Sherlock Holmes In America (4 page)

“Another time, perhaps.” My friend paused, his long fingers drumming along with the drops as he stared out our front window, eyes glittering brighter than the rain-soaked street below. “Perhaps one day we may both find occasion to test ourselves further on their soil.” He glanced back at me abruptly. “I should have liked to have met this Sam Jefferson, for instance. He had a decided talent.”

“Talent or no, he was there to witness the events; you solved them based on a secondhand account by a man who'd never so much as heard of the Science of Deduction at the time.”

“There are precious few crimes in this world, merely a hundred million variations,” he shrugged. “It was a fetching little problem, however, no matter it was not matchless. The use of the magic lantern, although I will never prove it, I believe to have been absolutely inspired. Now,” he finished, striding to his violin and picking it up, “if you would be so kind as to locate the brandy and cigars you mentioned earlier, I will show my appreciation by entertaining you in turn. You've come round to my liking for Kreutzer, I think? Capital. I must thank you for bringing your very interesting case to my attention; I shall lose no time informing my brother I solved it without moving a muscle. And now, friend Watson, we shall continue our efforts to enliven a dreary afternoon.”

Lloyd Rose

Lloyd Rose, former chief drama critic of the
Washington Post
, has written for the
New Yorker
and the
Atlantic
and is the author of three Doctor Who novels for BBC Books.

25
September—Sherlock is bored.

This condition is not my doing, as I keep reminding him. I no more wanted this educational trip to the green wilds of American New England than he, but if between us we could not dissuade Father, then there's an end to it.
I
have accommodated myself most comfortably. This agreeable inn—a spacious, rambling, white-frame structure—has a number of airy porches furnished with wicker armchairs of generous proportion. While Father explores the golf links, I sit and admire the mountains, now shifting from green to crimson and gold, and concentrate on my Adam Smith.

Note: the Americans do whiskey atrociously but tobacco very well indeed.

29 September—I managed to talk my way out of a “delightful” hike to a local waterfall today while Sherlock did not. This was amusing.

2 October—“Even the people here are dull,” he complains to me. I could retort that they are not much duller than the folk of the English countryside, but honesty compels me to admit he is not entirely wrong. The guests are almost exclusively members of the upper-middle classes from New York and Boston—pleasant enough, but intellectually limited, and with much the same sort of lives. Of the late war they appear to try to remember as little as possible, though I am certain that among the older generation many lost sons. Sherlock tells me that in a few of the local cemeteries he has explored for their native plant life, there are numerous graves of men who fell in battle ten and twelve years ago.

5 October—I overheard a ridiculous but nonetheless rather interesting conversation today. As a rule, I am fortunate enough to find a corner of the porch where I can be more or less by myself, but today a party invaded the area, taking over a table and ordering lemonade and a light lunch. There were two of them, both in banking, one a collector of ancient Byzantine (or perhaps, just perhaps, late Roman) coins and the other with a recent history of tuberculosis and an overdeveloped anxiety about rabbits. The former, whom I would have assumed to be the steadier of the pair, was regaling his companion with an extraordinary tale.

“I assure you,” said he, “I am not inventing this. Nor have I succumbed to some delusional illness. And I was quite as sober as I am now.”

“Nonetheless,” replied his friend, “you can understand that I find your story difficult to believe.”

“I should not have believed it myself if I had not seen. I scoffed when I first heard of the place.”

“Which is called the Ghost Factory—”

“Ghost Shop.”

“Oh, indeed!”

“That's only the derisive title of some of the natives who resent the invasion of so many tourists into their quiet town. The place is actually an inn run by a pair of brothers who, several evenings a week, hold mediumistic sittings in an upstairs room.”

“My dear Daniel—”

“I know, I know, but hear me out!”

“I have heard you out. You say that musical instruments play themselves—”

“—are heard to play when no human hand could touch them—”

“—and that dozens of spirits of Red Indians appear—”

“Chinamen too! And child spirits.”

“Popping up through a hidden trapdoor, no doubt.”

This was my private opinion as well, but the storyteller shook his head emphatically.

“No indeed. That's part of the wonder of the thing. The place has been investigated by an expert in the detection of fraud who has had the floors and walls examined and is prepared to swear there are no secret entrances.” At this point, regrettably, two young ladies joined the gentlemen, and the conversation veered off in a duller direction. I own myself intrigued. The idea of spirits is absurd, of course, but this sounds like quite a complicated hoax. If I can inquire without actually seeming interested in the nonsensical matter, I would like to find out more. Perhaps I can set Sherlock on the scent.

Later—Sherlock uncooperative. “Twaddle!” sniffed he, and proceeded to give me a patronizing lecture on human gullibility. He really can be most tiresome.

8 October—We were joined at dinner tonight by a gentleman Father had met that morning. Sherlock and I observed him with some interest from the door of the dining room, ourselves as yet undetected. He was a man of about forty with a short moustache and beard and an impressive, straight-backed presence.

“Military,” said Sherlock, as if that were not obvious to anyone.

“From his air and bearing,” I pointed out, “he is surely an officer of some rank. A colonel, I would think.”

“And yet not a field officer,” Sherlock murmured thoughtfully. “Look at his hands. No outdoor life or physical labor has roughened them.”

He looked very smug as he said this, and I was forced to concede that he had a point. Fortunately, before I actually had to say so, Father noticed and beckoned us over. He introduced his companion as Mr. Henry Olcott, a reporter for
The Daily Graphic.
Sherlock and I exchanged glances.

“But with a military background, surely,” said he.

“Possibly as a colonel,” I added.

I regret to say that we rather displeased Father. He does not like us to “show off,” as he puts it, and in this case went so far as to apologize for our rudeness. But when we hurried to voice our own apologies, Mr. Olcott genially waved them off. “They are completely correct,” he said to Father, “and I would only like to know how on earth they worked it out.” Father sighed, but told us to oblige him. “You will see,” he remarked to our guest, “how simple it all is once they explain it.” I believe Sherlock's vanity must have been tweaked at this, for he had the temerity to add, at the end of our account, “And you were a staff officer, sir, were you not?”

Father opened his mouth reprovingly, but before he could speak, Olcott exclaimed, “But that is wonderful. You are absolutely right. I was a Special Commissioner to the War Department, in charge of investigating fraud in arsenals and shipyards.”

This time Sherlock and I refrained from exchanging glances; indeed, we froze, pinned by the same certainty. But any questions we had were wiped from our minds by Father's next remark:

“And Colonel Olcott also served on the panel that investigated the murder of President Lincoln.”

Needless to say, all else was forgotten as we listened to his account of the fate of that great and tragic man—of his assassination by the villain Booth, a sometime actor who knew well the interior of the theatre in which he committed his terrible crime. We listened as Colonel Olcott told us of Booth's broken ankle as he leapt to the stage; his escape by horseback; and his vanishing for twelve days while his fellow assassins—one of whom had attacked the secretary of state, one of whom was meant to kill the vice president but lost his nerve—were apprehended. He also told us of the murderer's eventual death in a burning barn, of the executions of the other conspirators. Colonel Olcott grew more and more somber as he recalled his story; even after nearly a decade, the sorrow and horror of it clearly have not left him. He spoke with great clarity and attention to detail, leaving an overall impression not only of inbred decency but of hard common sense. Indeed, as he went on, it seemed to me that I had injudiciously jumped to a conclusion—such a man could never be involved with the foolery of something called the Ghost Shop.

I said so to Sherlock later as we were preparing for bed, and he acknowledged as much. “Still,” said he, “it seems almost too much of a coincidence that there should be two investigators of fraud here in this out-of-the-way part of the world at the same time,” and I must agree that the odds of such a thing strike me as high.

9 October (midmorning)—The problem with Sherlock is that he has no respect for the other fellow's privacy. It never seems to occur to him that a man should be left alone, to smoke and read and mull and go about his business. He is always bustling about
discovering
things and drawing conclusions that invariably lead to his coming to me with some involved plan of action that involves stirring ourselves to a completely unnecessary degree. So, this morning, he popped up on the veranda just as I was settling in with my after-breakfast cigar, and announced, “It is he!”

I am a man who likes to enter the day gradually, and I did not immediately follow him. “Who?” I inquired irritably. “And whence this penchant for gnomic announcements, Sherlock? It's very irritating.”

“I do apologize.” He glanced at his watch. “I realize that I am all but waking you in the middle of the night.”

“Go away.”

He sat down. “I mean that Olcott is our expert on fraud! He has reserved a place on the afternoon train to Rutland and then a carriage to Chittenden—the town in which, my enquiries inform me, this socalled Ghost Shop is to be found.”

I was dismayed at his industry. He must have been up since dawn, bothering people with questions and checking transportation timetables. “Well,” said I, closing my eyes and hoping he would take the hint, “I gather from this enthusiasm that you're going to look into the matter after all. It sounds a fascinating hoax.”

He did not immediately reply. I opened my eyes and saw that his expression was thoughtful. “It must be a very sophisticated one to have taken in Colonel Olcott. He really does not strike me as a man easily or willingly deceived.”

“Nor I.”

“So of course you will come to Chittenden with me to uncover the heart of this mystery.”

I was actually rendered speechless for a moment. Finally, I sputtered, “Have you quite taken leave of your senses, Sherlock? Can you give me one good reason I should leave this comfortable porch for a train and then a jolting carriage ride into the wilds? These forests demoralized Burgoyne, you recall—”

“One hundred years ago,” he scoffed, “and there has been at least one total deforestation since then. The trees are on average hardly twenty-five inches around.”

“That is hardly the point—”

“The point, dear brother, is that if you are here this evening, you get to join Father at dinner with some gentlemen he has met who are up on all the latest theories of scientific agriculture.”

Perhaps the journey will not be so bad.

9 October (late evening)—It was appalling. The train was primitive and the journey sooty—and as to the carriage ride, all I can say is that the American understanding of what is meant by “road” varies considerably from the English definition of the word. These rutted tracks must be nothing but mud when it rains. At present, there has been a drought for several weeks, so they are little but dust. And stones. At one point, there was concern we had broken a wheel. At another, we all had to dismount and ford a stream
by foot
so as to lighten the carriage for safe passage. Altogether, it was a miserable trip, not in the least helped by Olcott's good-natured stoicism and Sherlock's heretofore unexpected penchant for what I can only characterize as an exorbitant curiosity about the wilderness.

Still, I must admit the unpleasantness was considerably lightened by the story the colonel told us on the train. Sherlock had been a bit unsure how to approach him, but as soon as he found out we had heard about the events in Chittenden, he was immediately forthcoming. He began with the history of William and Horatio Eddy, the men who, with their sister, Mary, run the Ghost Shop. It is in fact a large, two-storey farmhouse built about thirty years ago—the brothers lately added a wing so as to convert the place into an inn they call the Green Inn, doubtless to echo the name of the surrounding mountains. The brothers were raised there in what appear to have been horrible circumstances, comparable to something out of Dickens. The father was a religious zealot and tyrant who, when his sons began experiencing trances and visions, attempted to beat them—and at one point burn with scalding water—into normalcy. When this treatment proved ineffectual, he “leased” them to a traveling mountebank who exhibited them as mind readers and fortune-tellers—a dangerous business, as they were frequently mobbed, shot at, and run out of town. “The children got all the kicks and he got all the ha'pence in this transaction,” the colonel observed with dry disgust.