Not if she chooses Jell-O and canned fruit, Kate thought but did not say aloud. Lee’s approach to parenting was inevitably colored by her life as a therapist; still, Nora appeared to have been born with skills of resistance that could meet the challenge of a too-clever mother.
However, the moment Kate saw Nora, standing in the hallway of the nursery school getting her coat put on, she was seized by the cowardly wish that she had let that other, more clever mother come pick the child up today: Nora was moping.
A moping Nora was Eeyore with a thundercloud overhead: glum, listless, unable to summon enough energy to meet another’s eye. She allowed her young teacher, Rowena, to thread her limp arms into the jacket, deaf to the young woman’s cheery chatter. When the buttons were done up and the day’s art masterpieces pressed into the small hand, she still just stood, until the teacher’s hand gently urged her in Kate’s direction. Kate had to stretch down for Nora’s hand, and as she straightened, she looked a question at Rowena.
The teacher shrugged, and told Kate, “Nora was great all day, but something seems to have happened during recess. She won’t tell me what it was, but she seems very sad.”
Nora’s response was to allow her head and shoulders to droop even farther, the very image of despondency. It was all Kate could do not to laugh, seeing her curly-headed three-year-old acting out depression. She winked at Rowena, who appeared relieved that Kate wasn’t taking it too seriously, and took Nora’s hand more firmly, leading her to the car and buckling her into her car seat.
All the way to the grocery store, Kate carried on a running conversation about nothing. Nora said not a word, but Kate didn’t press her. And she didn’t make the mistake of offering her an ice cream to cheer her up, merely lifted her into the cart and debated aloud the merits of red tomatoes versus yellow, frizzy lettuce versus crunchy.
“Don’t like frizzy,” said a small gloomy voice.
“You don’t feel like spring mix today, huh? Well, shall we get some for Mamalee, and you and I can have iceberg?”
“With glop.”
Kate laughed at the word. “That’s right, with blue cheese glop on top.” She repeated the inadvertent rhyme a few times, making a song out of the last three words, but Nora wasn’t quite ready to respond, so they continued with their shopping.
Finally, standing in front of the deli section waiting for their sliced turkey, Nora broke. She leaned forward in the cart until she was resting against Kate’s chest, and Kate wrapped her arms around the child, bending her head over, a still island in the middle of the busy store. When Nora spoke, it was in a voice too low to hear.
“I’m sorry, love, I can’t hear you. Could you say that again?”
“Am I illemut?”
“Are you what?”
“Illemut!”
“I’m really sorry, sweetheart,” Kate said, hating herself as a failure, “but I don’t know what that word means. Can you tell me where you heard it?”
“Dierdre Carter, I really hate her, she said I was illemut, and that you were going to go away and Mamalee won’t love me.”
Shocked, Kate stood back and tipped Nora’s head up so she could see. The child’s eyes trembled with unshed tears. “Who the hell is this Dierdre Carter and why would she say such stupid things?”
“She’s Alda’s big sister and she had to come today ’cause her school’s out and she bossed us all and took all the toys and then she was teasing Steven because his parents are getting a ’vorce and she said they were never really married and that he’s illemut and, and, she said I was, too.”
Illegitimate. Fuck. Kate wanted to hunt down Dierdre Carter and throttle the child. But more immediately, she leaned down until her face was inches from Nora’s. “This Dierdre sounds like a very stupid little girl, and a bully.” Bully was a concept much in play in modern schools, a thing nobody wanted to be. “Illegitimate is a really old-fashioned idea that means two people had a baby by accident, before they were really ready for it. But I guarantee you, there was nothing even a little bit accidental about you. We had to work really hard to get you, and we wanted you and we loved you before you were even a lump in Mamalee’s belly. Do you understand me?”
Nora nodded, already looking relieved.
“As for the other, just because some people get a divorce, not everybody does. Steven’s parents have a lot of problems we don’t, and sometimes everyone is happier if the parents don’t live together and fight all the time. Do Mamalee and I fight all the time?”
“Not all the time,” Nora agreed, unwilling to let go of her worry.
“You rat,” Kate said, her indignation exaggerated in an attempt at comic relief. “We don’t fight at all, we just argue a little.”
“Okay.”
She bent back again, holding Nora’s gaze. “I will not leave you. And Mamalee will never, ever stop loving you. You got that?”
Nora nodded, the black cloud dispersing from above her curls.
“Okay, now I’m finished with Dierdre the bully. Do you want cheddar or jack cheese in your sandwich tomorrow?”
“Gorgonzola,” said Nora with a wicked twinkle in her eye, and succeeded in cracking her mother up.
FIVE
Nora went to bed early that night, exhausted by her emotional excess, and only when she was safely asleep did Kate tell Lee about the incident. Lee’s first impulse was also to strangle the other girl, although she quickly recovered and speculated about the security of Dierdre’s own family structure. Kate frankly didn’t care, and knew that Lee would have it out with the nursery school director the following day.
She waited for the kettle to come to a boil, making her responses in the right places, her mind moving away from their daughter’s distress. She dropped a tea bag into one mug, reflecting that not long ago, she would have been making coffee. Probably the first sign of middle age, giving up coffee at night. No, the second sign—the first was gray hair Down There. At least she could still manage real tea, not the caffeine-free twigs mixture that Lee seemed actually to like.
She scooped twigs into the hinged teaspoon and put it in the other mug, poured boiling water over both, and moved toward the refrigerator, only to come up hard against Lee, standing and looking at her, the milk in one hand.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the carton, then looked more closely at Lee’s face. “Sorry, did I miss something?”
“I said, do you want to watch a movie?” Lee asked.
“Um,” Kate said.
“You have work.”
“I do, I’m sorry. You go ahead, I’ll come down when I’m finished.”
“By the distracted look on your face, I’ll be waiting until tomorrow. Is this the Case of the Murdered Sherlockian? How’s it coming along?”
“The man’s a puzzle. As far as I can see, he didn’t have a single soul in the world that he just hung out and had a beer with. However, he seems to have had a live camera operating in his sitting room. That’s what I need to look at tonight.”
“A webcam?”
“Looks like. Pointing right at the chair in his Sherlock Holmes sitting room, where people could tune in and see him sitting and waiting for Dr. Watson.”
“The man’s entire life was a construct,” Lee commented sadly.
Not, Kate reflected as she walked upstairs to the computer, a very desirable epitaph.
THE screen came up, showing the same image she had seen in the offices of Diagram Research, the clock frozen at 14:43 Sunday. She moved the cursor to the archives and clicked on January 23, the Friday around which he had died. The room appeared, looking much as she had seen it on Rajindra Pandi’s monitor that afternoon. The clock in the lower corner said 7:24; the “fire” was glowing and the gas lamps were burning bright to supplement the winter sun. She explored the site for a while, found a means of speeding things up, and watched nothing move at a faster rate, the clock spinning quickly forward.
Suddenly a figure flashed past, and she slowed, reversed, and saw a tall man in a
n old-fashioned suit walk across to the bookshelf, stand there for a couple of minutes, then come over to the chair with a slim book in his hand. Philip Gilbert laid the book on the littered table, trading it for a pipe, which he dug around in for a while before reaching forward to remove the tobacco pouch from the decorative slipper tacked onto the fireplace. He loaded the pipe and tamped it down, returned the tobacco pouch to its resting place, and lit a match, holding it to the bowl of the pipe. A cloud of smoke obscured his face briefly, then dispersed. He propped his feet up on the leather hassock that sat in front of his chair, took the book from the table and opened it, and sat, reading and smoking.
“You sure got an exciting life for yourself there, Phil,” she told the man on the monitor.
He turned a page.
The nose that had looked so sharp in death fit his living face more comfortably. It was actually not a bad-looking face. A little extreme in its features, between the big nose, the deep-set eyes, and the high cheekbones, but an interesting face, which looked younger than his fifty-three years. His hair was not as thick as she’d thought it; either that or the pomade he used was freshly applied. His body was long, his hands thin and sensitive—surgeon’s hands, they were called, or perhaps a pianist’s. No rings. No watch, although a shiny chain was visible across his vest, under the suit’s jacket.
She made a note on her pad: No such timepiece had come to light in the house.
“Where’s your damn watch, Sherlock?” she asked him. He did not look up from his page. She advanced the record in fits and starts, until at 8:40 he closed his book and took a final puff on his pipe, leaving it propped against some unidentifiable rubbish on the table.
He then reached into his inner pocket and took out a small notebook with a dark cover. He opened it, pulled a miniature silver writing instrument from within—pencil? pen?—and bent over the notebook. Of course, what he was writing could not be seen from the camera’s angle.
Kate sat back in disgust and told the man, “Phil, you’re going to be dead soon, and if you don’t help me out here, I’m not going to figure out what happened to you.”
She reached for her cup, but her hand froze as the man on the screen seemed to respond to her complaint. He slipped away the pen, snapped the book shut, and dropped it into his pocket. He placed his hands on the arms of the chair, and as he prepared to rise, he looked directly into Kate’s eyes and winked at her.
The frisson of reaction passed before the man was even on his feet: He’d been winking at the camera, not at her, and the coincidence in timing was just that. Still, she thought as her fingers finished closing on the mug, it had been an eerie sensation, that instant of communication with the dead. When he had left the room, she played the moment back, and decided that yes, it was a faint but deliberate movement of his right eyelid. A wink.
She drank her tea and watched the empty room for a while. Friday morning, the last Friday morning of Philip Gilbert’s life.
After a while, she stopped the clock, made note of the time, and went back into the archives for the day of the dinner party, January 7.
Geraldine O’Malley had said that Jeannine Cartfield, one of the dinner club members they hadn’t spoken to that day, had helped Gilbert make dinner that night. Probably that meant she had come by after work, so Kate scrolled to five o’clock and set the speed high. At 17:21 a brief blip registered on the left side of the screen. She rewound, and saw through the doorway a man’s feet passing left to right, then after a moment, the same feet, accompanied by a woman’s legs and heeled pumps, going from right to left: Gilbert letting someone in the front door. The woman was carrying something, but Kate could only catch the corner of a dark shape at about knee level. Neither came into the sitting room, which meant that they had either gone upstairs, or walked directly back into the kitchen.
Or, she decided ten minutes later, they had split up. Philip Gilbert passed through the room to set a tray with glasses on one of the fireside tables—which, Kate only now noticed, had been cleared off for the purpose. He left, and seconds later, from the hallway, came the woman, whom Kate assumed was Cartfield. Her feet were now brushed by a long skirt, which appeared in full as she came through the doorway: long skirt, trim white blouse (did they call those shirtwaists?), a black and silver broach pinned at the hollow of her throat. She was Philip’s age, if they had gone to university together, but she looked years younger. Her hair was gathered in a large Edwardian pouf on top of her head, a style that surely must have taken her longer to achieve than the quarter of an hour she’d been gone. A wig, or had she arrived with it like that? The woman stood in the doorway, surveying the room, then whisked offstage left, her skirts snapping around her ankles.
Only twice over the next two hours were the two together in the room in front of the camera, and both times were brief and businesslike, involving a flower arrangement and a discussion about a tray of canapés. No indication of any relationship beyond that of friendship; indeed, the woman might have been playing a young Mrs. Hudson, the housekeeper.
The two Indian cousins were the first to arrive, at thirty seconds past seven o’clock, dressed in Indian garb: Venkatarama even had a turban on, a decorative spray of feathers at the front. Gilbert let them in, although twice in the next quarter hour the woman went to answer the door in his place. By half past seven, all ten members of the Sherlock Holmes dinner club were in front of the camera, glasses in their hands. Gilbert must have said something, because they began to turn toward him, listening. His back was to the camera, and he talked for a few minutes. They responded with smiles at one point, raised eyebrows and nods of appreciation at another. At the end, his arm with the glass in it came up, and the other nine mimicked the gesture: a toast, accompanied by an exclamation of approval and then a lifting of glasses to mouths. Kate went back in time to freeze the image, and hit the print button. The printer spat out an ink version of the picture on the monitor.
Eight men, two women, meeting to celebrate the life of a man who had never lived. Ten grown and responsible individuals, comfortable in their heavy and constricting costumes, none of them in the least self-conscious about the arcane setting. The nine individuals facing the camera looked relaxed and at home. They looked like a group of native Victorians, in fact.
Kate printed two more copies of the frozen shot, and went on.
The dinner itself took place out of sight, but after an hour and a bit, the guests began reappearing before the fire. Chairs were pulled up, Jeannine Cartfield settled onto the leather hassock, Gilbert handed around cups of coffee and small glasses of liqueurs, and the party wound on. With sound, or to a lip-reader, it might have been mildly interesting, but limited as she was to peering through a window at the festivities, it was not the most enthralling party Kate had ever attended. When Gilbert brought out his violin and began sawing away, it bordered on the farce of a silent film. Fortunately, he limited himself to a single six-minute performance, after which he struck up a couple of songs, in which all joined in with gusto, their mouths opening and shutting like a tank full of goldfish.
Still, the ten people on the screen seemed to be having a fine old time. After their coffee, they played some kind of game that involved one member reading something short from a piece of paper and one of the others shooting up a hand, to answer a question or maybe identify a passage. Most of the answers seemed to be correct, but when one of them got it wrong—the chubby fellow who was either Alex Climpson, winery employee; Ian Nicholson, job unknown; or Wendell Bauer, grad student, had the worst track record—the others would rise up in good-natured ragging until one of them had provided the correct response. There seemed to be no punishment for being wrong, merely the teasing, although judging by the sheepish glances at the master of ceremonies, the withholding of approval from Gilbert seemed punishment enough.
Kate printed half a dozen other stills showing various group members, then speeded through the rest of the party. The clock read 22:08 when all of a sudden everyone stood up and le
ft the room. Not, however, in the direction of the front door, but turning left, either upstairs or to the kitchen. Kate itched to tilt the camera off the wall in their wake, and found herself wishing Gilbert had installed a series of these damn webcams, for her sake if no other.
Twenty minutes went by before the party reappeared, at which time they did start to leave. A few of them paused for a last chat in front of the fireplace, Rutland and the Indian cousins, the two women, and the redheaded man; then they too began to put on their coats and go. To her surprise, Jeannine Cartfield departed with the others, giving Gilbert a brief kiss on the cheek, exactly as Geraldine O’Malley had done thirty seconds earlier. The last to leave was the lawyer Rutland, who shook hands, tipped his silk hat onto his head, and left.
Gilbert came back from the door, gathered a few glasses onto the tray and carried them out. Kate’s finger prepared to hit the fast-forward button, but he came back in, dropping wearily into the frayed chair. He took a cigarette from a fancy little box on the hearth, lit it with a match, shook the match out and dropped it into the ashtray, and then he sat back in the chair, head resting on its high back, all his muscles going limp. The cigarette between his fingers trailed a dancing line of smoke into the air, and Gilbert sat, eyes shut, before his artificial fire. He looked tired beyond the results of a dinner party, as if only the press of people had kept at bay a deeper exhaustion. Or depression.
The untended ash grew, but before it became too long to resist gravity, Gilbert lifted it to the ashtray, flicked it off, took a puff, and then crushed the remains out. He scrubbed his hands over his face, stood up, and went around the room, winding down the gas lamps. When he left, the monitor was dark, but for the low-burning fire in the center of the screen.
Did Gilbert occasionally forget the camera was there? Or had that momentary demonstration of deep tiredness been part of the act, too?
The dinner party was over, and Kate glanced at the actual clock on her wall, then looked again. After eleven; she’d been watching the HolmesCam for over three hours. Lee was sure to be in bed.