Joaquin held up the bloody bundle. The smell was really strong now, and the Weres’ upper lips pulled up in a snarl of distaste. Even Weres liked their blood fresh. Joaquin, with a certain amount of drama, shook out the garments, one by one.
“Cedric, I believe these are yours,” he said.
“That’s not true,” Cedric said calmly. He swept a hand down his chest. “Someone is trying to incriminate me. This is what I have been wearing all evening.”
“Not so,” retorted Dahlia. “The flowers on your vest were golden at the beginning of the evening. After the death of the human, the flowers were blue.” She was almost sad to have to say the words, but out of spite Cedric had almost condemned the whole nest to hours in the police station, days of bad press, and the end of the regime of Joaquin before it had even really begun. “The clothes you have on now are your clothes you wear when you garden, the clothes you leave hanging on a peg outside. Including the boots.”
Everyone looked down at Cedric’s scruffy boots. They were certainly not footwear anyone would choose to wear to a reception, not even Cedric.
For a second, fear flashed in Cedric’s blue eyes. Only for a second. Then he charged at Dahlia, a wild shriek coming from his lips.
She’d been expecting it for all of a couple of seconds. She stepped to the left quicker than the eye could track her, seized Cedric’s right arm as he went past her, twisted it upward at a terrible angle, and when Cedric screamed she gripped his head and twisted.
Cedric’s head came off.
There was silence for a moment.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to Joaquin. “I didn’t intend his decapitation. The mess . . . ”
“He’ll flake away and we’ll get out the vacuum cleaner,” Joaquin said, with a good approximation of calm. Before his elevation to the sheriff’s position, Joaquin had been in body disposal, Dahlia recalled. “If the stain won’t clean out of the rug, we’ll buy another.”
That was something Cedric would never have said, and Dahlia brightened. “Thank you, Sheriff. He almost surprised me,” she said, and she could barely believe the words were coming from her lips. Perhaps she would miss Cedric more than she had realized.
“When the humans charge the police in order to be shot, they call it ‘suicide by cop.’ ” Katamori bowed to his new friend. He said gallantly, “We will call it ‘Death by Dahlia.’ ”
Charlaine Harris is a #1 New York Times bestselling author who has been writing for more than thirty years. After publishing two stand-alone mysteries, she published eight books featuring Aurora Teagarden, a mystery-solving Georgia librarian. In 1996, she released the first of the Shakespeare mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Lily Bard. The fifth (and last) of the series was published in 2001. Harris had, by then, created the Southern Vampire Mystery series about a telepathic waitress named Sookie Stackhouse who works in a bar in the fictional northern Louisiana town of Bon Temps. The first book, Dead Until Dark, won the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Mystery in 2001. The thirteenth and final novel in the series, Dead Ever After, will be published in May 2013. Alan Ball produced the HBO series based on the Sookie books, True Blood, which premiered in September of 2008. Its sixth season aired earlier this year. Harris has also co-edited six anthologies with Toni L. P. Kelner. Personally, Harris is married and the mother of three. She lives in a small town in southern Arkansas in a house full of rescue dogs. “Death by Dahlia” features Dahlia Lynley-Chivers, who was introduced in the Sookieverse short story “Tacky,” and has appeared in All Together Dead and several other short stories. Dahlia also “stars” in Dying for Daylight, an interactive PC game.
The Case: Two men find death when they descend into the sea to recover the remains of a man who has lain dead ninety fathoms deep for five years. Meanwhile, terrifying sounds emerge from what was thought to be a watery tomb.
The Investigators: Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest consulting detective, and John H. Watson, MD, Holmes’s friend, assistant, and sometime flatmate.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DIVING BELL
Simon Clark
WATSON. COME AT ONCE. THAT WHICH CANNOT BE. IS.
That astonishing summons brought me to the Cornish harbor town of Fowey. There, as directed by further information within the telegram, I joined my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, on a tugboat, which immediately steamed toward the open sea. The rapid pounding of the engine made for an urgent drumbeat. One that reinforced the notion that once more we’d embarked upon a headlong dash to adventure.
By the time I’d regained my breath, after a somewhat hurried embarkation, I saw that Holmes had taken up a position in the tugboat’s bow. There he stood, straight-backed, thin as a pikestaff, hatless, and dressed severely in black. Every inch the eager seeker of truth. His deep-set eyes raked the turquoise ocean, hunting for what he knew must lie out here.
But what, exactly, was the nature of our case? He’d given no elaboration, other than that mystifying statement in the telegram. That which cannot be. Is.
I picked my way across the deck, over coils of rope, rusty chain, and assorted winding gear that adorned this grubby little workhorse of the sea. The vessel moved at the limits of its speed. Steam hissed from pipes, smoke tumbled out of the funnel to stain an otherwise perfectly blue June sky. Gulls wheeled about our craft, for the moment mistaking us for a fishing boat. Either they finally understood that we didn’t carry so much as a mackerel or, perhaps, they sensed danger ahead, for the birds suddenly departed on powerful wings, uttering such piercing shrieks that they could be plainly heard above the whoosh! and shorr! of the engine.
Likewise, I made it my business to be overheard above the machine, too. “Holmes. What’s happened?”
That distinctive profile remained. He didn’t even glance in my direction.
“Holmes, good God, man! The telegram! What does it mean?”
Still he did not turn. Instead, he rested his fingertip against his lips.
Hush.
My friend is not given to personal melodrama, or prone to questioning my loyalties by virtue of frivolous tests. Clearly, this was a matter of great importance. Just what that matter was I’d have to wait and see. However, a certain rigidity of his posture and grimness of expression sent a chill foreboding through my blood. Terrible events loomed—or so I divined. Therefore, I stood beside that black clad figure, said nothing, and waited for the tugboat to bear us to our destination.
Presently, I saw where we were headed. Sitting there, as a blot of darkness on the glittering sea, was a large vessel of iron. What I’d first surmised to be a stunted mast between the aft deck and the funnel was, in fact, a crane. A cable ran from the pulley at the tip of that formidable lifting arm to a gray object on the aft deck.
In the next half hour Holmes would speak but tersely. “Steel yourself, Watson.” That was his sole item of conversation on the tugboat.
The dourness of countenance revealed that some immense problem weighed heavy on the man. His long fingers curled around the rail at the prow. Muscle tension produced a distinct whitening of the knuckles. His piercing eyes regarded the iron ship, which grew ever nearer. And he looked at that ship as a man might who’d seen a gravestone on which his own name is etched with the days of his mortal arrival and, more disconcertingly, his departure.