was then that Monica Starr spoke. "They have another," she said quietly. "I killed Franz Faber."
"Monica!" Ralph shouted. "Don't ever say that again! Someone might believe it."
I stared at Leacock and Gentry, seeing the disbelief in their faces. But than I glanced at Holmes and saw something quite different, something like satisfaction. "Of course she killed him. I've known it since last night. But I had to hear it from her own lips."
"How could you have known?" Ralph asked. "What happened last night?"
"You called her by a nickname, 'North.' When Franz Faber lay dying, he reverted to his native language. The officer asked who stabbed him and he didn't say Norton but Norden, the German word for north. He was saying you stabbed him, Monica. Do you want to tell us why you did it?"
She stared down at the floor, unable to look any of us in the eye. Finally she answered. "I love Ralph, I love him so much. My brief time with Franz was a big mistake, but when I became pregnant he threatened to tell Ralph the baby was his and not Ralph's. I couldn't let him do that. I begged him not to, but he wouldn't listen. I'd brought a knife along to threaten him, but when he saw it he just laughed. That was when I stabbed him."
"Monica—" It was almost a sob from Ralph Norton's lips.
The six of us took the long train ride back to Montreal together. Holmes telephoned Detective Leblond from a stop along the route and he was waiting for us at the station.
Holmes and I took a carriage to Irene Norton's home. He insisted on giving her the news in person. "Your son will be home soon," he told her. "He's gone to the Sûreté with Monica Starr."
"Have you solved the case?" she wanted to know. "Is my son innocent?"
"Innocent of all but a youthful love. Only time can cure him of that." He told her of Monica's confession.
"And the baby?" she asked. "Who is the father?"
"We didn't ask, but it seems Faber had reason to believe it was his. It may take Ralph some time to get over that."
She dipped her eyes, and may have shed a tear. "A scandal in Montreal. Who would have thought it? First me, all those years ago in Bohemia, and now my son."
"No one is blaming you, or your son."
She lifted her head to gaze at Holmes. "How can I ever thank you? Will you be going back now?"
He nodded. "I am retired and keep bees at my villa in Sussex. If you are ever in the vicinity, it would be my pleasure to show it to you."
"I'll keep that in mind," she said, and held out her hand to him.
The Adventure of the Field Theorems
by Vonda N. McIntyre
Vonda N. McIntyre is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning novel Dreamsnake. She is also the author of The Moon and the Sun (which also won the Nebula Award) and several other novels, including a Star Wars novel and several Star Trek novels. Other original novels include The Starfarers Quartet, Barbary (a book for younger readers), Superluminal, and The Exile Waiting. Much of her short fiction has been collected in Fireflood and Other Stories.
Readers have a tendency to identify authors with their characters, and this was certainly the case for Arthur Conan Doyle. He received piles of letters from readers asking for his help in solving actual crimes, to which he could only throw up his hands. Not only did Conan Doyle lack the rigorous, logical, machine-like Holmes-ian ability to penetrate subterfuge, but the author was also famously gullible. He repeatedly put his reputation on the line championing any hokey spiritualist who waved some ectoplasm at him. (In fact, the stage magician Houdini, who knew all the tricks of the spiritualists and who dedicated himself to unmasking them, displayed more Holmes-like behavior than the author ever did.) Perhaps the most embarrassing example of Conan Doyle's credulity was his publicizing the case of the Cottingley fairies—amazingly, the creator of Sherlock Holmes showed no skepticism when some mischievous teenage girls took photographs of themselves standing beside cardboard-cutouts of gnomes and fairies and then presented the images as real. This next tale shows us this side of Conan Doyle. Of course, in the wilds of an author's imagination, you can never be too sure what's real and what isn't.
Holmes laughed like a Bedlam escapee.
Considerably startled by his outburst, I lowered my Times, where I had