Sherlock flicks on the flashlight and stares at the laundry ledger. He sits up, shedding sleeping bag and forcing Joan up too as precious heat drains away into the night. Sherlock appears oblivious to that. He sticks the flashlight between his teeth and leads through the pages, grunting when he reaches the end of the routine communal bales and the start of the personal items, and the names. His gaze whips, fast but heavy like the lash, up to Joan's face. "Why did you have this in your sleeping bag, Watson?"

She flushes. "I was reading it."

"I deduced that much. Find anything interesting?"

She steels herself. Looks him in the eye. "A lot of Holmes."

He stares back at her, and she cannot read him. "Yes."

He drops his head, then, and his gaze follows after, like a shadow lurching to keep up as you hurry between street lamps. He scans the book.

Joan waits, lips pressed together, determined to ignore the cold. There is silence as Sherlock sits with the page open and his face pointing towards it, but his mind obviously far, far off. "Ah!"

Joan tries to see the entry which startled him but cannot. She waits, but he just closes the ledger, slides it down inside the bag, and settles back in his original position.

Joan hesitates. The moment, their spark of intimacy and love, is so far gone she could probably see it soaring over Long Island if she tried, but Sherlock is composing himself for sleep and has not unzipped their sleeping bags. She shuffles down beside him again, feeling his warmth and his distance like the dizzying head-rush sensation in a dream, just before you teeter over the precipice.

"A lot of Holmes," Sherlock remarks into the atmosphere.

"Five," Joan says. Is that a lot? In one family, she guesses it is. If there were five, say, cops in one family, you'd say that was a lot, you'd say it must run in the blood, you'd mention it every Thanksgiving dinner and chuckle.

Presumably family reminiscences about mental health don't work like that.

After a while Sherlock says, "Aren't you going to ask me?"

She dislikes asking. Prefers deduction. Prefers still when he volunteers the truth, when it so closely involves his own history."Maybe later."

She turns away, but as she does she sees him staring, a faint frown on his brow, and his lips just parted as if he was about to speak and then did not know what he was going to say.

Then he speaks.

Sherlock's voice is light and low in the darkness. "For many families, coming to America is a sign of new beginnings, of the potential for success. In my family it has long been a sign of failure."

He pauses. Giggles and rustles waft across from the Radical Types. There is a clanking of beer cans as someone rolls over in their tent.

Sherlock resumes. "This place. An asylum. A place to keep the people who embarrass you by their strange behaviour and their refusal to abide by the rules of society. Your lunatic relations."

Joan remains still.

"Not quite a hospital, not quite a prison. Anyone who could handle a canoe might escape. Anyone who could persuade the supervisors that they had been, somehow, cured, could ask to be sent home. But given that the families most embarrassed by lunacy, the families who could afford to send someone to an asylum, were the wealthiest, there was usually someone around who wanted to keep that money rolling in."

He rolls over, lies on his back looking up to where stars would be, if the sky were clear. "You saw the jetty here. An elegant construction with a small shelter and a place for the carriage to wait. Visitors were then taken up to the house."

"It's a five minute walk."

"Some visitors, Watson, were catatonic."

She has a clear picture in her mind, then, of a figure lying on the wooden planks of the landing, in a coarse white coat, his arms strapped around his torso, his face turned up to the sky, pleading.

"This place was discreet and difficult to reach. It took us two hours to drive here in a Lexus, Watson. Imagine trying to visit an imprisoned relative in a pony trap or on foot. And then you would require a boat."

"There must have been regular deliveries, staff visiting the mainland."

"Correct, Watson, and visitors would find themselves sharing a vessel with tinned and dried goods and supplies of fuel and medicine."

"So what ended it?"

He gives a short laugh. "What ends most criminally negligent ventures?"

"The authorities found out they were treating their patients cruelly and shut them down."

"Your faith in the regulations is touching, Watson, but no. In this case, as in many others, the end came for quite another reason. The owners found something more profitable to do."

She thinks organised crime, gangs, assassination.

Sherlock's mouth twists. "They opened a chain of care homes for the elderly."

She recalls the dates on the mouldy documents they found earlier. "1963. The end of institutionalisation."

"Yes. But this was not a state hospital. It was a private business. A hotel."

"So these people were guests."

"Well, they certainly paid. The entertainments programme left something to be desired."

He falls silent.

Joan has nothing to add, to query. He has offered up his privacy. She dare not touch it.

He switches off the flashlight and they lie still, and eventually, Joan sleeps.

Author's Note: Just to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous 2014. -Sef