Oscar took a long pull on his root beer. “We’ll see what my witness says when she sees you two. Meanwhile, why don’t you just empty your purse for me?”

“What for?” Lynda said.

“To see if you have Matheson’s missing room key.”

“Are you trying to humiliate me just because you can’t bum cigarettes off of me anymore?”

Oh, damn. She did still have the key. No, she couldn’t have been that stupid. But so much had happened, maybe she’d had no time to think about it... The knots in my stomach grew tighter.

“So you won’t let me look in your purse?” Oscar said.

“I’d feel violated.”

“Uh-huh.” He ostentatiously twiddled his thumbs.

“You don’t have a search warrant,” I pointed out.

Oscar raised his eyebrows, all innocence. “You know, I was really hoping I was wrong and we wouldn’t have to go the search warrant route, the line-up-”

“Okay, okay,” Lynda said. “I’ll open my damned purse.”

She pulled the gray-blue leather bag off of her lap by its strap and raked the contents out on the Formica table top, carefully avoiding the water rings from our drinks.

The variety was incredible: a change purse, a wad of crumpled tissues, three packs of gum (all opened), a key chain with a little canister of mace, a wallet, Lynda’s Android, one loose key, a plastic tampon holder, a rosary, assorted loose change, four pieces of hard candy (Werther’s), a notebook, a pen, a pencil, six bobby pins, a nail clipper, two tickets stubs from a 2008 Cincinnati Reds game, a compact, the agenda for “Investigating Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes,” a sucker, a checkbook, a hair brush, and a Sussex County map.

Oscar picked up the key chain and squinted at each key in turn. There must have been a dozen of them.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” I griped.

“Not me,” Oscar said, but I didn’t believe him. He had reasons to have it in for Lynda, and he wasn’t a particularly forgiving kind. “I don’t know why you have all these keys, but none of ’em’s from the Winfield.”

“I know,” Lynda said. I knew, too, because none of them was a key card.

Oscar held up the one loose key and I saw that it was the key to Mac’s house. He studied it, shook his head, and gave that, too, back to Lynda. She passed it on to me in a casual, unobtrusive gesture beneath the table that Oscar wasn’t supposed to catch but did. He snickered. I knew what he was thinking and I didn’t bother to set him straight.

“Now empty out the change purse,” he ordered.

Lynda looked at me, sighed, and complied.

This is it, I thought. I made up my mind that if I had to toss up the contents of my wrenching stomach I’d do it in Oscar’s substantial lap.

But there was no key card amid the quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies, and blessed medals in the change purse.

Lynda started to put things back in the purse.

“The wallet!” Oscar cried out.

He reached across the table and jerked it out of Lynda’s hand. I knew that wallet: It was a Coach, a present from me on Lynda’s twenty-sixth birthday, a little more than three years ago. We’d been dating less than a year at the time. Slowly, at Oscar’s demand, Lynda unfolded all the little flaps and windows where one might stick a key card.

Might, but hadn’t. The Winfield key wasn’t in there among the paper money and the plastic credit cards, either.

Oscar slammed the wallet on the table in front of Lynda and stood up, letting his chair clatter to the floor behind him. “You win this round,” he barked, “but that doesn’t mean I’m through with you two.”

Chapter Thirty-Three - The Adventure of the Empty House

Even with Oscar long gone from the game room, I lowered my voice before I asked Lynda, “Where’s the key?”

“In the mail,” she said, scooping everything back into her purse. “I sent it back to the hotel this morning when I realized how incriminating it could be.”

“Very clever. You’re not only smart, which I always knew, you have the makings of a great criminal. I just wish you’d told me that before. The information would have added years to my life.”

“Sorry. We were always talking about other things. How long do you think it’ll take for Oscar to realize he should still parade us before his star witness?”

I gulped the last of my caffeine-free Diet Coke, barely thinking about what the acid in soda can do to a nail. “Only as long as it takes him to stop being so peeved that it clouds his judgment. But maybe after we look at the DVD in my office it won’t matter.”

We walked across the campus, hand in hand once more, and we fell to talking about the Chalmerses’ marital mess.

“I believe in marriage and I believe in forever,” Lynda said. “And when I get married I want to make sure it is forever. For that, love is essential but not sufficient. It’s not nearly enough. I saw that close up. I think my parents loved each other in their own way, but that didn’t keep them married. I don’t want to screw up the way they did.”

This was not new conversational territory for us, but the circumstances were somewhat different than in the past given that - so far as I knew - we were no longer dating. We were, however, holding hands. What was she trying to tell me by bringing this up? More importantly, what was I supposed to say?

One thing for sure, this conversation was not about Lynda’s parents, who had met in the Army and had divorced years ago. I didn’t know much about them, not even their names, because the subject didn’t come up much, except in negative contexts like this one. Theirs was not a close family.

With the wisdom of age, I decided that the safest course was to ask a question and not venture any opinions.

“Well, then, theoretically,” I said, backing slowly into a delicate subject, “other than love, what would you be looking for in a husband?”

“A partner,” she said without hesitation. That word again! “And you can’t have a partnership without two strong parties. So I’d have to be able to hold up my end of the deal. I mean, I’d want to be far enough along in my own life and career to have a strong sense of my personal identity.”

“Whew,” I said, “I’m glad to hear you’re not planning on marrying for money. That means I’m still in the running.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

We shared a nervous laugh as we entered my little office on the first floor of Carey Hall, but I filed the conversation away for future reflection.

My office is crammed with books and binders, file cabinets, campus publications, newspapers, and a television with a DVD player/recorder. Every day I record the Cincinnati news programs in case they have an item on St. Benignus. Most of the stories show up on their websites, of course, but if they slander us I don’t want to count on that.

“Now are you going to tell me what this is all about?” Lynda asked as I fast-forwarded through the TV4 Action News weather and the opening segment of Mandy Petrowski’s report about the thefts and the colloquium.

“I don’t think I’ll have to tell you. Just watch.”

I pushed the remote to slow down the action just after the exterior shots of me talking outside the library gave way to video of Woollcott Chalmers pointing with his cane to a bust of Sherlock Holmes.

“Moran had planned to shoot the detective at night from across the street, using an air gun specially manufactured by the blind mechanic Von Herder,” Chalmers was saying.

I punched the stop-action button, freezing the old collector’s image on the screen. “That’s it,” I said.

Lynda shook her head. “Sorry. Maybe my brain is out of whack from that knock on the head, but I don’t get it. What did he say that’s so important?”

“Just two words: Air gun. Look, Chalmers has a real bust of Sherlock Holmes in his collection, why not a real air gun to go with it? That’s the real reason why the coroner’s report said there was no powder burns or ‘tattooing’ on the victim’s body, and also why nobody heard the shots. No wonder Mac found this TV report ‘highly suggestive’ about the weapon.”