Holmes nodded and picked up the rest of the tale. “The bees failed to pollinate the avocado trees because their queen was gone,” he explained. “Queenless bees cannot survive. They were queenless because Jonas Imbler removed the queen to start his rogue hive in the oleander grove. The sabotage of the pollination experiment was a mere byproduct of his larger scheme to murder Mrs. Tingley. Without her, he felt sure the Society would fail and his wife would be willing to leave Lomaland.”
“It seems a strange way to commit murder, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Tingley said. “Surely there are more straightforward methods available to one who is determined to kill another human being. Poisoned honey seems rather a roundabout way to do it.”
“Roundabout, yes,” Holmes replied, with a small smile. “But for Jonas Imbler, it had the virtue of poetic justice. He saw you, Mrs. Tingley, as the queen bee of Lomaland, and he felt that one queen deserved death at the hands of another.”
Mrs. Spalding’s face continued to wear its stubborn look. “How can you be sure,” she asked, “that Mrs. Imbler was not her husband’s willing accomplice?”
Holmes shook his head. “I am convinced that Mrs. Imbler knew nothing of her husband’s activities. She might be capable of murder; I believe most people are. But she would never use her bees as weapons. She has far too much respect for them. It would be,” he added, turning to me, “as if our own Mrs. Hudson were to put poison into her breakfast porridge.”
I hastily agreed that this was not to be contemplated. I could see that Mrs. Spalding was not mollified, but Mrs. Tingley nodded her agreement.
“The soul is not invisible, Mr. Holmes,” she pronounced. “It reveals itself in our every waking action. And Mrs. Imbler has shown me a soul devoted to order and peace. Her well-tended hives are her character reference.”
We stayed one more night with the Spaldings before returning to the Hotel del Coronado. It was a night of sheer magic, for the magnificent orchestra played exquisitely as the sun lowered itself into the Pacific and the lights went on, one by one, inside the glass globes over the domes of Lomaland.
I stole a glance at Holmes. He was entranced by the music, and I saw another glimpse of the child he had once been as I watched a tall, slender boy of about twelve raise his violin to his chin and draw his bow across it.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING THREE QUARTERS by Jon L. Breen
Jon L. Breen, the winner of two Edgar Awards in the biographical/ critical category, has contributed to six previous Sherlock Holmes anthologies. He is the author of eight novels, including the Dagger Award-nominated Touch of the Past, and around a hundred short stories. His reviews appear regularly in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Mystery Scene, and frequently (and non-politically) in The Weekly Standard. His latest books are the comic courtroom novel Probable Claus (Five Star) and A Shot Rang Out: Selected Mystery Criticism (Surinam Turtle).
Although I was a freelance American correspondent for several English newspapers, joining the crowds of ink-stained wretches attending the latest famous personality’s arrival in Chicago was never part of my usual regimen. So it was purely by chance that autumn afternoon in 1907 that I was at Grand Central Station on West Harrison Street to see Sherlock Holmes’s unheralded arrival. I had known him years before, and apart from my pleasure at seeing him again, I had hopes of an exclusive story to impress my Fleet Street masters.
“Clive Armitage, Mr. Holmes. We met-”
“I remember you well, Armitage, and I am pleased to greet a fellow Londoner. You are fully Americanized, I see.”
“It’s true I’ve been here several years now, and some say I’m developing an American accent, though I can’t hear it myself. Why do you think me Americanized?”
“Your tiepin and cufflinks identify you as member of some sort of baseball supporters club, and the handle of your walking stick depicts an ornate American eagle. You appear to be chewing gum, a habit that has not yet infected British journalists in my experience.”
“A representative of the Wrigley Company gave me some samples when I was working on a feature article about them,” I said somewhat defensively. “Wrigley is something of a Chicago success story, and I was assured their products will one day span the globe, so be warned.” Then, like a thespian belatedly remembering his lines, I exclaimed, “That was a truly amazing demonstration of your undiminished powers.” It wasn’t actually so amazing once he explained it, but I was not above flattery in search of a journalistic coup. “When I came to America, I feared I would miss reading about your adventures in The Strand, but Collier’s Weekly has filled the breach. Didn’t I hear that you had retired, though, beekeeping in Sussex or some such thing?”
“That is essentially correct.”
“And how is Dr. Watson?”
“Well. I see little of him since his most recent marriage.”
Finally, I reached the obvious question. “What brought you to America?”
The answer proved frustrating: “A matter too delicate to reveal. Perhaps one day the full story can be told. For now, consider me an ordinary tourist, hoping to see some of this invigorating young city before returning home. I seek no publicity of my presence here, and in fact explicitly discourage it.”
“Do I gather though that you still do some detective work?”
“On rare occasions. A problem with truly singular elements is difficult to resist.”
I immediately offered to be his guide to the city of Chicago, and he readily accepted. In the days to follow, we saw (and smelled) the stockyards, visited the site on De Koven where Kate O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern and started the great fire of 1871, viewed such towering architectural masterpieces as the Rookery and the Schiller Building, rode the “L” trains, marveled at the great collections of the Art Institute, attended a concert of the Chicago Orchestra, and sampled the varied cuisines that immigrant populations offer a great city’s diners. On his third morning in the city, I suggested a visit to the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago’s 1893 world’s fair, and casually asked if he would consent to meet a friend of mine while we were in the area.
“I am too much in your debt to refuse,” he said, “but I trust I can rely on your friend’s discretion.”
“Absolutely. He’s an interesting chap. Athletics coach. I met him when I was in France seven years ago covering the Olympic Games. A man of unshakable moral principles.”
“They can only be deemed unshakable if they have been put to the test.”
“Oh, his have. He was planning to bring several runners to the Games but cancelled the trip when he learned the finals of all their events would take place on Sunday. Then a cablegram from Paris said the French had decided to change the finals to a weekday, so he made the trip with his athletes after all. But when he got there, he found the original schedule still in place. He withdrew his team from the competition. Americans take the Sabbath seriously, you see. Don’t ask my friend his opinion of the French. But he’s a splendid fellow, really, has played and coached nearly every competitive sport under the sun. At present, he is most renowned for football.”
“Is that Association football or rugby?”
“Neither. American football. Closer to rugby but different. It’s a college game primarily, but some institutions have banned it on grounds of excessive violence, including fatalities. In response, the coaches keep adjusting the rules, whether to save the sport or outfox their fellows, I’m not certain, but it is enormously popular and draws huge crowds.”
Conveniently for my ulterior motive, the former site of the World’s Fair overlapped the campus of the University of Chicago, a highly experimental, daringly coeducational institution established only a few years earlier thanks to a series of gifts by John D. Rockefeller. For all the university’s modernist innovations, its buildings were of a traditional gothic design, combining with the artistically landscaped quadrangles to create an aesthetically stimulating environment for learning.