recall finding the two of you being extraordinarily curious about their routines. The delivery boy from the village came by in the early morning. So matters would be taken care of a little later in the morning—not too late, or Carlton might awaken or be found away from the place where he was supposed to be committing a crime.
“What did they tell you when they called this morning, Colonel?”
“Alice told me that they had met Carlton in the village and told him I wanted to send him to an asylum. Said he’d gone off his head and was going to kill himself on one of the abandoned lanes.”
“What!” Carlton said.
“It was an important part of the plan that the colonel be lured away from the road, to lessen the chance of something felonious being seen by inconvenient witnesses who might come driving up the hill. So Carlton’s Model T was taken to the end of the lane. And Alice waited with the Rolls to keep an eye on things.”
“Not quite,” said the colonel. “She was there to point the way, and hurry us along by exclaiming that Anthony had run down the lane to try to intervene. But she got into my car with us, and rode with us to where Anthony was lying in wait for us. It had started to rain by then, quite hard.”
“Which might, I suppose, have been seen as an aid to their plan: kill the colonel and his heir, make it appear that Carlton was the guilty party, and sit back and inherit. They needed to be sure that the bodies would be found —missing persons cases are hell on probate—so they would leave Carlton’s car to point the way. The rain would make it seem that Carlton’s vehicle got stuck in the mud.”
“It did get stuck!” Anthony said. “And we didn’t know how the old bastard had left his will, so we weren’t going to kill him until we were sure.”
“Anthony! Shut up!” Alice screamed at him.
“Oh, I was supposed to believe that Carlton clubbed me from behind while you two stood and watched? There must be a passel of nincompoops on your father’s side of the family.”
“All sorts of things went wrong, didn’t they?” Wishy said. “Robert didn’t stay to help you, sir?”
“Robert’s no fool. I’m sure he knows that if a man finds himself unarmed and outnumbered, he must put some distance between himself and the attacking force!”
“So Anthony shot him in the back,” I said. “And in the head, though fortunately that bullet merely grazed him. I’ve talked to Dr. Smith, and he assures me Robert will recover. You, on the other hand, Anthony, are doubtless going to the electric chair.”
“No! No! I have no gun. It was Alice! And it’s no use telling me to shut up, Alice, because I won’t!”
“What happened after she shot him?” Slye asked.
“It was miserable out there, but I trussed up the colonel while Alice tried to hunt down Robert. Then she came running back, says there’s no time to lose, the delivery boy is coming up the hill—she told me to put the colonel in his car and hide it in the horse barn, and wait there for her. She went tearing off, then took the Rolls up the road at lightning pace. I waited until the delivery boy went past, then took the car up along the service road out to the barn. We knew the servants would be busy talking to the lad on the other side of the house, getting the village gossip, and wouldn’t see us. And I did just as she asked—even carried the old bugger up into the hayloft, and that wasn’t easy, I tell you!
“I really thought we might pull it off. She had even thought to bring a change of clothes for each of us, so that by the time we went into the house, we didn’t look so disheveled or damp.”
“But the Rolls is designed to be noticed,” Slye said, “and was noticed by the delivery boy, which made the staff wonder why it took so long for you to enter the house. Not only that, the housekeeper caught sight of the colonel’s car, and wondered what was keeping him.”
“You got the floorboard of the Rolls muddy!” Wishy said, as if this was the worst offense of all.
“Must I listen to this fake Holmes?” Alice shouted.
The room fell silent. Then Slye said, “Yes, for it would do you good. He has an excellent head and a genuine heart, both of which you lack.”
Carlton Wedge, as it turned out, felt himself to be at rock bottom, and was eager to take the colonel up on his offer to undergo treatment for alcoholism. We helped them find a facility worthy of their patronage.
Dr. Smith began driving out to Slye’s place, asking me to consult with him on some of his cases. I find the work interesting, but not as interesting as helping Slye to recover, and with the little problems that come his way.
Aloysius Hanslow still dresses like Holmes and invites us to come with him whenever Sheriff Anderson calls. Wishy has stopped flinching when he looks at me.
Slye continues to improve, although those moments in the colonel’s horse barn caused a minor setback. He talks of returning to the city, which he was never wont to do before now.
For the time being we are in the country, where old men tell young boys of war, and some of us who’ve seen it hope it never comes again, knowing it always will.
Jan Burke is the author of fourteen books, including
In college a boyfriend urged her to read
A SPOT OF DETECTION
The boy was ill. He knew he was ill, and the fact that the school matron had sent him home—and Matron rarely sent anyone home—meant his demise could be imminent. The spots on his chest itched, worse than the itch caused by crushed rosehips when Weston—the sniveling rat, Weston—pushed a handful down the back of his collar. This morning he’d scratched and itched throughout Latin and into Algebra. And then after lunch the itch went from his chest to his legs, and then began to be apparent above the collar of his cornflower-blue-and-black uniform blazer. He’d wheezed and coughed well into Geography, and finally laid his head on the desk as if begging for mercy. But at least that was better than home, where there would be only his mother, Aunt Ethel, and his grandmother for company, with the occasional visit from his ill-tempered Uncle Ernest, who only ever talked about money and how much the family was costing him. He sighed and the sigh made him cough again. It was a long walk from school to the house and no one had offered to accompany him; he was, after all, expected to act like an Englishman, and the stiff upper lip—even one with a giant teasing spot on it—was not permitted to wobble. Once home, his mother would send him to bed and that would be that. The school would not let him rest though; work would be sent in a brown paper parcel for him to complete from his sickbed. He was second to last in his class to come down with measles, so he knew what to expect.
The sweat beaded across his forehead and trickled in rivulets from his neck down the gully that was his spine. Not long to go now, he thought. He rubbed his eyes, which were running as much as his nose, and he swayed a little, trembling with fever. As he lingered on Margaret Street trying to garner fortitude for the last half-mile, raised voices seemed to ricochet past his aching ears. At first he thought he had experienced some sort of hallucination. He cupped an ear and listened. Yes, he had definitely heard some level of discord, and the point of origin of the fracas appeared to be the upper floor of one of the three-story terraced houses that flanked his route. He shook his head to clear a mind befuddled by blocked sinuses. The voices, coming from somewhere above and to the left of him, were raised again, and now, as he looked up, squinting in an endeavor to ascertain the source of the row, he saw the shadows of a man and a woman silhouetted at the window of an adjacent house. One of them had
