Seasonal Work: Stories by Laura Lippman

Author:Laura Lippman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Last of Sheila Locke-Holmes

Years later, when relatives tried to tease her about the summer she turned eleven and opened her own detective agency, she always changed the subject. People thought she was embarrassed because she wore a deerstalker cap with a sweatshirt and utility belt and advertised her services under the name Sheila Locke-Holmes, which was almost her real name anyway. She was actually Sheila Locke-Weiner, but it was bad enough to be that in real life. The only case she ever solved was the one about her father’s missing Wall Street Journal and she disbanded her agency by the summer’s end.

Besides, it didn’t begin with the deerstalker cap, despite what her parents think they remember. She was already open for business when she found the cap, in her mother’s side of the walk-in closet, in a box full of odd things. Because her mother was Firmly Against Clutter—a pronouncement she made often, to Sheila’s father, who was apparently on the side of clutter—this unmarked box was particularly interesting to Sheila. It contained a deerstalker cap, although she did not know to call it that; a very faded orange T-shirt that said go climb a rock; a sky-blue wool cape with a red plaid lining; and a silver charm bracelet.

She took the box to her mother, who told Sheila that she really must learn to respect other people’s privacy and property. “We talked about this. Remember, Sheila? You promised to do better.”

“But I have to practice searching for things,” Sheila said. “It’s my job. May I have the T-shirt? It’s cool, like the shorts people buy at Abercrombie, only even better because it’s really old, not fake-old.”

“Don’t you want the cape, too? And the charm bracelet? I think those things are back in style as well.”

Sheila maintained a polite silence. Her mother was not the kind of mother who was actually up to date on what was cool. She just thought she was. “I like the cap. It’s like the one on that book that Daddy is always reading, the one he says he wants to work on if it ever becomes a film.”

Her mother looked puzzled. “Sherlock Holmes?”

“No, the one about the stupid people who fought for the South in the Civil War.”

“Stupid people?”

“The dunces.”

“The dunces—oh, no, Sheila, that’s not what the book is about. But, yes, the man in A Confederacy of Dunces wears a cap like this. And writes things down on Big Chief tablets, sort of like you’ve been doing.”

Sheila could not let this pass. “I use black-and-white composition books like Harriet M. Welsch in Harriet the Spy.”

She took the cap, though, to be nice. Grown-ups thought they were always watching out for children’s feelings, but Sheila believed it was the other way around just as often. Sheila was tender with her mother, who was sensitive in her own way, and indulgent of her father, who was dreamy and absentminded, usually lost inside whatever film he was editing. He had worked on some famous films,

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