Heartbreaking Work: The Fictional and the Dead

• Click Click Boom
• Under the Sun

Thomm Quackenbush

"Sherlock didn't say that," noted Marlena. "Or not originally. It is attributed to him, but that would be like crediting you for coining it."

"What the everloving what are you talking about?" asked Frederick, the gas rapidly leaving his emotional tank. His lips pursed as he looked into the corners of his room -- swept and dusted by Marlena, though she couldn't say the last time they had seen a cleaning -- as though they might contain another person who had prompted her.

"'The game is afoot.' Not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's. He also never wrote 'Elementary, my dear Watson,' but that misunderstanding is more reasonable. He did say 'Elementary,' and he did say it to Watson, but not that exact phrase."

"I did not say he did, but how does this matter? Why is your precious book taking a back seat to this correction?"

She stared agog as though he were calling her very nature into question. "It matters hugely. How would you feel if someone put words into your mouth that you had never said?"

"I imagine that Sherlock, being fictional, and Doyle, being dead, are probably okay with it. Doyle was a Spiritualist, so maybe he isn't okay with it from the grave, but I wouldn't stake my fortune on it. If he is offended by the misquoting, I've never heard him objecting from the Beyond."

"Then we have to not be okay with it for them."

He rolled his eyes indulgently, implying that she was both ridiculous and charming. In that spirit, he said, "I will do my level best to be offended on behalf of the fictional and the dead."

"It's from Henry IV, Part 1, Scene 3," she said, adding, in case he needed it, "William Shakespeare."

"'Before the game is afoot, though still let'st slip.'"

"What?"

"That's the quote, isn't it?" he said in the insufferable way that meant he knew it was.

"How did you know that?"

"I am not grossly ignorant of the literary canon, despite what you seem to think," he said. "I wrote a paper on the Henry plays last month."

"And you remembered that Hotspur said that?"

"No," he said. "I remembered that the Earl of Northumberland did."

Marlena's eyes went blank, the first two fingers of her left hand pulling lightly at her bottom lip. He had corrected her. Worse, he was right. Numbness, fury, and arousal fought for supremacy of her body. None decisively won.

"In the future, I will be sure to cite any commonplace quotes," said Frederick, tapping her nose. "This is the crossed-eyed bear."

Her eye found life enough to glare. "You will not survive if you do that again. The tapping or mondegreens."

"So be it. 'Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it,'" he said. "Oscar Wilde."

"'What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done,'" she said tartly. "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. So, let me tell you a story."

He smiled. "I like stories."

"It's about you."

"I sometimes like stories about me. What genre?"

"Speculation."

His mouth drew in apprehension. "Ah, so fiction."

"We will see. So, turnabout. All that you said about me, at least involving that letter, could apply to you. You could mean it to throw me off. You like me -- god forgive you that you do -- and want to spend more time with me, so you stole my book and set up a scavenger hunt. Now you come in to raise the stakes. I wasn't at the print shop. I didn't hear this testimony. What if you made this all up so I would stick around, which still means you stole my book? Who else could?"

"Brilliant deduction," he said. "Wrong, but I do like hearing you come up with these things. The fact that you found me on the quad after you were done wrecking my room? And the broken things?"

"Easily explained with an accomplice. You passed your keys off to a confederate, who placed the note. They would have had ample time to photograph and print it while I was still asleep."

"Purely hypothetically?" Frederick asked though he did seem more unsettled than she had when facing accusations.

"Purely. You pointed out that your room locks when you leave. Someone with your keys had to be able to get in here, which obviates the need to pick the lock."

"So, they would have had to get my keys back to me, correct? I have a single, so no roommate with his own set."

"Yes."

"Elementary," he said, producing the keys. "I must have had these on me to return to the room. I did. We entered, so they were not outside possession."

"Not for a significant amount of time," she said. "The margins are slim and uncertain. It would have been insanity to do it, but possible."

"Not likely," Frederick pronounced. "Not for a convoluted method to hang out more with a sexy AF hookup, though I increasingly suspect you would be worth the subterfuge and cunning."

"Short of picking the lock or teleporting your keys, that means someone else does have a set." Her mood lightened in a flash. "Or, if not your keys, the master key for emergencies, in case a known epileptic thuds to the ground or water and debris inundates a floor below."

He grinned. It was an attractive grin, Marlena supposed. Good teeth. Probably saw some adolescent orthodontia, which would bespeak that he was not a ragamuffin before matriculating. Given his obscene dipping into the modern vernacular, she figured he could have been a scholarship student. That suggested a rougher upbringing. But, no, good teeth. Teeth so good that they had to be shaped by the hand of Dr. Morty Silverstein, DDS, at the cost of thousands.

She realized too late how long she had been studying his first bicuspid. A boy could get ideas.

"The RA or Safety and Security," he said, not noticing her gaze or having the sense to pretend he hadn't.

"It is means," she said, "though the opportunity is a matter of minutes, and the motive is a mystery."

"It's a lead."

"The game is afoot!" she said, adding, "William Shakespeare."