The Barker Street Regulars

build, his jaunty mustache, and the outdoorsy glow on his face, he could’ve been about to accept an important scientific award for having invented an ingenious contraption that enabled researchers to investigate the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, and other places with low potential for development as family vacation spots. Both men made ordinary remarks about my neighborhood. Yes, I agreed, the townhouses that Harvard had built on the opposite side of Concord Avenue were a big improvement, and it certainly was convenient to have a branch of the library right across the street. Furthermore, neither Hugh nor Robert asked whether I owned the house or rented my floor, and neither stooped to making any sort of ill-bred reference to the increase in property values that has accompanied the gentrification of the area.
    As I was contemplating the happy prospect of raising my tenants’ rent, Rita came down the back steps, and I felt ashamed of myself. When I performed introductions, Robert and Hugh were gracious and charming.
    They said normal things like How do you do? and nothing at all about Sherlock Holmes. This phenomenon was, it seemed to me, a miracle on a par with my letting sixty social seconds elapse without mentioning dogs, not that it’s ever happened, but, hey, if Robert and Hugh, why not me?
    After explaining that she had to dash off to a meeting, Rita murmured to me, “You were right about that psychic after all. She got my poor patient’s hopes all built up, and now, all of a sudden, she announces the dog is dead. I am outraged. Will you be around tomorrow morning?”
    “No, I’m going to a show. Tonight?”
    “I’m having dinner with someone. A person of the opposite sex, actually. A man.”
    “Rita, I know which is the opposite sex. You have a date,” I informed her. “Well, have a good time.”
    Still without mentioning Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, fog, gaslights, gasogenes, violins, cocaine, Jezail bullets, or anything else even remotely related to their obsession, Robert and Hugh seconded my good wishes and said what a pleasure it had been to meet Rita. Following their fine example, I refrained from asking whether the date owned a dog.
    Once Hugh and Robert were in my kitchen, the availability of dog hair was embarrassingly obvious. I’d given Kimi a token, useless brushing that morning and vacuumed everything, including her. During my absence, a malamute storm had blown in to whip up whitecaps on the floor in the form of wisps of fluffy undercoat. Oblivious to the clumps of hair springing from her hindquarters, Kimi dashed up to welcome our visitors. “Robert, she’ll get hair all over you!” I warned about a second too late. “I’m sorry.”
    “It doesn’t matter in the least.” A true gentleman!
    His dark topcoat bore a long, wide swatch of white. “Is she suffering from some sort of condition?”
    “No,” I said. “This phase is the worst. The undercoat comes out first, this wooly stuff, and then the outer coat, the guard hairs. That part isn’t quite so bad. Kimi, you are a good girl. It’s not your fault, is it?”
    Hugh, meanwhile, was crouched down collecting samples from the floor and transferring them to a small brown paper bag. The activity fascinated Rowdy, who has always taken a keen interest in the tools of housework, mops, brooms, vacuum cleaners, and dust cloths, all of which he apparently regards as rival dogs, and an even keener interest in people, especially people displaying peculiar behavior. Like a psychiatrist evaluating a potentially explosive patient, Rowdy quietly observed Hugh from a distance of a few feet. Then, reaching a benign diagnosis, he calmly gave Hugh a big, wet kiss. Hugh answered with a childlike grin of surprise and awkwardly thumped Rowdy’s head.
    I said, “Rowdy, enough. That will do. Kimi, here, let’s get a nice clump of fresh hair from you.”
    Rising, Hugh reached inside his jacket to extract a pen from the array lined up in the plastic pocket-protector in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. “I’ll need to label this,” he explained as he stepped toward my kitchen table, on which rested my one-volume Doubleday edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. The book lay open to display two pages of The Valley of Fear. I liked the beginning, the part about Fred Porlock, the Tragedy at Birlstone, and especially the cipher message that Holmes decodes by consulting an almanac. As I refrained from admitting to Hugh and