“Are you one of her fans?”

“You could say that. I’m going to be the treasurer of her re-election campaign.”

Bias noted.

“What were her relations with Matheson?” I asked.

“I have no reason to think that she had any outside of the club, other than the fact that she’s female - which, come to think of it, is a pretty compelling reason. And I guess Hugh might have tried some cases in front of her. You ask a lot of question, Mr. Cody. Shades of Sherlock!”

“Now that hurts, Mrs. Chalmers. I’m not the Sherlockian here - you are.”

She shook her head. “Not me, my husband. Don’t get us confused. I have my own interests.”

“Music and art and things cultural, right?”

“That’s another question.”

“I have more. For instance, is Noah Queensbury for real?”

“His wife must think-”

“I mean about Sherlock Holmes,” I interrupted, impatient.

“He’s a gifted surgeon. I suspect that he works hard and plays hard. That Holmesmania stuff is his way of playing. He may act crazy, but I think it’s just an act.”

I paused at an intersection, waiting for a WALK light. Renata, seeing no cars coming our way, jaywalked. I scampered to keep up.

“Were any of your friends, or just people you know from the colloquium, late for the banquet last night?”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I got held up fixing my hair into those ringlets I wore last night.”

We were within sight of Muckerheide Center now, the flat slabs of some architect’s tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright rising above the horizon before us.

“But your husband was there as early as the cocktail hour,” I pointed out. “Mac said so.”

“Sure. When I saw how long it was going to take to fix my hair, I told him to go on without me. He and Kate and Mac were all dressed, and they’re more social creatures than I am anyway. And even a husband and wife need a little personal space between them now and then, don’t you think?”

Personal space... it sounded like an echo of Lynda’s constant complaint that I was too clingy, too jealous, too bossy - and after a while, just too too. Maybe things between us never would have gone off the rails if I had lightened my touch a bit. Maybe that was still possible.

“I guess I’m not qualified to answer that one,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never been married.” Not that I was against the idea.

I glanced in her direction, trying not to look like a man looking at a woman. I’m sure I failed miserably. It was hard to get away from the fact that Renata Chalmers was a stunningly attractive and sensuous female married to a man about forty years older than she was. I’d have bet he felt no such craving for personal space.

Sunday, March 13

9:00

Breakfast (President’s Dining Room)

Field Bazaar

Session Four

10:00

“Dr. John H. Watson: Conductor of Light” - Dr. Noah Queensbury, BSI, Cincinnati

10:30

“Holmes on the Radio” - Bob Nakamora, Philadelphia

11:00

“Humor in the Canon” - Dr. Sebastian McCabe, BSI, Erin, Ohio

11:30

Sherlockian Auction - Bob Nakamora

12:00

Farewells and Thanks

Certificate of Participation

Chapter Twenty-Four - Bacon, Eggs, and Suspicion

I took my leave of Renata at the registration table outside the Hearth Room. She continued on to the President’s Dining Room, although we were too early for breakfast, while I lingered to talk with Popcorn.

My administrative assistant, four feet eleven inches of romantic imagination wrapped up in a grandmother of three, was still swept up in Love’s Savage Desire.

“Is this your first time through that book or are you re-reading the steamy parts?” I asked, as if I didn’t know the answer. In her opinion, I don’t put enough sex and violence in my books. She’s a widow.

Popcorn sighed and set down the paperback. “I saw Lynda earlier.” She wasn’t at church, then, at least not any more. “Are you two an item again?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “but keep an eye on her Facebook status.”

Turning away from Popcorn’s blue cat’s eyes, I found myself looking at the coat rack next to the registration desk. There were only a couple of coats on it, and no hats at all. I strained to remember what it had looked like yesterday.

“Did you notice anybody taking a deerstalker off of that rack yesterday afternoon?” I asked Popcorn.

Anybody who had a thing like that at a program like this would most likely want to wear it all the time, like Queensbury, not warehouse it on a coat rack - unless maybe he was saving it up to wear as a sort of disguise during the commission of a murder.

But Popcorn shook her head. “I don’t think so. I couldn’t swear to it because I was taking money and handing out name tags when I wasn’t reading my book, but I don’t think so. Why, is there one missing?”

“Probably not. It was just a thought.”

I left Popcorn to her book, planning to join the breakfast crowd in the President’s Dining Room. Before I got very far in that direction, though, I saw the bald-headed bookseller go in the second door of the Hearth Room with a box under his arm. Reuben Pinkwater, Mac had said his name was, and he was on Mac’s list of people to interview.

I sidled up to him casually as he pulled books out of the box and stacked them on the long table. He was wearing gabardine pants, a small brown bow tie and white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. When he heard me coming he looked up and gave a cheery “Good morning.”

The smile, showing off his gold tooth, put wrinkles in his face to match the soft indentions at the back of his head. It occurred to me then that all bald men over the age of thirty-five look alike, from Daddy Warbucks to Lex Luthor to Kojak.

But a deerstalker would hide a bald dome nicely.

“Morning,” I agreed. “I haven’t seen you around Erin.” This was content-free chatter to get the ball rolling.

“Probably not. My shop’s in Licking Falls. The Scene of the Crime. Here.”

He handed me a business card with the name of the store and the unmistakable silhouette of Sherlock Holmes, the man in the deerstalker.

With the card in my hand I gestured to the small stack of deerstalker caps on one end of the table. “Do you sell many of those?”

He looked where I pointed. “A few a year. I thought I’d get rid of them all this weekend, but no such luck.”

Pinkwater fussed with the books in jerky movements, squaring off volumes that already looked perfectly aligned to me. There were paperbacks and hardbacks of every size, some hot off the press and some barely held together with rubber bands. About ninety percent had either “Sherlock Holmes” or some obvious Sherlockian reference like “Baker Street” in the title.

“Isn’t this kind of a narrow specialty?” I asked.

“Oh, I just brought the best of the Holmes stuff for this symposium or whatever it’s called,” he said. “We sell all kinds of mysteries. In fact, Al Kane’s doing a book signing for us tomorrow night. See anything you like?”

Resisting the impulse to calculate the odds on that one, I said, “You have some old books here. There must be a few gems for collectors among them.”

Pinkwater smiled. “Nothing that would excite a Woollcott Chalmers, that’s for sure. I shy away from real rarities. You have to know what you’re doing there or you can get burned. That happened to me once on a copy of The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Ellery Queen and very rare because it was suppressed by the Conan Doyle Estate. It turned out to be a modern bootleg reprint.” He shook his head. “There’s not much margin for that kind of error in this business.”

What was that volume Pinkwater had showed me yesterday about a rare book that turned out to be fake? There it was, still on the table - The Adventure of the Unique ‘Hamlet.’ There was the beginning of an idea there, if only I could put my finger on it.