The Adventure of the Skittering Shadow: Sherlock Holmes in Space (4 page)

I most certainly could believe it. However, I obediently leaned forward to gaze upon my friend’s discovery with what I hoped was the proper amount of awe and curiosity.

“What is it?” I asked, genuinely stumped.

It looked like a tiny blob of clear plastic, maybe a millimeter or two across, that had melted on the carpet. To me, it looked rather like a misplaced blob of hot glue. In Miss Helen Stoner’s bedroom, I could believe it. The blob certainly didn’t
look
like anything important.

“It is my first clue,” Holmes said impressively.

“Yes, but what
is
it?”

“I don’t know yet,” Holmes admitted with a small grimace and, considering the circumstances, an overabundance of dignity. “But in the entire room, it is the only thing that doesn’t belong here. And when I discover what it is and how it came to be among the fibers of Miss Stoner’s carpet, then I will be that much closer to discovering what happened to the sister that night.”

“Someone – probably Julia Stoner herself – could have tracked it in.”

“And then not noticed when it spontaneously combusted, burning at such high temperatures that it melted and became permanently affixed to the carpet?” Holmes demanded impatiently. “Unlikely.”

It seemed, as Holmes said, rather unlikely, but I nevertheless tried to imagine circumstances under which such a thing might happen. I failed. Holmes waited patiently for the return of my attention before declaring, “Do you see now? This is our first clue, Watson. Where is Miss Stoner?”

“Attending to her laundry,” I answered. “She should be back soon, though.”

“Excellent! A few minutes, and we shall be done too. Hold this for me, would you, old man?”

And so saying, Holmes passed me his clue, now sealed in an evidence bag, before clambering up the metal ladder into the unmade bed. As I watched, he poked about in the bedding and peered into the vent above it for mere moments before abruptly abandoned the bed with a sudden, vigorous energy. Holmes was practically cheerful when he requested my help in rescuing the desk chair from the disorder that it was mired in, adding, “And do try not to step on anything important.”

“I shall endeavor to do my best, but I make no guarantees.”

“I accept your terms. Look out for the music box!”

By virtue of working together, we managed to free the chair and its little red cushion from the mess without breaking anything. And by the time that Miss Stoner returned from the laundry room, we had lowered the table in the main room and positioned the storage cubes as seats on either side of it. At the head of the table stood the only real chair and its cushion, which Holmes had claimed for himself while I made the coffee. On seeing us waiting for her at the table, Miss Stoner helped herself to a cup of coffee and joined us.

“Have you discovered anything?” she asked eagerly, her gloved hands tight around the coffee mug.

“A few things,” Holmes said vaguely. “I would like you to take us around and introduce us to your neighbors as prospective renters. Make certain to mention that we will have your old room and that you will take your sister’s. Tonight, we will all stay in your bedroom. You will go to sleep, and we shall keep watch for the danger.”

Miss Stoner’s protests were immediate and vociferous, forcing Holmes to add severely, “Remember that you put yourself entirely in my hands. Have you changed your mind?”

The woman regarded Holmes for several moments, her eyes narrowed. She tapped her forefinger twice on the table, and then nodded. “I regret nothing. I shall do as you say, Mr. Holmes.”

She lifted her cup of coffee to her mouth with a steady hand. If Helen Stoner felt any nerves at the prospect of tonight’s activities, I could not see them.

After we finished our coffee, Miss Stoner did as Holmes had instructed. She took us around the building, ostensibly trying to sell us on it as she made it generally known that we were her prospective boarders.

“Boarders?” repeated the neighborhood beekeeper, her surprise evident. Older and slow moving, she lived in a ground floor apartment. She sketched a second glance over Holmes and me, her blue eyes sharp, before returning her attention to Helen Stoner. The expression on her weathered face softened. “It must be difficult.”

Miss Stoner nodded. “There’s the mortgage, of course, but the apartment is just so
lonely
without her. I’ve been staying in capsule hotels since – since it happened. I think having new people make new noises around the old place will help a lot. And I’m going to switch rooms. I’ll take her room, and they’ll have my old room. So that’ll be different too.”

“I understand,” murmured the beekeeper. Taking Helen Stoner’s hand in her own, she gave it a gentle squeeze. “Let Yoko and I know if there’s anything that we can do for you.”

“Thank you,” said Helen Stoner, her free hand coming to rest on top of the older woman’s gnarled one.

We met most of the first floor neighbors, visited the gym, and rescued Helen Stoner’s laundry from the laundry room before briefly returning to her apartment.

“The entire second and third floors belong to a retired civil engineer,” explained Miss Stoner as we followed her up the stairs. “He converted them into a series of micro-apartments. There are between fifty and a hundred people living on each floor, depending on whether the micro-apartments on it are being rented as singles or doubles. People move in and out of there all the time, so there’s no point in getting to know anyone on those floors. But I’ll introduce you to everyone that I know on the fourth and fifth floors. And I’ll show you our floor’s communal kitchen. Each floor has its own kitchen, and you won’t be welcome in any of the others. Oh! And there are a couple of lovely little tables on the roof for socializing, a barbeque, and some really amazing clotheslines. I’ll show you those as well.”

When we finished nosing around the building, Holmes shepherded us back to Miss Stoner’s apartment and then left, saying, “There are certain avenues of inquiry that I prefer to investigate on my own. And I might poke around a bit on the second and third floors. I shall try to be back by dinnertime. And feel free to do as you wish with the second bedroom. I have finished with it.”

As soon as the front door shut behind Holmes, Miss Stoner retreated to her bedroom where she began a valiant effort to organize her things, starting with the clothes on the floor. When I began to collect the shoes, Helen Stoner dropped the laundry bag and took them from me.

“I’d rather that you didn’t help with this,” she said as she turned to put them in the closet. “But I’d really appreciate it if you washed the sheets and pillowcases. I’ll send the duvet out later.”

“I can manage that,” I said as allowed her to fill my arms with the aforementioned sheets and pillowcases. “What about your sister’s bedding?”

“The police still have them. I should probably see about claiming them at some point.”

“Well, if you need me for anything…”

“I’ll call,” she promised, then politely ushered me out of the room.

I trundled the bedding down to the washers in the basement then returned to the apartment to find two bulging laundry bags piled against the wall outside of Helen Stoner’s bedroom. Looking in, I found Helen Stoner stuffing yet more clothes into a tote bag. She had already removed the worst of the debris from the floor to the desk, closet, and laundry bags.

Looking up at me, she asked directly, “Did one of you cut a square out of the carpet?”

“Holmes needed it for something,” I said vaguely. “If you don’t mind, I thought I’d log into the medical network for a bit.”

“I’ll try to be quiet.” Miss Stoner eyed me speculatively for a moment. “Military grade implants?”

“Yes. Until recently, I was a naval doctor.”

She smiled briefly and nodded before turning back to her work.

Leaving her to it, I went to pour myself another cup of coffee before claiming the chair with the red cushion as my own. Once I was comfortable, I used my implants to access Nerio’s health network.

I logged into my professional account, browsed the list of medical clinics currently requesting a surgeon, and fired off the necessary responses. Then I accessed Nerio’s virtual medical school to continue work on my current module. When I finished the course of study, a certificate of completion would be appended to my medical licenses and I would be allowed to practice in the planet’s hospitals and clinics, both virtual and concrete, without immediate supervision.

I worked on my module for some time before I realized that Miss Stoner was watching me from the door to her twin’s bedroom. Uncertain how long she had been waiting, I saved my progress and logged out.

“I need to go out for a few things,” she said when she was certain that she had my attention, “but I wanted to add you to the apartment’s security system before I went.”

“Security system?” I parroted, surprised.

Although a frontier town filled with cutting edge technology, Nerio was primitive in many respects. People carried keys, little pieces of metal specifically shaped to fit in particular locks, as most of the technology on Mars went to keeping the population breathing, fed, and in reasonably good health. Everything nonessential to sustaining human life was fairly old-fashioned.

“It was Julia’s,” explained Miss Stoner, as if that had been the source of my confusion.

Since I was not the sort of man who pressed others to confide their secrets in me, I merely nodded and allowed Miss Stoner to take a three dimensional image of my right eye and a drop of my blood. And on reflection, given what little I knew about Julia Stoner’s work, I found that I was relieved that her sister had chosen not to explain.

When she was satisfied that the apartment’s security system had accepted me, she left, her empty shopping bags in hand, and I went downstairs to move my load of laundry from the washer to a dryer. I soon understood why there were so many washing lines strung between the buildings.

I was still muttering about highway robbery as I stumped back up the stairs to look in the peephole and press my recently injured digit to what was ostensibly the keyhole. Something lightly scraped my fingertip, and I heard a soft click from the other side of the door before it opened to me.

Alone in the apartment, I visited a few news sites and was interacting with an article about the famous
Salt Lake City Blues,
a zombie ship that had religiously kept to the same route for almost twenty years before becoming erratic, when Holmes returned. He was grinning like the ship’s cat that got the cream.

“Watson, the neighborhood was a veritable font of information!”

“And what did you learn?” I asked, while exiting out of my article.

“I learned that the sisters are well known and well loved, if not always particularly well distinguished between by their acquaintances,” said Holmes as he took the seat across from me. “Julia Stoner taught and attended cooking classes at the local community center, while Helen Stoner had yet to encounter a crafts club that she was uninterested in joining. She was also president of a local geology club.

“I was not, however, the first to take an interest in the sisters Stoner. Several others had already pumped the locals for information, most while posing as citizen journalists, although one enterprising pair claimed to be from the Healthy and Safety Department and another from the borough’s Bureau of Environmental Controls.”

“Health and Safety?” I asked, dismayed. “And the Bureau of Environmental Controls?”

“Cover stories, I assure you,” responded Holmes, waving away my concerns.

“Then who the devil do you think they were?”

“Colleagues of Julia Stoner’s, no doubt,” responded Holmes. “According to my contact in the city government, Julia Stoner really did – or does, I suppose, since her files have yet to be closed out – work for a research department. And as of yet, no one there has benefited from her death. The position is being held open, pending the conclusion of the investigation into her death. The nature of the death apparently sent up all sort of red flags. According to my contact, she was quite well liked by her colleagues, which is no doubt why several of them have decided to play amateur detective, consequently muddying up the waters, so to speak.”

I was willing to wager that none of them were as smart as they thought they were. Seeking to encourage my friend, I said, “I have no doubt that you will find a way to rise about the rest,” and Holmes grinned, quick and fierce.

Clapping his hands together, he declared, “It has become something of a competition, Watson.” Pointing his hands at me, his palms still pressed together and his fingers straight out, he added, “And I am determined to win it. Speaking of which, where is Miss Stoner?”

“She went out to do some shopping. That was some time ago, though, so I expect her back shortly.”

“Excellent. Then let’s relax and recharge our energies while we can. Perhaps some music while we wait?”

Holmes and I were enjoying the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s most recently released composition when Helen Stoner returned bearing a rug cleaner, a bag of shopping, and Indian takeout. We shared a friendly meal, after which the lady disappeared into the bathroom to attend to her nightly ablations.

When it was just the two of us in the main room, Holmes said to me, his voice low, “I wish that I could tell you the exact shape that the attack will take, but I do not know it myself. All that I am certain of is its direction. Watch the air vent over the bed as if a life depends upon it, for it very well may. I trust that you brought your pistol?”

“I did not,” I admitted, chagrined. “Do you think we’ll need it?”

“Probably not,” replied Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps seeking to reassure me, he added, “It was only to have been a precautionary measure.”

When Helen Stoner emerged from her toilet, Holmes and I took our turns. Then we settled in to wait, Miss Stoner in the bed and Holmes and I on our respective storage cubes.

The room was so small that Miss Stoner had to climb up into the bed before Holmes and I could drag our seats into the room, and once we were all in the room, there was no hope of shutting the bedroom’s door. As the man seated further inside the room, I had no hope of getting past Holmes to the door without either asking him to precede me through it or going over him. For her part, Miss Stoner was thoroughly trapped.

After we were all more or less settled, Sherlock Holmes asked Helen Stoner to shut off the room’s air vents without actually closing the vents themselves and to adjust the apartment’s lighting to emergency levels, tasks which she duly performed.

“Now, go to sleep,” he commanded. “Or at least pretend it.”

It was a task easier said than done. Helen Stoner tossed and turned, flipped her pillows over, and kicked off her thin blankets only to retrieve them a moment later.

“There is nothing to fear,” soothed Holmes. “Watson and I will keep a close vigil. You will not meet the same end as your sister. But for our plan to succeed, you must convey at least a passable impression of slumber. Please try to relax.”

Helen Stoner tried to do as Holmes recommended, and at length, she settled into an uneasy stillness.

A heavy silence gradually settled over the room. In it, the shadows became frightful things. Their menace seemed nearly palpable to me, each one perhaps hiding the agent of Helen Stoner’s death. My every nerve stretched to its limit, searching for the coming danger.

No human can go on like that for long periods of time, especially without outside stimuli, and so it was that by degrees my nervous tension relaxed first into wariness then simple alertness. As the silent hours dragged past even that slipped from my grasp, and I found myself struggling to stay awake. I stood, stretched, and stayed on my feet for a time. When I reclaimed my seat, I jiggled my good knee in bursts.