Chapter Twenty
Grace had a bounce in her step when she walked back to The Lodge.
By the time they’d said their goodbyes, Annie seemed sure Jack would find his way again soon.
Anyone would be shaken by losing their livelihood.
He was bound to get back on his feet sooner or later, and she owed it to him to wait it out by his side.
The two women pledged to support each other going forwards and meet regularly for coffees and walks in the surrounding parkland.
Grace anticipated being able to tell Rosie she was going walking with a real friend. It felt good.
After book club the following week, Grace went back into Frank’s study.
Sending up a silent apology to her late husband, she put on the big light and set about scouring the shelves for anything that might look like a journal.
There was nothing. She carefully trained her eyes on every single shelf and couldn’t find anything other than novels by people she didn’t know.
Books had their place, but right now she didn’t want to learn about the views of strangers.
She wanted to climb inside Frank’s brain and understand his thoughts.
Those few pages in his reading journal had given her a precious moment inside his head and she was desperate for more.
She glowered at the books she’d piled on the coffee table that morning, any desire to read them gone.
Even Charlotte’s Web didn’t tempt her back.
She slumped back into Frank’s chair and raised her eyes to the top shelves.
Because of her height, she hadn’t been able to reach up to check them properly, but she’d carefully examined each one.
At least, she thought she had. Now she looked again, there was a thick book with a black spine sitting next to a copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. The spine was bare.
Jumping from the chair, Grace rushed into the kitchen to fetch the moulded plastic stool she used to reach to the back of the top cupboards.
It was a bigger version of the one Rosie bought for Jude to help him clamber onto the toilet by himself when he was a tiny boy.
Jude remembered it, and always laughed when Grace used it to scrabble for tins of tomatoes or chickpeas, calling her ‘Mini Gran’ and offering to get whatever she needed.
She’d mock-glare at him, telling him she was a perfectly independent and capable woman, then remind him how lucky he was to be at least a foot taller than her.
Placing the stool on the wooden floor of the study, Grace stepped up and reached for the black book.
She had to nudge it out by hooking her finger into the bottom of the spine and dragging it towards her.
Suddenly, it dislodged and tumbled towards her face, a hard edge smacking against the bridge of her nose.
The pain made her stagger. She lost her balance, falling backwards, her hip thumping against the parquet floor and elbow smashing into the hard wood.
She lay on the floor, breathing hard. Something liquid trickled down the side of her nose.
She put her finger to it and knew by the stickiness it was blood.
She did a mental assessment of her body, moving her legs carefully.
Her hip was painful but didn’t feel broken.
The same with her elbow. Carefully, she sat up, then used the coffee table to shift onto her knees and slowly stand. Everything ached.
The black book was open on the floor, loose pages scattered around it like flower petals.
Blood dribbled from the end of her nose onto a piece of paper, but she didn’t see the red splat because her eyes were focused on the handwriting.
It was Frank’s, and despite the pain in her hip and the throbbing in her nose, the sight of all those words made her cry tears of joy.
***
Grace leaned into the bathroom mirror, its ring light illuminating her pale face, as she tried to cover the gash on the bridge of her nose with a plaster.
It had taken an age to stop bleeding, and even now, fifteen minutes later, the cut seeped if she inadvertently twitched her nose.
Good job I’m not Samantha from Bewitched, she thought, carefully tapping down the adhesive strip.
The urge to wiggle her nose like the TV witch she’d loved watching when she was young was almost overwhelming.
If she was a witch, what spell would she cast now?
She knew the answer. Sadly, she didn’t have magic powers and Frank wasn’t going to spring back to life.
But the next best thing had just smacked her in the face: his journal.
She might not be able to talk to him, but she had the chance to hear his voice again through what he’d written in that surprisingly heavy black book.
She turned her face from left to right, sighing at the purple bruises blossoming under both of her eyes, then left the bathroom and went back down to the study.
Her hip screamed when she bent down to retrieve all the papers, and her elbow throbbed when she sat in the chair and turned to the first page.
As soon as she read the first sentence, her mind took over.
The pain eased from her body as she fell into the words.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Elementary, my dear Watson!
I was very disappointed when I discovered Sherlock Holmes never used this exact phrase, partly because I want to quote it right now.
What I’ve discovered about Holmes adds to my theory.
I’ve been quite the detective since the idea came to me, and now I feel like all the clues are coming together, and the facts of the case are proven.
Grace reread the first paragraph, trying to work out what it meant. It seemed Frank enjoyed reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries so much he’d taken to writing one himself.
These are the facts:
Holmes can’t remember appointments and seems oblivious to time, but he can remember minute details and focus on complex crimes with laser intensity. (Hyper-focus and poor executive function, my dear Watson!)
He gets sidetracked in simple conversations, and bored and depressed when life becomes mundane. (Attention deficit – although that’s a misnomer, in my opinion. There’s no shortage of attention, just a lack of focus. Emotional dysregulation, if I’m not very much mistaken).
Music helps him think and focus and he’s incredibly creative and articulate.
He has impulse control issues and addictive tendencies.
From this I conclude … the great Sherlock Holmes was one of us!
One of us. Grace read it again. She recognized some of the traits Frank wrote about from the discussions she’d had about ADHD with Jude and Rosie. But Frank didn’t say Holmes was like Jude. He said he was one of us.