Locked rooms

And I could picture it, clearly: Mother's indignation that Father was meeting the man; a family's final minutes tainted by recrimination and regret; the motorcar setting off down the road . . .

“You would not have changed a thing,” Holmes said firmly. This time, I believed him.

I changed out of my day-clothes and settled into a soft bed that seemed to tremble and sway with my tiredness, but my eyes would not close. I looked at the mezuzah, lying still on the bed-stand, and found myself saying, “Holmes, would you mind awfully if we didn't leave right away? I'd like to see my family's graves, and explore the area a little.”

“No, I do not mind spending more days here. We've been in California for a week and a half, and I don't believe I've set eyes on a redwood tree.”

“And it would also allow you to finish your Paganini research.”

“My—ah, yes, my Paganini research.”

“There is no research project, is there, Holmes?”

“Not as such, no,” he admitted. The bed's sway was magnified briefly as he settled in beside me. I turned to him, closing my eyes with the pleasure of simple human touch.

“Don't let me forget,” he said. “I must be downstairs at nine o'clock for breakfast with Mr Garcia and the Irregulars.”

“I'm sure that if you haven't appeared, we shall wake to find them staring down at us.” He laughed, and stretched to shut off the light. As darkness took over, I had a final thought. “Holmes, what was Dr Ming saying to you?”

“While he was sitting on the motorcar bonnet, do you mean? I apologised for manhandling him so unceremoniously, and said something to the effect of what good fortune it had been to happen across the one person in Chinatown who could summon a crowd's instantaneous response. He replied that the lines of good fortune and the lines of feng shui are often mistaken for each other.”

My sleepy brain chewed on that for a bit. “So, what, he was saying that his presence there was predetermined?”

“His words were ‘Those who perceive the dragon's path may alter it.'”

I wavered: If the old doctor's presence was deliberate, that would suggest that the Fates—or the old gentleman himself—had not only seen the need for his presence at that precise time and place, but had also envisioned our ability to make use of it.

In the end, I shook the troubling conundrum out of my head and settled into the comfort of the pillow. As I slid towards sleep, I felt, or dreamt, the lightest of touches on my hair, followed by the words, “Ah, Russell, what is to become of me? I find I've even grown attached to this infernal hair-cut.”

I felt my lips curl slightly. “That is really most unfortunate, Holmes. I had just decided to allow it to grow back.”

And at last I slept, dreamlessly.

Afterword

Thanks are due, as always, to the wise and capable people of the McHenry Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, without whom this book would be a smaller and less lively thing.

Thanks are also due to Dick Griffiths, Jon Hart, and Fred Zimmerman of the Blackhawk Museum in Danville, California. If you want to see Donny's blue Rolls-Royce, that's where it lives.

To Abby Bridge, researcher extraordinaire, and the collections of the California Historical Society, the San Francisco Public Library, and the Mechanics' Institute Library; Don Herron, who knows all things Hammett; and Stu Bennett, who uncovered some insider's guides to the City.

Although none of the biographies of Dashiell Hammett I found, including that written by his daughter, Jo Hammett (Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers), mention this extraordinary meeting of minds in the spring of 1924, from all I can see, Miss Russell captures the man's essence, from the dapper clothes and weak lungs to the man's robust sense of ethics. It should be noted, regarding Hammett's disinclination to sell out his employer in this story, that this desperately ill, lifelong claustrophobe, an old man at the age of fifty-seven, spent twenty-two weeks in federal prison during the Red-baiting fifties because he refused to give up the names of men who had trusted him. As Lillian Hellman said in the eulogy of her longtime lover (which can be found in Diane Johnson's excellent Dashiell Hammett, A Life) Hammett submitted to prison because “he had come to the conclusion that a man should keep his word.”

No small goal for any of us.

About the Author

LAURIE R. KING became the first novelist since Patricia Cornwell to win prizes for Best First Crime Novel on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of her debut thriller, A Grave Talent. She is the bestselling author of four contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, eight Mary Russell mysteries, and bestselling novels A Darker Place, Folly, and Keeping Watch. She lives in northern California.

Other Mystery Novels by

LAURIE R. KING

Mary Russell Novels

The Beekeeper's Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor

O Jerusalem

Justice Hall

The Game

Kate Martinelli Novels

A Grave Talent

To Play the Fool

With Child

Night Work

And

A Darker Place

Folly

Keeping Watch