When Emily slammed the heavy kitchen door shut, a faint
chiding from memory appeared. If her
great-grandmother had ever caught her so carelessly shutting the door, Emily
would have only heard the end of it when her sentence was over.
She walked slowly to the work shed and carefully turned the
lock chambers over with her fingers. The
tumblers clicked back and forth, finally settling that the magic was
appropriate enough to open her particular combination. Emily flipped the switch on while moving to
the table at the rear and she sat down to study the papers remaining on the
table.
The case out currently was a private matter.
It had no connection to the current smuggling case that she
had been involved with by the Feds. And
it had absolutely not connection to the work being done for the Torrios, who
were being difficult but were maintaining their patience. This folder didn’t even have a connection to
the case she was looking over for the state park service.
Just a seemingly simple robbery – enough to distract her
brain from the matters at hand.
The matters had taken place in an antique store on the east
side of Cumberland. The small shop supposedly dealt
mainly in mortal items and practices, with the occasional mildly magic object
passing onto the shelves. Nothing more
extreme than perhaps an enchanted vase or a levitating set of flat wares.
That was at least what they had said in their report to the
police.
The discrepancy in their input of product and their output
of product is why the outside hand of Emily O’Brien was asked for. The shop owners faulted to dealing with the
insurance company for a lesser payout.In the claim to the police department, the shop keepers reported a
variety of stolen mortal jewelry and a few pieces of mildly enchanted
furniture. The same was reported to the
insurance company, quite fraudulently.
Her observations of the scene had quickly led Emily to the
hidden compartment that contained a master list. Even without the information from the ledger,
it was almost too easy to recognize that something else was going on with the
shop. Perhaps that was why they sought
her out and their easy agreeance to pay double her normal rate.
Yes indeed, it was a simple case when it came to the motive
and the perpetrator. From the first day,
Emily knew that it was the shop keeper’s wife who had taken the items, but she
had spent the past two weeks of free time looking for a location. The theoretical location of the stolen goods
was what kept her mind engaged.
After a time of studying the details, there came a knock at
the workshop door and the faint creaking as someone stepped across the
floorboard. The gentle fingertips that
drummed across her shoulder and the other hand that ran down her back. It was obviously Sherlock who then said,
“Emily, I am terribly sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
There was another creak and another groan as he shifted to
look over her shoulder at the case on the table. The only recognition Emily gave of his
presence was shuffling the papers around and pushing a surveillance picture
into his hand.
“So, I was right. You
are working on outside cases again.” Sherlock tapped the photograph against his fingertips and laughed while
saying, “Does the United States government know of these side jobs of yours?”
Emily couldn’t refuse his laughter and turned about in her
chair to pull another folding chair up to the table.
“I should certainly hope not.”
“And why not?”
She sighed, pushing her fingers through her hair and huffing out, “They’d
probably make me an accessory to the crime. Which is really more of lover’s spat that anything else. I just need to find the hiding place, my fee
will be finalized, and I’ll report it to the revenuers as anything else.”
Sherlock pulled his step ladder chair out from the corner of
the room and Emily tried to ignore the sounds of the floorboards
scratching. One of her better senses was
her hearing, amplified by certain magical blessings, and most often in the
modern world it was a curse. Every
slight movement and gesture had its own sound.And it took a lot of commotion to take all of those sounds away.
“Would you mind filling me on all of the details?”
Emily lifted the folder from the tabletop, reordering the
photographs as each one fell into Sherlock’s hands. He looked through them with a hum, occasionally
tapping against the bookcase and slowly starting to sing. She slowly tried to recognize what he was singing
and followed along in the tapping. There
was no point in trying to mimic the tune, but Emily stayed the course while
they both set their minds to working on the case before them.
Holmes spoke in the middle of the silence and asked, “Were
there any other suspects beyond the wife?”
“Yes,” was the only answer Emily could force out. She followed it up with, “The detectives believed
that it was one of the delivery men who came back around to return the shipment
to the seller.”
She pulled a black and white mug from another folder.
“This is George Briggs, previously convicted for grand
larceny.”
“What did he steal last time?”
“You’re going to balk at this, Sherlock, but he stole a magical snuffbox.”
Sherlock’s chair rocked back and forth, the metal sliding
with a slight squeak as the bottom step got stuck, and a nice accompaniment to
Holmes’s laughter. The squeaking stopped
when he leaned forward over the work bench once again, but Emily could still
hear him giggling.
“Emily, my dear, what could possibly be so special about a
snuff box?”
She set about digging around in the desk once more, trying
to find all of the information before their allotted amount of time ran
out. Emily tried to ignore the remnants
of his giggling, but it crossed the thresholds into her mind while the search
went on. All of the information was
right there, but just somehow buried.
“Fuck.”
A blank look crossed Sherlock’s face as she swore, but Emily
noted he lack of movement and speech. He
stayed away from the desk, going back to examine the photographs of the shop
that were already in his hands.
Maybe the detective would be able to find something he
missed.
The proper photograph finally found its way into her hands
and Emily explained, “It’s dangerously enchanted and also covered in precious
stones. Briggs took it from a museum
where he worked as a delivery man for the café’s food vendor.”
The details of the case quickly started running through
Emily’s mind, and she soon felt Sherlock’s eyes upon the side of her face. He noticed her distress far too quickly.
“Is there something about the original Briggs case that
bothers you?”
“Beyond every single detail of the matter? No, nothing about it bothers me.”
Emily had snapped at him.And she then leaned back in her own chair to avoid Sherlock’s continuing
glare, refocusing her mind to think about the shop. Whether or not Briggs had stolen the piece
during the last case was none of her concern. But she at least knew that he wasn’t guilty of this crime.
If she could only find the wardrobe.
She walked through the crime scene one more time, noting the
smashed glass on both sides of the window frame and the crumpled scraps of
paper. The wardrobe had been in the back-storage
room, prompting the police to believe a delivery man had something to do with
it.
But the storage room had something obviously wrong with the
amount of space available. Emily had put
it down to a hidden compartment for the more illicit items, but there was that
empty sheet in all of that empty space.
Something
was being hidden.
It was just staying in plain sight.
Her quick rise back to the land of the living startled Holmes as
Emily quietly stated, “I know how they did it.”
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