Then he pointed at an object of stainless steel and black plastic across the room, half out of its box, where I’d left it. “Despite that unusual scientific apparatus over there, it’s obvious that you’re not consumed by doctoring.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  He paused, inviting me to look down at a side table, “Because I noted the unthumbed quality of your current medical periodicals.”

  He was right again. My AMA Journal and Pediatrics Quarterly were still in the same pristine condition they had arrived in. In truth, they’d gathered a bit of dust, which I made a mental note to clean up.

  “You are endeavoring to write,” he went on, “using what I presume to be some manner of electrical typewriter here.” He touched my computer keyboard, then moved on to indicate the paperbacks of Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles lying nearby as he said, “These several works of historical literary fiction on your desk indicate your preference for that style of literature, and that you were likely using them for reference.”

  With his elegant, black patent leather shoe—unfortunately scuffed during his encounter with the street gang—he kicked lightly at something on my floor. “These crumpled papers in and around the rubbish basket are the classic indicators of a frustrated writer.”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek, trying to keep a straight face. Because he was dead on.

  His hand swept in the direction again of the bookcases. “There are, however, no books on these shelves bearing your name as author, and I have never yet known any published author who could not resist displaying his books.”

  “Or her books.”

  “Yes, of course, Doc-tor,” he sniffed, still with lingering incredulity about me being one.

  I suspected, therefore, that the notion of a serious female author was barely possible in his estimation. He might not have known that George Sand was a woman. Perhaps he’d never given the Brontës, Jane Austin, or Mary Shelley any consideration. And his smug pronunciation of “Doc-tor,” dripping with skepticism about my intelligence and abilities, was clearly employed to assert his perceived, egoistic superiority. But I decided to blithely ignore it, and not call him out on it until he’d gotten more situated in this century.

  And in this specific instance I did have to admit, “You’re correct. I haven’t had a book published . . . yet.” In spite of his annoying sexism, I was truly amazed by his perceptiveness.

  “Yes, exactly as I said.” He continued with his typical haughty air as he picked up a folded section of the Chronicle. “This newspaper, with teams marked by you, suggests you enjoy wagering on a sport called hoe-key.”

  “Hockey.”

  “Right.” He snapped back, as though that was exactly the way he’d pronounced it. He glossed over his error, took it completely in stride, ignoring my correction. “Your manner of dress is decidedly more conservative in appearance than others I’ve glimpsed today, and you are apparently a physician—a traditionally conservative profession. But your relatively short hair betrays you as what I believe your American writer Mark Twain called a ‘tomboy.’ This suggests you have the adventurous spirit more appropriate to the masculine gender.”

  Wow. He was definitely a piece of nineteenth-century work when it came to gender equality. Not unlike men in too many countries of this century, I sadly realized.

  He paused beside another small table. “That desire for adventure is further substantiated by the numerous travel magazines lying about. They, quite unlike your medical journals, have been well thumbed. This indicates to me that you enjoy looking through them again and again, which could only mean you harbor a romantic desire for faraway places and adventures.”

  He drew a breath and gestured toward the front door. “When we first arrived. I noticed your motorized bicycle outside. That in itself would seem a rather adventurous mode of transportation—particularly for a woman—and a dangerous one as well, judging by the recently acquired scratches on its right side and the corresponding abrasion and bruise on the outside of your right knee.”

  Glancing down, I realized that I was still clad in only my pajama top, and he was looking at the still-healing scrape on my bare leg.

  “Have you not had a minor accident in recent days?” he said confidently, baiting me.

  “Well, yes,” I tried my best to downplay it. “No big deal, really. Some jerk cut me off down on Marina. While he was texting.”

  Holmes waited patiently for the sound of my voice to stop. Beyond my admission that his deduction was correct, he wasn’t even listening to my words.

  He drew himself up rather formally, about to speak of something that was obviously quite distasteful to him. “Your amusement with the . . . the male sexual organ is suggested by the license plate on your car: BG WILLY. Willy being common, vulgar slang for the male . . .” He struggled to find a word and then to let it pass his lips. “The male . . . membrum virile.”

  I swallowed a smile. He would not acknowledge my amusement but rolled onward. “Your preference for tropical vacations is made clear by the number of folk items, several of which are woven in a style that is, if my memory serves correctly”—and I saw he was absolutely certain it did—“peculiar to Panama.” He pointed to a brightly colorful handmade wall hanging picturing South American peasants in their native garb, leading llamas over a sunny mountainside.

  Growing more serious, he tilted his head lower and raised an eyebrow, like one talking to a fellow addict. “Your use of cocaine is obvious from the fine, white powder on your glass table here,” he indicated the coffee table in front of me. “Along with the straw you use for inhaling it.”

  Then he pointed at my left hand. “On the ring finger of your left hand, there is a thin white line which has not been tanned by the sun. My deduction would therefore be that a wedding band has been recently removed. And your bitterness at your husband’s departure is obvious from these photos of him cast carelessly aside. One of which shows his blond hair.”

  I glanced in the direction he was looking and saw the pile of photos I had gathered to give—or rather throw back at—He Who. The topmost was one I’d taken at Rockaway Beach. He was shirtless and mugging with a bodybuilder pose. I was embarrassed that Holmes had seen it.

  “His paints and canvases, two of which bear his name, are stacked haphazardly by your front door. And your childish outburst of angry temper is clear from the bent nails on the walls where you pulled down those paintings, and also by the way you apparently smeared paint across his canvases, defacing them.”

  Holmes tapped the floor with the toe of his shoe, drawing my attention downward. “Marks on the rug suggest you’re taking positive action, rearranging your furniture to start afresh.” Reaching down with careful fingers, he retrieved something from the front of the couch. “These few short gray animal hairs along here and those thin claw scratches on the leg of the couch tell of the cat. And this small collar”—he picked it up from the table in front of me—“has a tag labeled Twinkie—i-e being the female suffix. The collar’s lack of occupancy affirms that Twinkie is, alas, no longer with us. That you kept Twinkie’s collar testifies to your excessive sentimentality, does it not?”

  He held the collar out to me. I took it from him with an annoyed expression that also indicated I could not deny the truth.

  He settled, like a monarch, into the overstuffed chair in front of the bay window, looking smug, like the cat who’d eaten the canary. He crossed his lean legs and seemed unaware that the flap of his torn trousers had opened, exposing the pale, scraped, bony knee beneath.

  He smiled grandly and sighed. “You see how truly elementary it is, Winslow, if one only trains oneself to observe?” Then with a flourish, as though he’d done it a thousand times before, he flipped the piece of trouser material back to cover his exposed knee.

  Putting his elbows on the arms of his chair, he touched the tips of his index fingers together, forming a triangle in front of his face, looking at me while cocking a superior eyebrow.

  I stared a moment, then broke into giggling laughter. “I cannot believe I am really sitting here and saying this: You have now convinced me that you really are Holmes!”

  “And what was your first clue?” he simpered derisively. Leaning his right cheekbone casually against his right forefinger, he took on the air of a learned college professor, and pontificated. “Actually, most women don’t possess logical minds, so it’s natural that you would have difficulty in—”

  “Hey!” I bristled. This time he’d gone too far. “You’re brilliant, okay? I acknowledge that. But my being female has nothing to do with my abilities. Or lack of them.”

  “Actually, you are quite right,” he said with certainty, pointing that long, thin forefinger at me for emphasis. “My friend Watson, as well as Inspector Layton and all of Scotland Yard, also seemed slow-witted to me. I had to constantly exercise great patience with them.”

  “Well, I’m sure the exercise of patience worked both ways.” I smiled with a sharpened edge of my own. “Considering your incredibly irritating arrogance.”

  He blinked at my straightforwardness. I enjoyed seeing him put off-balance and was eager to rub his nose in it a bit more. “And hard though it may be to believe, given the general accuracy of your deductions, you did make a few errors which I should probably clarify for even such a brilliantly logical mind as yours.”

  I got up and moved toward the stainless steel and black plastic object he’d pointed out earlier. It was partly out of its box and in the living room because I had been planning to return it. “What you referred to as an ‘unusual scientific apparatus’ is a cappuccino maker.” His blank expression revealed he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, so I elaborated, “For making an espresso-based coffee drink.”

  “I see.” His eyes had narrowed, his mind was working. “A coffee beverage with perhaps an equal amount of milk in it?”

  I was surprised. “Yes. You know about them?”

  “No, but I deduced from the specific name you gave the concoction. A ‘cappuccino’ would most likely derive from the monks of the Capuchin order, and the only distinguishing aspect of them which might be mirrored in a coffee-like beverage would be the color of their traditional robes.”

  “You know, I never thought about it, but you may be right.”

  “I’m sure,” he said dryly.

  Boy, this guy didn’t give an inch. But I had him for certain on the next one. I sat on the arm of the couch to tell the story. “My license plate, BG WILLY, does not refer to the male . . . pe-nis.” I stuck it to him in the fashion of his snide “Doc-tor” and enjoyed seeing him shift uncomfortably and recross his legs, so I played into it. “Your incorrect assumption might instead indicate that you, sir, have a mind fixated on sex.” He squirmed ever so slightly. I was delighted. Then I smiled, to let him a little off the hook, explaining, “Big Willy was the name of a dimwitted guy from my teenage hippie years. Big Willy was permanently stoned on marijuana and was always so confused that I started using his name to define confusion. If someone is ‘Big Willy,’ it means they don’t understand. Like you didn’t, for example. Get it?”

  “I do indeed.” He nodded, grudgingly. “I am no longer ‘Big Willy.’”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Well, not about that, anyway.” I walked back toward the folk items on my wall. “Panama, yes. Tourist, no. I worked there with Doctors Without Borders—a wonderful international aid organization my mother also worked with. I was down there during the 2017 cholera crisis that unexpectedly turned into an armed protest.”

  I picked up a small piece of lead from the mantle and held it proudly between my thumb and forefinger. “I took this bullet in my right leg.”

  I saw, with pleasure, that he appeared positively startled by the prospect that I’d been at a battlefront. “A woman in a military skirmish?”

  I cocked my head at him. “Oh yes. And women are also part of the crews aboard combat naval ships like those in the fleet you saw today. Some women are admirals, generals, vice president. Times have changed, Mr. Holmes.” I held the bullet out to him.

  He took it and turned it thoughtfully between his lean fingers, then cocked his head right back at me. “Ah, but only a romantic would’ve kept it, Winslow.”

  He was right. But I pressed on, crossing to my desk. “I am trying to write a novel—you are correct. But what you called an ‘electrical typewriter’ is actually a computer that allows me to record, store, cross-reference, and alter the work. The computer can also find other resource material via the internet, which is a wireless communication system, a worldwide web, initially created by our United States Defense Department. That digital network can be accessed, searched, and used by anyone with a computer or a smart phone”—I held mine up—“from just about anywhere in the world.”

  Now that concept caught his attention in an electrifying manner. His eyes lit up. Holmes keenly studied my cell phone and computer. I could sense that he felt an immediate kinship between my PC and his own computerlike mind.

  I sat on the couch opposite him. I tried my best to look contrite regarding my “habit.”

  “My cocaine,” I began with an attitude of confidential confession that, I was pleased to see, drew him in, “is actually an artificial sweetener that I spilled here. It is a sugar substitute. Taste it.”

  He put the tip of his finger in it, smelled it, and touched it to his tongue. The intense sweetness turned his face positively sour.

  “I add it to my iced tea,” I went on, “which I drink with a straw, such as this one.” I looked at him intently. I wanted to be certain he got the point. “In your day, the casual usage of opiates and narcotics such as cocaine was more acceptable. Now, these drugs are deemed dangerous ‘controlled substances.’ Illegal possession of them is a serious criminal offense.” He was thoroughly startled. “And addiction to them remains just as debilitating.”

  I held up my ring finger. “This white line does not indicate the absence of a wedding band. It was just a friendship ring. We were not married, we only lived together. And only long enough for me to diagnose what an insincere, disgraceful ass he was, which was a very short time. I was not the one who was abandoned. It was I who threw him out.”

  Holmes shifted uncomfortably. It was clear that an empowered, independent female represented a challenge to his Victorian perspectives.

  “I broke it off with him when I caught him ‘playing doctor’ with a model in his studio. And those so-called smears you detected on his canvases are not my vandalism but—brace yourself—his style of painting. They look that way because he painted them that way. It has nothing to do with my tantrum. A tantrum which, I admit to you, I did have.”

  Holmes’ brow furrowed, elbows propped up, his fingertips touching, processing it all like my computer when that spinning blue circle indicates it’s hard at work.

  “Thank you, Winslow. Most educational. Now, if you don’t mind—” He jumped to his feet, grimacing slightly with stiffness from his injuries. Though he tried to hide his discomfort by pretending to stretch then shake out his arms, I knew better. Finally, he took a rejuvenating breath, saying, “I am most eager to begin exploring new opportunities.” He handed the bullet back to me with a wink. “Be sure to keep it in a safe place, so you can show it off again.”

  He crossed toward my desk. “Now then. If you’ve no objections, I’ll continue my schooling. I’m most anxious to get in touch with the twenty-first century. First, I’d like to clear up this problem with my clubfooted nemesis and regain my identity papers—after which I will turn my focus to helping Leftenant Ortega solve the two strange murders involving a tiger.”

  I was confused. Had I missed something? “Two murders involving a tiger?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he murmured. He had seated himself in front of my open laptop and was studying its keyboard. “So, how do we go about getting in touch with Scotland Yard?”

  “Oh, no, no. Not tonight.” I was exhausted. This killer day had caught up with me. I hauled myself up off the couch and walked toward the desk. “We’ll do it first thing in the morning.”

  He glanced searingly across at me. “I thought I’d made it quite clear, Winslow, that regaining my identity papers is of—”

  “Utmost importance. Yes! I know. All of it. I also know that you just slept for a hundred and some years, but I haven’t. I can barely see straight and—”

  “But you agreed to—”

  “Yes!” I stomped my foot. “Tomorrow. First thing.”

  He saw my determination and sputtered, “Oh, very well then.” He looked back at the keyboard, and his tone became slightly more reasonable. “May I impose upon you to at least tell me how to—”

  “Just touch the Enter key. The big one on the right side.” He did so and was surprised as the fifteen-inch flatscreen came to life in front of him. I paused beside the desk, frowning. “But I only know about the one tiger murder involving Detective Keating. Has there been—”

  He raised a hand to dam up any further inquiry. “That must wait, Winslow.” Then he needled me with “Particularly as you are so exceedingly tired.”

  I chuckled at his petulant tit for tat, then I touched the external trackball, saying, “You’ll need this too. See?” I demonstrated how to maneuver the cursor. I brought up a web search box and showed him how to click into it. “It’s menu-driven, so just—” He’d glanced at me for further clarification, I groped for an explanation. “Uh . . . user friendly?” He still wasn’t getting the drift. “Type in any question you have—like ‘how to use a computer,’ then left-click on any results that look promising.”