile in every direction. Thirty-eight dead and a hundred wounded. One man had a ship’s cleat pass straight through his stomach with such force it killed him and his wife, who was seated behind him. The Fell family had to sell nearly half of their holdings to satisfy the damages. They were always involved in lawsuits and disputes.”