No Police Like Holmes Read Online Free Page A

watched in silence from the doorway as the rest of us strolled through the room. Mac dawdled over some faded paperbacks, the particular kind of book toward which his own collection mania is bent. I got caught up in the bizarre design of a Firesign Theatre record album called “The Giant Rat of Sumatra.”
    â€œDon’t waste your time with that,” Chalmers said when he saw what I was up to. He pointed with his cane to a glass case against the far wall. “There lay the real gems of my forty years of collecting Sherlockiana.”
    I put the album down and joined Mac and Renata in following Chalmers across the room.
    The case to which the collector had pointed was lined in red velvet, giving it the air of a reliquary. Reposing on the cloth were several letters, a calling card from Arthur Conan Doyle with a note scribbled on it, a small playbill from an early performance of the melodrama Sherlock Holmes signed by the lead actor, William Gillette, and several books whose bibliographical significance escaped me.
    Chalmers said, “Until I found it, no one even suspected the existence of-”
    â€œWoollcott!”
    Renata, grabbing his arm tightly, didn’t need to say anything else. Chalmers’s blue eyes, magnified by his thick glasses, grew even wider as he instantly saw what his wife was too flustered to voice.
    â€œI don’t-” He hesitated, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. This afternoon... everything was here when we left.”
    His wife nodded. “I know.”
    â€œWhat is it?” Mac asked sharply. “What’s missing?”
    â€œThe Hound of the Baskervilles manuscript,” Renata replied.
    â€œMuch more than that,” Chalmers added in an agitated voice. “There was also a first edition of the Hound inscribed by Conan Doyle to Fletcher Robinson himself. And a Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, the rarest of all Sherlockian books, made even rarer by a hand-written note on the first page from Conan Doyle to his mother.”
    I whistled. “That kind of stuff must be worth a pretty penny.”
    â€œPriceless!” Mac thundered. He tugged on his beard. “I find it hard to credit that our librarian misplaced them.”
    â€œThere’s no chance of that,” Renata said. “They were here when we left this afternoon after helping set up the display. They’ve been stolen.”

Chapter Four - “We’ve Had a Little Incident”
    â€œAnd it’s only my first month on the job,” Gene Pfannenstiel moaned, shaking his shaggy head.
    â€œI know,” I told the young librarian.
    â€œNothing like this ever happened anywhere else I’ve worked,” he assured me.
    â€œYou said that already,” I reminded him. “Twice.”
    Gene’s broad face, usually alive with the excitement of some bookish pursuit that would have put me to sleep, was a study in earnest concern. Or as earnest as a chunky man can look in a frizzy beard and no mustache.
    In pleated black slacks and a white shirt open at the collar, he was dressed more like an Amish storekeeper than the curator of special collections at the Lee J. Bennish Memorial Library. Blinking around at the rest of us, he looked about as worldly, too.
    â€œI should have asked to have special guards posted outside,” he fretted.
    â€œThat’s obvious,” said Lieutenant Ed Decker of Campus Security.
    â€œNot particularly helpful at this juncture, however,” Mac rumbled.
    By this time he had driven Woollcott and Renata Chalmers back to the McCabe house, where they were staying the weekend. The old man had left looking about ten years older.
    I wasn’t feeling so hot myself. It didn’t take a public relations genius to figure that news of the Sherlockian thefts would quickly overshadow everything else happening on campus this weekend. A major gift to the college - or parts of it, anyway - had been stolen almost as soon