South Floridian towns are like splatter paintings. A dash of vibrant purple flowers over there is side-by-side with the gray of a concrete elementary school over here and the orange of an art-deco surf shop on the other side of the street. Walk for any length of time, and you won't be able to miss a garage sale or a thrift store or an antique shop. You never know if you'll find a hidden gem like an Andy Warhol print from the 1970's or just Uncle Andy's failed attempt at watercolor. That's the thrill of the thing. It's why thousands of Floridians awaken at unearthly hours every Saturday—to Garage Sale, an activity that must always be depicted in capital letters.
Mary Hudson awoke to the sound of her alarm buzzing at one of those unearthly hours. As reality returned, she realized with a start that she was taking up more than her usual third of the bed. Harold wouldn't like that. She looked over to his empty side, and everything came back with a jolt. Of course Harold wasn't here. He was sitting in jail for a murder he had surely committed, but they were about to let him out. Insufficient evidence. It made her stomach turn.
Get with it, Mary Hudson, she said to herself as she got up and dressed and smoothed her hair. Her new friend Alice, the one from the grocery store, had invited her to do an American thing today, to ride around with her and look at garage sales and charity shops. She was determined to go, and she was determined to have a good time. She wasn't really sure why anyone would spend a whole day looking at other people's cast-offs, but she was set on finding out.
The door closed behind her, and she went out into the intensely humid air, already oppressive even before the sun had fully risen. She would never have chosen to come here, and she would never understand why anyone wanted to retire to a place where one could hardly catch breath outside for four or five months of the year. London might be wet and foggy, but it wasn't like this, as if the sun had singled you out and decided to beam on you specifically until you were ready to lie down and die underneath a blanket of hot, wet air. She shielded her eyes against the blinding rays breaking through the clouds and walked across the street to Publix, the supermarket where she had first met Alice.
Alice was everything Mary was not—loud, bright, chatty, and outgoing. At a different time and place, perhaps, Mary would have gently rebuffed her efforts at friendship, put off by her boisterous manner. But this was not that time, and Mary Hudson needed a friend. That's why she had let Alice persuade her to come today.
The hour was too early for the store to be open, so Mary waited on a bench outside. She waited five minutes, then ten, and finally fifteen, but Alice did not appear. Not for the first time, Mary wished she had a mobile phone. She would get one, Harold or no Harold. After twenty minutes, Mary decided Alice was not coming. Time to go home. Slightly surprised at herself, she realized that wasn't what she wanted to do. She couldn't spend another day holed up with her sewing and the television, waiting for the lawyer to tell her Harold was about to be free.
Instead, she walked back across the street with a determined tread and went to the condominium parking lot, where Harold's Volkswagen was parked. He would never let her drive it when he was home, but he wasn't here to stop her now. She got into the car and turned on the ignition. Mary Hudson was going Garage Saleing.
She drove past the huge Methodist church, bigger than any house of worship she had ever seen in England, and Sam's Bar-B-Q, which had given her food poisoning when she ate there. Scanning street signs carefully, she turned left onto Meleleuca Lane. This, Alice had told her, was the gold standard for Garage Salers, a long street of above-averagely wealthy people who weren't averse to putting their castoffs out for the masses on the weekend. She parked next to large group of other cars in a vacant lot at the end of the street, hoping her hip wouldn't give out before she could get back.
Mary started down the street with a determined tread. People were already swarming the houses with garage sale tables out, and she regretted the time she had lost waiting for Alice. Oh well. She had made it through plenty of sales at Sainsbury's and Boots back home, and she could make it through this. With a frequent shopper's instinctive eye, she skipped over the first two sales. Too many people. Too picked over. The third, however, was medium-sized with three tables in front of a two-story brick house, and the crowd browsing the hodgepodge of stock was minimal. She moved toward it, and as she did, she heard why the crowd had cleared off.
"—priceless family heirloom!"
"—bought for next to nothing at a charity shop."
She caught snatches of an argument going on between a short, red-faced woman behind a cash box and a tall, almost painfully thin young man with an English accent who was holding up the most hideous thing Mary had ever seen. It was the skull of some kind of cattle with huge horns, which would have been macabre in itself, but someone had seen fit to fill its empty eye sockets with light bulbs. She could only imagine how ugly it would be when turned on.
As Mary watched, the red-faced woman jerked the horrible object out of the man's grasp. "I can't let this go for less than forty-five dollars. My father would roll over in his grave!"
"Your father never even saw this," said the young man, speaking quickly. "It's no more than twenty years old at the most. I'll give you five dollars."
Mary saw the woman's eyes finally travel over to her, and the red face suddenly became the picture of good-humor. "May I help you, ma'am?"
"I just wondered what the problem is," said Mary, smiling as kindly as possible at the woman and the young man, who looked strangely calm for being in the middle of an altercation.
"It's no problem," said the woman guardedly. "This man doesn't want to pay what this piece is worth." Mary hardly thought the monstrosity in front of her warranted the word "piece," but she held her tongue.
"What's your side, then?" she asked the tall man, who looked down at her with his piercing eyes for a long, appraising moment before answering.
"This was made by an artist from the midwestern United States in the 1990's, and it was purchased for very little." He ran his hands lovingly over the surface of the disgusting object, while the lady clutched it protectively. "If you look here, you can see where she's tried to get rid of the traces of a tag, the sticky sort they use at the thrift stores around here. When I found it, it was thrown over there with a bunch of children's toys. No priceless heirloom would have been treated that way."
"But—but, no! No less than thirty-eight dollars," the woman sputtered, looking cornered. Mary knew that look. When a woman looked like that, it meant she was about to put her foot down to save face. She didn't know why she should care, but something about the way the gaunt, graceful young man looked at the nasty thing tugged at her. She pulled her wallet out of her purse.
"I'll take it for thirty-eight dollars." The young man's face registered blank astonishment, while the red woman was all smiles. She took Mary's fifty dollar bill and made change, then wrapped the skull in a brown paper bag and handed it to her. The moment Mary grasped it, she handed it to the young man. "Here you are, dear. I think this is what you wanted." The young man took the bag and pulled the skull out by the horn, hugging it against his thin frame. He didn't say anything, but she didn't mind. He looked so happy.
Mary smiled benignly at the woman with the cash box, who looked furious that the young man had gotten what he wanted without paying, and walked on down the street. After a moment, she felt something behind her and realized she was being followed. She looked back and met the eyes of the young man, who smiled at her, a smile that took his face from elegant and somber to childlike.
"My name's Sherlock Holmes," he said, thrusting his hand out awkwardly.
Mary shook it. "Mine is Mary Hudson. Would you like to shop with me?"
Sherlock looked confused for a minute, as if he didn't know how to respond. "All right," he said after a while.
He was the strangest companion Mary had ever had. He wouldn't talk for long stretches of time, and then all of a sudden, he would see something on a table, something as innocent-looking as a child's tea set, and it would set him off on a burst of factual information about the item's history. At first, she wondered if he was making it all up, if he had one of those psychological diseases that caused a person to fabricate complicated lies for no apparent reason, but after a while she realized that he was telling the truth. It was too logical, too likely. He knew the things he was saying. She began to be amazed at him.
After an hour, Mary's hip was beginning to ache, and the crowd of shoppers was beginning to dissipate. She looked over at Sherlock, who was fingering an old-fashioned magnifying glass. "I'm a little tired. I'd like some breakfast. How about you?"
He looked over at her, again surprised. "I'm fine."
"I'm not," said Mary, smiling. "Come and keep me company." She wasn't sure how he would respond to this, but he followed her back to the car like an overgrown bloodhound puppy. "Is your car here?" she asked.
He shook his head. "I walked."
"Get in, then." Mary looked on in amusement as Sherlock folded himself into the tiny Volkswagen, and then she pulled away from the sale-lined street and back into the small hubbub of downtown.
She wasn't sure why she liked the young man, but she did. There was something supremely in command and supremely helpless about him, all at the same time. He was utterly brilliant, she could already tell, but he also seemed a little bit unsure about what to do with himself. He couldn't be older than his early twenties, she didn't think. "Here we are," she said brightly, breaking the silence as she pulled into Cracker Barrel, the most American of American restaurants.
A young woman seated Mary and Sherlock at a table beside a window. The middle of the table held one of those peg games with the goal to leave only one. Mary scanned the offerings of pancakes and biscuits and breakfast meats while Sherlock solved the game on the first try and then played subsequent games where he left two, three, and four pegs on purpose. When the waitress came, Mary ordered a much larger breakfast than she could eat, hoping she could tempt her thin companion. The waitress's eyes lingered on Sherlock, and she seemed sorry to leave.
"Mrs. Hudson," Sherlock finally said, breaking a long silence. "There's a reason I'm here." His eyes were serious, but also kind. Mary was good at reading people, and she could tell he meant to be gentle.
"What is it, dear?" she asked, wondering what someone who had met her that morning could possibly be so worried about.
"I want to help you with Harold."
Mary looked back at him, doing her own appraisal. She saw a young face, a sad one, with beautiful bones that protruded a little too much from almost translucent skin. She saw intelligence and confidence, the absolute belief that somehow he could do what he offered. She saw need. For some reason, the young man in front of her had to help, had to try, at least. She had no idea if he could really do anything, but she knew she couldn't refuse him, no more than she could have walked away at the garage sale. "All right," she said quietly, and she was rewarded immediately by the sight of luminous happiness filling his unusual eyes.
You never know what you'll find when you go Garage Saleing, Alice always said. Mary Hudson looked across the table at Sherlock Holmes, and she had to agree.