Charles Doyle was real. Touie was real. Their deaths were tragedies. Sherlock Holmes was a bit of imagination. His death was a petty amusement. The old chattering woman and the growing crowd behind her did not know about Arthur’s father-they didn’t even know his name. The death of Charles Doyle did not merit a single sentence in the Times, the Daily Telegraph, or even the Manchester Guardian. Touie’s illness would remain a secret for years. No, these people-these wretched, detestable people-knew nothing of Arthur. They knew only Holmes.

Arthur remained mute to the abuse until a nearby constable meandered over.

“Go along, now, go along,” he instructed the crowd, with more understanding than belligerence in his voice. They complied, though the old woman cursed Arthur’s name with every breath as she walked away. The constable-short, slim, professional-retrieved Arthur’s hat for him.

“Thank you, sir,” said Arthur, his consciousness returning to his surroundings.

“Don’t you worry about all that, Dr. Doyle,” said the constable. “I think you gave old Mr. Holmes a right fine farewell. Just a pity to see him go.” And with a tip of his cap, the constable walked away.

CHAPTER 6…Until Now

January 6, 2010

Harold entered a second-floor reception room of the Algonquin Hotel to the sound of ducks in heat. The assembled Sherlockians were quacking at one another in anticipation. They were also “assembled” only in the sense that they were in fact all within the same four walls. They guffawed, hollered, and called to their friends like a rabble. They did not possess even a semblance of assembly.

Hundreds of Sherlockian luminaries were in chairs, though none really sat: To Harold they seemed to vibrate about an inch above their seats. They hovered, inquiring of their neighbors for rumor with sharp torques from side to side. Harold caught the scattered nouns from a half dozen different chatterings: “late,” “Alex,” “missing.”

On his way to an open chair, Harold poked the shoulder of an older English attendee whose name he couldn’t remember. The woman turned, her tight gray hair spinning round to reveal glasses thicker than one would think a woman could get away with wearing. Somehow she did.

“Is something up?” asked Harold, trying to seem both nonchalant and not hopelessly uninformed.

“Alex is late,” she said quickly. “There was an attempt to ring his room, but the phone is off the hook. He’s gone missing.”

“Jesus,” said Harold.

He thought of Alex’s nervousness the night before. Of Alex’s belief that he was being followed. It couldn’t be…

A small, youngish woman whom Harold didn’t recognize sat down to his left. As she turned, a wave of her curly brown hair swept to the side and Harold saw her eyes, opened wide as if taking in the world were a constant act of discovery. Her light blue dress made her appear to be a bit younger than she probably was. She wore a pink and yellow banded scarf around her neck, making her look, for a second, like an unwrapped bonbon.

“Gosh, what a commotion!” she said. Was she speaking to Harold? Her head faced forward as she continued scanning the room.

“Yeah,” said Harold, too quietly.

She turned to face him, and the sharp eye contact startled him a bit.

“Excuse me,” she said with a friendly tone in her voice. “Did you say something?”

“I… umm, yes. Yeah.”

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you with all the noise in here. What did you say?”

“Yeah.”

She paused. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, I said… Yeah. As in, yes, there’s quite a commotion. In here.”

She looked at him for a long moment, sizing him up.

“Right,” she said. She turned away again.

Harold blushed. Then he started saying things, as was his compulsion. He had a terrible habit, when he became nervous and didn’t know what to say, of saying a few unrelated things in rapid succession, as if hoping that at least one of them might take hold.

“Did you come here for the lecture? I’m Harold. Is it still raining out? Harold White.”

The woman raised her eyebrows in thought; she was probably trying to figure out which of Harold’s prompts to respond to.

“Harold,” she said. “Do you know Alex Cale?” Apparently she’d chosen none-of-the-above.

“We’re friends,” he replied, excited to have somehow begun the conversation with what for him was a solid subject. “Well, we’re friendly. I saw him last night. In the hotel.”

“He was here last night?”

“Yes. He got caught in the rain.” Harold chided himself silently for continuing to focus on the rain. He was sure there was something more interesting he could say to this woman. “He seemed nervous, actually. Said someone was following him. But you know- He’s got a flair for the dramatic.”

The woman looked up at Harold’s deerstalker hat. She gestured to it with her right eyebrow.

“It looks to me like you both do. Do you think someone was following him?”

This was a difficult question. It was probably the most difficult question she could have asked.

“No. Maybe. I mean, wouldn’t that be fantastic? Well, not fantastic, not if something bad happened, but… noteworthy. You know what I mean.” Something about her just made Harold want to talk-and keep talking. It was an appealing trait. A handy one for a…journalist?

After Alex Cale had announced his discovery, those months before, the Baker Street Irregulars had received a deluge of requests from reporters looking to attend this January’s convention. Well, “deluge” by Sherlockian standards. Professional Sherlock Holmes obsessives tended not to garner much attention from the media. But they still had firm rules about this sort of thing-no one who was not a member of an accredited Sherlockian organization was allowed to attend the weekend’s lecture. All requests were denied.

“Excuse me,” said Harold, interrupting himself. “Who are you?”

“Sarah Lindsay,” said the woman buoyantly. “Nice to meet you!” She extended her hand for a shake.

“Which organization are you a member of?”

“Oh, none,” she said. “I’m a reporter. I’m doing a story on Alex Cale and the missing diary.”

“How did you get in here?”

In response Sarah shrugged. “Jeffrey Engels,” she said. “We e-mailed back and forth for a while, and he let me in.”

Harold thought this was a little strange-if Jeffrey had decided to make an exception for Sarah, wouldn’t he have mentioned something about it?

“He’s such a sweet guy, Jeffrey,” she continued. “Are you an Irregular, too?”

“Yes.” Harold realized that he had already spilled every secret he might know about Alex-his odd behavior last night, his paranoia. Sarah would make Alex, and the Irregulars, look like fools. She would mock their bits of period costuming, their occasionally self-serious lapses into indecipherable scholarship, their “flair for the dramatic,” as Harold had just said. He made a nervous face.

“Are you worried about my being here? You don’t need to be, I promise.”

“No, I…I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just, we have rules about reporters. Strangers of any kind, actually. I didn’t-”

“Harold, it’s okay. What were you worried about? That I’d tease you about your hat? Or those little pipes that half of the men here are carrying in their coat pockets?”

Harold smiled. She was funny.

“Look,” he replied, “we’re at a Sherlock Holmes convention. If I wasn’t wearing a deerstalker cap, don’t you think that would be a little weird?”

“Very. If you’re going to be an expert on nineteenth-century detective fiction, I say you should dress the part. But aren’t you a little… young to be an Irregular?”