Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Holmes looked up from the four books filled with their hundreds of scrawls. “Perhaps, if it might be possible . . .”

“Yes, yes,” said Clemens. “Those four guest books cover eighteen eighty-five until we all sailed in June of eighteen ninety-one. All the names of all our overnight guests are there. Take the books with you, but make sure that Hay returns them to me in pristine condition. For I am certain, you see, that someday my biographers will have much need to refer to those guest books after they’re done with the immediate task of blotting the spot where I leave off.”

“Thank you,” muttered Holmes, “but I won’t need to borrow the guest books. Merely memorize the December ’eighty-five pages and all of the eighteen eighty-six.” Holmes began flipping through the pages of names and comments, running his finger down each page.

“You can memorize those hundreds of signatures and comments merely by looking at them once?” asked Clemens. His tone sounded dubious to James’s ear.

Holmes’s finger paused and he looked up at the others. “Unfortunately, my memory has been like this since I was a small boy. If I see something, I can call it back at any time. It is more of a curse than gift.”

“But it must be wonderfully handy in your line of work,” said Howells.

“At times, quite so,” said Holmes. “But it took me years to learn how to deliberately forget things which were of no use to me.”

“Remind me never to play poker with you, Mr. Holmes,” said Sam Clemens.

But Holmes had immersed himself in the 1886 guest book again, his finger rapidly sliding down page after page.

Clemens shrugged and gestured toward Howells, who leaned forward, got the white ball in his sights, and rocketed it into the triangle of clustered spheres. Balls rolled and caromed everywhere. One went in. Howells continued—sinking a second, then third before failing to get any in a hole on his fourth attempt.

“I presume we are playing eight ball, Sam,” Howells said.

“Ah hah!” said Clemens, flicking ash into a waiting bowl. “Assumptions are dangerous, Howells! In truth we’re shooting straight pool—fifteen points wins.”

“What can you tell me about billiards technique based on what I have seen so far?” asked Henry James as Clemens lined up his next shot.

“Well,” said Clemens, “from observing both Howells and me, you can see that if your ball glides along in the intense and immediate vicinity of the object ball, and a score seems exquisitely imminent, you must lift one leg; then one shoulder; then squirm your body around in sympathy with the direction of the moving ball; and at the instant when the ball seems on the point of colliding, you must throw up both your arms violently. Your cue will probably break a chandelier and then catch fire from the exposed gas jet, as Howells has demonstrated here in this very room so many times, but no matter; you have done what you could to help the final score.”

The game proceeded, Clemens evidently winning, when suddenly Holmes finished scanning the thick guest book, slammed it shut, and said, “You had Rebecca Lorne and her cousin as guests in February of ’eighty-six!”

“Lorne? Lorne?” said Clemens, his head snapping up with its lion’s mane of white hair. “Oh, yes, I remember the woman and her shy cousin . . . what was his name? Carlton? No . . . Clifton. ‘Clif’ with one ‘f’ as Miss Lorne called him. I couldn’t have told you that it was in February of ’eighty-six, not so soon after Clover Adams’s suicide.”

“How did you know them?” asked Holmes.

“Oh, I’d met Miss Lorne the previous summer . . . no, early autumn, just after Congress had convened . . . while I was staying with Hay and Adams for a few days as I lobbied before a congressional committee for my copyrights. She was spending quite a bit of time with Mrs. Adams . . . with Clover . . . as I recall. Henry Adams was beside himself with worry about Clover’s unhappiness . . . it’s why I shifted my visit from his home to Hay’s . . . and it seemed as if Rebecca Lorne was the only friend who visited her on a regular basis during that dark time.”

“But how did she and her cousin Clifton end up spending a night with you here in Hartford two months after Clover’s death?” asked Holmes. “Had you struck up a separate friendship or habit of correspondence with Miss Lorne and her cousin?”

“Heavens no!” said Clemens. “As I remember, the two simply dropped by one Sunday to pay their respects. A Sunday in the middle of the month as I recall.”

“The fourteenth of February,” said Holmes, whose gray-eyed stare was so intense that it might have frightened Clemens if the humorist-writer hadn’t been staring into space as he tried to remember Rebecca Lorne and her visit.

“That’s right,” said Clemens. “But you must remember, Detective, that this was more than seven years ago. Miss Lorne and her cousin Clifton stopped by to pay their respects since they, or at least Rebecca Lorne, were aware that I’d known Clover Adams for years and they ended up having to spend the night because of a terrible snowstorm that swept in that afternoon. I remember that Livy insisted they stay with us rather than try to get to the train station. I believe they were going to Boston at the time . . . not just visiting, as I recall, but in the process of moving there from Washington.”

Clemens leaned on his cue stick, getting blue rosin on his cuff, and fixed Holmes with a stare almost as intense as the gaze the detective had shown only a moment earlier. “Why this interest in Miss Lorne, Mr. Holmes? Is she a . . . suspect . . . in this investigation of yours?”

“She is an unknown factor, Mr. Clemens,” said Holmes, not shrinking from the writer’s formidable gaze. “Mrs. Adams . . . Clover . . . had known Rebecca Lorne for only a year, yet they seemed the most intimate of friends in the weeks and months before Mrs. Adams’s apparent suicide.”

“ Apparent suicide?” barked Clemens. “How could it be anything but suicide, Mr. Holmes? Henry Adams himself found her body, still warm after drinking the cyanide from her photographic developing potions.”

“With Miss Rebecca Lorne waiting outside the house,” said Holmes. “Miss Lorne may have been the last person to see Clover Adams alive.”

“You are misinformed, Mr. Holmes,” barked Clemens, his face growing dark above the white mustache. “I have it from Henry Adams himself that he encountered Miss Lorne waiting outside their house at sixteen-oh-seven H Street because she had come to visit Clover but had been waiting to go up because no one answered the bell.”

Holmes nodded. “You have it from Henry Adams himself that the woman who called herself Rebecca Lorne said that she had been waiting outside when no one answered the bell. But there remains the possibility that Miss Lorne had visited Clover Adams during the few minutes that Henry Adams was gone and was coming out of the home at sixteen-oh-seven H Street rather than waiting outside it.”

“Preposterous,” cried Clemens.

“Possibly,” said Holmes.

“And what do you mean by saying ‘the woman who called herself Rebecca Lorne’, sir? Who else might she be?”

“Indeed,” said Holmes.

James had been watching this exchange with the utmost interest and now he looked to Holmes to give his theory about Lorne being the woman Holmes had known as Irene Adler.

Instead, Holmes asked the humorist, “During Miss Lorne’s brief visit here in Hartford or during your earlier encounters with her in Washington, did she give you the sense of having ever been familiar with theatrical life?”

“Theatrical life,” repeated Clemens, lighting a new cigar. “I don’t know what you . . . wait. Wait. Now that you mention it, I remember telling Livy after their visit—‘This woman has been on the stage’. Yes, by God, I remember now.”