There was a tiny driveway in front, not really long enough to park my car without it extending over the sidewalk, so I always parked on the street. My secondhand Vespa motorbike was kept locked to a plumbing pipe near the stairway that ran up the south side of the house to the covered porch.

  When we arrived that evening, the streetlights had just come on and dusk was settling in. Holmes retrieved his well-worn valise and violin case from my car. I set the alarm with my key remote and the car responded with its familiar chirp. I saw Holmes’ brow knit and explained, “That means it’s locked up tight.” He pulled on a door to satisfy himself, then I led him up the fourteen steps to the arched porch and proceeded to unlock my front door.

  As we walked in, Lucie, my golden retriever, gave her typical little woof, which is more of a greeting than any kind of warning. I love Lucie, and she’s a dear companion, but as a watchdog, forget it. I’ve always felt that if burglars ever came in, she’d woof once and then cheerfully lead them straight to the family silver—what little I have. Seeing me, Lucie panted contentedly and accepted my ritual kiss atop her head. Then she did what truly looked like a double take at the dapper, formally dressed Holmes, forming a skeptical expression that, I swear to God, implied, Are you serious with this guy?

  “It’s okay, Lucie. He’s a friend,” I said, and she greeted him as such. For his part, Holmes was reserved—obviously not a big animal lover, but he gave her a polite nod.

  I noticed that Holmes was surveying my living room with those keen gray eyes of his. My house was brighter inside than Mrs. Hudson’s, the walls a warm, pale yellow. The curtains were white and thin. I like light. The electrical fixtures on the wall had replaced their gas predecessors ages before I began living there but maintained the early San Francisco look. Out of necessity, my furniture was eclectic. Some of it was still my parents’ furnishings, mostly cheery florals, with soft cushions. I have a lot of plants, which I talk to encouragingly as I water them.

  “I haven’t had the money to fix the place up much,” I apologized. “And it’s probably kind of sparse for your 1890s taste.”

  “A bit perhaps, but nonetheless quite revealing,” he said, lightly rubbing his hands together while still scanning the room.

  “Really?” My voice had a slight edge as I asked, “And what exactly can you tell me?”

  “Oh, perhaps not that much.” He shrugged. “After all, there have surely been changes in styles and fashions over the years which may affect, ever so slightly, my deductions.”

  I welcomed the opportunity of putting him to a serious test, so I gestured expansively toward the living room, saying, “Oh, pray, proceed.”

  “Well, first off, I should say you are the daughter of a passionate sculptor.”

  I blinked. He’d grabbed my attention. Then, while generally looking in my direction, he meandered back and forth across the room in front of me, like a lawyer presenting his summation to a jury. “You, however, followed your mother’s example and swung toward the rigorous discipline of medicine, taking your degree at Mr. Stanford’s University.” He paused an instant, then said, “I extend my condolences about your parents’ decease.”

  I drew a little surprised breath.

  Then he continued, “In addition to your knowledge of Latin, you speak French and Spanish. You are highly intelligent and have an excellent bedside manner with children—who are the specialty of your medical practice.”

  Now I was surprised, but Holmes was just getting warmed up.

  “You are affiliated with the Saint Francis Memorial Hospital at 900 Hyde Street,” he went on while sometimes glancing downward or thoughtfully upward as though pulling his deductions out of thin air like a magician materializing a bouquet. “You have strong opinions but prefer to work through quieter, more circuitous avenues.” I felt my jaw slackening, but clamped my mouth shut.

  “Despite some lingering interest in unusual scientific experimentation here at home, it’s obvious that you’re not entirely consumed by doctoring any longer.” He glanced directly at me, saying, “You are endeavoring to write a work of historical fiction, but are experiencing much frustration in your efforts, and thus far you are unpublished in that arena.”

  My perplexity was growing. I perched on the couch’s round arm as he did a slow three-sixty while saying, “You enjoy wagering on sports.” He came back around with his fingertips pressed together in front of him. “Despite your conservative appearance, you harbor a deep romanticism and a desire for adventure”—he spoke that word with a beguiling twinkle in his eyes—“in spite of the recent injury it’s brought you.”

  He drew a breath. “You are intrigued by the bizarre, and—” Here he stiffened, clasped his hands behind him, and glanced away from me with some embarrassment and considerable distaste. “And apparently,” he finally managed to say, “you find humor in the male . . . sexual organ.”

  My jaw dropped open. But then I clenched it—this time, because something was dawning on me and I was beginning to get angry. He paid no mind and steamed ahead, using his hands to shape or emphasize some words. “On holiday, you prefer exotic, tropical locales, particularly Panama, if I’m not much mistaken.” Then he looked directly at me with his brow lowered and a darkly knowing gleam in his eye. “You sometimes require a heartier stimulant than tea or coffee, not unlike myself, although you prefer to inhale your cocaine, rather than injecting a solution as I do.”

  Unaware that I was beginning to fume, he proceeded with clinical coolness. “I also know without question that you are,” he said with syrupy sarcasm, “overly sentimental.” A quality he obviously abhorred. He continued breezily: “And that you had a gray, short-haired, female cat named Twinkie, now deceased.”

  I gritted my teeth, jamming my right fist hard on my hip. Lucie glanced up, knowing that move signaled a storm about to break.

  “Ah, but I also know you have excellent resiliency, Winslow. Granted, you did have a childish temper tantrum when your husband very recently abandoned you.” My eyes went wide. “But,” he continued pleasantly, “you’ve taken positive actions to create a new life without that man who has long blond hair, fancies himself a painter, and whose name is—”

  “Don’t say it!” I shouted, but he did.

  “—Max.”

  I screeched with an explosive, furious, caustic-ironic laugh as I leapt to my feet! The furious laugh was at myself—because I’d sworn to never hear that damnable name again.

  The caustic-ironic part was also at myself—because by saying that hated name, this Brit had triggered a light-bulb moment: in a flash I suddenly understood exactly what was going on! What I should’ve guessed all along. The truth! My rage was roiling because I realized that the devilish man he’d just named—my own personal “archnemesis”—had obviously orchestrated this whole ridiculous, unbelievable circus and— I started spewing out a string of vile expletives that startled the Englishman and were incoherent even to me until—abruptly—I sucked it up. Locked it in tight.

  I stood unmoving. Turned to stone. At last, I allowed myself to slowly whisper, “How could I have been”—I scrunched my eyes closed as I shouted, full voice—“so incredibly stupid!”

  “Winslow?” the bemused Britisher asked calmly, “Whatever in the world are you—”

  “Stop!” My hands shot out with palms facing him. I glared at him. “Just. Stop. And you can drop that oh so veddy, veddy propah over-the-top accent, okay? I get it now: the whole scam. Clear as a bell.” Now, I was the one pacing, thinking it through, grumbling about my despised ex. “I’ve heard that bastard brag about the elaborate practical jokes he’d played on people. Some funny, some shameful.” I nodded because all the pieces were fitting. “And I sure know how badly he wanted to get back at me, to really stick it to me.” I chuckled bitterly. “Well, I have to give him credit—this one was a doozy!”

  “Doctor, I’d very much appreciate it if—”

  I was deaf to him, off in my own world, still adding it all up. “He must’ve dipped deep into his damn trust fund to engineer this theatrical hoax.” I shook my head at my blind naiveté, rambling, “I can absolutely picture that despicable rat and his gleeful cronies setting up that Frankenstein cellar, rigging the vapors rising, the freaky makeup, the letter in code from the ‘poor dead brother’ and—” That brought a sideways thought. My eyes narrowed. “I certainly hope he paid old Mrs. Hudson a bloody fortune to come out of retirement. To get back on stage again, lure me in, send me down into that cellar so I could ‘accidentally’ discover your funhouse!”

  For a nanosecond I thought of her sweet old face and muttered to myself with honest respect, “And wow. She was really convincing.”

  Then I turned sharply on the “Englishman,” saying with a smirk, “But where did he dig you up?” Suddenly I knew: “Probably down at the Improv, huh? Pretty good performance. You really studied your part. Completely sucked me into the possibility of—” The anger suddenly surged volcanically back up, and I went wild-eyed as I shouted-laughed, furiously shaking my fists at the ceiling. “God! How could I have been so gullible as to fall for the whole ‘asleep for over a century’ routine?”

  “My dear woman,” the Brit said patiently, quietly amused, “why on earth would you make such an unfounded supposition?”

  “Why?” I turned on him, shouting, “why?” Then I began my frontal assault. “Because with the exception of a few obvious errors, everything you said about me was absolutely dead on! And there’s no way you could possibly have known it all without being told!”

  “Errors?” His eyebrows arched in curious disbelief. “What sort of ‘errors’ are you—”

  “Oh, will you please drop all the Sherlock-Hubert crap. The show’s over, pal. Now get the hell out of my house!” I pointed dramatically toward the door.

  He remained unruffled, saying with smug, patronizing assurance, “But you have left out the critical fact—the one that is obviously the most important, because it undermines your entire hypothesis.”

  “I haven’t left out anything. Now go.”

  “Yes, you have,” he insisted emphatically. “The fact that you, Doc-tor, pronounced me dead—from an adrenaline overdose.”

  “Well, obviously”—I glared—“I was wrong! Now move it, mister.”

  Still entirely cool, he drew himself up imperiously. “Madam, if you’ll kindly quell your feminine hysteria for one brief moment—”

  I saw red and snarled at him with focused vitriol. “This is nonsexist hysteria, goddammit!” And with that, I grabbed his funky old violin case and bowler hat, pushed them against his paisley silk vest, and pressured him backward across the small foyer toward the door, which I flung open.

  As I herded him out onto porch, he was still insisting, “I assure you, Winslow, that this person named—”

  “Don’t say it!” I snapped with deadly menace, fist raised, ready to stop his clock.

  “This . . . person of whom you speak . . . is entirely unknown to me. And I never even imagined your existence until I awoke today. Everything I just deduced is perfectly obvious to the trained, observant eye and—”

  “Well, you can take your ‘trained, observant eye’ and stick it up your pseudo-Victorian arse!” I thrust the violin case into his hands and slammed the door in his face.

  I stood inside, quaking with seismic anger. After stomping into the living room, I pulled out my cell phone and hotly punched in the cursed number that I had kicked out of my speed-dial contacts.

  I saw sweet Lucie looking out mournfully through the thin drape on the narrow window of my front door frame at the performance artist who remained standing on my porch. Lucie glanced at me with her woeful hound eyes, seeming to plead his case.

  “Forget it, Lucie. Don’t go there. Don’t make me try to explain charlatan to you.” I heard a knock at the front door and that British voice saying something unintelligible outside. But just at that moment my call was answered by an outgoing message from that oh-so-velvety-smooth, smoky baritone voice I now detested, and I blasted it.

  “Hello, you, you—” I barely held back all the blistering, profanities I could have branded him with. “Well, you know exactly what the hell you are—and you’re damn right I’ll leave a message for you! How dare you drag that sweet old Mrs. Hudson into such a warped, nasty, lowlife scam!”

  I smacked the phone off and stormed upstairs toward my bedroom, where I kept my emergency stash of See’s chocolates.

  6

  It wasn’t until later that I learned exactly what transpired after my furious outburst and my expulsion of the man in question, but having now researched it thoroughly, I can recount it to you.

  In point of fact, there were several occasions during this adventure when I was not actually present with Holmes in the midst of a situation. In such instances, he later provided all the details, or I pried them out of him.

  In addition to having Holmes’ meticulous accounts to guide me, I’ve interviewed in depth most of the involved parties, whom you’re about to meet, regarding the specifics they witnessed. By cross-referencing those with my debriefings of Holmes, it became clear to me that he had not editorialized his recollections and had essentially stuck to the truth. The result is that I have collected all the considerable facts. The only embellishments I’ve allowed myself are a few small touches that I know to be consistent with Holmes’ character and behavior from my personal involvement with him. I’ll endeavor to present it all to you in a straightforward, linear fashion, which will hopefully keep the narrative flowing more smoothly.

  Now back to the matter at hand. After I slammed the door on him, here’s what happened:

  Holmes stood on the porch a moment, looking back in at Lucie. He was left quite off-balance by my seething eruption. He knocked on the door and said loudly, “I am not seeking reentry, Winslow, but it is absolutely vital that we get that inquiry sent off to Scotland Yard.”

  Getting no response, he shouted, “Winslow?” but still heard nothing in response. Frustrated, he raised his hand to knock again on the door, then stopped himself—he had too much pride. He saw that Lucie was still offering her sympathy through the narrow vertical window beside the door, but he stiffly refused it. He squared his shoulders, turned, walked down the steps, angrily muttering, “Ridiculous!” Then he crossed the sidewalk to my Accord.

  Night had fallen some time earlier, but when Holmes peered through the car’s back window, he could see his dusty case of wine resting on the back seat. He tried the car door, but it was locked. He was not about to come back and ask me to open it. Instead, he uttered an angry puff of irritation, then looked around and spotted a bench across the street in the Palace of Fine Arts Park opposite my residence. A punked-out kid with green, spiked hair and a nose ring lumbered past him. Holmes sniffed to himself, “Herbert Wells was prophetic: the Martians have landed.”

  Penniless, friendless, but nevertheless the absolute master of himself, he walked toward the wooden bench, behind which reflections of streetlamps glittered on the surface of the rotunda’s placid lagoon. Facing his destitution with much more than merely the traditional British stiff upper lip, Holmes’ self-confidence was extreme. His possession of unique and extraordinary skills set him apart from his fellow Homo sapiens. This made him feel superior to just about all of them.

  Except perhaps one. Even in his own thoughts he referred to that person merely as “the Woman.” She was like a saucy gadfly who flitted up occasionally from his subconscious. She had been cocksure of her own abilities and more than a match for him. Over a hundred years later, he still found the memory of her deeply unsettling. I would learn much more about this intriguing lady, but not for a while.

  Holmes sat on the bench in the dark park, and despite the curious glances that his Victorian attire attracted from several passersby, he assumed the confident attitude of a neighborhood regular. He had found his briar pipe and matches in his frock coat’s inner pocket along with a bit of his favorite black shag tobacco. Being over a century old, it was stale, but to him it was very pleasant. The blue smoke curled slowly upward into the lamplit darkness.

  It was his first moment of actual solitude since awakening. He leaned back, spread his left arm out along the top of the bench, and began processing this new world he’d crossed over into. London and all his experiences in the past seemed like a dream to him now, though not in merely a will-o’-the-wisp fashion. Not simply fleeting images, instead it was a long dream, richly, intricately detailed, day by day, night by night, for forty-one years. Here was his childhood, his brother, his education, insights, humor he’d enjoyed, tragedies he’d endured, plus dangers, adventures, a great many successes, and yes, he admitted to himself, an occasional minor failure. The Woman’s beautiful visage flitted through his brain again, gazing deeply into his eyes with a puckish twinkle in her own violet ones.

  Surely, he knew, even she would have been appropriately impressed with his crowning achievement: traveling forward through time to sit on a bench in twenty-first-century San Francisco. He smiled to himself, thinking how intrigued and envious H. G. Wells also would have been. Holmes thought back on that autumnal evening in 1898 when Wells had joined Watson, Doyle, and himself in the sumptuous, gaslit Hotel Connaught dining room.

  Wells was thirty-two, yet when wearing a dark, high-collared sweater and white shirt but no tie, as he did that night, he still had the youthful air of a recent Oxford graduate. Fine-featured, with sandy-brown hair and eyebrows set widely apart above his light eyes and crescent mustache, he had a boyish lick slanting across his smooth forehead, which Holmes had noted attracted the attention of several young women Wells passed when crossing the dining room. His smile was warm as he gripped Holmes’ hand. Wells expressed delight at meeting him and Watson, being well acquainted with, and a fan of, Doyle’s chronicling of their casework.