The Barker Street Regulars (25 page)

In
The Valley of Fear,
Holmes reasons that C stands for
column.
Therefore the book he seeks is one with columns. It seemed to me that if the cipher I needed had columns, the
C
would appear at the start of my message. It didn’t. So I needed a work without columns. Not the Bible, for example. Instead of a C, my message had
L, W—
lines and words? So, the message began with the thirteenth word of the twenty-fourth line on page 534 of
some
book without columns. With a minimum of 534 pages, it was a long book. And as Porlock had done in sending his encoded message to Holmes, Hugh and Robert must have chosen a work that would be easy for me to find. An almanac? The men had commented that my house was right across the street from the Observatory Hill branch of the Cambridge Public Library. As I was about to sprint over there, I had a sudden inspiration.

Of course! Hugh, Robert, or almost anyone else would correctly assume that I owned the latest edition of the American Kennel Club’s
Complete Dog Book.
Consulting it, I found that page 534 was devoted to the beginning of the write-up of the Tibetan spaniel. A photograph occupied about half the page. Consequently, there was no line twenty-four. Dead end. What other long book without columns would I be certain to own?
The Merck Veterinary Manual!
Flipping to page 534, hurriedly counting lines, I found that the twenty-fourth had only twelve words.

Then, like Holmes, I suddenly realized my mistake. The correct cipher had to be
The Complete Sherlock Holmes.
It was long. It lacked columns. Furthermore, Hugh and Robert not only knew that I owned it, but had seen my one-volume Doubleday edition the day they’d trailed me home from the Gateway. Yes, of course! What story had we discussed? Which adventure had Hugh’s little Holmesian puzzler been about? Indeed,
The Valley of Fear.
Robert and Hugh had known for certain that I’d read about Porlock’s cryptic message.

Turning to page 534, I found myself in “The Solitary Cyclist.” Grabbing a pencil, I hurriedly marked the numbers of the lines. With a yellow legal pad at hand, I started to locate the lines in the message and count the words. Like Holmes, I got off to a false start;
coal-black
counted as one word, not two. I tried again. “Line twenty-four, word thirteen,” I said to Rowdy and Kimi. “Hm. The end of the line. A word division.
Con.
Fine.
Con
it is. Line thirty-six, word three.
Lady. Con lady!
There! The game really is afoot!” I explained to my two Watsons. “What do you think of that?”

Decoded, the cryptic message read:

Con-lady and blackguard up to Heaven knows what! We hastened onward to the marks of feet upon the muddy path close to the hedge down half no or wood road. If we blunder we shall meet with abduction or murder. Quick, clear eyes of a young friend now see where we were. Help!

“No or wood,” I said with sudden alarm. “Norwood. Down half. Lower. Lower Norwood Road. They’ve gone to Ceci’s!”

This message was supposed to reach me tomorrow. It was a precaution sent in case Hugh and Robert vanished; in case, as the message said, they were abducted or murdered. After leaving the Gateway, they must somehow have learned that something was to happen tonight at Ceci’s house. Their plan, I decided, was to hide on Lower Norwood Road, the dark dead-end street at the bottom of Ceci’s property. Did Ceci have an appointment with Irene Wheeler tonight? And did the men hope to nab her confederate as he and his stolen dog staged another appearance of the late Lord Saint Simon? Like Holmes and Watson in “The Speckled Band,” Hugh and Robert were keeping a night watch. But Holmes and Watson were young and strong. Watson carried a revolver. It was of no comfort to me to realize that Robert and Hugh, too, would be armed.

I
DIDN’T PANIC.
A stolen Great Pyrenees wasn’t exactly the hound of the Baskervilles, and unless Watson had failed to mention the excellence of the Grimpen Mire school system, the suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, was a far howl from the evils of the famed Baskervillian moor. Furthermore, I had learned of Hugh and Robert’s plan in what I trusted was plenty of time to intervene. In dog training, low-key prevention is always a better strategy than dramatic after-the-fact confrontation and correction. As in dog training, so, too, in life. And when it comes to training dogs, I’m not in the habit of screaming for help. If I persuaded the Newton police to block off Lower Norwood Road, there’d be a hullabaloo that might culminate in Hugh’s arrest for what I suspected was illegal possession of a handgun. A trivial offense? In Massachusetts, it carries a mandatory one-year jail term. The frivolous thought crossed my mind that at least Hugh would have an advantage over his fellow prisoners: He’d entertain himself by endlessly rereading Sherlock Holmes. Then the reality of prison hit me: harassment, assault, drugs, bitter
loneliness, and shame. Hugh was an old man. Jail would kill him. Furthermore, although possession of Holmes’s favorite weapon was probably legal, I didn’t trust Robert to use the hunting crop exclusively as a harmless Sherlockian prop. And Holmes, like Watson, sometimes carried a revolver. What if, God forbid, Hugh and Robert mistook some innocent dog walker for Irene Wheeler’s confederate? What exactly was Hugh and Robert’s plan? Some Sherlockian scheme, no doubt, to lurk in the shrubbery and then spring a surprise attack on the villain. The end of the Hound of the Baskervilles came when Holmes emptied five chambers of his revolver into the beast. Dear God! What if Hugh and Robert shot a dog?

But with a minimum of fuss, I could foil the scheme. If Irene Wheeler’s confederate arrived to find Lower Norwood Road other than dark and deserted, he’d simply postpone the reappearance of the spectral dog and depart, thus depriving Hugh and Robert of the opportunity to get themselves in trouble. And if my own plan went astray? Newton, as I’ve said, was not the Grimpen Mire. If need be, I’d scream: I’d ring doorbells or lean on the horn of my car until some outraged suburbanite called the police. If I hurried, I’d beat Hugh and Robert to Lower Norwood Road.

I gave Rowdy and Kimi their dinners at ultra-fast-forward. Instead of walking them, I let them out in the yard for a few minutes. To avoid once again losing my bearings in the tangle of gaslit streets on Norwood Hill, I consulted my scribbled directions to Ceci’s and studied the Newton map in my atlas of eastern Massachusetts. Then I crated Kimi, threw on my parka, snapped a leash on Rowdy, and tore to my car. I told myself that Rowdy was my camouflage: If for some unforeseen reason I needed to pass unnoticed in Newton, I’d become
yet another suburbanite exercising another suburban dog. Like Sherlock Holmes lingering outside Irene Adler’s house, right? Disguised as a drunken-looking groom—of the equine variety, of course, although when you consider Holmes’s admiration for
the
woman, you naturally have to wonder about his unconscious motivation in casting himself as a groom. And about mine in taking Rowdy with me. Camouflage? Oh, sure. Any excuse would do. The truth? As the Bible says, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

Instead of meandering along Greenough Boulevard, I cut across the river to Soldiers Field Road. A sharp left took me under the Mass. Pike, and a right led me to Oak Square in Brighton. Turning left, I crossed into Newton and, consulting my refreshed mental map, made my way up Norwood Hill without getting lost. The challenge was greater than on my previous trip. The night was mild and foggy. I seemed to ascend into a cloud. Twenty minutes after I’d left home, I was on Norwood Road. A block ahead of me, I knew, the road split. Upper Norwood forked to the right and continued past Ceci’s house, and Lower Norwood veered left to dead-end near the bottom of her property. On my previous trip here, I’d had to get out of the car to search for a street sign. The neighborhood had intimidated me and made me feel vaguely angry and resentful, as if the invisible inhabitants of these immense houses had conspired to maintain exclusivity by insisting on charming gaslights that failed to illuminate hidden street signs.

Now, on this Friday evening, one of the houses on the block of Norwood Road before the fork was visibly and brightly inhabited. Fog-softened light radiated from every window of the three-story colonial; cars lined both sides of the narrow street. About half were big,
new four-by-fours: Jeeps, Blazers, a Land Rover. Honestly, to judge by what’s driven in prosperous suburbs, you’d assume that free-roving lions and elephants posed a constant threat to people running errands and ferrying children to soccer practice. If not, why prepare for a safari? Anyway, parked between a Mercedes and a vehicle suitable for off-road adventure in Africa was a familiar old Volvo from which the bumper sticker had been removed. Hugh and Robert had evidently decided that when the game actually was afoot, it was best not to advertise the news. Had their quarry also arrived? I scanned for a dark panel truck. Its presence here, I realized, would be unremarkable; anyone would assume that it belonged to the caterer hired by the hosts of the party, or perhaps to an electrician, plumber, or locksmith responding to a household emergency. But the panel truck wasn’t there. It could have been on Lower Norwood Road, of course, or somewhere else nearby. And the man with the bulbous forehead could have driven anything: a rental car, a fancy new four-by-four borrowed from a friend. Was he here? Or had I arrived in time?

Rowdy’s comforting presence offered a reliable way to find out. At shows and at dog training, I seldom have to worry that Rowdy will start a fight. What I do have to worry about is that a dog with warped judgment will decide to take him on. Also, when trouble breaks out between other dogs, Rowdy feels compelled to join the fun. If he’s loose in the back of the car, he has a slight tendency to roar at any dog we pass. And, naturally, he won’t tolerate having his turf invaded by canine strangers. When I first brought Kimi home, he exhibited a certain amount of rivalry. Now, of course, he adores her. The two of them won’t fight about anything except food, and even when a battle breaks out, there’s more
noise than actual bloodshed. So for a dominant male malamute, he’s remarkably good with other dogs. But if Irene Wheeler’s confederate had arrived here with a male Great Pyrenees, Rowdy would let me know.

Backing carefully along the car-lined block of Norwood, I reached an empty space and parked. Would the villain remember my car? Probably not. He’d seen it for only a few seconds. Outside the restaurant, it had been Kevin, not me, he’d recognized. Would he know my face again? Maybe. But Lower Norwood Road was dark. I hoped that no one had repaired the broken gas lamp. I certainly hoped that no one there was giving a party. And Rowdy and I wouldn’t go all the way to the end of the street; we’d just reconnoiter and backtrack.

As soon as Rowdy and I began to stroll up Norwood Road, I discovered a new and powerful reason to object to the damned inadequate, elitist gas lamps. It was one thing to be unable to read a street sign, quite another to be virtually unable to see Rowdy. Now, in the fog and darkness, when subtle changes in Rowdy’s body language were supposed to signal the presence of Simon’s spectral stand-in, I could see little more than a burly, white-faced mass with a plumy white tail. Running my hand down Rowdy’s neck and back, I felt no sign of hackles. Trotting along, he paused now and then to lay casual territorial claim to a tree trunk in the name of the Sovereign Nation of the Alaskan Malamute. We reached the fork in the road without incident and turned left onto Lower Norwood. The dim glow of a gas lamp showed a sidewalk stretching along the left-hand side and, on the right, the kind of wide strip of grass and tall shrubbery I’d seen at Ceci’s. The map of Newton had shown me that Lower Norwood Road was only one short block long. The few houses facing it were on the left; on the opposite side were the ends of large lots like
Ceci’s with addresses on Upper Norwood. The dead-end road was even darker and more deserted than the last time I’d seen it. In addition to the gas lamp near the fork, two others were visible, one on the right, then one on the left. The broken one I’d noticed near Ceci’s still hadn’t been fixed. On my previous visit, the house opposite Ceci’s lower gate had been dark. The carriage lamps and other bright lights of the brick Tudor next to it, I now realized, had been the principal source of illumination for the street. Ceci had remarked that its owners must be home from Florida. Maybe they’d gone back. How was I supposed to reconnoiter when I couldn’t see anything?

But if I couldn’t see, I couldn’t be seen, could I? Especially if I avoided the small circles of gaslight. Crossing to the right-hand side of the road, I hoped that local dog walkers carried plastic bags and invariably cleaned up after their dogs.

I stopped for a moment. In the house across from me, a glowing first-floor window suggested a television. The house beyond it had a car parked in the driveway and a bright window on the second floor. I listened. Prosperous suburbs are supposed to be peaceful and quiet. In the daytime, all year long, they are, in fact, cacophonous. As soon as snow vanquishes the din of lawn-service equipment, snow blowers start roaring. Furthermore, house-proud people with money are always renovating, putting up additions and garages, or having driveways and sidewalks deafeningly repaved. Politicians eager for reelection make sure that the streets get swept, plowed, and newly blacktopped by machines obviously designed by hearing-aid manufacturers bent on causing mass hearing loss and thus generating business for themselves. Face it: This kind of noise is beyond the reach of the poor. Even now, Newton
was far from silent. In the distance, traffic swept along the Mass. Pike. I heard a plane overhead. Blocks away, cars and trucks rumbled. To avoid the gaslight, I crossed to the left-hand side, stopped to listen again, and went on. Rowdy gave no indication of sensing the presence of another dog. Reaching the last illuminated gaslight, we crossed back to the dark side. Opposite us was a deserted-looking house. Beyond it was the Tudor with the carriage lamps set on big pillars. The last house looked as empty as on my first visit. With the exception of the car I’d seen in a driveway, there wasn’t a single vehicle in sight. No one else was walking a dog. It was easy to imagine that a nuclear attack had destroyed all the people, but left their houses and possessions intact. I’d intended to glance down this street. According to my plan, if I found it dark and empty, I’d return to my car and drive back here with the headlights on high beam. Just as I was about to make an about-turn and carry out the plan, Rowdy quit sniffing the ground. I couldn’t see the expression on his face or the hair on his back. I couldn’t even see his face. His white tail wagged merrily in the air above an apparently nonexistent dog. He was pulling me toward someone or something near the gate to Ceci’s yard. There’d been no nuclear attack here, of course. There wouldn’t be now. And the murk was just that, a meteorological phenomenon, fog, neither toxic nor otherworldly. No one has succumbed to it or been wafted here enshrouded in its vapors.