“What?” This was so out of left field I wondered if she were delirious. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m fessing up. I’m telling you that I ordered Maggie to stay home and nurse her ankle yesterday so I could assign myself to the story because I missed you. You’re a bundle of neurotic ticks and only slightly less crazy than McCabe, but I missed you so much that I just had to see you again.”
That was somewhat like being slapped with her hand, then kissed by her lips, but the overall effect put me in serious danger of levitating. I tried not to show it.
“Then why’d you get rid of my picture in your apartment?” I asked.
“I didn’t. I just moved it to the dresser in my bedroom. Get that leer off your face.” She winced. “Mamma mia, what a headache. It feels like - Oh! Oh, no!” With a look of wild panic on her face, she jerked her hand away from mine, pulled herself up from the floor, and stumbled to the bathroom. Immediately came the sickening sound of repeated vomiting. When Lynda emerged again she was pale, washed out. I put my arm around her.
“I actually used to like mysteries,” she said. “After this weekend, I’m not sure I can read them anymore.”
“You never liked mine.”
“I never said that. They’re really pretty good, except for all that macho crap and the sexism.”
Fighting the urge to respond to that, I said, “What the hell happened here?”
“I was in that other little room, the sitting room with the bookcases, when I thought I heard a sound in here. The room looked empty, but when I went on to check out the hallway I got conked from behind.”
“The bastard must have been hiding in the bathroom. Let me look at your head.”
Gently as I could I separated the matted hair to get a look at the wound. It was a bloody bump about the size of a quarter. I accidentally touched it with the tip of my index finger.
“Ow!” Lynda jerked away. “Sadist.”
“It doesn’t look too bad,” I said, “but I understand that head wounds are tricky. You should go to the hospital.”
“I should use dental floss and give up red meat, too. At least, that’s what you used to tell me.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t want some doctor tapping my knee with his little mallet. Just give me a minute, I’ll be okay.”
“Whatever you say.” The new Jeff Cody is non-directional. “Did you find anything while you were poking around?”
She shook her head, then winced. “No chance to. Why did somebody do this to me?”
“Because somebody wanted you out of the way before you could prove the identity of the killer.”
“Chalmers?”
“I can’t think of a better candidate. He looks frail, but maybe he hit you with his cane.”
It didn’t make sense that Chalmers would just leave her there, right in the place he was staying, but then maybe that’s what we were supposed to think.
“The book,” Lynda said suddenly, gripping my shoulder. “We still have to look for that missing Holmes book.”
I talked her into letting me clean her wound first with soap and water and peroxide from the bathroom cabinet.
“As you said, this is where the killer had to be hiding,” she pointed out as we stood in the bathroom. “We might as well start our search here.”
I couldn’t see hiding a priceless book in a room where people were taking showers and flushing the toilet. Humidity is death on paper products. But we gave it a go. It wasn’t an especially large bathroom, and a few minutes of intensive searching was enough to convince both of us that Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887 wasn’t hidden in the towels or wrapped in waterproof plastic inside the toilet bowl.
“Maybe it isn’t hidden at all,” I suggested. “Chalmers probably never dreamed anybody would be rude enough to search his rooms, not even his host’s brother-in-law.”
“And then maybe he didn’t have time to hide it after he knocked me out,” Lynda added. (Actually, that sounds pretty weak right now, but it didn’t then.)
In the bedroom, she tackled Renata’s dresser and I took Woollcott’s - just the places a person might casually stick a book that wasn’t much more than a fat pamphlet. I started my search with a once-over at the top of both dressers. His still had keys and coins and a bottle of pills, just as I’d seen that morning. Hers had all those womanly things like lipstick, a hair brush, a jewelry box, eye shadows, and powders.
And yet I had a nagging feeling that something was missing, something was not as it had been earlier that morning.
I opened a wine-colored bathrobe from the top drawer of Chalmers’s dresser and unfolded it. No book hidden inside.
“How do you like this?”
I turned around to see Lynda holding up a red satin-and-lace nightie that clearly wouldn’t hide anything.
“It’s the real you,” I assured her, my voice a little dry.
“You wish.” She refolded the garment and put it back in Renata’s drawer. “If the book was ever here it was probably removed while I was unconscious. Or maybe the whole idea that Chalmers killed-”
“Hold it.”
I’d found something sandwiched between pairs of white undershorts. It was a little book with paper covers, about half an inch thick, five and a half inches wide and eight and a half long. There was a drawing on the cover in brown, a man lighting an old-fashioned lamp. Most of the printing was in black, including the part across the top where it said Beeton’s Christmas Annual. But the title of the lead story, appropriately, was in big red letters - A Study in Scarlet. Gently, I turned to the first page and found a faded inscription in a handwriting I’d seen before:
Dear Ma’am,
I hope this little detective tale brings you some enjoyment.
A.C.D.
“This may be why you were hit on the head,” I told Lynda. “To keep you from finding this.”
Chapter Thirty-One - The Return of Sebastian McCabe
“It’s the biggest story of my career,” Lynda said as we drove back to Muckerheide Center in her Mustang, me at the wheel. “Murder, jealousy, sex, burglary, brilliant detective work - it has it all.”
“Everything,” I agreed, by no means happy.
I could imagine the headline stretched across the top of the Observer tomorrow - or the website today, for that matter. Even worse, I could see Ralph Pendergast’s reaction to the news that the killer was Mac’s house guest. Oh, this was going to get real ugly real fast.
Mac’s talk on “Humor in the Canon” was over and a Sherlockian auction was underway by the time we arrived at Muckerheide Center. In fact, my elephantine brother-in-law was nowhere to be seen as we slipped into the seats at the back of the Hearth Room. The seat next to Kate was empty.
Sherlockian books and memorabilia donated by participants in the seminar were being sold to pay bills not covered by the modest registration fee and to build a kitty for next year’s program, a highly optimistic presumption at this point. Some of the stuff on the block raised (or lowered) the word “obscure” to new levels. Tie tacks, greeting cards, mugs, Christmas ornaments, you name it - anything with a connection to Sherlock Holmes, no matter how tenuous, seemed to be fair game.
Bob Nakamora, acting as auctioneer, held up a volume about the size of a normal hardback book but with a faded red cover of paper. The illustration showed Holmes in his dressing gown.
“Here we have a rare edition of The Incunabular Sherlock Holmes,” he announced. “There were only three hundred and fifty signed and numbered copies printed by the Baker Street Irregulars in 1958. This is number” - he opened the cover just a crack and peered inside - “ninety-four. What am I bid?”