Harold thought of “The Purloined Letter.” No. In this case, the diary had not been hidden in plain sight. That would be too easy.
What was the twist? If Conan Doyle had hidden the diary himself, where would he have hidden it? Or, better yet, if Conan Doyle had hidden the diary for Holmes to find and Holmes were strolling through this study right now, where would he look? If Harold was sure that the diary was hidden here, and he was… well then, he was only more sure of one thing: that there would be a twist. Because there always was.
He thought of all the great twists he’d read at the ends of all the great mystery novels. Some were small shifts of focus, others were radical shifts of plot, such that everything you thought you knew turned out to be false. Harold wasn’t certain what sort of twist he hoped for. But all the best twists he’d read shared one key feature.
The well-written twist always preyed upon the reader’s assumptions. Something the reader had simply assumed to be true-because how could it not be?-turned out to be false. Something unquestioned was questioned. Something that had never felt worth examining was examined, and an answer was found in the most unlikely place.
What did Harold assume? That Bram Stoker had hidden the diary so that he could come back later and destroy it. That Bram Stoker had hidden the diary within this room. That no one had ever found it. That the room had been emptied, destroyed, turned over a thousand times and that the diary wasn’t here.
That the diary had been here. That the diary wasn’t here.
Harold stopped breathing.
The diary had been here. The diary wasn’t here.
And it was all so stunningly, embarrassingly obvious.
He flipped through the pages of photographs quickly, looking hard at the gray-on-gray images.
“Have we found the diary yet?” came the voice of Penelope Higgins.
He looked up to find her stocky frame in the doorway.
“Yes,” said Harold, in no mood for games.
Ms. Higgins laughed at him through her nose. “Right then! Well, where is it?”
Harold earnestly turned back to the photos, plowing through her sarcasm. “The diary was hidden here in 1900. But it’s not here anymore, and it wasn’t here after Conan Doyle died. So at some point between 1900 and 1930, someone took it out of this room.”
“So somebody stole it?”
“No. Somebody took it out of this room. But I don’t think they knew what they were taking. I think somebody removed the diary by accident, not realizing what it was. So what I want to know now is, what was taken out of here in those years? What was big enough, and obvious enough, and hollow enough, that somebody could have quickly shoved a diary in it but that no one would have looked inside? It’s not a vase, it’s not a chest… Maybe the empty base of a lamp?”
“The lamps all went to Conan Doyle’s daughter, I believe. And there weren’t many of them. Fairly little, too, if I remember. Probably kept them in her attic. But I don’t think you’d be the first to search Conan Doyle’s daughter’s attic for the diary, Mr. White.”
Harold turned the page and laid his eyes on a small, dark photograph from 1899. It was of the study, of a liquor table in one corner, festooned with clear decanters and a strange, tall object. He squinted and looked closer. It was bigger than any of the liter-size decanters, wider around the bottom and rising a good two feet into the air. Both the base and the balloon-shaped body were made of opaque glass. A series of what looked like tubes ran around it, and something like a nozzle poked out from the top.
He flipped the pages quickly, finding a later photograph of the same space. It had been taken in 1905. The angle was different, and the liquor cabinet was in a slightly farther spot along the wall… But the object was gone. In its place was something similar but smaller. Much smaller.
He pressed his finger against the first photograph. “What is this?” he asked. “It’s hard to make out.”
Penelope Higgins bent over the photograph book herself, squinting past her thick, round glasses.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “The gasogene!” Harold remembered reading about gasogenes over the years, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen one. They were early carbonators, used privately to put the bubbles in a gentleman’s seltzer. They were expensive and rather unwieldy, and they were found only among the bar sets of the wealthy.
“It’s huge,” said Harold.
“Yes, rather. It was an early gasogene, I think. Conan Doyle received one of those monstrous nineteenth-century ones early on and got rid of it when the newer ones were developed a few years later. This one was a gift, if I recall.”
“From who?”
“Bram Stoker. They were friends, you know.”
Harold froze again.
“He got rid of it? To where?”
“Hell if I know,” said Ms. Higgins. “Conan Doyle would have sent the thing away long before he died. 1901? ’02? ’03? Must have been.”
“Did he toss it away?” Harold asked, worried that she might say yes. If Stoker had been able to stuff the diary in the wide base of the gasogene and then Conan Doyle had carelessly tossed it in the trash a year later…
“I don’t think so,” said Ms. Higgins, doing her best to recall. She sighed. “If I must, I can check my books. We have lists, you see, of all of Conan Doyle’s possessions and where they’ve gotten off to.”
“Please,” said Harold. “Please.”
“I think I’ve one in my car. The thing is dreadfully heavy. Hold on.” With an irritated sigh, she left him alone while she went outside. Harold sat, tapping his fingers, waiting for her to return.
He flipped through the photograph book listlessly. He was so close now. So miserably close… He skimmed through the end of the book, where he saw portraits of the Conan Doyle family. Harold looked over the faces of Conan Doyle and his wife, his second wife, his children. Generations of Conan Doyles had been in this house and had never known the secret that Harold was about to uncover.
He stopped at the very last photo in the book. It was bright and colorful, modern-clearly taken only a few years past. It must be of the great-grandchildren of the Conan Doyle family. It was unlabeled, but Harold recognized a few of the faces. He even saw Sebastian, grinning out at him from the photograph. If only Sebastian knew where Harold was now. Harold grinned back at the photograph. He felt as if he’d beaten them all.
His eye caught on a young woman standing next to Sebastian in the photograph. She was a solid foot shorter than Sebastian, with curly brown hair and a bright yellow scarf wrapped around her neck.
As Harold’s eyes went wide and every muscle in his body tensed in shock, Ms. Higgins came back in holding a folder full of papers.
“Lucerne,” she said. “It looks like Conan Doyle’s first gasogene, miraculously, made its way to the collection in Lucerne.”
Harold didn’t look at her. He couldn’t take his eyes off the photograph. He mumbled something about Switzerland.
“Yes,” said Ms. Higgins, not expecting this level of indifference from Harold. “It’s at the Sherlock Holmes museum in Lucerne, in Switzerland. You know it?”
“Yes,” muttered Harold. “It’s at the base of the Reichenbach Falls, where Holmes died. They have a complete re-creation of Sherlock Holmes’s study. It’s made up with all items from the period, including a number from Conan Doyle himself. I’m sorry, who is this?”
Ms. Higgins stepped toward him. “What?” she asked. “Who?”
“This woman. In the photograph.” Harold pointed, his hand shaking in the air. He felt as if he were pointing straight at a ghost.
Ms. Higgins approached the photograph. She followed his outstretched fingertip to the beautiful face of the young woman.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s Sarah.”