Martin Greenberg - Sherlock Holmes In America

My mother tried to raise her sons properly, but I have a dreadful feeling that my mouth was hanging agape at this point. I certainly wondered if it was I who was mad, or the lady speaking to me. “But Hope confessed,” I said at last.

“I know that,” she reiterated, as if she were explaining to a child. “He did that because he knew he didn’t have long to live anyway.” She wiped away a tear sliding down her sunburnt cheek. “And because he wanted to shield Tom.”

The sun was now high in the Utah sky, and at last the light began to dawn in my foggy English brain as well. “Dennis killed them both,” I said.

“Of course,” Lucy nodded. “He hated Drebber and Stangerson far worse than Jeff or I did. You see, he hadn’t been able to save the girl he loved. She really was dead.”

“Sally Sawyer,” I whispered.

Lucy looked at me, surprised. “How did you know?”

“Never multiply names unnecessarily,” I recited, recalling Holmes’s dictum as if from a dream. “Dennis told us the name himself, in the story he prattled when he came to try to get the ring from us. But come-how did Hope know of that visit?”

“Oh, goodness, Doctor!” Lucy laughed, for the first time, and I saw she was still a handsome woman. “What chatterboxes you and Inspector Gregson were in that cab on the way to Scotland Yard! Jeff told me all about it!”

I must have looked hurt, because she added, in a kindly tone, “Jeff said Mr. Holmes let slip a hint or two, also… and you have to admit that my Jeff was a resourceful man.”

“More even than we credited,” I agreed sincerely. Seeing sudden misery in her face, I reached across the distance between our two chairs and clasped her wrist. “You must miss him sorely.”

“Every day!” she cried, raising her overflowing eyes to the empty sky, then turning them back to me. “But we had near two happy decades ranching in Wyoming before Jeff learned Tom was on Drebber’s trail in Cleveland. Jeff determined to stop him from doing murder. He couldn’t bear for Tom to have that sin on his conscience or his soul, no matter what the provocation.” Now she was caught up in the full onrush of her story, and had to tell all.

“And I couldn’t bear him to go without me, so we went together. We couldn’t find Tom in Cleveland, but that foul Drebber spotted Jeff and had him jailed for a trumpery nonsense-and I couldn’t bail him out at first for fear that Drebber would see me! By the time Drebber was gone and I’d got Jeff out, it was too late to stop Tom. That was how it went, across half the world, it seemed, using up our resources and Jeff getting more and more desperate, until finally we came to London.

“Jeff tried to do double duty hunting for Tom and guarding Drebber and Stangerson, while I did what I could, too-though it wasn’t much because I daren’t let them see me.

“At last, at Lauriston Gardens, Jeff was too late by moments to stop Tom. It nigh broke his heart.” She looked at me fiercely as if daring me to deny it.

“He wasn’t too late to be observed by the constable,” I pointed out. “And his presence there created all kinds of compromising physical evidence, although I always said that Holmes was too quick to theorize about a crime scene which he himself compared to the aftermath of a buffalo stampede.”

“Jeff made up that stuff about going back for the ring,” she said. “After you told him about ‘Mrs. Sawyer’ coming to your rooms for it, it was easy enough for him to figure out that Tom had lost Sally’s ring there. Tom really wanted it back, you know; it was the one he’d given Sally himself, not like the one in my case.”

“You mean Dennis and Sally had really been married before Drebber had taken her away?” I exclaimed. “But that’s infamous!”

“Oh yes,” she sighed. “It’s not unknown among the polygamists, you know. Sometimes plural wives are passed around-it’s awful. Anyway, Jeff was too late again when Tom got to Stangerson, and I guess you know the rest.”

“But why did the two of you go through all this to save Tom Dennis?” I asked, running my hand through my hair distractedly. “It’s noble, of course, and I commend you both for it, but why should Hope risk the happiness of the woman he loved to save Dennis?”

“Because he didn’t want his son to be a murderer.”

I was suddenly as dizzy as if I had really plunged into one of those mountain chasms.

“Tom is Jeff’s son from an attachment long before me,” she continued. “And now poor Tom is truly bereft over this; he understands, as Jeff always knew he’d do, about revenge not lightening his heart from sorrow. That’s why he decided to join me in my good work.”

“Good work?” I muttered blankly. “What work is that?”

“Why, helping plural brides to escape over the border into Wyoming and freedom!” she exulted. “Jeff and I had done it for years, and now Tom’s taking it up with me, in Jeff’s memory, and Sally’s-or at least he was, until you laid him low with that lucky shot.” She gave me a dark look under which I began to shift uneasily in my seat. I began to wish, not for the first time, that Holmes would arrive.

I’m not sure that her animadversion about my marksmanship did not rankle as much as the implication that I was somehow setting back the march of women’s rights. “Oh, I’d love to do it all by myself!” she went on. “Maybe even be a Masked Rider like my old friend Bess Erne, but we can’t get a passel of young Mormon women past the Temple guards without a man. The safest way’s to pretend that we’re a Mormon family traveling, a husband with his wives. Now I don’t know what I’m to do! If I take these girls back, their families will never let them slip away again. They’ll be watched too closely. And we can’t camp here much longer; the relief squad for the guards will be coming.”

She looked me full in the face with her piercing eyes. “Do you want them to end up like me-or Sally?” she asked.

I was silent. “No,” she mused, after a few moments watching my face, “so I guess the only answer is for the fake husband to be you, or Mr. Holmes.”

“Hah!” I laughed. “Holmes will never do it! You don’t know his views about women. He couldn’t carry the part off even if he did agree.”

She smiled at me.

And that is how I added the women of a third continent to my store of dearly-bought knowledge. “How many of them are there in all?” I sighed.

“Seven.”

“Oh dear,” I muttered. “‘As I was going to St. Ives… ’ Introduce these young ladies to me,” I said. “I must know their names if I’m to be plausible.”

“Oh, that won’t be any problem,” laughed Lucy. “All seven are named for flowers, and four of them are named Violet.”

When I returned exhausted to the foot of the mountain, the stars were out and I was wrestling with conflicting emotions. I felt pleased with my good deed, but also unsure of how to tell Holmes that I had left Dennis with Lucy Hope-or, for that matter, how to share any of my news with him. I confess I was also put out with him for leaving me to handle the entire matter myself, and I tried to keep that perturbation uppermost in my mind, so as not to contemplate the awful possibility that he might have attempted to follow me, but met with some mishap on the treacherous mountain pathway.

Consequently, it was with mingled relief and displeasure that I found both Holmes and Ames still at our campsite, in a cloud of tobacco smoke discussing possible Phoenician voyages to the New World, and the relevance of this to the Book of Mormon.

Holmes, when he spied me, seemed more annoyed than relieved. “What’s this, Watson? Did you miss Dennis?”

“And you as well , Holmes,” I replied testily.