A Study in Sherlock

reading, the one he says he wants to work on if it ever becomes a film.”

Her mother looked puzzled. “Sherlock Holmes?”

“No, the one about the stupid people who fought for the South in the Civil War.”

“Stupid people?”

“The dunces.”

“The dunces—oh, no, Sheila, that’s not what the book is about. But, yes, the man in A Confederacy of Dunces wears a cap like this. And writes things down on Big Chief tablets, sort of like you’ve been doing.”

Sheila could not let this pass. “I use black-and-white composition books like Harriet M. Welsch in Harriet the Spy.”

She took the cap, though, to be nice. Grown-ups thought they were always watching out for children’s feelings, but Sheila believed it was the other way around just as often. Sheila was tender with her mother, who was sensitive in her own way, and indulgent of her father, who was dreamy and absentminded, usually lost inside whatever film he was editing. He had worked on some very famous films, but he worked in an office, no closer to the movie stars than Sheila was when she watched a movie on her computer, so no one at school thought what her father did was cool. Her mother was a lawyer, which definitely wasn’t cool. It wasn’t uncool. It just was.

Sheila sometimes went to her father’s workplace, all the way downtown, on Canal Street. This usually happened on school holidays that her mother’s law office didn’t recognize as holidays or during the summer because of what her parents called child-care chaos. They had a lot of child-care chaos the summer that Sheila was eleven. On these days, Sheila and her father took the 1 train, which irritated her father because it was a local, but she liked all the extra stops. There were more people coming and going. She tried to make up a story about each person in the car. They tended to be sad stories.

Her father worked at a big Mac computer and it was always exciting—for the first half hour or so. Sheila would even start to think that maybe she would be a film editor. She enjoyed her father’s lectures about the choices he had, how he sometimes had to find the film that the filmmaker failed to make, that it was like trying to cook a meal with only what was already in the pantry. But it was slow, tedious work. She eventually got bored, wandered to the lunchroom where the bagels were set out, or asked if there was a computer she could use, or played games on her father’s phone. Most often, though, she pulled out a book, usually a mystery or something with magic.

“You’re on a crime spree,” her father joked. But she was not an indiscriminate reader of mystery books. She started with Encyclopedia Brown and tried very hard not to cheat by looking up the solutions in the back, but some of the clues were awfully small. (How was she supposed to know that Southerners called the Battle of Bull Run the Battle of Manassas?) She read books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, which were sort of like mysteries, and Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret, the sequel, which she liked even better. Despite her deerstalker cap, she did not read Sherlock Holmes. Nor did she read Nancy Drew. Sheila hated Nancy Drew, who reminded her of a girl in her class and not just because she had red hair. Like Nancy Drew, Trista had two friends, Caitlin and Harmony, whose job seemed to be to advertise her wonderfulness. Oh Trista, they would moan, you are so smart, you are so pretty, your clothes are the best. They said this over and over again and somehow it all became true. When it wasn’t, not in Sheila’s opinion.

Sheila talked to her father about Trista and her friends because her father was interested in why people did the things they did, whereas her mother said such conversations were merely gossip, which she forbade, along with Gossip Girl. Her father said it was psychoanalysis and that gossip was fine, anyway, as long as it didn’t become like the Gossip Game in The Last of Sheila, a film that he particularly liked. Sheila pretended to like it, too, because it seemed important to her father. He needed her to like The Last of Sheila, Paths of Glory, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Magnificent Ambersons, Miller’s Crossing, and Funny Bones. So she did, and she never told him that Funny Bones was very scary for what was supposed to be a funny movie and that she didn’t understand what anyone in Miller’s Crossing was talking about, no matter how many times she watched it.

“It’s like this Trista has her own PR firm,” Sheila’s father said.

“Puerto Rican?”

“What?”

“That’s what they call the Sharks in West Side Story. PRs.” Her father had shown her the film on television, telling her to look at the color of the sky as Tony walked through the alleys, singing of Maria. He was critical of the editing, although it had won an Oscar, according to the white-haired man, the one who talked after the movies on that channel. “Awards don’t mean anything,” her father told Sheila, yet his awards—none of them Oscars—were framed and hanging in his office.

“Oh, I meant public relations. You know, people who are hired to tell other people how great people are.”

“Could I have someone like that? Instead of a babysitter? Could you hire someone to tell people I’m great?”

Her father laughed. But Sheila was serious. She had not had a good year in fifth grade and she was dreading sixth grade. She was not sure a vintage GO CLIMB A ROCK T-shirt could solve all her problems, although she hoped it would be a start. But how much easier it would be if someone would go to the school and tell everyone she was great. Sheila the Great. There was a book by that name, a Judy Blume, but it made her sad, because the Sheila in that book was so clearly not great.

However, Sheila did not realize how bad fifth grade had been until her parents received a call from the school, suggesting they come in for a conference before the new school year began. “Just to make sure we’re all on the same page as far as Sheila’s behavior is concerned.” She knew this because she picked up the extension in her parents’ bedroom and her father caught her.

“Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves,” he said.

“It’s part of my job. I have to know things. That’s how I found out what was happening to your newspaper. I heard the super complaining to the doorman that people were subscribing to newspapers and leaving them downstairs for days at a time, so he was just going to start throwing them away if people didn’t come down and get them by nine.”

“I’m down by nine.”

Sheila gave her father a look. “Almost never. You leave for work at ten or eleven and, most nights, don’t come home until after my bedtime.”

He gave her a story by Saki, which apparently was related to what her mother drank from the little carafe at the sushi place. The story was about a cat, Tobermory, that learned to talk and told everyone’s secrets and the people then plotted to poison him. They didn’t get a chance—he was killed in a fight by another cat—but that didn’t worry Sheila. She knew how to get around being poisoned. You just made sure that someone else tasted your food first. She also decided that if she ever was allowed to have a cat, she would name him Tobermory and call him Toby for short. She thought about changing the name of her stuffed white-and-gray tabby, which had been passed down to her by her mother, but it didn’t seem right, changing someone’s name when he was so old. Her mother was fifty, so her stuffed animals must be … almost fifty. Sheila had wanted to change her own name. Last year she had asked if she could be Sheila Locke instead of Locke-Weiner. She argued that a girl should have her mother’s surname, that it was good for women’s rights. Her mother said such a change would hurt her father’s feelings, that he had managed to grow up with the same name and all Sheila had to do was remind people, politely, that it was pronounced whiner.

Like that was so much better.

After solving the case of her father’s missing newspaper, Sheila felt she needed more work. She put up a small note, advertising her services, but the super scolded her and said such postings were not allowed in the hallways. Her family’s building had lots of rules like that, almost more than school. For example, no delivery people were ever allowed past the lobby, which was part of the reason that all those newspapers ended up on a table and then got thrown away by the angry super.

People in the building were always stressing that this rule was very good for the kids because they could come and go throughout the building and their parents would know that they would never meet an outsider. But there weren’t that many kids and Sheila wasn’t friends with them anyway so she would have gladly traded that rule