The Great Shelby Holmes (2 page)

“Oh heavens!” she exclaimed with a shake of her head. “No need to panic, everybody! It's really nothing.” She excused herself, muttering “I told her not today” under her breath.

Maybe explosions were a routine occurrence in this apartment building? If that was the case, I'd take the army post any day over some crazy New Yorker with a stick of dynamite.

The building was eerily silent for a few minutes, and we all returned to the business of moving and unpacking boxes.

Mom gave me an uneasy smile. “Well, John, it looks as if you finally have something exciting to write about in your journal.”

Yeah, though I could've done without the stress of thinking we'd been bombed. For some reason, my grandma insisted on giving me a journal for my birthday every year. They were half-filled with unfinished stories of space travel and doodles of my unoriginal comic book characters: Awesome Dude, Tarantula Man, Sergeant Speedo, and Amazing Girl.

I stuck to fiction since there wasn't a reason to journal about my real life. Because my life was boring, dull, uninteresting, lackluster, monotonous, unexciting. (Grandma had also given me a thesaurus.)

I guess you could think that moving to a new place was exciting, but it was something we did so often that it was more of a pain. And it was hard. New friends, new teachers, new routine. Once I got all that down, the days on post would always run together: school, playground, homework, and bedtime. Repeat. Then we'd move and it would start all over again. It didn't matter if I was in Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, or Maryland. Somehow, it was always the same.

All that was about to change.

“Sorry!” Mrs. Hudson reentered our apartment, pulling someone behind her. “You know what to do,” she ordered through clenched teeth.

A skinny white girl with bright red frizzy hair came forward. She had on an oversized white lab coat and goggles pushed up on her forehead. From the waist up, she was covered with black soot, except for where her goggles had been. She placed a hand on her hip. “I've been informed by Mrs. Hudson that my
harmless and perfectly safe
experiment has made for an unpleasant moving day for you. I've been instructed to apologize.” She sighed heavily.

Ah, did she consider
that
an apology?

“Thanks, dear. Do you live in the building?” Mom asked, always in a rush to make friends for me whenever we got to a new place (mostly out of guilt, since she was the reason we had to move so much). But this girl, who looked to be no older than seven, was way too young for me to hang out with. I just turned
eleven
. I didn't need to spend the rest of my summer babysitting.
Especially
some weird science geek.

“Yes. Upstairs in 221
B
.” The girl walked over to Mom and extended her hand to shake. “How long were you in Afghanistan?” she asked.

My mom's arm paused in midair as she glanced over at me. We were both thinking the same thing.

How did she know that?

The girl continued, “You're an army doctor, I presume? And by the way you favor your right leg, it appears that you injured your left side somehow. Hip? I hear shrapnel can be quite painful.”

This was strange on so many levels. Mostly because whenever my mom's military service and injury were brought up, people avoided eye contact and spoke in a hushed voice. Not this girl. Nope. It was like she was asking about the weather. Her tone was even while her gaze mostly remained on Mom, but occasionally her attention would switch gears as if she was looking for something.

Mom's jaw was practically on the floor. “How did you—”

She was cut off by the sound of broken glass coming from the living room.

Awesome. Moving day kept getting better and better.

One of the movers removed a blanket that had been protecting a floor-length mirror.

“This wasn't wrapped up tightly
enough.” The guy shrugged and continued to unwrap the blanket. “Couldn't be helped.”

“Stop!” the girl shouted at him. She strode over and examined the broken glass.

Mrs. Hudson laughed lightly to break the tension. “Oh, it's just this thing she does.”

Um, okay.
As if
that
explained what was going on. Were all New York City kids like that?

“Hey!” the mover yelled at her. “What are you doing?”

The girl was on her hands and knees, her face mere inches from the guy's feet. Quickly, she jumped up and wiped her hands. “He kicked the mirror in.”

“I didn't—” the mover began to protest.

She pointed to his shoe. “Based on the angle of the hole in the mirror, which is the size of the toe of your boot, the hole occurred at an upward trajectory, an angle that matches the height of our front steps. Therefore, I've correctly deduced that you did indeed kick the mirror while walking up the steps. While in all probability said event was an accident, it certainly was your fault.”

The only thing clear to me was that I now lived among bombers and freaks.

“Would you care for me to draw a diagram, or are you going to save us all time and confess?” The mover stood there, dumbstruck. The rest of us were shocked as well.
Except for Mrs. Hudson, who seemed amused and a little bit tired.

The mover stuttered for a few moments before bending down so he was eye-to-eye with the girl. “Who
are
you?”

Her lips curled upward into a satisfied smile. “I'm Shelby Holmes.
Detective
Shelby Holmes.”

CHAPTER

2

S
ince
I
was
sick
of
unpacking
I
decided
to
spend
the
next
morning
outside
,
on
the
steps
of
our
new
home—a brownstone building in Harlem, which is way on the upper, upper west side of Manhattan. Mom was busy with meetings at her new job at the Columbia University Medical Center. She gave me permission to explore the neighborhood, as long as I was careful and remained in a ten-block radius of our building.

Careful?
I'd rather take my chances on the streets of Manhattan than be stuck inside an apartment building with some girl who liked to set off explosives.

As much as I wanted to walk around my new neighborhood and maybe also meet some people who weren't trying to kill me, I was a little overwhelmed. New York City was very different from anywhere else we'd lived. On the army posts, we were relatively contained. Now the possibilities were endless. I had no idea where to start. Did I head east?
Or west? Or uptown? Or downtown? And which way was east? Or west?

Instead, I settled in with my journal. Yeah, it was old-school that I favored pen and paper over a computer. But there was something, I don't know, more personal about writing a story out with your hand instead of tapping at a keyboard.

Not like I'd done a lot of writing lately.

I hadn't written anything in months. I'd tried, but I just couldn't do it. It was pretty ironic that when things were actually happening in my life, I froze.

But now … I suddenly had an itch to write. I looked at the blank pages, trying to find some way to describe what happened yesterday. How did this little girl know all that stuff about Mom? And the mover? I was fascinated, but also really, really creeped out.

I considered myself lucky she hadn't turned her attention toward me.

Just then, the front door opened and shut with a bang. Without even turning my head, I knew my luck had run out.

Shelby skipped down the steps, leading a white-and-brown English bulldog on a leash.

“John Watson”—she nodded at me—“meet Sir Arthur.”

I reached down and petted the dog, who slumped happily and rolled over so I could rub his belly.

Great
. The only living creature to welcome me to town was a slobbering dog.

“Sir Arthur?”

“Well, he
is
British,” she remarked. “And the best dog ever. Since the Queen hasn't seen fit to reply to my correspondence about making such an extraordinary animal an official member of the Order of the British Empire, I've taken it upon myself to honor him with the designation of respect he deserves and call him ‘Sir.' ”

That dictionary Grandma had also given me was going to get some serious use if I kept talking to Shelby Holmes.

She bent down to give him a quick belly rub. “Well, we've got our rounds to make. Come on!”

The dog rose reluctantly and continued down the stairs.

“Wait!” I called out, surprising myself. Before I could really think things through, I decided to go for broke. “Can I come with you?”

Yeah, she was strange. But I had to find out how she'd done all that stuff yesterday. Okay, and I was a little intimidated to walk around the neighborhood by myself. Not like a tiny girl could do much to defend me, but at least we had Sir Arthur.

Shelby shrugged indifferently. “Suit yourself.”

As we walked down our street, lined with brownstones that matched our own building, Shelby launched into a detailed explanation of her “rounds.” Honestly, I could only follow part of what she said. She talked really fast and was rattling off a long list of people she always checked in with daily.

I did, however, understand one thing: Shelby Holmes was a very nosy girl.

I started to count the blocks as Shelby turned onto Lenox Avenue (that's one block away from home). I was surprised by all the taxis and cars that whizzed by. There were so many things to take in: the noise, the stores with signs in foreign languages, the people, the different outfits (one guy had on colorful silk pajamas and a matching hat), and the crowds as we crossed 125th Street (now we were five blocks away from home, or was it six?).

I nodded at a guy who was selling hats at a stand. He had these cool twists in his hair. There should be no surprise that the barbers on army posts only knew one style: buzz cut. Nearly every single person we saw greeted Shelby by name.