A summer storm caused us to cancel our plans to ride to the river and spend a lazy day fishing. By one o’clock, we had tired of billiards, cards, and chess. We had adjourned to the upstairs library, where I got no further in a letter to my sister than “Dear Sarah, …”
For his part, Slye stood at one of the long windows, staring out toward the woods beyond the back lawn. The rain had let up, but the day was still misty, so I doubted he could see much.
Not much that was actually there, in any case.
I had been more anxious about him a few hours earlier. The first thunderclap had me watching him with concern. He noted my scrutiny with a wry smile, and turned his back to me. I kept watching. Although I saw a certain rigidity in his spine and shoulders, he did not seem unsettled to the degree I might once have expected, and I began to cherish hope that he might, after all, be able to return to the city at some point in time. Seven months had passed from the time of the incident that had encouraged his family to urge him to retire to the country. He had asked me to come with him, an invitation I had happily accepted.
Some men returned from the Great War whole of body and mind. Slye and I, while thankful (on our good days) to have survived, were not undamaged. My scars were plainly visible, but his had not made themselves known—to others, at least—until nearly a year after we had returned. Slye would, I thought, soon fit back into society. The methods espoused by Dr. Rivers of England for the treatment of what some call “shell shock” were doing him a great deal of good.
I had just decided not to interrupt Slye’s brooding silence when his excellent butler, Digby, quietly entered the room.
“Excuse me, sir. The younger Mr. Hanslow—Mr. Aloysius Hanslow—”
Digby got no further—Wishy Hanslow dodged past him, disheveled and a little damp.
Hanslow wore his usual outfit—clothing of another decade, another continent, another man. Slye had once explained to me that long before Hanslow became a devoted reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books, Wishy had found an 1891 copy of the Strand among the stacks of periodicals his father hoarded—which perhaps had planted the seed that later blossomed into his present mania for all things Sherlockian. Hanslow had been particularly taken with one of Sidney Paget’s drawings from “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and two years ago his tailor and hatter had been charged with re-creating Sherlock Holmes’s long coat and deerstalker. Judging by the condition of these articles of clothing, Hanslow seemed not to have seen the drawings in which Holmes carried an umbrella.
“No need to announce me, Digby!” Hanslow said now. “No need! All family here!”
“Indeed?” Digby said in an arctic tone.
“Of course! I think of Bunny as a brother!”
“Now, Wishy,” Slye said, as Digby frowned, “stop trying to irritate Digby. You and I are friends, and as such, far more likely to get along than I do with my brothers.” He turned to Digby. “Thank you, Digby.”
“Sir, he would not let me take his hat and coat,” Digby said, looking anxiously at the carpet.
“No, I don’t suppose he would,” Slye said. “But we’ll be leaving soon, I’m sure, so no need to worry.”
“Don’t know why you keep him around,” Wishy said as soon as the butler left. “If I had to look at that mug of his seven days a week, I’d be a nerve case, too. Sure that’s not your problem?”
I couldn’t help but stiffen. Slye observed this, smiled at me, then said, “Do you suppose Wishy is on to something, Max?”
Hanslow turned, only just then noticing my presence. He winced and moved his gaze to a point somewhere over my left shoulder. “Oh, didn’t realize you were in the room, Dr. Tyndale.” He didn’t sound pleased. The feeling was mutual.
“No, Wishy isn’t on to anything,” I said, answering Slye. “What would you do without Digby?”
“True,” Slye said. “He is indispensable to what passes for my happiness. Now, Wishy, what brings you out on this dreary day?”
“Crime, Bunny! Crime. I need your help! Lord, I wish you’d get a telephone!”
“I find them unrestful.”
“You have one in the city!”
“Yes, but the city is already unrestful, so I don’t notice it as much there.”
“Well, never mind that. Will you come with me to Holder’s Crossing?”
“What has occurred at Holder’s Crossing?”
“The colonel’s gone missing—looks like foul play.”
“Not Colonel Harris?” Slye said, looking troubled.
“Yes. Sheriff Anderson called and particularly asked me to lend a hand. Mentioned you, too, Bunny. Must have my Watson with me. And—er, you can come along as well, Dr. Tyndale, if you’d like.”
“We’d be delighted to help in any way possible,” Slye said. “Wouldn’t we, Max?”
This was by no means the first time we had accompanied Wishy on such an expedition. I had given up trying to persuade Slye that we were only encouraging Hanslow to embrace his delusion that he was an American Sherlock Holmes. Bunny rightly pointed out that Wishy would never claim to be as great as his hero. “Of course not!” I said. “My dear Slye, the gap between the intelligence of the two is nearly as wide as the ocean that separates them!”
“Oh no,” Slye said in his calm way. “Wishy isn’t at all stupid.”
I kept my tongue behind my teeth. Sometimes, friends must agree—even if silently—to disagree.
Wishy Hanslow had a second obsession—automobiles. I have been told that he razed his former stables and built a structure that houses no fewer than ten of them. It was easier to abide this infatuation. As a result of it, we rode in comfort in his chauffeured Pierce-Arrow Series 51 limousine to Holder’s Crossing. On the way, I asked him why he had been out in the storm.
“Oh, you’ve noticed my clothing is a bit damp! Very observant. I was coming back from driving myself to a separate case—”
“I told you I would have driven you, sir!” the chauffeur said.
“Yes, well, now I wish I had listened to you. Thing is, bad roads, had a flat, and had just managed to change the tire when the rain started.”
Slye asked him about that case, which involved finding a missing dog, detective work that apparently fell within Wishy’s capabilities. Somehow in the telling of his tale, he seemed to grow more accustomed to my scarred face, actually looking me in the eye when he answered my questions.
When Slye asked what he knew about the case at Holder’s Crossing, though, he blushed and admitted that he knew very little. Sheriff Anderson had called and stated that Colonel Harris had gone missing. “Said there was reason to suspect foul play, but that he would explain everything in detail if I would be so good as to bring you along.”
“How kind of him to mention me,” Slye said.
“I’ve asked him to ensure that nothing is disturbed until we get there. He promised he would do his best.”
“You know this missing gentleman?” I asked.
“Oh yes. He must be in his seventies now. I haven’t seen him in years, though.”
He briefly fell into one of his moods, but Wishy’s incessant chatter seemed to distract him, for by the time we arrived at Colonel Harris’s estate, he was looking mildly amused.
The estate lay three miles or so beyond Holder’s Crossing. We took a winding, mostly paved, relatively wide road up a wooded slope, passing a few narrow farm lanes here and there, before suddenly coming upon a clearing. A large two-story home stood at the end of a sweeping drive. The house was not as large as Slye’s, nor even Hanslow’s, but there could be no doubt that this was the home of a wealthy man. The grounds, although not extensive, were well kept. A service road led to a horse barn and other outbuildings, but no other houses were within sight. The home’s situation, placed as it was within the woods, gave one a sense of peacefulness and privacy.
A Model T was parked in the drive. It was splattered with so much mud that the grime nearly obscured the sheriff’s department’s markings on its doors. The vehicle was dwarfed by the far less muddied yellow Rolls-Royce parked next to it, a gorgeous machine that drew a sigh from Wishy. “A forty/fifty,” he said. “Silver Ghost. Six cylinders and quiet as a whisper.”
“The colonel’s?” I asked.
“Oh, I doubt that very much,” Hanslow said. “He’s something of a pinchpenny.”
“Still getting around by horse and buggy?”
“No, he sold off his horses five years ago, on his seventieth birthday.”
He fell silent, and suddenly looked so sad, I couldn’t help but feel both pity and curiosity. I was about to ask him what was wrong, when Slye said, “Wishy is an expert on automobiles, and a walking catalog of his neighbors’ vehicles. What does the colonel drive, Aloysius?”
“Model T Center Door Sedan—1915, I believe,” he answered, perking up. “Thank you, Bunny. I’m flattered you’ve noticed. I have a scheme in mind about the individual identification of automobiles, but I haven’t quite worked out all the details.”
“License plates do that, don’t they?” I asked.
“Oh, no. Not at all. Easy to switch them. Now what I have in mind involves something like the engine casting number—”
I was spared a lecture on his automotive identification scheme when the chauffeur opened his car door before ours, causing Wishy to remonstrate with him, and to switch his attention to the topic of automotive etiquette, and his strong view that his passengers should have been allowed to exit first.
The colonel’s elderly butler, Rawls, knew my companions—I noticed he did not attempt to relieve Wishy of his deerstalker. He looked pale and shaken, but maintained a dignified pace as he guided us to a parlor on the first floor. Sheriff Anderson, a stout man of sixty with luxuriant mustachios, stood by the fireplace, studying a small notebook. He looked up as we were announced and smiled. “Aloysius, thank you for coming! And you’ve brought Mr. Slye and Dr. Tyndale! Excellent!”
“Is this some sort of jest?”
We turned toward the speaker—a frowning, elegantly dressed young blonde, who lounged carelessly in a large chair at the opposite end of the room. She flinched when she beheld my beauty, and quickly busied herself with taking a cigarette from a gold case and fitting it into an ebony holder.
She was not alone. A pale, sandy-haired gentleman, whose clothes were equally fine, stood just behind her. He blushed when our eyes met, then moved to light her cigarette.
“You own the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost parked in the drive,” Hanslow said with some reverence, removing his hat in the lady’s presence.
She lifted her brows and addressed the sheriff. “Is this play actor supposed to find my uncle?”
“Allow me to introduce Colonel Harris’s niece and nephew, the children of his youngest sister,” Sheriff Anderson said coldly. “Miss Alice Simms and Mr. Anthony Simms.”
Anthony Simms came forward and shook hands with each of us as the sheriff named us. He had an athletic build and a firm grip, but his palms were damp.
Alice stayed where she was.
“Mr. Simms works in an office,” Hanslow began. “He rushed here today from work. Note the smudge of ink on his vest—”
“Are you certain that’s ink, Aloysius?” Slye asked.
Hanslow held up a large magnifying glass and bent closer to Simms.
“Now, see here!” Simms protested. “I don’t know what you’re blathering about but I don’t care to be—”
Wishy straightened and said with resignation, “No, might not be. But it is a smudge. And it’s improperly buttoned.”
Simms peered down at his vest in dismay and hastened to correct the buttoning problem.
“I thought you said they were here to help,” Alice said to the sheriff. “I really don’t think an itemized list of my brother’s sartorial mishaps is what we were hoping for.”
Sheriff Anderson ignored her and invited us to take seats near the fire, then began to tell us about the case. “At six this morning, Colonel Harris, an early riser, had breakfast with his son.”
“His so-called son,” Alice interrupted.
“If you please, Miss Alice!” the sheriff snapped.
She sighed dramatically, then fell silent.
“I should explain,” the sheriff said, “that the colonel had only recently been reunited with his son. It seems that during the colonel’s service in the previous war—er, well—I should say, the war with Spain.”
“Ah, yes,” Slye said. “The ‘splendid little war.’ He fought in Cuba.”
“Yes,” the sheriff said. “Not a Rough Rider, but with the regular army. A major at that time, then promoted again not long before he left the military. He had been in the cavalry since the Civil War.”
“Bunny and I used to love to listen to his war stories,” Wishy said.
“When we were children, yes,” Slye said. “But you were going to tell us about his son?”
“Yes, of course,” the sheriff said. “The colonel has outlived his two sisters, his only siblings, but to the surprise of their offspring, he recently revealed that while he was in Cuba, he married an American woman whose family had been living in Havana for some years.”
Alice said, “Oh, no. We’ve known about the marriage for years. It was Uncle’s Tragic Love Story. At the ripe old age of fifty-three, he fell head over heels for his nurse—a dark-haired woman thirty years his junior—while he was delirious with yellow fever. Typical silly old man, wasn’t he? He recovered and was shipped back before he could make arrangements for her to join him. But here’s the thing—according to my uncle, she died there. I remember Mama saying it was for the best, or we would have been mortified by the spectacle he would have made of himself. For my own part, I thought it was good to know the old dickens had had a bit of fun.”
“The colonel didn’t quite look at it in that way,” the sheriff said repressively. “He thought the woman he loved had died. Turns out, she didn’t. That is, not at that time. She gave birth to a son, and continued to live in Cuba until she died two years ago.”
“Never contacting her husband—her wealthy husband—during those twenty years!” Alice said.
“Nor bothering to divorce him,” the sheriff said. “And he didn’t make any effort to go down there and find her, now did he? Perhaps that hurt her. I don’t know. In any case, according to her son, she decided she didn’t want to leave Cuba or her family. She told him his father had died of yellow fever. We have no opportunity to ask her what her motives were, and it hardly matters now. As for the colonel’s wealth, her own family is extremely wealthy—wealthier than the colonel, by what the colonel told me. They own a sugar plantation.”
Alice subsided.
“Anyway,” the sheriff went on, “Robert—his son—was told on his twenty-first birthday that his father the soldier had not died of the fever, as Robert had long believed, but was alive and well. He was given some papers that helped him to track down the colonel—no difficult thing, after all. He came up here last year, and the colonel was delighted to meet him. Welcomed him into his home, couldn’t have been prouder.”
“Look, we came over here several times to try to get to know Robert,” Anthony said. “Welcome him into the family, all that. We just became convinced he was a con man taking advantage of our uncle.”
Anderson turned to give a hard stare to the Simmses. “He told me himself that he had no doubt that Robert was his son, but that his nephews and niece weren’t taking it too well.”
“Nephews?” Wishy said. “Plural?” He looked around as if expecting to find another of the colonel’s relatives hiding behind a chair.
“My men are still looking for Carlton Wedge, his other nephew.”
“Carlton Wedge!” Wishy said. “Now I look at you, Mr. Simms, I see a family resemblance—no insult intended. You could knock me over with a feather. Never knew he and the old man were related!”
“Well, Uncle really hasn’t been part of our lives until recent years,” Alice said. “Our mother and Carlton’s were much younger than the colonel. He was their half brother—after his mother died, our grandfather married a much younger woman.”
“Apples not falling far from trees,” Slye murmured to me.
“My uncle was a grown man, out west fighting Indians when his sisters were born,” Alice went on. “He was hardly ever home. So the family has never been what one might call close-knit. But in the last five years or so, my uncle has been doing his best to change that.”
“Carlton Wedge,” Wishy repeated. “Can’t think how one would find him. Gambled away the homestead years ago.”
“Before the Volstead Act,” Slye said, “one would merely have to ask which bar was doing the most business. Now I suppose it will be necessary to search for him in speakeasies.”
“As we mentioned to the sheriff,” Alice said, “Carlton also drives a Model T.”
“No help. So do tens of millions of other Americans.” He turned to the sheriff. “Where is Robert Harris? Er—I assume the newly found son is using the colonel’s surname?”
“Yes. As for where he is—he is in Mercy Hospital, fighting for his life.”
This announcement drew astonished gasps from Hanslow and me, but Slye only said, “As fascinating as these family histories are, I see we have interrupted you too often. Would you please give us the tale from the beginning?”
“Yes, certainly. As I said, the colonel and his son, Robert, had breakfast at six this morning, then spent time together in the colonel’s study. Rawls believes they were going over some business papers—apparently the colonel has been including Robert in more and more of his business dealings. The phone rang at eight, and the colonel answered it himself, as is his custom. Then both gentlemen hurried from the house without telling any of the servants where they were bound. They left in the colonel’s Model T.
“Shortly before nine o’clock, the housekeeper looked out from one of the upstairs windows. Though it was raining, she caught a glimpse of the colonel’s car returning, coming up the road through the woods. She made her way downstairs, to tell the cook that the gentlemen would soon be back, and might want something to eat. But the gentlemen did not enter the house.”
He paused, then said, “She is getting on in years, and visibility was limited, so perhaps she was mistaken about the vehicle, because a short time later, Mr. Simms and his sister arrived. They tell me their uncle had asked them to come here, to speak to them about Carlton.”
“Carlton had called him in a drunken rage,” Alice said. “Threatened him. Said he was convinced Robert was a fraud, pretending to be someone he couldn’t possibly be.” She looked pointedly toward Wishy, who was busily writing notes. Hearing her pause, he looked up. She smiled at him in the way a shark might smile at a sardine, then said to Slye, “I hasten to add that Uncle wasn’t in the least afraid of Carlton—in fact, he’s rather fond of him. But he thought it was time to have the dear boy committed to a sanitarium.”
“Sheriff Anderson,” Slye said, “have you asked Rawls about this threatening call?”
“Yes. He confirms that the colonel not only received a call from Mr. Wedge yesterday, but that two days earlier, Mr. Wedge, while in an inebriated condition, attempted to visit him. The colonel barred him from the house, told him to sleep it off in the horse barn, and, according to Rawls, added that he’d better not show his face around here again until he’d gained some sense. But he also added that the colonel was embarrassed about Mr. Wedge, and never discussed him with the staff.”
“Mr. Simms, did you know of this drunken visit?”
Anthony Simms glanced at his sister, then shook his head.
“No. Shocking.”
“He mentioned it to me,” Alice said. “Sorry, darling,” she said to Anthony. “I should have told you.”
“Interesting,” Slye said. “But we are interrupting again. Sheriff, please do continue.”
The sheriff consulted his notes. “Shortly after the Simmses arrived, a delivery truck from the village grocer drove up to the back of the house. Normally the boy would have been here early in the morning, but the storm made him decide to make deliveries to his customers who lived on less well maintained roads before those lanes became impassable. He had been delayed all the same, and a lucky thing that turned out to be. The housekeeper, certain that she had seen the colonel’s car, wondered if he might have had a flat tire, or some other problem. The young man told her he had seen the Rolls, some distance ahead of him, but not the colonel’s Model T. But he promised the housekeeper that he’d keep an eye out on his way back to the village.
“The storm eased about then, and so as the delivery boy made his return trip, he looked down each of the lanes as he passed them. At the fourth such lane, he was greeted with a startling sight—young Mr. Harris, his face covered in blood, lying next to a car.
“The boy hurried down the lane, thinking there had been a terrible accident, but the car appeared to be undamaged. He hardly gave it more than a glance, though, because when he got out of the truck and knelt next to Robert Harris, he saw that the colonel’s son had been shot.
“I’ll say this for the lad—he had presence of mind. He looked around quickly, and seeing no sign of the colonel or anyone else, put Mr. Harris into his truck and drove as fast as he could toward the village—smart enough to figure out that the doctor would be there, rather than wasting time taking the wounded man back up here, where they’d only have to wait for the doctor to come up. The doctor did the best he could for him, then drove him to Mercy Hospital over in Tarrington.”
“They’ve an excellent man there,” I said. “Dr. Charles Smith. We served together overseas. He’ll know what to do for such injuries.”
“I’m glad to hear that—that’s the very man who’s caring for him. I’ve also got two of my deputies there to guard him, and to see if he can tell them anything once the doctor permits them to question him.”
He rubbed a hand over his forehead, as if to clear his thoughts.
“So while Robert Harris was being cared for by the medical men, I was called, and the boy took me back to the lane. I was quite anxious to find the colonel, of course. Unfortunately, although his car is there, he’s nowhere nearby.”
“May I take a look at it?” Wishy asked.
“Yes, I hope you will, because I must say there’s something—” He glanced at the Simmses and said, “We can discuss all this along the way.”
He rang for Rawls, and asked him to fetch his deputies up from the kitchen, where they had been offered hot coffee and sandwiches.
“Are we to be kept prisoner here, then?” asked Alice.
“It’s best for now if you wait here, under guard. I would hate to see any further harm come to any member of your family.”
“For our own protection, then?”
“That, and because I feel certain I’ll have more questions for you.”
“Can I at least stroll around the gardens now that the sun is out?”
The sheriff hesitated, glancing at Slye, who gave the slightest shake of his head. “No, miss,” the sheriff said, “I can’t risk it. You’ll stay in this room, please, and if you have need, there’s a lavatory just across the hall. Should you need anything else, food or drink, just ring for Rawls and I’m sure he’ll bring it to you.”
She pouted, but clearly saw she’d not win him over. Anthony tried to argue that they should at least be given the run of their own uncle’s house, but the sheriff, I was quickly learning, was a man who could assert his will when necessary.
The trip to the lane where the car was still parked was brief but productive. Wishy wouldn’t hear of taking the Pierce-Arrow down the narrow muddy track, so we cautiously made our way on foot. Fortunately, the summer sun had been out for a little while, so at least we weren’t making the trip in the rain.
The sheriff’s deputies posted there had made good use of their time, one staying with the car while three others searched the woods. “No sign of the colonel yet, sir,” the one at the car reported. “Though it seems obvious that poor young gentleman crawled out to the lane after being shot. We followed your orders and didn’t touch the car. Any idea when the fingerprint man will be here?”
“Any time now.”
I saw that Hanslow, when in his element, was not the idiot I had assumed him to be. He could not be dissuaded from mimicking what he believed to be Sherlock Holmes’s manner of investigating, making use of the magnifying glass, muttering to himself, and frowning a great deal. Slye several times had to point out that there was more than one way to interpret the tire tracks and boot marks Wishy observed in the mud. But these were mere preliminaries.
When Aloysius Hanslow stopped playing at being the Great Detective and really looked at the vehicle mired in the lane, he did what none of the rest of us could do—and with a degree of confidence that transformed him. Some part of my brain registered this transformation, but not for long, for the shock of his pronouncement dislodged all other thought.
“Dear me, Bunny!” he said. “This isn’t the colonel’s car!”
Slye had an arrested look, as I’m sure we all did. Then he smiled and said, “Tell us how you know.”
I couldn’t completely follow all that followed, but I could grasp that some sort of difference in radiators and other features of the machine itself were nothing compared to what one could learn simply by looking at—and smelling, through a window that was not quite closed—the interior of the automobile. “Bunny, this car was not owned by a man of the colonel’s disposition!”
He was right. The car was strewn with wads of paper, bits of tinfoil wrappers, and empty bottles. It stank of cheap gin and emitted other unsavory odors of unmistakable but unnamable origins. I thought of the neat, well-kept home I had just been in and knew Wishy was absolutely correct.
“Carlton’s?” Slye asked.
Wishy surprised me by considering the question carefully as he put on a pair of gloves. “I believe so. Sheriff, you said you’ll have a fingerprint man up here soon?”
“Yes, he’s on his way. But Aloysius, you know that Carlton’s fingerprints on his own car, if it is his car—”
“Certainly—of no use. But if the fingerprints of the colonel and Mr. Robert Harris are on the inside of the vehicle—”
“I don’t think anyone other than a driver has recently occupied this vehicle,” Slye said, peering in through a side window. “The seats are covered with too much detritus. At the very least, those wads of paper would have been crushed and flattened. I suspect if you are brave enough to look through them, you will find evidence that this is indeed Carlton’s Model T. In fact, I can see several envelopes addressed to him lying on the backseat.” He stepped away from the car. “Wishy, could a Rolls-Royce be driven down this lane?”
“Not without damage to the paint. That’s why we left my car on the paved road.”
“The grocery truck?”
“It’s a Model T truck. No wider than this car.”
“Confound it,” the sheriff said, “this only raises more questions! If this is Carlton’s car, then what happened to the colonel’s car? And if no passenger sat in this car, how did Mr. Robert Harris come to be here?”
“Sheriff,” Slye said, “our answers are undoubtedly at the house. I’d like to return there as quickly as possible. Also, I’m afraid Carlton Wedge may be in some danger.”
“My men are looking for him, I assure you. I intend to try to get the Simmses to be more forthcoming about his recent whereabouts.”
With this we had to be satisfied.
Once back at the colonel’s house, the sheriff went into the study to use the telephone, while Wishy, given specific instructions by Slye, walked toward the Silver Ghost. I followed Slye into the kitchen, where I frightened a young maid into giving a little scream. I begged the cook not to carry out her threat to beat some sense into the girl. Slye asked if Rawls and the housekeeper could be brought there without alerting the Simmses to the fact, which the maid readily agreed to.
Slye questioned these two worthies about the arrival of the Simmses, thanked them, and strode outdoors. He stood gazing toward the outbuildings. Wishy hurried up to us. “You were right, Bunny. The floorboards are filthy. A shame, to muddy a car like that!”
“I suspect they were rather rushed.” He paused, then said in one of the gentlest voices I had ever heard him use, “I’m afraid I must next look into the horse barn, Wishy.”
“Oh,” Wishy said, turning pale.
“Would you like to search the other outbuildings, while Max helps me there? Or report your findings to the sheriff?”
“I’ll search the other buildings, if that’s quite all right.”
“Most helpful,” Slye said.
“Good, then.”
We walked together toward the outbuildings. Hanslow studiously avoided looking at the horse barn. Before we had drawn very close to it, he said, “I’ll meet you back at the house, then. But if you should need me—you know I’ll come, Bunny.”
Slye put a hand on his shoulder. “Never a doubt of it, Wishy.”
Hanslow looked at me, for what was probably the longest period of time he had ever gazed directly at my face, then said to Slye, “You can tell him about her if you’d like. Understanding sort of fellow, Max.”
“Yes, he is. Thank you, Wishy. See you in a bit.”
“Oh—ah, Bunny, what am I looking for?”
“You might come across a gun, muddy clothing, or some other important clue.”
“Right!” He marched off with renewed purpose.
Slye said nothing more until Wishy was out of earshot, then smiled at me. “You’ve had an honor bestowed on you, Max.”
“So I gather,” I said, watching his friend head for the building farthest away from the horse barn.
“When I left for the war, Wishy was the best horseman in the county. Raised and trained thoroughbreds, won races. He was too big to be a jockey, of course, but he loved few things on earth more than to take a fast horse for a gallop in a meadow.
“Unlike the colonel’s family, the Hanslows are close-knit, and Aloysius was an especially devoted brother. Adored his little sister. Gwendolyn. Five years his junior and bidding fair to become a beauty. Gwen was easy to adore. She was vivacious, smart, and if, like her brother, she was a chatterbox whose enthusiasm sometimes outpaced good sense, she was also, like her brother, generous and sweet-natured. She worshipped him.”
He fell silent, his face set in lines of grief. He didn’t speak again until we were nearly to the stable doors.
“Wishy saw it happen. One moment he was enjoying a pleasant spring afternoon, turning back toward the stable, when Gwen came racing toward him on a horse. She gave a great whoop, called out, ‘Look at me, big brother!’ and fell—for reasons no one has been able to explain to Wishy’s satisfaction—breaking her neck. She was dead before he reached her.
“He didn’t blame the horse, and even refused his father’s demand that the animal be put down. But he sold all his horses, and razed his stables. A few months later, he became an automobile enthusiast.
“He experienced one other change. Wishy’s mother told me that her son has been dressing like Sherlock Holmes—or his notion of Holmes—since shortly after his sister died. Her theory is that the idea of being like Holmes, able to solve mysteries, to explain the inexplicable, to see the small clue that has gone overlooked, makes Wishy more comfortable in a world that has battered him with its random misfortunes and senseless sorrows.”
“You know, Slye,” I said after a moment, “where we were, one couldn’t help but think of the lost dreams and desires of fallen comrades, the theft from the world of their potential. But I think we sometimes forgot that even before the influenza pandemic, here at home there were losses that were no less bitter for being faced one by one.”
“No.” He sighed. “But we must go forward, even with these hitches in our gaits. Let’s see what we can do for the colonel.”
He pulled the stable doors open. There was straw strewn about in the center aisle, in a building that had not housed horses for five years.
“From Carlton’s night of sleeping off a binge?”
“No, someone trying to cover up parallel tracks of mud, unless I miss my guess,” Slye said.
The car was in the fourth stall down, the one nearest the ladder into the hayloft. I thought we might need Hanslow to verify that it was the colonel’s Model T—and I supposed we’d have to take it out of the stables to do that—but there was no doubt in either of our minds that we had found the missing automobile. Slye bent to examine something on the floor of the stall, while I moved closer to the car.
“Slye, there are bloodstains on the backseat!”
He didn’t answer, and when I looked back at him he was standing stock-still, his face drained of all color, a look of abject terror on his face.
I damned myself three times over for not thinking of the effect—the cumulative effect!—this day’s events might have on his mind.
“Boniface Slye,” I said, quietly but firmly. “You are here with me.”
He blinked, swallowed hard, reached a trembling hand up to his head, then held it up to me, palm out. There was blood on his fingers. “Slye!” I cried. “But how …”
He looked up, and as he did, a drop of blood fell on his face. He looked back at me, and said in a faint voice, “Is it real, Max? Or am I imagining that it is raining blood again?”
“It’s real, only—not what you’re thinking, Slye! The hayloft!”
He seemed to come back to himself then, and we raced up the ladder. We found the colonel—alive, awake, and mad as fire, but in a seriously weakened condition. “Do what you can for him,” Slye said as I worked to remove the gag from the colonel’s mouth. “I’ll fetch your medical bag from the car.”
“Robert!” the colonel croaked. “Help him.”
“He’s being cared for, sir,” I said, taking his blindfold off and looking at his head wound. To my relief, it appeared that it had clotted, then reopened—perhaps as he stirred awake. Still, the bloodstain on the floor of the hayloft was large enough to be worrisome.
“Untie me so that I can kill that damned bitch and her brother!”
“I’ll untie you, but you must try to lie quietly. Sheriff Anderson is here, and he hasn’t let your niece and nephew move an inch since he arrived.”
“Ah. Good man, Anderson.” He studied me a moment and said, “What the hell happened to your face?”
“Ruined by the same thing that ruined your manners.”
He gave a crack of laughter, and was still overcome by mirth when Slye brought my kit up a few minutes later. Slye raised his brows.
“Hysteria,” I said.
“A lot of that going around,” he said, which set the colonel off again.
Eventually we had him cleaned up, stitched up, and comfortably ensconced in his bed. He had refused to go to the hospital, even when I tempted him with the idea of being closer to his son. “I’m not going to be able to do a damn thing for him there today, while I can still help Anderson here. If I go to that blasted hospital, they’ll drug me sure as hell, and you know it.”
Sheriff Anderson got a statement from him, and told us that Carlton had been located.
“It was a plan that might have worked,” Slye said to the group assembled in the parlor. Sheriff Anderson, Carlton Wedge, the Simmses (now each handcuffed and under the eye of a burly deputy), Wishy, and I had been joined by the colonel, as tough an old bird as I ever care to meet. “You owe your life to your housekeeper and a grocery boy, Colonel Harris.”
“We were never going to kill our uncle!” Anthony protested, even as his sister told him to shut up.
“I may not have every detail just right, but I believe I can come close enough,” Slye said. “Last night, Anthony met Carlton and easily tempted Carlton to drive him to an abandoned barn where Anthony had hidden a few bottles of gin. Carlton, unaware that the drinks poured into his tumbler were spiked, woke up many hours later, wondering who had tied him up, and with no clear recollection of the previous evening’s events. He was able to free himself, and was found by the sheriff’s deputies as he wandered down the road to the village, thinking he must have left his car there.
“Carlton will be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that dear old cousin Anthony was setting him up to be falsely accused of murder.
“The Simmses planned to lure Robert Harris and Colonel Harris to a small lane on a seldom-traveled road. They knew the regular schedule of the household from previous recent visits. Rawls, the housekeeper, the cook—all recall finding the two of you being extraordinarily curious about their routines. The delivery boy from the village came by in the early morning. So matters would be taken care of a little later in the morning—not too late, or Carlton might awaken or be found away from the place where he was supposed to be committing a crime.
“What did they tell you when they called this morning, Colonel?”
“Alice told me that they had met Carlton in the village and told him I wanted to send him to an asylum. Said he’d gone off his head and was going to kill himself on one of the abandoned lanes.”
“What!” Carlton said.
“It was an important part of the plan that the colonel be lured away from the road, to lessen the chance of something felonious being seen by inconvenient witnesses who might come driving up the hill. So Carlton’s Model T was taken to the end of the lane. And Alice waited with the Rolls to keep an eye on things.”
“Not quite,” said the colonel. “She was there to point the way, and hurry us along by exclaiming that Anthony had run down the lane to try to intervene. But she got into my car with us, and rode with us to where Anthony was lying in wait for us. It had started to rain by then, quite hard.”
“Which might, I suppose, have been seen as an aid to their plan: kill the colonel and his heir, make it appear that Carlton was the guilty party, and sit back and inherit. They needed to be sure that the bodies would be found—missing persons cases are hell on probate—so they would leave Carlton’s car to point the way. The rain would make it seem that Carlton’s vehicle got stuck in the mud.”
“It did get stuck!” Anthony said. “And we didn’t know how the old bastard had left his will, so we weren’t going to kill him until we were sure.”
“Anthony! Shut up!” Alice screamed at him.
“Oh, I was supposed to believe that Carlton clubbed me from behind while you two stood and watched? There must be a passel of nincompoops on your father’s side of the family.”
“All sorts of things went wrong, didn’t they?” Wishy said. “Robert didn’t stay to help you, sir?”
“Robert’s no fool. I’m sure he knows that if a man finds himself unarmed and outnumbered, he must put some distance between himself and the attacking force!”
“So Anthony shot him in the back,” I said. “And in the head, though fortunately that bullet merely grazed him. I’ve talked to Dr. Smith, and he assures me Robert will recover. You, on the other hand, Anthony, are doubtless going to the electric chair.”
“No! No! I have no gun. It was Alice! And it’s no use telling me to shut up, Alice, because I won’t!”
“What happened after she shot him?” Slye asked.
“It was miserable out there, but I trussed up the colonel while Alice tried to hunt down Robert. Then she came running back, says there’s no time to lose, the delivery boy is coming up the hill—she told me to put the colonel in his car and hide it in the horse barn, and wait there for her. She went tearing off, then took the Rolls up the road at lightning pace. I waited until the delivery boy went past, then took the car up along the service road out to the barn. We knew the servants would be busy talking to the lad on the other side of the house, getting the village gossip, and wouldn’t see us. And I did just as she asked—even carried the old bugger up into the hayloft, and that wasn’t easy, I tell you!
“I really thought we might pull it off. She had even thought to bring a change of clothes for each of us, so that by the time we went into the house, we didn’t look so disheveled or damp.”
“But the Rolls is designed to be noticed,” Slye said, “and was noticed by the delivery boy, which made the staff wonder why it took so long for you to enter the house. Not only that, the housekeeper caught sight of the colonel’s car, and wondered what was keeping him.”
“You got the floorboard of the Rolls muddy!” Wishy said, as if this was the worst offense of all.
“Must I listen to this fake Holmes?” Alice shouted.
The room fell silent. Then Slye said, “Yes, for it would do you good. He has an excellent head and a genuine heart, both of which you lack.”
Carlton Wedge, as it turned out, felt himself to be at rock bottom, and was eager to take the colonel up on his offer to undergo treatment for alcoholism. We helped them find a facility worthy of their patronage.
Dr. Smith began driving out to Slye’s place, asking me to consult with him on some of his cases. I find the work interesting, but not as interesting as helping Slye to recover, and with the little problems that come his way.
Aloysius Hanslow still dresses like Holmes and invites us to come with him whenever Sheriff Anderson calls. Wishy has stopped flinching when he looks at me.
Slye continues to improve, although those moments in the colonel’s horse barn caused a minor setback. He talks of returning to the city, which he was never wont to do before now.
For the time being we are in the country, where old men tell young boys of war, and some of us who’ve seen it hope it never comes again, knowing it always will.
Jan Burke is the author of fourteen books, including Bones, which won the Edgar for Best Novel, Disturbance, and The Messenger. Her novels have appeared on the USA Today and New York Times bestseller lists and have been published internationally. She is also an award-winning short-story writer.
In college a boyfriend urged her to read The Hound of the Baskervilles, which soon led to the purchase of the entire Canon. Though she ultimately came to her senses about the value of the boyfriend, Burke’s admiration of Sherlock Holmes only grew over the years, and she believes the respect for the power of physical evidence in Conan Doyle’s writing not only influenced her own writing, but also laid the groundwork for her later advocacy for the improvement of public forensic science. In 2006, Burke founded the Crime Lab Project, a nonprofit organization supporting public forensic laboratories throughout the United States.