A Study in Sherlock

THE LAST OF SHEILA-LOCKE HOLMES Laura Lippman

Years later, when people tried to tease her about the summer she turned eleven and opened her own detective agency, she always changed the subject. People thought she was embarrassed because she wore a deerstalker cap with a sweatshirt and utility belt and advertised her services under the name Sheila Locke-Holmes, which was almost her real name anyway. She was actually Sheila Locke-Weiner, but it was bad enough to be that in real life. The only case she ever solved was the one about her father’s missing Wall Street Journal and she disbanded her agency by summer’s end.

Besides, it didn’t begin with the deerstalker cap, despite what her parents think they remember. She was already open for business when she found the cap, on her mother’s side of the walk-in closet, in a box full of odd things. Because her mother was Firmly Against Clutter—a pronouncement she made often, usually to Sheila’s father, who was apparently on the side of clutter—this unmarked box was particularly interesting to Sheila. It contained the deerstalker cap, although she did not know to call it that; a very faded orange T-shirt that said GO CLIMB A ROCK; a sky blue wool cape with a red plaid lining; and a silver charm bracelet.

She took the box to her mother, who told Sheila that she really must learn to respect other people’s privacy and property. “We talked about this. Remember, Sheila? You promised to do better.”

“But I have to practice searching for things,” Sheila said. “It’s my job. May I have the T-shirt? It’s cool, like the shirts people buy at Abercrombie, only even better because it’s really old, not fake-old.”

“Don’t you want the cape, too? And the charm bracelet? I think those things are back in style as well.”

Sheila maintained a polite silence. Her mother was not the kind of mother who was actually up-to-date on what was cool. She just thought she was. “I like the cap. It’s like the one on that book that Daddy is always reading, the one he says he wants to work on if it ever becomes a film.”

Her mother looked puzzled. “Sherlock Holmes?”

“No, the one about the stupid people who fought for the South in the Civil War.”

“Stupid people?”

“The dunces.”

“The dunces—oh, no, Sheila, that’s not what the book is about. But, yes, the man in A Confederacy of Dunces wears a cap like this. And writes things down on Big Chief tablets, sort of like you’ve been doing.”

Sheila could not let this pass. “I use black-and-white composition books like Harriet M. Welsch in Harriet the Spy.”

She took the cap, though, to be nice. Grown-ups thought they were always watching out for children’s feelings, but Sheila believed it was the other way around just as often. Sheila was tender with her mother, who was sensitive in her own way, and indulgent of her father, who was dreamy and absentminded, usually lost inside whatever film he was editing. He had worked on some very famous films, but he worked in an office, no closer to the movie stars than Sheila was when she watched a movie on her computer, so no one at school thought what her father did was cool. Her mother was a lawyer, which definitely wasn’t cool. It wasn’t uncool. It just was.

Sheila sometimes went to her father’s workplace, all the way downtown, on Canal Street. This usually happened on school holidays that her mother’s law office didn’t recognize as holidays or during the summer because of what her parents called child-care chaos. They had a lot of child-care chaos the summer that Sheila was eleven. On these days, Sheila and her father took the 1 train, which irritated her father because it was a local, but she liked all the extra stops. There were more people coming and going. She tried to make up a story about each person in the car. They tended to be sad stories.

Her father worked at a big Mac computer and it was always exciting—for the first half hour or so. Sheila would even start to think that maybe she would be a film editor. She enjoyed her father’s lectures about the choices he had, how he sometimes had to find the film that the filmmaker failed to make, that it was like trying to cook a meal with only what was already in the pantry. But it was slow, tedious work. She eventually got bored, wandered to the lunchroom where the bagels were set out, or asked if there was a computer she could use, or played games on her father’s phone. Most often, though, she pulled out a book, usually a mystery or something with magic.

“You’re on a crime spree,” her father joked. But she was not an indiscriminate reader of mystery books. She started with Encyclopedia Brown and tried very hard not to cheat by looking up the solutions in the back, but some of the clues were awfully small. (How was she supposed to know that Southerners called the Battle of Bull Run the Battle of Manassas?) She read books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, which were sort of like mysteries, and Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret, the sequel, which she liked even better. Despite her deerstalker cap, she did not read Sherlock Holmes. Nor did she read Nancy Drew. Sheila hated Nancy Drew, who reminded her of a girl in her class and not just because she had red hair. Like Nancy Drew, Trista had two friends, Caitlin and Harmony, whose job seemed to be to advertise her wonderfulness. Oh Trista, they would moan, you are so smart, you are so pretty, your clothes are the best. They said this over and over again and somehow it all became true. When it wasn’t, not in Sheila’s opinion.

Sheila talked to her father about Trista and her friends because her father was interested in why people did the things they did, whereas her mother said such conversations were merely gossip, which she forbade, along with Gossip Girl. Her father said it was psychoanalysis and that gossip was fine, anyway, as long as it didn’t become like the Gossip Game in The Last of Sheila, a film that he particularly liked. Sheila pretended to like it, too, because it seemed important to her father. He needed her to like The Last of Sheila, Paths of Glory, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Magnificent Ambersons, Miller’s Crossing, and Funny Bones. So she did, and she never told him that Funny Bones was very scary for what was supposed to be a funny movie and that she didn’t understand what anyone in Miller’s Crossing was talking about, no matter how many times she watched it.

“It’s like this Trista has her own PR firm,” Sheila’s father said.

“Puerto Rican?”

“What?”

“That’s what they call the Sharks in West Side Story. PRs.” Her father had shown her the film on television, telling her to look at the color of the sky as Tony walked through the alleys, singing of Maria. He was critical of the editing, although it had won an Oscar, according to the white-haired man, the one who talked after the movies on that channel. “Awards don’t mean anything,” her father told Sheila, yet his awards—none of them Oscars—were framed and hanging in his office.

“Oh, I meant public relations. You know, people who are hired to tell other people how great people are.”

“Could I have someone like that? Instead of a babysitter? Could you hire someone to tell people I’m great?”

Her father laughed. But Sheila was serious. She had not had a good year in fifth grade and she was dreading sixth grade. She was not sure a vintage GO CLIMB A ROCK T-shirt could solve all her problems, although she hoped it would be a start. But how much easier it would be if someone would go to the school and tell everyone she was great. Sheila the Great. There was a book by that name, a Judy Blume, but it made her sad, because the Sheila in that book was so clearly not great.

However, Sheila did not realize how bad fifth grade had been until her parents received a call from the school, suggesting they come in for a conference before the new school year began. “Just to make sure we’re all on the same page as far as Sheila’s behavior is concerned.” She knew this because she picked up the extension in her parents’ bedroom and her father caught her.

“Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves,” he said.

“It’s part of my job. I have to know things. That’s how I found out what was happening to your newspaper. I heard the super complaining to the doorman that people were subscribing to newspapers and leaving them downstairs for days at a time, so he was just going to start throwing them away if people didn’t come down and get them by nine.”

“I’m down by nine.”

Sheila gave her father a look. “Almost never. You leave for work at ten or eleven and, most nights, don’t come home until after my bedtime.”

He gave her a story by Saki, which apparently was related to what her mother drank from the little carafe at the sushi place. The story was about a cat, Tobermory, that learned to talk and told everyone’s secrets and the people then plotted to poison him. They didn’t get a chance—he was killed in a fight by another cat—but that didn’t worry Sheila. She knew how to get around being poisoned. You just made sure that someone else tasted your food first. She also decided that if she ever was allowed to have a cat, she would name him Tobermory and call him Toby for short. She thought about changing the name of her stuffed white-and-gray tabby, which had been passed down to her by her mother, but it didn’t seem right, changing someone’s name when he was so old. Her mother was fifty, so her stuffed animals must be … almost fifty. Sheila had wanted to change her own name. Last year she had asked if she could be Sheila Locke instead of Locke-Weiner. She argued that a girl should have her mother’s surname, that it was good for women’s rights. Her mother said such a change would hurt her father’s feelings, that he had managed to grow up with the same name and all Sheila had to do was remind people, politely, that it was pronounced whiner.

Like that was so much better.

After solving the case of her father’s missing newspaper, Sheila felt she needed more work. She put up a small note, advertising her services, but the super scolded her and said such postings were not allowed in the hallways. Her family’s building had lots of rules like that, almost more than school. For example, no delivery people were ever allowed past the lobby, which was part of the reason that all those newspapers ended up on a table and then got thrown away by the angry super.

People in the building were always stressing that this rule was very good for the kids because they could come and go throughout the building and their parents would know that they would never meet an outsider. But there weren’t that many kids and Sheila wasn’t friends with them anyway so she would have gladly traded that rule for having Chinese food brought right to the door with everybody already in pajamas. There was nothing cozier than eating Chinese food with her parents with everyone already in pajamas. But because someone had to go downstairs to fetch it, they never ended up doing it that way. Besides, they seldom ate dinner as a family because her father worked late. He said he couldn’t help being a night owl. Sometimes her mother ate with Sheila; sometimes she drank a glass of wine while Sheila ate dinner by herself. They had a formal dining room, but it was rare for them to eat in there because it was so formal. They were not formal people, her father said. They all preferred the little breakfast bar in the kitchen, which was bright and cheerful.

But everyone else, guests and strangers, loved the dining room with its scary crimson walls and the chandelier that looked like something that might become a monster at night. It’s a beautiful apartment. That’s what everyone said, upon entering. What a beautiful apartment. They praised her parents’ taste. They expressed envy for the bookshelves, for the tiny study that her parents shared, for the floors, which were parquet, which Sheila eventually figured out was not a type of margarine. But whenever her mother led someone down the hall with the bedrooms, she would say apologetically: “The bedrooms are kind of mean.” Sheila felt this made their bedrooms sound much more exciting than they were. They were small and square with such limited closet space that the smallest one, in the middle, had been transformed into a walk-in closet/dressing room. Her father got one side, her mother got the other. Sheila remained stuck with the little stinky one in her room.

The summer she turned eleven, she began to spend a lot of time in the walk-in closet and that was how she found her mother’s deerstalker cap.

“Were you popular?” she asked her mother, twirling the cap on her index finger. “When you were my age?”

“I was kind of in the middle. Not popular, but I had lots of friends.”

“Were you pretty?” Her mother was one of the old mothers at her school and although there were quite a few old mothers, she was one of the old-old mothers.

“I didn’t think so, but I was, actually. I had shiny hair and such a nice smile. When I see photographs of myself from that time, I could kick myself for not realizing how pretty I was. Don’t make the same mistake, Sheila. Whatever age you are, you’ll look back ten years and you would kill to look like that again.”

“I don’t want to look like I’m one years old. I was fat and I had no hair.”

Her mother laughed. “Later, I mean. At thirty, a woman wants to look as she did at twenty, so on and so forth.”

Sheila had shiny hair and she supposed her smile was nice, but that was not enough, not at her school. Things must have been simpler in her mother’s times. Then again, she grew up in Ohio.

Sheila spent entire days in the closet and her babysitter didn’t care. The summer babysitter was old, a woman who didn’t want to go anywhere and had to visit the doctor a lot, which is why there was so much child-care chaos. Sheila found she could hear whatever her parents said in their bedroom, if she crept into the closet late at night after a bathroom run. They talked about her at times. It was neither good nor bad, so her father wasn’t exactly right about eavesdroppers. Her parents were worried about school. They talked about bullies and clicks. Trista’s name came up. Trista was a bully, for sure. She was the worst kind of bully, the kind that had other people do her bullying for her. Her hair was shiny, too. So shiny hair was part of being popular, but it wasn’t the only thing that would make a person popular. In her composition book, Sheila began working on a list of things required for popularity and came up with:

1) Shiny hair

2) Nice smile (no braces. lip gloss?)

3) Good clothes

4) Being nice to most people but maybe mean to one person

5) To be continued

She continued to search the walk-in closet. Her father saved everything. Everything! Single cufflinks, keys to forgotten places and key rings with no keys, coasters, old business cards. He had a box of Sheila’s baby clothes, nothing special, yet he kept them. It was embarrassing to see those stupid clothes, especially the Yankees onesie. Girls shouldn’t wear baseball onesies.

But it was in her mother’s jewelry box, the one that Sheila was never, ever supposed to touch, that Sheila found the heavy engraved card with her father’s name and a woman’s name and an address downtown, on Chambers Street. She did not know her father had been in business with a woman named Chloe Beezer. Sheila had never met Chloe Beezer, or heard her father speak of her. The card was pretty, cream-colored and on heavy paper, with a thin green line around their names. Beezer—what an ugly name. A person would have to be very pretty to survive such a name.

There was a photograph clipped to the back. Her father, with a mustache and longer hair, tilted his head toward a woman with blond hair. They were somewhere with palm trees, bright orange drinks in front of them, an orange sky behind them.

“Dad, who was Chloe Beezer?” she asked him on the 1 train, coming back from his office. It was the final week of her summer vacation and the train was hot and smelly.

“How do you know that name?” he asked her.

“I found a card, with her name on it and yours.”

“Where?”

Why did she lie? It was instinctive. Instinctive lying was part of the reason that Sheila was in trouble at school. She took things. She lied about it. But how could one tell the truth about taking things? How could she explain to anyone that Trista’s billfold, which had a pattern of gold swirls and caramel whorls that reminded Sheila of a blond brownie, had seemed magical to her. A talisman, a word she had found in books by E. Nesbit and Edward Eager, writers her father insisted were superior to J. K. Rowling. If she had a billfold like that, she would be powerful. And she was very considerate, which is probably why she got caught: she removed the money and the credit card and the other personal items and put them back in Trista’s purse, taking only the billfold. Trista’s family was rich-rich. A billfold meant nothing to her. She would have a new one in a month or two. Whereas Sheila’s family was comfortable, according to her parents. Except in their dining room, which made them all uncomfortable.

She was not supposed to snoop. But she also was not supposed to go into her mother’s jewelry box, which sat on the vanity that separated her father’s cluttered side of the closet from her mother’s neat, orderly side.

She decided to admit to a smaller crime.

“I found it in a box you had with cufflinks and other old stuff.”

“You shouldn’t be poking around in other people’s things, Sheila.”

“Why? Do you have secrets?”

“I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Do you want me to go in your room and search through your things?”

“I wouldn’t mind. I’ve hidden my composition book. You’ll never find it.” If there was a lesson to be learned from Harriet the Spy, it was to maintain control over one’s diary, not that Sheila’s had anything juicy in it. “Who was Chloe Beezer?”

Her father sighed. “You know, I think, that I was married once before. Before your mother.”

She did know that, in some vague way. It had just never been real to her.

“The card was something she made when we got married and moved in together. We sent it out to our friends. We didn’t have a wedding, so we wanted our friends to know where we had set up house.”

“Was she Beezer-Weiner?”

He laughed, as if this were a ridiculous question. “Chloe? No. No. She wanted no part of Weiner.” He laughed again, but it was a different kind of laugh.

“Did she die?”

“No! What made you think that?”

“I don’t know. Did you get divorced?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s an odd thing, Sheila, but I don’t really remember. We married quickly. Perhaps we didn’t think it through. Are you ready for school next week? Don’t we need to make a trip for school supplies?”

She knew her father was changing the subject. She let him.

But once at home, she had to know if her mother was aware of this extraordinary thing about her father. “Did you know Daddy was married before?” she asked her mother when she came home. “To someone named Chloe Beezer?”

“Yes,” her mother said. “I did know that. You did, too. We told you, years ago.”

“I might have known, but I guess I forgot.”

Her mother looked at her father, who was reading his Wall Street Journal at the breakfast bar. Because he had to come home early with Sheila, they were going to have takeout from City Diner. “Why is this coming up now?”

Before Sheila could answer, her father said: “She found an old piece of paper in a box of my stuff. I told her she should respect our privacy more and she said she would. Right, Sheila?”

“Right,” she said, although she didn’t remember agreeing. “And a photograph. There was a photograph paper-clipped to it.”

“Do you want sweet potato fries, Sheila?” her mother asked.

“Yes, with cinnamon sugar.”

That night, as her mother put her to bed, Sheila was thinking about lying. She wasn’t supposed to do it even when it made sense. But what about when someone else repeated one of her lies? Her father was the one who said she found the card in his boxes, but it had been in the jewelry box, which she was specifically forbidden to touch. Didn’t her mother remember it was there? It was right on top, in clear view. She would see it tomorrow morning. Her mother went to that box every workday, pulling out golden chains and silver bangles. Her mother was very particular about her jewelry. She spent more time on selecting jewelry than she did on making up her face. “An old face needs an ornate frame,” she said, laughing. It was an old face, even as mother’s faces went. Sheila wished this wasn’t so, but it was. She could see that her mother had been at least medium-pretty once, in the same way that she had been medium-popular. But she wasn’t pretty now. It might help if she were. Trista’s mother was pretty.

“Mom, I went into your jewelry box.”

“I figured that out, Sheila. That’s okay. It’s good you’re being honest about it with me. That’s the first step. Telling the truth.”

“Why did you have that card?”

“What?”

“The card, with the photograph.”

“Oh, you know how hard it is to keep things in order sometimes.”

Yes, on her father’s side of the closet. But her mother’s side was always neat, with shoe boxes with Polaroid pictures of the shoes inside and clothing hanging according to type and color. Everything was labeled and accounted for on her mother’s side.

“Daddy thought it was in his boxes.”

“It probably was.”

“Do you snoop, too, Mom?”

She didn’t answer right away. “I did. But it’s wrong, Sheila. I don’t do it anymore.” She kissed her good night.

Two days later, Sheila disbanded Sheila Locke-Holmes. She left the deerstalker cap on a hook in her closet, put her almost-blank notebook down the trash chute, and took apart the utility belt that she had created in homage to Harriet the Spy. She told her mother that she would like to wear the charm bracelet, after all, that charm bracelets were popular again. She wore it to school the first day, along with her mother’s T-shirt. Sixth grade was better than she thought it would be and she began to hope she might, one day, at least be medium-popular. Like her mother, she had shiny hair and a nice smile. Like her father, she was dreamy and absentminded, lost in her own world. There were worse ways to be.

Sheila’s mother was not dreamy. She did not indulge conversations about why people did what they did. She did not stop movies and show Sheila the color of the sky or explain how Dr. Horrible could go down wearing one thing and rise up wearing another a second later. But she was sometimes right about things, as Sheila learned with each passing year. At thirty, Sheila would sigh with envy over her twenty-year-old face. At forty, she would look longingly back at thirty.

She would never yearn for that summer when she was eleven. Whenever someone brought up the time that she wore the deerstalker cap and started her own detective agency, she changed the subject but not because she was embarrassed. She could not bear to remember how sad her mother looked that night, when she confessed to snooping. She wanted to say to her mother: He saves everything! It doesn’t matter! She wanted to ask her mother: Why did you take the card? Did you want him to know you took it? Why did you put it somewhere you would have to see it every day? She wanted to ask her father: Why did you keep it? Do you miss Chloe Beezer? Aren’t you happy that you married Mommy and had me? What was in those orange drinks?

But all these things went unsaid. Which, to Sheila’s way of thinking, was also a kind of lying, but the kind of lying of which grown-ups approved.

Laura Lippman purchased a deerstalker cap in London when she was fourteen and still owns it, although she will never be an expert in all things Sherlock Holmes and, in fact, made a really embarrassing error about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work in her Tess Monaghan series. A New York Times bestseller and winner of several awards for crime writing, past president of the Mystery Writers of America, she has published sixteen novels, a novella, and a collection of short stories. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans.