The Barker Street Regulars

Robert, however, whenever I’d tried to finish the story, I’d found myself bogged down in all that business about Vermissa Lodge and the bodymaster, mostly because it had nothing to do with Holmes and Watson. I’d left the book open in the hope of reminding myself to plod on.
    “Ah hah!” Hugh exclaimed with great vigor and enthusiasm.
    “Applying myself to the Canon,” I said, hoping to avoid a trivia question about The Valley of Fear that I wouldn’t be able to understand, never mind answer.
    My vagueness succeeded to the extent that Hugh, after gesturing to Robert to keep his distance from the open book, spoke to his companion rather than to me. “Now, Robert, Holly presents us with an intriguing little puzzle. Open on her table is the volume you will certainly recognize.”
    Robert nodded solemnly.
    “Open to a certain work that makes a singular yet cryptic allusion to her profession,” Hugh continued, “and contains a doubly allusive line.”
    I was so mystified that I glanced at the book to see whether it had somehow turned its own pages from The Valley of Fear to The Hound of the Baskervilles. It had not. Furthermore, far from making a cryptic allusion, The Hound of the Baskervilles was explicitly about a dog.
    Hugh was beaming. After depositing his evidence bag on the table, he jabbed a fist of dramatic challenge at Robert and demanded, “Quote the line!”
    I know the answer now, of course. What I still find eerie is that in addition to containing a double allusion to my profession, the correct solution to Hugh’s trivia challenge hints at the identity of Jonathan’s murderer in a way that Hugh could not possibly have known. So, only if you consider yourself a genuine Sherlockian, I offer the challenge to you: What was the line?
     

Chapter Nineteen
     
    T HREE DAYS LATER, I presented Irene Wheeler with a close-up photograph of the cat. I’d taken the picture on Saturday after Rowdy and I returned from the show. About the show itself I will report almost nothing except that the stunning young malamute who went Winners Dog and Best of Winners had a name with eerily Holmesian connotations: Kaila The Devil’s Paw. Devil’s Paw? Devil’s Foot. Yes, indeed, Radix pedis diaboli, devil’s-foot root, the obscure African poison that the evil Mortimer Tregennis stole from Dr. Stemdale, the source of the toxin that left Tregennis’s sister dead and his two brothers completely demented, the same poison that Sterndale himself used on Tregennis and that almost did in Holmes and Watson when the Master’s experiment proved far more potent than he intended. Furthermore, Narly, as the dog is known, happened to be the grandson of a famous and utterly gorgeous top-winning malamute, Tracker, officially named, I swear, Ch. Kaila’s Paw Print. Yes, Paw Print, as what was frozen in the mud near the scene of Jonathan’s murder. Paw Print, footprints, as in those of a gigantic hound.
    What’s more, when Hugh and Robert unexpectedly turned up at the show to collect samples of white dog hair, they embarrassed me less than my father had done at a few thousand previous shows. But everyone knows Buck, whereas Hugh and Robert expected introductions and kept announcing that they were friends of mine. I dealt with them rather well, I thought. I warned them not to go around brandishing scissors and not to demand great hunks of show coat. Instead of telling my friends that the newcomers were Holmesian lunatics, I described them as researchers, a term that Hugh and Robert happily accepted. The description went over well with the dog people, too. Show types being, by definition, a competitive crew, the exhibitors, once assured that only small samples were required, seemed pleased to have their dogs selected as subjects in a scientific investigation and proceeded to inundate Hugh and Robert with information about correct coat and color in breed after breed. The investigators, however, were disconcerted to discover that in addition to all-white or predominantly white breeds like the kuvasz, the Great Pyrenees, the Samoyed, the West Highland white terrier, and the bichon frisé, there existed white-coated individuals in dozens of other breeds as well. In some, the boxer and the German shepherd dog, for example, an all-white coat was a disqualifying fault. In others, including the Alaskan malamute, it was perfectly acceptable in the show ring and, to my eyes, beautiful. Westies and bichons and such were obviously too small