One phrase kept flickering across his drunken sorrows. “The penny dreadful.” Having no one else to laugh to, Harold laughed to himself. It was a term so much more apt than he’d known. For the story he’d been living in had now been revealed to be fleeting, shallow, and cheap. A brief flash of petty magic that entertained only the dull and the naïve. A penny tale, and not even worth so much as that.

The taps on his shoulder came while he was reaching for more pretzels, his arm dangling across the long wooden bar in search of the tiny plastic bowl. They were an insistent series of quick taps-one-two-three on his back, just at the bottom of his shoulder blade. He turned, swiveling on the stool, and saw no one behind him. Strange.

Harold heard a cough and looked down. There he found some manner of black-helmeted gnome staring up at him. He swallowed, blinked, and recognized the face of Dr. Garber. With Harold high on his stool, the top of her head came up only just above his navel. She smiled.

“Harold!” she said, as if she were genuinely happy to see him.

“Hi there,” he replied. He really wasn’t in the mood for conversation right now. He turned himself a half inch farther back toward his drink, trying to be subtle.

“Where’s your friend? Sarah?” The subtlety didn’t seem to be working.

“Gone. She… she had to leave.” He was too tired to come up with a good lie. Plus, he was such a shitty liar anyway.

Dr. Garber frowned. She gave him a concerned look.

“Lovers’ quarrel?” she asked, in a tone equally playful and sympathetic.

“Not exactly.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll patch it up,” Dr. Garber said as she hopped up on the adjacent barstool. Harold was not aware of having invited her to join him. “I like the sight of you two together. You’re a lovely couple.”

He offered no response, save a few nods. He sipped more bourbon. Dr. Garber sipped at her own drink, something clear and carbonated, most likely gin and tonic. He realized that she wasn’t going to leave, and he determined that his best bet was to change the subject, so at least he didn’t have to talk about Sarah anymore.

“Thanks for your help with the letters,” he said. “I think we found everything we needed.”

“Terrific! You’re on your way to the missing Conan Doyle diary that Cale was on about?”

“Well… no.” It was going to involve more effort not to talk about this than to talk about it, Harold realized. Might as well just give in. “The diary was burned up. Stoker did it, in 1900. He tells Conan Doyle about it in one of his letters.”

“Hmmm,” Dr. Garber pondered. “Is that what he wanted to meet about, then?”

“Meet about?”

“Yes. The meeting Stoker kept trying to arrange. I’ve always wondered about it myself. Did you see the notes from Stoker’s business secretary at the Lyceum? Even she kept pressing Conan Doyle for the two to have a meeting, for a few months, on some pretense of financial concerns.”

Harold frowned. He hadn’t seen any correspondence between Stoker’s business secretary and Conan Doyle in the collection. “Are those letters down there as well?”

“Oh, I suppose not, now that you mention it. They weren’t from Stoker personally, you know, so they’re kept elsewhere. I forget which university they’ve run off to, but they’re in some lesser Stoker collection somewhere. Maybe Austin, actually. The messages are all from Stoker’s secretary to Conan Doyle’s secretary, so they’re really not of much interest. Mostly about Conan Doyle’s unpaid cut of profits from his plays, about making sure various seats of good quality are available for various of Conan Doyle’s friends. But if memory serves, all that fall and winter there’s some harping about scheduling a meeting between the two men.”

“A meeting?”

“Yes.”

In that moment Harold become intensely aware of all the bourbon in his system. He found himself, for the first time in days, fighting against it. The liquor had done its job of subverting and nullifying all rational thought for the past forty-eight hours, but now Harold desired very much to think. And to think clearly.

“Where?” he asked, his lips moving slowly. He was afraid of the answer she might give.

“Where did Stoker want to meet?”

“Yes. In the letters I read, Stoker made a reference each time to wanting to come to Conan Doyle’s house, his study. It didn’t occur to me as noteworthy at the time, but… Oh, Jesus… Did I seriously just…? Okay, try to remember: In the letters between Stoker’s secretary and Conan Doyle’s, did Stoker’s secretary suggest any particular spot he wanted the two to meet in? Like, say, Conan Doyle’s study?”

Dr. Garber made an odd face. She seemed startled by Harold’s sudden bout of intensity.

“I’m not sure,” she said, taking a sip of her clear cocktail and trying to brush Harold’s seriousness off with a smile. “Does it matter?”

“From the letters we have, we know that Conan Doyle was missing his diary. He always wrote in his study, and we know, from the found volumes, that that’s where they were kept. We know that Stoker was involved in the diary’s disappearance, or else why was Conan Doyle so sure that Stoker had taken it? But Conan Doyle wasn’t aware of its being destroyed, of its being burned, before Stoker told him in the letter. So Conan Doyle hadn’t walked in on a fire in the study, for instance. Stoker must have been left alone in the study, where he stole it. But what if he didn’t actually burn it?”

“Why wouldn’t he burn it,” asked Dr. Garber, “if he was trying to get rid of it?”

“I don’t know,” said Harold. “Maybe he didn’t have time. Maybe Conan Doyle was on his way back into the room. Something might have stopped him.”

“What would he have done with it, if he hadn’t burnt it?”

“Hidden it,” said Harold. “Hidden it in Conan Doyle’s own study.”

“The letters!” Dr. Garber exclaimed, her face brightening. She took up her role much faster than Sarah had, for sure. “That’s why you think Stoker wanted so terribly to meet Conan Doyle in person! So that he could get back into the study.”

“Yes,” said Harold, impressed with Dr. Garber’s reasoning. “Did the secretary-to-secretary correspondence talk about meeting at Conan Doyle’s house as well?”

“I don’t know,” she said after some thought. “They very well could have. I just don’t remember.”

Excitement percolated through Harold’s body, tingling every inch of his skin. Was he deluding himself? Was he tricking himself into thinking that the mystery wasn’t over, that there was more to do? He realized it didn’t matter. Whether the clue was real, or whether it was simply a half-remembered fragment of an utterly uneventful business note from a hundred years past that had been divulged in idle conversation, it was a reason to keep going.

He swallowed the rest of his bourbon easily in one gulp. “Sounds like enough to go on,” he said.

“But where will you go? Even if Stoker did hide the diary in Conan Doyle’s study in 1900, how does that help you find it now? Where would you find it?”

Harold stood and collected his coat.

“I think first I’ll try Conan Doyle’s study,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

CHAPTER 39 The Printer

December 3,1900

The chain of reasoning which led Arthur from Bram’s house on Saturday to the storefront of Stegler & Sons Printing House, along the Strand, on Monday was quite simple. Indeed, by the time Arthur stepped up onto the small front stoop of the printing house, he was genuinely surprised that it had taken him this long to arrive.