Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(43)

Daley clicked a few buttons, and the dancing men and their partners dipped and whirled through the ether and onto Watson’s laptop. In a trice, as she clicked her keyboard, the fox-trot music reprised and the dancers appeared again, their swirl of tulle and glitter now on Watson’s much larger screen.

“Better, right?” she said.

“Better.” I had to agree. Now I could make out the shabbiness of the ceiling, the smudged mirrors, black streaks from countless soles on the floor.

“Please continue, Mr. Daley,” I said, as Watson lowered the sound. “Ms. Moran, recently affianced to you, did not appear for a scheduled lesson? Had you quarreled?”

“No, no. We didn’t fight, not at all. So, yeah, when she didn’t show up, I was pretty worried. I have a key to the studio, so I stayed later than usual, but she still didn’t come. I called, texted, went to her house. Left a note. I went home. No messages. I even checked the hospital. Nothing. I hoped she would call, or something, but she didn’t. And then I fell asleep. I couldn’t wait to talk to you, that’s why I’m still in this getup.”

The man blew out a breath, and every one of my instincts whispered “lovesick,” though it’s not a word we often hear these days. I waited. People tell their stories in their own ways, and that is always instructive. If one is seeking the truth, sometimes it is best to listen.

“Anyway, the weird emails I told you about. Penny’s who got them,” Mr. Daley eventually went on. He paused, smoothed back a lock of dark hair. “Do I need to fill out a form, hiring you?”

“In due time,” I said. “For you still have not explained what you’d like us to do.”

“Okay, long story short. After Penny said she’d marry me, it was all pretty great.” He stood, began to pace. Not that he had much room to pace in our little office, his long legs taking him past Watson’s desk and toward the rear wall in four steps, then back to the swivel chair. “But then, two weeks or so ago? She started behaving strangely. Going off. She missed a class. Then came back as usual. Then missed again. She wouldn’t tell me why. I confronted her, you know? Had I done something wrong? If she didn’t want to get married, I thought, just say so. I mean . . .”

“She received a series of emails,” I prompted.

“Yes, yes, that’s the whole point,” Daley said. “I’m embarrassed to say I swiped her cell phone when she was asleep. We were at my place, we’d had some wine, and I was pushing her, a little, about why she was unhappy. She insisted there was nothing. But I—well, I got into her mail. I searched to see if anything had arrived around the time she first got upset. I found some . . . strange ones. I couldn’t decide whether if I forwarded them to myself she could tell I’d done that—”

Watson looked up from her computer screen. “She could.”

“Good thing I didn’t, then. Instead I grabbed my own cell and snapped photos.” He held up his cell as if to show me. “Want to see one?”

“Will you email it to Watson?” I asked. “And Watson, will you print it out?” Nothing like a good old piece of paper.

Our little printer whirred.

“Could you tell who sent it?” I asked. I stood, as the printer was just out of reach. It ejected one sheet of paper, on which the sender and Ms. Moran’s address were clearly apparent. Would this be that simple? No. “It says ‘no one at no one dot com.’ Did you try to contact them?”

“How could I?” Daley asked. “That’d show I’d taken her phone. And—” He shrugged. “What would I say?”

“Too bad,” Watson said, tapping her keyboard. “It’s easy enough to create an anonymous email address. Even with that, I might be able to track the sender down, but not without the actual phone.”

I studied the page again, frowning. There were no words. Only tiny pictures. An apple. A smiley-face. A heart. Then a sun, a moon, and some wavy lines, like the television meteorologists use to indicate wind.

“Did you ask her about this?”

“How could I?” Mr. Daley said again. “She’d know I looked at her email, something I’d never do. Even though I did. I had to, right?”

“What’s done is done,” I said. “And we shall go from there.” I thought about the emoticons we’d just seen, and the relationship between this heartbroken young dancing instructor and his mysterious—if she was—fiancée.

“An apple. For the teacher, perhaps?” I theorized. “Someone loves the teacher, and wants to marry them, and live happily ever after.” I tried to come up with a meaning for the wind. “Somewhere windy?”

“Good one,” Watson said. “Or someone named McIntosh, like the apple, you know? Is happy that his heart operation went well, he’ll now live through many days and nights unless the wind changes.”

“Possible,” I replied, simply to be polite. Watson is sometimes cavalier about details. “But we must be wrong, for why could either of those be upsetting to Ms. Moran?”

I picked up a paperweight from my desk. The durable chunk of native granite, a legacy from my father, was speckled with potassium feldspar, quartz, and biotite. A “thinking rock,” he called it. I turned its smooth weight in my hand, over, and over, and over. Why do people use symbols instead of words? Sometimes, in emails, to save time. In shorthand, to write more quickly. In the Bayeux Tapestry, or Sistine Chapel, or Guernica, to be artistic, or to preserve history. Other times—because they only want specific people to understand their meaning.