Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Volume 16

by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  “Just try a little, Daniel, okay? For me?”

  She held it close and I felt the steam go up my nose and it felt sort of good. I tried to breathe through my nose, but it was hard and I couldn’t smell anything any more, not even Shenka’s fresh smell.

  I blew on it a few times until the steam went away. I couldn’t taste much but it felt good sliding down my throat. Shenka gave me a big smile.

  “Good boy.” That made me think of the stocking that wasn’t hung by the chimney with care and I felt myself sniffle again. “Try a little more, okay?”

  I did. She put another log in the fireplace and a few minutes later a little flame started peeking over it. It made me sleepy to watch it. I can stay up until eight-thirty when there’s no school, but I already felt tired and it was only seven-twenty-five. It was snowing even harder, and I wondered when Mom and Dad would come home.

  “Daniel, why don’t we get you some cookies and get you ready for bed.”

  I almost asked if I could pour a glass of milk for Santa Claus and put some cookies out for him, too, but then I remembered.

  “Okay.”

  Mom made her special chocolate chip Christmas cookies, but I couldn’t even taste them. I only had one and it hurt to swallow. Shenka watched me push the plate away and hugged me again.

  “Daniel, I don’t think your parents will mind if you don’t have a bath tonight because you are ill. Let us get you into a nice warm bed so you can rest and feel better for Christmas.”

  She watched me brush my teeth and left me in the bathroom alone to get into my pajamas. When I came out, she’d put another blanket on my bed and she tucked it in around me. I still felt myself shivering. I looked out my window at the garage and the empty swimming pool with the cover over it, snowflakes getting bigger and floating around in the light between the garage doors. Shenka pulled the shade down most of the way so the light was just a little box on the far wall. She leaned down and brushed her lips across my forehead and left me nestled all snug in my bed.

  “Try to sleep, Daniel. If you need anything, I will be right downstairs until your parents get home.”

  It was bad enough waiting for Christmas, but even worse knowing that Santa Claus wasn’t going to come. My clock ticked as loud as a hammer and kept me awake. I tried reading some of my comic books, even though I’d read them all before, but my eyes were all yucked up so the pictures looked blurry and I finally dropped them next to my slippers. I put my head down but it was hard to breathe so I watched the square of light on my wall like it was a movie. I tried to remember How The Grinch Stole Christmas and watch that, but my eyes didn’t work and my breathing filled up the whole room.

  I wondered if Shenka was watching a DVD downstairs or reading a book. Maybe she was eating a cookie for me. At least I knew she got me the bat I wanted, and that made me feel a little better.

  When my clock said it was almost midnight and Santa Claus should have been landing on the roof, Dad’s headlights flashed on the garage and I heard him stop near the back door. He and Mom stamped the snow off their boots on the back porch before they came in.

  A few minutes later, the car pulled out again and I knew Dad was driving Shenka home. She must have told them I was sick because Mom came into my room a minute later. She was still wearing her elf costume, her red sweater with candy canes and the green tights. Her dark curls had a few white snowflakes melting in them.

  “Honey, are you all right? Shenka said you weren’t feeling well.”

  “I’m okay.” My throat burned and the words came out so soft I don’t think she even heard me.

  She had a bottle of Robitussin and a spoon. Yuck. She felt my forehead.

  “Shenka said she took your temperature and you had a little fever. She gave you some tea and honey. Did it help any?”

  “A little,” I whispered. I didn’t care if it was Christmas eve or not. There was no Santa Claus and I felt sick. I just wanted to close my eyes and wake up all better. Then I remembered I wouldn’t be able to try out the bat Shenka gave me until spring anyway. I wondered if Mom and Dad got me a new glove, too. Maybe Shenka told them I wanted one like Derek Jeter’s.

  “Let’s give you some of this,” Mom said.

  She waited with the spoon until I opened my mouth and she could slide it in. I couldn’t even taste it.

  I guess I finally fell asleep, but then I started coughing and couldn’t stop and it woke me up again. Mom came in wearing her nightgown and robe. She got me a glass of water and watched me drink the whole thing down. Then she hugged me.

  I rolled over and looked past the glowing numbers on my clock and out the window. The snow was drifting over the swimming pool cover and making the light on the garage look like a big puffy cloud.

  Mom looked out the window, too.

  “What do you hope Santa brings you most tomorrow, Daniel?”

  My eyes blurred up again. “Dad says there’s no Santa Claus.”

  Mom made a face. She was still looking out the window. “Forget what Dad says. What do you want most of all?”

  “A bat,” I said. I figured it was safe to wish for that because I knew Shenka got me one.

  Just then, I heard a car coming down the driveway and the lights reflected off the garage door so the box of light moved across my wall.

  My clock said it was after two o’clock and Mom said something about some kind of pitch. I didn’t think she liked baseball that much. I heard her feet on the stairs, real heavy. A minute later, I heard the back door open.

  The light over the garage was like the moon on the best of the falling snow, and I saw Mom walk toward the garage with something shiny in one hand and the long green package behind her back. I could see her nightgown below her coat, almost down to her boots. Dad eased out of his car and she met him after he closed the garage door. Even though there was no such thing as Santa Claus, he was still wearing his costume.

  Mom handed him the shiny thing and he tipped it up to his mouth. It was the flask he drank liquor from.

  He took a long drink and when he took his hand away from his mouth, Mom swung that green package at him. She stepped forward with her left foot, the way Shenka taught me to do, and led with her hips and kept both hands together. She let her arms stretch out as long as they could, and her shoulders turned with her hands so the package was a green blur in the snow-filled light.

  The snow was so thick it was like watching through fog, but I saw Dad’s head snap back. He dropped his flask and stumbled back a step, then he fell through the swimming pool cover and into the deep end, near the diving board.

  Mom stood there looking at the empty spot for a minute, then she held Shenka’s package up and looked at it from one end to the other. Snow was coming down so hard I could hardly see her as she looked at the garage, down at the flask, and at the swimming pool. Then she walked back toward the house and I pulled the covers around me before she saw me looking out my window.

  When I went downstairs the next morning, it was still snowing and there was a fire in the fireplace. Mom was in jeans and her red and green Christmas sweater, the one with snowmen all over it.

  “Merry Christmas, honey.” She gave me a big hug. “How do you feel?”

  My throat was still sore and my eyes were sticky. I sat on the couch and looked in the fireplace, where a bundle of green paper burned along with a log. At one end of the mantel, I saw my stocking on the nail above the fireplace, and it was bulging full, round and thick like a catcher’s mitt.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  Mom put my stocking on the table in front of me. “He must have stayed at Shenka’s parents’ house because of the snow.”

  When I looked out the window, I couldn’t even see Dad’s tire tracks from last night. Or where Mom went out to meet him. Maybe she didn’t go out there after all. Maybe I just dreamed it because I was sick.

  Mom put my other presents on the coffee table so I could sit on the couch and open them.

  She reached under the tree and
picked up a long thin package. The tag had Shenka’s writing, but now the paper was shiny red with pictures of Santa Claus all over it.

  “I’ll bet you know what this is, so why don’t you open it first.”

  Sure enough, it was a bat, just the kind I wanted. I stood up and held it high, the way Shenka showed me. It felt good in my hands, like something alive and strong. I wanted to try it out, but I couldn’t, not in the house.

  “How nice,” Mom said. “You should call her later and thank her.”

  “I will.”

  I wondered if Shenka had opened the gold heart on a chain that Dad and I got for her. I’d ask when I called to thank her for my bat.

  Mom watched me opening the presents from my stocking. She pulled a tissue from the box on the table for me and wiped her eyes.

  “I hope I’m not getting your cold.”

  I got a baseball glove, too, a Derek Jeter one, just like Shenka’s. Even with my cold, I could smell it, like a whole room full of shoes.

  When I’d opened all my presents, Dad still wasn’t there.

  Mom dialed her cell phone. When Shenka’s dad came on, she wished him Merry Christmas.

  “Is Ted over there still? Oh. I see. No, but it was snowing pretty hard when he left here with your daughter last night, so I wondered…”

  There’s no such person as Santa Claus, so he couldn’t be lying in the deep end of our swimming pool. Besides, who ever heard of Santa Claus swimming?

  Mom listened to the voice on the other end for a minute, her eyes drifting beyond our Christmas tree and out the window toward the garage.

  “Could you put Shenka on for a minute?” Her eyes looked back at me. “Daniel wants to thank her for the baseball bat.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Steve Liskow (www.steveliskow.com) is a former actor, theatrical director, and English teacher whose short stories have earned an Edgar nomination and the Black Orchid Novella Award. Many of his novels take place in his home state of Connecticut and feature issues including teen trafficking and a shooting at a public school. Blood on the Tracks (2013) introduces Detroit PI Chris “Woody” Guthrie and draws on Steve’s experience as a guitarist and DJ. The book won Honorable Mention for the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Novel Awards in 2014.

  THE CASE OF THE ADDLETON TRAGEDY, by Jack Grochot

  Sherlock Holmes was ecstatic when he returned to our rooms at Baker Street after a morning of investigating the bizarre death of Sir Reginald Abercrombe, who was recklessly riding a galloping horse through a neighborhood in Kilburn and fell lifeless from the saddle in the back yard of Mrs Mortimer Snead. The animal kept running and made its way back to the livery stable, leaving the outstretched corpse of Sir Reginald on the lawn for a terrified Mrs Snead to discover when she went out to dry her linens on the laundry line.

  One of Scotland Yard’s most inexperienced inspectors, Joseph Kennedy, called on Holmes just after breakfast to ask for his assistance in unraveling the mystery of how Sir Reginald met his abrupt end.

  “It was a simple matter of deduction, Watson, a mere distraction from my regular work,” the consulting detective confidently informed me. “The hoof prints in the grass directly under the clothes line were a clear indication that Sir Reginald hung himself without a thought of the danger in his behavior. A trip to the livery stable confirmed that he had rented a horse for the day and that it arrived home minus its rider. An examination of the cadaver at the hospital revealed that Sir Reginald died of a crushed windpipe. Case closed. Now here is the most interesting tidbit: The horse he rode was none other than Silver Blaze, racing champion of the Wessex Cup in Dartmoor, whose disappearance I solved and which you so fluently chronicled with your penchant toward exaggeration. I recognized Silver Blaze instantly when I visited the stable and found him in cross-ties while being groomed by the manager. As the hostler explained it, Silver Blaze suffered a bowed tendon in a subsequent contest and was retired. The owner learned that Silver Blaze, unfortunately, was unable to breed, so he sold him for a pittance to his friend, the livery stable manager, who nursed Silver Blaze back to soundness, but by then he was too old and too fragile to compete again.”

  “All of which proves that fame is a fleeting condition,” I responded philosophically in reaction to the news. “As for the problem of Sir Reginald, I can only say it is fortuitous that it was resolved in a few hours, knowing that you are juggling several investigations at once in this, your busiest year, since I sold my practice in Kensington and moved back to our shared diggings.”

  Having made that observation, I was reluctant to burden Holmes with a conundrum of my own—yet it bothered me so greatly that I spoke up, despite my misgivings, to solicit his advice.

  “Yesterday afternoon,” I began hesitantly as he sat comfortably in the wicker basket-chair, “the postman delivered a distressing letter to me concerning a predicament of my former commanding officer in the second Afghan war, Captain Ichabod Addleton.”

  “What sort of predicament—anything that might require my services?” Holmes asked graciously, pretending not to be preoccupied.

  “It seems that Captain Addleton has been driven out of his good senses by a calamity, the simultaneous deaths of his wife and daughter,” I answered gravely. I rose from the desk and handed Holmes the correspondence, explaining that it was from the captain’s sister, with whom he was living in Blackwall. “I never met her, but the captain apparently mentioned me to her before he dropped into the abyss,” I went on.

  “Her penmanship is exquisite,” Holmes commented as he glanced at the two pages of stationery. “She must be considerably younger than he.” Holmes read aloud:

  “Dear Dr Watson,

  “I am writing to you out of desperation and concern for my brother, Ichabod Addleton, who once told me of your remarkable published article in a medical journal regarding the complexities of the human brain. I am afraid my brother has lost his mind, and perhaps you can help restore his sanity.

  “Ichabod sank into deep depression after a fire at his home in Knight’s Place killed his loving wife, Annabelle, and his only child, Daphne, who was only twenty-two years old and betrothed to a soldier in Her Majesty’s Palace Guard. The victims were overcome by smoke and perished in their beds, while Ichabod escaped the flames because he was away that night at the Veterans’ Club playing cards.

  “His depression led to delusions, and now he confines himself to his rooms on my second floor, thinking that he is William Shakespeare and composing the same lines of a play over and over.

  “I have consulted a therapist, who conducted an interview with my brother, and he came to the conclusion that Ichabod believed himself responsible for the demise of his family. The therapist, Dr Michael Paquet, stated to me that the situation seemed hopeless, because he could not convince my brother that the disaster was accidental due to a faulty chimney attached to the fireplace, just as the police had theorised.

  “I implore you, Dr Watson, to come talk to Ichabod and see if you can make progress where Dr Paquet could not. My brother might respond to you in a more positive way, because he respects and admires your heroic efforts in Afghanistan, as well as the reputation you have earned since your honourable discharge from the military.

  “Yours truly,

  “Amanda Addleton”

  Sherlock Holmes shrugged his bony shoulders as he stood to hand back the letter, but otherwise showed no emotion. “It is brief and to the point, Watson, although it leaves questions unanswered, such as why your Captain Addleton would consider himself to blame. We should go there in the morning to find out for ourselves,” Holmes offered.

  “But what of your other cases—would not a journey to Blackwall interfere with your schedule?” I countered.

  “If it means helping a dear friend settle a difficulty, my schedule can accommodate a day’s delay,” he said sincerely. “Now tell me what you know of the captain and the therapist, Dr Paquet.”

  I explained that Captain Addleton was in charge of my r
egimental unit in the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers from the time I joined the medical corps as an assistant surgeon until a short time after I was seriously wounded in 1880. I remembered how Captain Addleton sat sympathetically at my bedside many times in the field hospital, barking out strict orders to the nurses about my care and encouraging me to lightly exercise to improve the circulation in my limbs. I also recalled the conversations we had regarding our kin back in England. I related to Holmes that it was during those chats that the captain told me stories about his young daughter and about the hardship of separation from his Annabelle. He would describe his magnificent stone house near Twickenham Green and the immense fireplace that warmed the entire downstairs, except for the kitchen, where Annabelle kept a woodstove burning and cooked or baked all day to her heart’s content. He fondly referred to their housekeeper, a quick-tempered girl in her late teens, who treated Annabelle like the mother she always wanted but was denied because the woman died in childbirth. The youthful servant, he said compassionately, lived with her quarrelsome father in a nearby apartment, but she detested the arrangement because he never forgave her for the fate of his wife.

  Additionally, I informed Holmes that Captain Addleton and I maintained contact by post after we left the service, but the occasional communications dwindled to nothing over the last few years.

  “As for Dr Paquet,” I continued, “the physician’s directory cites his work with patients diagnosed as schizophrenic and delusionary. He studied under the noted Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler, the author of numerous monographs on the subject of mental illness.”

  “What you tell me about the captain is suggestive,” Holmes observed, without elaborating. “And Dr Paquet seems competent enough, but he gives up too easily. You can accomplish more than he, I am certain.”

  We were interrupted in our discussion by a familiar footstep on the stairs. Our landlady, Mrs Hudson, entered our rooms to bring us a hot pot of tea and freshly-made crumpets, with a word of rapprochement for Holmes. “You haven’t been eating properly because of all your comings and goings lately, so here is a snack to tide you over until dinner,” she said thoughtfully. “And don’t you run off this evening, for I am making a special supper, chicken pot pies and mashed potatoes, one of your favourites. That will put some meat back on your skinny frame.”