The Baker Street Letters Read online

  “Then the room’s been searched,” said Reggie.

  “Very popular item, this map.”

  “She has a tin box on that mantel,” said Reggie. “Behind the photographs, and underneath the books.”

  “Not any more she doesn’t,” said Laura, lifting up the books.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “It’s moot, though,” said Laura. “She told you she hid the originals when she was eight, and I think we can believe her on that. An eight-year-old girl doesn’t hide things in a tin box. She doesn’t have a tin box. At eight she has a little jewel case that her mother gave her, and she puts that, and anything that is too big for it, in a shoebox, and she hides the shoebox in the attic.”

  “So where do we look? There is no attic.”

  Laura didn’t answer; she was busy examining the framed photos on display on the mantel.

  “Is there a photo missing?” she said. “There should have been three. The two remaining are set up that way.”

  Reggie stepped up beside her. There were just two framed photos displayed now on Mara’s shelf. One was of Mara as an adolescent, somewhere indoors, holding a puppy that had to be Mookie. The other was a much younger Mara, sitting with her mother on the front porch of a yellow wood-frame house.

  “You’re right,” said Reggie, “there was another. A man, early thirties, perhaps. Standing somewhere outside in dry hills.”

  “Her boyfriend?”

  Reggie thought about it. “No, the photograph was too old for that.”

  “Her father, then?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And someone took that, too,” said Laura.

  “Or she took it down.”

  “Keep it there all these years and then take it down now?” said Laura.

  “Yes,” said Reggie. “She could have a reason for that.”

  “Let’s check the other rooms. I’ll try the bathroom cabinet. Why don’t you see how the bedroom looks?”

  Reggie did so. The bed was contemporary and inexpensive; she’d put her money into the big down pillows. The window was open by a couple of inches, just enough for the thin white curtains to move gently in the wind.

  “Anything of interest?”

  Laura had come up behind him unnoticed.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Reggie.

  Laura walked to the foot of the bed. “She’ll only keep this till she marries. Then she’ll spend a tidy fortune on a hardwood suite that she fully expects will last forever.” She paused and then added, “Or perhaps she merely bought what was available. In any case, everything on the bed is just a little off-kilter as well.”

  “So the room’s been searched and restored,” said Reggie.

  “I would say so.”

  “What did you find in the loo?” he asked.

  “Nigel may in fact have been here. Some man was, at any rate. He left the seat up.”

  “Anything else?”

  “There are some essentials missing from the cabinet. And I found her travel set in the hallway closet. Five-piece, but the rucksack is missing. So she left intentionally, but in a hurry, I would guess. Which I might do as well if I came home and found my place tossed.”

  “Unless it was tossed after.”

  Laura went back into the living room and stood looking at the paintings that Mara had on easels by the window. Reggie joined her there.

  “She must be in her domestic phase,” said Laura. “And she’s in a bit of a rut. She keeps painting a tree. This one’s all made of rectangles, this one’s less representational, and this one is background for a pretty yellow house—but they’re all the same tree.”

  Reggie went to the mantel, picked up one of the photographs, and brought it back.

  “This yellow house?” he said.

  Laura looked from the photograph to the paintings.

  “Oh, what idiots we are,” she said. “We’re looking in the wrong home, unless she grew up in this flat. She hid the map when she was eight, in the house where she lived then, and if they don’t have accessible attics, then I bet she did the next best thing—she put it here.”

  Laura was pointing at a painting, at the ground beneath the pepper tree.

  “She buried it?” said Reggie.

  “And when she grew older and moved away, she forgot about it. Or maybe they moved when she was still a child, and she thought she would leave a box of treasures for the next child to find. And there would be all manner of wonderful things, not just silly papers. It’s there. That’s her safe place to put things, right there.”

  “I believe you.”

  “So the question now is, where is the house she grew up in?” said Laura.

  “That one’s easy,” said Reggie. “I’ve already been there.”

  A short time later, Reggie and Laura stood on the brick red cement front porch of Mara’s childhood home, waiting as a real estate agent struggled with the broker’s access lock on the front door.

  “I love your accents,” she said as she tried again to get the numbers right. “This lawn will be green as Ireland if you give it a little water.”

  Finally the lock fell open. She eagerly shooed Laura and Reggie inside.

  Laura stopped for a moment, just at the center of the front room, and Reggie watched her turn and appraise the structure as if she truly meant it.

  Reggie just watched and said nothing. He had never seen a woman stand still—in a room or on a stage—as evocatively as Laura. Whether it was strength, or vulnerability, or designed seduction, or all of them together that she sought to convey, she did so with the slightest upward tilt of her jaw, or adjustment of her lower lip, or what seemed an almost willful summoning of a rosy blush to her cheekbones.

  Of late Reggie had been seeing too little of that blush, whether willful or involuntary.

  The agent began to explain that the gleaming hardwood floors had just been buffed.

  “Yes, they certainly have,” said Laura, and then, according to plan, she asked if they could see the backyard.

  “Of course,” said the agent.

  “So important for the children,” said Laura as the agent took them through the kitchen. The agent smiled knowingly and asked how many there were; Laura replied that there were none yet, but one never knows.

  “There’s a beautiful old pepper tree,” said the agent. “You could attach a swing to it.”

  Laura walked out under the tree, admired the branches, and said that perhaps one could. Then she casually pushed some fallen leaves about with her foot and studied the ground.

  “Don’t worry about all these leaves,” said the agent. “It just sheds seasonally—I think. They’re really not a problem.”

  “I’m sure not,” said Laura, smiling and looking up but still nudging the dirt casually with her toe.

  “I think I’d like to see all that storage space now,” said Reggie.

  “Of course,” said the agent.

  Laura said she’d just stay and get the feel of the backyard for a few minutes more, and Reggie and the agent left her there as they went into the house.

  Reggie examined the storage space in the garage, and the closets, and underneath the kitchen sink; he asked about the type of wood used in the new flooring and the number of sealing coats used on it; he said something random about the color scheme used for the bathroom tiles; finally, mercifully, as he stood in the kitchen and wondered aloud about the cost of redoing the cabinets, Laura appeared in the doorway.

  The agent was looking the other way, fortunately. Reggie gestured subtly, and Laura reached down and brushed the last remnants of dirt from her knees. Then she nodded at Reggie and entered the room.

  “Yes, it’s a lovely yard,” Laura announced. “Great for causing a ruckus.”

  “It’s a fine house,” Reggie said conclusively to the agent, “but we’ll need to mull it over.”

  The agent sensed failure and suggested that she show them another.

  “No need at all,” said Laura. “It’s a
perfect house. It’s us. Not the house. I mean, I’m just not sure the house is quite us. We need to toss it about a bit. Don’t we, dear?”

  “Yes,” said Reggie. “That’s what we’ll do.”

  “Well, don’t wait too long,” said the agent. “I’ve already had a second call on it today.”

  The agent drove them back and dropped them at the Beverly Hilton.

  Laura walked up close beside Reggie as soon as they got out of the car and whispered to him, “What a splendid little eight-year-old she was.”

  “No argument, but what makes you say so?”

  “The things she chose to keep and protect.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t think I’m at liberty to say; she meant everything in there to be a secret, of course. And I put all of it carefully back. Except these.”

  Laura reached inside her blouse and carefully pulled out three thin paper sheets.

  “I’m glad they used vellum for these,” she said. “It would have been a bit scratchy otherwise. But I’m afraid they’re a bit damp now.”

  She handed them to Reggie.

  “Pleasantly scented, though,” he said.

  “I did try not to sweat,” she said.

  She was smiling in a satisfied but eager sort of way. Reggie recognized it as her victory blush; it was the way she would be when coming offstage on a particularly good night, and in his opinion, there was nothing better in the world.

  “I have to take these to someone who can read them. But I can be back in two hours,” he ventured hopefully.

  For a moment, the look on Laura’s face told him she would say yes to this proposition. But then her expression changed.

  “I won’t have time,” she said after a moment. She hesitated again, looked away briefly, then looked Reggie in the eye. “I have work to do with Robert later—I mean, if we’ve done everything we can here for the moment.”

  “Robert?” said Reggie.

  “Yes,” said Laura. “When I told him I had to come out here, he said he’d come, too; insisted on it. Very sweet of him, really.”

  “You mean he’s here?”

  “Yes.”

  Reggie absorbed that. “I see,” he said. “What . . . sort of work?”

  “Why, script changes, of course. What else would it be?”

  “Of course,” said Reggie. “So much of Shakespeare is in need of a good polish.”

  Then Laura went up to her hotel room, and Reggie caught a cab.

  Traffic was light, and Reggie got to the Pasadena Geological Institute in good time. He found the young woman working at her terminal, a bit too closely for the good of her eyesight.

  Reggie sat down and put a vending machine cappuccino on the table next to her.

  “Mine?” said Anne, accepting it gratefully. “How’d you know I needed that?”

  “I was at university once,” said Reggie.

  “So what else did you bring me?” she said.

  Reggie gave her the map that Laura had dug up from Mara’s backyard.

  “Can’t say much for your filing system,” she said, brushing residual backyard dirt from the papers Reggie presented to her. She paused for a moment, snuffled her nose, then looked at Reggie with a puzzled expression.

  “Chanel?”

  Reggie didn’t answer.

  She carefully unfolded one of the sheets and looked at it. After a short moment, she gave a soft whistle.

  “This has got methane pockets everywhere, like a honeycomb,” she said. “All of them eight percent and higher.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “It is if you light a match. Whatever they were planning, this would have sunk it.”

  She turned back to the terminal and entered the site number from the map. A new screen display came up.

  She stared at it, then gave Reggie a look, then stared in astonishment at the screen again.

  “Holy shit,” she said under her breath.

  “What is it?”

  “This is a live dig.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Your location is the North Lankershim terminal of the Silver Line—”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” she said. “Here, look. This circle here is the dig for the North Hollywood terminal of the Red Line at Chandler Avenue—their tunnel is running west of the Cahuenga Pass and under the Santa Monica Mountains, and geologically speaking, you can see that it’s not prohibitive. Well, maybe you can’t, but I can. They’ll have their problems, but at least they’re not going to blow themselves to kingdom come. But our dig—the Silver Line hub—follows a different route, tunneling on the east side of the pass, so that it can hook up with a line that will connect Glendale and downtown L.A. In the database, it looks like a cakewalk. But now look at your map—every one of those little triangles indicates a gas concentration way over the limits. I’ve seen that dig; and they aren’t prepping for this. Damn, they may have already hit one of these. There was a guy killed in a fire there a month or two ago. They said it was the tunnel linings—just like that downtown fire yesterday. But that’s because they trust the geological survey data. They believe what’s in the database, so they look for another cause.”

  “You’re saying they’re digging into methane and they don’t know it?”

  “I’m not saying it, you’re saying it. Your map says they’re tunneling into a methane minefield. I mean, if this thing is for real.”

  She put down the sheet and swiveled in her lab chair to look Reggie in the eye.

  “Okay,” she said, “this is getting serious. You gotta level with me. How’d you get ahold of this thing?”

  “A copy of it came in the post. And I know the copy is nearly twenty years old, because that’s when it was sent.”

  “Why would someone send it to you?”

  “It wasn’t sent to me,” said Reggie. “It was sent to . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Look,” said Reggie, “I can’t see that it matters how I got it, all that matters is—”

  “Of course it matters how you got it. No one’s going to believe this without some kind of provenance. If this is real, the Valley Transportation Authority needs to know about it, and the North Lankershim dig sure needs to know about it. But this is no easy thing, and if I’m going to get this in front of them, I’ve got to know—how’d you get it?”

  “An eight-year-old girl sent it. Twenty years ago. To Sherlock Holmes.”

  Silence. She looked at Reggie with exactly the expression he’d expected.

  “Excuse me?”

  “She sent it to Sherlock Holmes.”

  “You mean with the funny hat, the pipe, and all that?”

  “I know how it sounds. But hear me out.” Reggie explained his business address, and the process of the letters, as rationally as he could.

  “Uh-huh,” said Anne.

  “There’s more,” said Reggie. “I think my clerk at Baker Street may have been killed because of this.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You’ve said it yourself. Decisions are made on these things that affect money everywhere in the Valley. So suppose twenty years ago someone wanted the subway to be planned for one route rather than another . . .”

  “They’d alter the data,” she said, sounding as though she were beginning to believe it.

  “Yes,” said Reggie.

  “And if they were smart,” she added, “they’d destroy the original.”

  “Yes. But the original survived. An eight-year-old girl saw to that, trying to find her father. And when that sandhog was killed in the fire at Lankershim, the stakes were raised. If this surfaces now, whoever made those changes twenty years ago will be looking at homicide.”

  “Oh, now you are freaking me out.”

  “And myself as well. I shouldn’t have involved you in this.” Reggie stood. “I’ll let the foreman at the Lankershim site know what we found.”

  “Whoa, hold on. No one’s going to believe
you. Let me see that thing again. What an idiot I am, it’ll be right there—signatures. It’ll have the signatures.”

  She eagerly picked up one of the sheets and looked in the right-hand corner.

  She squinted and held it up.

  “Twenty-year-old penciled, handwritten, Chanel-scented signatures.” She gave the sheet back to Reggie. “Can you read it?” she said. “I’ve got contacts in, so you can’t go by me.”

  Reggie looked. “It’s not your contacts,” he said. “I can’t make them out, either. My guess is one of them should be a man named Ramirez—it was his daughter sent the map—but I can’t tell anything from this.”

  “Well, okay,” said Anne. “Tell you what. You go to the North Lankershim site and give ’em a heads-up if they’ll let you. I’ll get Professor Rogers into this. I can’t just waltz this over to the Valley Transportation Authority and drop it on them, but he can. His office hours are probably done for the week, but I think I can track him down; I know where he does his afternoon jog. We’ll have his attention now.”

  “Thank you for your help,” said Reggie

  “Fair trade for the cappuccino,” she said, pushing back in her chair. “But one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is this a hobby of yours or something? Is this how you Brits take vacations—you go someplace hot and dry and mess around with stuff? Like in . . . what was that old film—Lawrence of Arabia?”

  “No,” said Reggie as he got ready to leave. “For me, it’s all been pretty much involuntary.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, hold still a second.” She got a tube of something out of her backpack, put a dab on her finger, and applied it to the bridge of Reggie’s nose.

  “You’ve got just a little sunburn going there,” she said.

  Reggie left the institute and took a taxi back to the Valley.

  It was past noon, and hot despite the hazy overcast, when Reggie got to the Lankershim site.

  The same pleasant female security guard was there as before, but she was busy shooing away camera-toting tourists. Reggie walked through the gate and then toward the excavation pit, where Sanger, his back toward Reggie, was directing workers on scaffolding.

  Reggie reached the edge of the excavation and looked down. He guessed it to be at least ten stories deep, probably more—the shadows at the depths made it hard to tell. It was a sheer vertical drop.