tonight, he needed to hasten his pace; it was already 6 p.m. and the performance was scheduled for 8. Hurrying toward the exit, however, he neglected to carry out his evening ritual of stepping on the frog. An inlaid design on the court’s terrazzo, lobby floor, the bespeckled, emerald green creature with bulging black eyes was a reminder to all that encountered it that the site of the courthouse had once been a muddy swamp. To the judge, it had become a symbol of good luck, and he soon regretted having not taken advantage of its power. Because though he had completely forgotten about the press, the vulturous gathering on the courthouse steps told him that they most assuredly had not forgotten about him.
3
August, 1924
Sarah had guessed right. No time remained to go home before the movie. Ponjola, a controversial film about a woman whose wearing of men’s clothing inspires her to live as a man, was on at the Princess.
She had been wanting to see it ever since Obee told her it wasn’t worth the bother. As she filed away the last docket, she congratulated herself for bringing her own change of clothes: a tan, silk bloomer outfit she had ordered from the Sears catalog. Just as smart as the one she had seen in the Lion Store window and half the price.
Absent the usual bustle, the building felt a little eerie. Even the judge had gone, unusual for a man who often stayed long enough to greet the cleaning crew at 10. But then again, he was a family man now.
Quiet, still, cold. The Lucas County Courthouse. An imposing structure, built in the Italian Renaissance design when the style was first becoming popular here, it was faced in sandstone, with alternating columns and arches and an intricate frontal fraise. Venturing out of her office into the massive vestibule, the emptiness covered her, the strangeness of seeing a familiar object from a different vantage point. Concrete, wood, and glass, usually fading into the backdrop of human activity, were suddenly brought to the fore, striking in their material indifference. Even the floor beneath her seemed altered. Odd that she had never noticed it before, but in the gleaming, polished marble she could see her reflection clearly. Appropriate perhaps for a place of justice. She envisioned some tortured soul waiting to plead his case. Intending to skirt the truth, he rehearses his lines with downcast eyes. But in the process, he encounters his own image, comes face to face with himself, and changes his mind. Truth prevails. Justice is served.
Truth and justice. Words that Sarah took for granted. Ideas that she breathed in like air. But what of those ideas? Were they eternal principles, outside the bounds of human history, or man’s invention and therefore subject to interpretation? In court she had heard convincing arguments for each point of view. But this was one of those questions to which she herself didn’t have a definitive answer. What she did have, however, was a remedy for the queasy feeling to which it gave rise: Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Just thinking about the magazine started to settle her stomach, which she also realized was painfully empty. She had never before read about his exploits in the evening. But she had never been here alone before either. One rare event surely deserved another.
Sarah couldn’t remember precisely when her flirtation with the master detective had become an habitual affair. She did know that beginning the day with him and the trusty Dr. Watson was good for her. Not only did the practice sharpen her mind, but it made her more empathetic. If the order, the logic, the impeccable deciphering of clues in the story encouraged her to think more analytically, the problems surmounted by the fictional cast made her better understand those faced by the real people she encountered at court. Not that her reading was limited to the works of the popular Arthur Conan Doyle. Not by a long shot. But more demanding literature she saved for the privacy of her living room. There she had tackled everything from Milton to Austen, Dostoevsky to some of the recently published poems by Emily Dickinson. Last month she had even made it through, although not entirely comprehended, the new translation of Emile Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. But it was Doyle’s larger-than-life, eccentric protagonist who inspired her in the quotidian present.
Over the years she had become fascinated with Doyle, too, a man whose complexity nearly matched that of his most celebrated character. A physician turned writer, Doyle possessed both the logic and imagination necessary for each of those professions. He even claimed to believe in the paranormal, and while Sarah didn’t go quite that far herself (her rather embarrassing participation in the telepathist performance last fall notwithstanding), she admired someone of his intelligence admitting that things existed that reason alone could not explain.
It was, however, Doyle’s acute sense of justice that Sarah found the most compelling. Like the time he demonstrated that a man convicted of having slashed a number of horses and cows couldn’t have committed the crime because of poor eyesight. Or the incident involving Sir Roger Casement. Though adventure fantasy wasn’t her type of story, she had read Doyle’s The Lost World because the character of Lord John Roxton was based on Casement, an Irish diplomat accused of trying to get Germany’s support for the Irish independence movement. Casement had previously alerted Doyle to the terrible injustices committed against blacks in the Congo, and when Doyle felt that Casement had become the victim of injustice himself, he offered his support. Convicted of being a traitor in 1916, Casement was eventually put to death, but not before Doyle almost succeeded in sparing his life.
Sarah reached into her emergency candy jar with one hand and turned to the final paragraph of The Last Bow with the other. She had read the story once before, and therefore already knew that Holmes averts the death of thousands by infiltrating a German spy ring. But the plot was only part of the pleasure. Words themselves were comforting. As were the familiar characters. If they were interesting enough, what did it matter that they repeated themselves?
Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less and a cleaner, better stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. Start her up, Watson, for it’s time that we were on our way. I have a check for five hundred pounds which should be cashed early, for the drawer is quite capable of stopping it if he can.
“Done.” She closed the magazine and sighed with a familiar mixture of satisfaction and loss. Finishing a story was always like a little death, no matter how many times one had read it. Best to begin another immediately. Next on her list, The Valley of Fear, the only full-length Holmes novel she hadn’t yet read. She would start it bright and early tomorrow.
She slipped on her outfit, exchanged her tortoise shell comb for one with pearl studs, and added a pair of matching drop earrings. She sighed again and frowned. What was bothering her? She couldn’t place the feeling. Too much chocolate? The disruption to her pattern? Perhaps the story’s not quite-so-happy ending. Generally, of course, it was optimistic. But, as Holmes had rightly predicted through his metaphor of the east wind, bad had to precede the good. For the story was published in 1914, when England’s worst days of the Great War still lay ahead.
Sarah walked rapidly down the long corridor that led to the stairs. With the building empty, her Cuban heeled, brown patent leather shoes echoed loudly, drawing her gaze momentarily toward the floor, where once again she saw her reflection. The marble here was duller than upstairs, her image fuzzier, the outline of her more formally attired shape blurred. And that gave her pause. If the same tortured soul she had conjured up earlier had been waiting down here instead, he might have very well decided to stick with his lie, the entire course of his life altered by something as minor as a slight shift in location. She gave a departing look around the court’s hallowed halls and exited feeling queasier than ever. Chilled rather than refreshed by the cool breeze that was starting to gather force, she headed quickly for the theater, wondering when the approaching storm
