Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [29]
“Perhaps you could get the details of both, and we could decide which fits better with our plans. Thank you.”
Holmes brought me a cup of tea and a selection of sandwiches, settling down at the window with his own refreshment. He ate two sandwiches in rapid succession, then sat back with his cup. “Have you a schedule for the morrow?” he asked.
“Norbert's arranged various appointments in the morning, but I have the rest of the day free. Would you like to see something of the city? We could go out to the ocean and sun-bathe, if the sun comes out. And there's a famous salt-water baths out there as well, if you'd like those.”
He fixed me with a disbelieving gaze. “You wish to play the tourist?”
I kept the innocent expression on my face for as long as I could, but a slight movement of my mouth gave me away, and the answering relief on his face released the laughter. “Holmes, I wouldn't think of getting in the way of your glass plates.”
He shook his head with disapproval, but said only, “You shall ask Mr Norbert about the keys?”
“Certainly, and if he knows where I can find Mah and Micah.”
“You might also enquire if his watch-dogs saw anything out of the ordinary before the twentieth of March.”
“I shall.”
In the end, we did play the part of tourists, for that evening at least. We took a motorcar out to where San Francisco ended, and ate dinner at the Cliff House restaurant with the Pacific Ocean pounding at our feet, watching the sun go down. Wine again proved to be available, albeit decanted into an anonymous pitcher, and if the cooking was not as exceptional as the view out of the windows, the food was palatable. When we had finished our coffee, we walked down the steep hill and onto the sand, strolling along the beach. The wind had died down and the fog was lying well off-shore; it was quite pleasant.
At the far end, with the western sky darkening towards deepest indigo, Holmes settled onto a section of the sea wall that kept the sand at bay and took out his tobacco.
“Is this beach familiar to you?” he asked.
“It is, although the Cliff House I remember was a magnificently absurd Victorian monstrosity, so enormous and top-heavy it was a wonder that it didn't topple into the sea in the earthquake. We used to come here a lot with my father. Levi would build elaborate Gothic fortified castles using dribbled wet sand while I read a book, and my father would alternate between swimming and reading one of his dime novels. Which reminds me—do you know what I found on the shelves in the library?”
“Oh, Lord,” he said.
“Yes, three of the stories Conan Doyle published. Oh, Holmes, my father would have been so delighted by the situation. He had a very droll and complicated sense of humour—you saw the cat carving on the high shelf?” I explained to him my father's canary perch, and he chuckled around the stem of his pipe.
“Were the library books his?”
“A lot of them were in the house when he took it over. You see, his parents badly wanted him to remain in Boston, but he refused to leave California, and lived on his own here for years before they decided that, for the sake of the family name, if their son wasn't coming home, he might as well comport himself in as civilised a fashion as one could in the wilderness of San Francisco. They gave him the family house and its fittings to permit him to do so. I think they'd bought the books by the linear foot when they built the library—you know how it is, books look good on the shelves, even if they're never read. Actually, my father wasn't a huge reader himself—you may have noticed that many of those books still have uncut pages. He used to come home with a book he'd bought, spend half an hour skimming through it to extract the essence, and never look at it again.”
“Your mother was the reader, then?”
“A rabbi's daughter? Of course. Father used to say she was the brains in the family, but I think it was just that her intelligence was intellectual, his was practical. His mind grasped patterns—he could have been a superb chess player, if he didn't find the game