by Sam Gamble
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.
Presently, there came a faint rhythmic clicking from somewhere within ceiling. I would not have heard it had the air been blowing through the vent. Even having heard it and knowing what I did, I was prepared to dismiss it as some vag
ary of the ventilation system or perhaps the building settling had not Holmes seized my wrist in a viselike grip.
My heart lurched in my chest and I straightened, straining to see something, anything, out of the ordinary in the low light. I saw nothing. Everything appeared to be as it should have been.
Holmes dropped my wrist and snatched up my walking stick. Leaping to his feet, he lashed at the ceiling with my cane, and on the bed Helen Stoner shrieked and rolled away from him. Cramming herself into the corner, she shouted, “What is it? What’s going on? Lights full!” and abruptly flooded the room with bright light, successfully blinding all three of us.
Holmes nevertheless continued his attack on the ceiling, bellowing, “Can you see it? Watson, do you see it?” while I blinked wildly, willing my eyes to adjust faster.
“No,” I cried, nevertheless lurching to my feet. “I cannot!”
But that was not entirely accurate.
A flicker of movement had caught my eye, and turning to look at it directly I finally saw what Holmes had: a shadow as small as the nail on my smallest finger skittering across the face of one of sickly green stars. It had eight legs, a bulbous body, and a scattering of glowing red eyes.
I smashed it with a space rock.
There was a spark and a flash of heat and I cried out, dropping the rock. Meanwhile, the wall caught fire.
“Stoner, the fire!” shouted Holmes as he spun on his heel. He left the room at a run, my cane still clutched in one thin hand. “Watson, come on!”
Holmes was gone by the time that I made it to the apartment’s door, but there were footfalls running down the nearest stairwell, and I blindly charged after them.
I clomped down the stairs, determined to catch up to my friend before he caught up to the murderer, but after three short flights of stairs, Holmes was still nowhere to be seen. Instead, I found myself pursuing an enormous man whose breadth seemed to span the stairwell from wall to wall. Two landings ahead of me, he was charging down the stairs at a breakneck speed.
It seemed impossible that two unconnected men should both race down the stairs at this late hour, so I redoubled my efforts, determined to catch the stranger even if I could not catch up to Sherlock Holmes.
The stranger looked up at me once, his tanned face twisted into a snarl and his deep-set eyes wild, but he did not stop. If anything, his lowered his head and increased his pace, and I responded by vainly trying to increase my own.
We were careening down the last flight of stairs, each in danger of breaking his neck, when the other man found within himself a last burst of speed. In acute danger of being outpaced, I flung myself forward, my feet leaving the stairs as I committed myself wholeheartedly to landing either on the unknown man or my face. At the same time the stranger stumbled, his arms pinwheeling wildly, and I slammed into his back, knocking the breath from us both as I bore him to the ground at the bottom of the stairs.
“Good show, Watson!” exclaimed Sherlock Holmes from somewhere overhead. I could just see his shoes from the corner of my eye as I wrestled with my captive. “You’ve nearly got him!”
I dared to glance over and found Holmes standing among the shadows to one side of the stairs. He was holding my cane upside down, the silver handle turned so that it might hook a passing stranger’s ankle, causing him to stumble at an opportune moment. An elbow to my gut reminded me of where my attention ought to have been, and I made short work of subduing our captive.
“Watson, do you know who you’ve caught?”
“No idea,” I gasped, the larger man beneath me nearly bucking me off.
“Then let me present to you Dr. Grimesby Roylott. He is the murderer of our client’s sister.”
“I can hardly say it is a pleasure,” I grunted. The man was pinned, but he was not accepting his lot gracefully. “Shall we call the police?”
“I imagine that Miss Stoner already has. Aha! And there they are coming up the walkway. Let me get their attention, and then we shall get this all sorted out.”
“I can hardly wait.”
Chapter 06
It took hours to get things sorted to the mutual satisfaction of Holmes and the borough’s police, at the conclusion of which Dr. Grimesby Roylott was locked in a cell without chance of bail. As happy as I was to see such a creature locked away without chance of escape or causing further harm, I was equally happy to learn that the small fire in Miss Helen Stoner’s bedroom had been contained and doused before it could do more than leave an ugly blot upon the wall.
It was not until breakfast, a meal which we shared with Miss Stoner, that I was able to ask about the points on which I was still murky.
“It was you who put me on the right track, old man.”
“I?” I asked, astonished.
“When you summarized the facts of the case, you said that, because the room was locked, nothing could have gotten to the deceased Miss Stoner. My initial thought was that your statement was untrue. If the room were properly sealed so that nothing had been able to reach her, then the victim would have died of asphyxiation. Clearly, air had somehow reached her, which in turn meant that regardless of any other feature that the room did or did not possess, there must have been a working air vent in it.
“That gave me two suspects – the sister who knew her pass code and some unknown agent able to move through the air vent. As you noted, the living Miss Stoner was the dead Miss Stoner’s greatest champion, which created in me a willingness to seriously consider the possibility of a third party’s interference via the air ducts. It was not the simplest explanation for what happened, but it was the one that best suited the facts then available to me.
“The home’s ducts and vents proved to be open, functional, and connected to the same source. If the means of murder had been gaseous, certainly the sister, and perhaps the building’s other tenants, would also have died. Therefore, whatever outside agent had killed Miss Stoner had been solid and small enough to pass through an intact air vent. Unfortunately, there I ran into interference.” Holmes pinned Miss Stoner with a fierce look. “You implied that everything in this apartment was exactly as it had been when your sister died.”
“It was!” exclaimed Miss Stoner, glaring. Sherlock Holmes stared her down, and she finally looked away under the pretext of fishing a white handkerchief from her pocket. “I grabbed a few things from the clean laundry and got out. I didn’t disturb anything.”
“A wise decision,” declared Holmes, “particularly since you had already trod upon the paramount clue. Though I cannot guarantee that the borough’s authorities would have taken note of it, they would have had a more sporting chance of solving your sister’s murder had you left Helen Stoner where you had found her.”
Thunderstruck, I gazed blankly at my friend for some seconds before my gaze belatedly swung over to Miss Stoner, Miss Julia Stoner. I was just in time to see the surprise fade from her expression; surprise but not censure or even denial.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Holmes,” she said coolly, twisting and untwisting the hapless handkerchief, her gloves softly creaking with her every motion. “However did you leap to such a wild conclusion?”
“You certainly dress the part and I cannot deny that your mannerisms are convincing enough, save for in moments of emotional honesty, but I found the seminal clue in Miss Helen Stoner’s bedroom. No easy feat, I assure you, but impossible save if that room was the true site of the murder. Helen Stoner died in the second bedroom, and, on finding her dead, you switched places with her.”
Miss Stoner carefully put down the unfortunate handkerchief. Her gloved hands, as still and sure as stone, came to rest on the tabletop, her fingers splayed wide. Leaning towards Holmes, she demanded, her voice low and urgent, “What did you find?”
“You do not deny it?” I asked, astounded. And at her damning silence, asked, “How did you manage it?”
“When I accepted my post, all of my individually identifying biometric records were misplaced from the
public databases. In them, I do not exist except as a name and Helen’s twin. Information is added and subtracted as needed. The morning of my sister’s death, a carefully timed power fluctuation allowed me to make certain substitutions in our longstanding medical records so that Helen would be positively identified as me. That we possessed the exact same genetic material made everything easier. The clue please, Mr. Holmes?”
Wordlessly, Holmes reached into an inner pocket of his black coat to produce his proof. Miss Julia Stoner took it and examined it for only a few scant moments before murmuring, “Oh yes, I see now. No, I suppose I couldn’t have tracked this anywhere. Not in its current state at any rate.” Still she stared at the little melted blob of plastic, her lips compressing into a thin line and her eyes narrowing in thought. Finally, a surprising hardness in her voice, she said, “And you found this in my poor Helen’s bedroom.”