A/N: Here's the third chapter. I'm on a roll here here. Hope you enjoy.

"Please…now will you tell us the circumstances of your grandson's return from Italy?" Sherlene asked

Mrs. Maberley nodded slowly but she looked the portrait of her grandson. Her memory took her back to the day her grandson had come to her house well over a month ago. It was a day that was still all-too-fresh in her mind.

That day, she had almost did not recognize the man that came to her house.

Douglas was no longer the man she remembered. Gone was the handsome fearless young man she had known him to be throughout his life. His eyes held no longer a spark of life and energy. They were dull and depressed with the gleam of an inner rage and unspoken pain. His hair was no longer bouncy and soft. It was thick and heavy with grease as if he never bothered or cared to wash it anymore. His body thin, bruised and sickly and his beautiful tan skin had taken a grayish white hue. It had seemed that in the space of a few months since she had last seen him before that day, Douglas had transformed into a broken and sickly man.

"My gallant boy…" Mrs. Maberley whispered sadly, her mind drifting again.

Luckily for Sherlene's patience, Mrs. Maberley once again quickly came back to herself and began to explain.

"You may remembered him as debonair and splendid Dr. Watson…" the old woman began, "You didn't see the morose and brooding creature he became. His heart was broken. In a single month, I watched him turn into a worn out, cynical man"

Mrs. Maberley believed that was the only reason for what caused the erupted change in her grandson. There were few things in the world that could cause such an amendment in a man like Douglas. His grandparents loved him. He was in no financial trouble. He had an occupation that he loved and a good company of friends. The only thing missing from his happy life was the love of an intimate companion of the fairer sex.

"A woman?" Sherlene asked, though she knew the answer. She had seen it before all too many times.

In her line of work, it seemed that some of the worse of criminals were those of her own sex. It was no secret that women were often overlooked as potential criminals. Society branded women as pure, clean and powerless, but Sherlene herself knew better. Just as men always had power over women, women always had power over men. That power was what humans classified as love. In the criminal world, love could make a man or a woman do unspeakable things to another.

Without a doubt, women could do just as much harm to men and destroy them all in the name of love. It had taken her many years, a lot of frustration and failures to pound that notion into the heads of Scotland Yard's finest.

Mrs. Maberley made to answer with an affirmative, but she hesitated, and then shook her head. Her emotions were getting away from her as tears swelled in her eyes and her voice shook. "He wouldn't speak of it. He was afraid of…upsetting his grandmother."

"And so you never learnt her name?" Sherlene asked

Mrs. Maberley could not pull herself away from her raging emotions long enough to answer. But Sherlene did not bother to press her any further. The elder lady had given her enough.

The woman detective turned in her chair to stand up and went over to collect her hat, gloves and cane. "It might be advisable for someone to stay with you tonight." She glanced over her shoulder to the doctor. "Watson?"

"Yes, of course," Watson readily agreed. If Sherlene was asking him to stay and protect Mrs. Maberley, she must have sensed an imminent danger even though he did not. Even after all these years, all his time spent in Afghanistan and later, with Sherlene and her oftentimes-dangerous cases, he still had not mastered that particular instinct.

"Oh no, I really couldn't ask for such a thing!" Mrs. Maberley protested, but Sherlene had already donned her hat and left the sitting room, heading outdoors.

Watson quickly assured Mrs. Maberley that he would be back before dark and not to concern herself. He thanked her for her hospitality and left the house, following after his bohemian lady friend.

By the time Watson caught up with Sherlene, she had stopped along the side of the entrance to the road leading to the house. She had stripped herself of the skirt she wore while visiting Mrs. Maberley's home, revealing the dark trousers she had hidden underneath. It was one of the little tricks Sherlene did to pass herself as a respectable woman. In truth, Sherlene hated skirts and dresses with a passion. As she once told him, skirts got in the way of an investigation and would tear far too easily. However, she often had to force herself to wear them to please the strict society she lived in.

It had taken Watson a long while to get use to seeing a lady wearing trousers on a daily basis when they were at home at Baker Street, and a little longer while to get use to the fact that she wore trousers under her skirt whenever they ventured outside. Though nowadays the people that hired her were well aware and acceptant (to a degree) of Sherlene's unusual habits, they still preferred her wearing a skirt. Watson, himself, was no longer bothered by it, as he accepted long ago that Sherlene was a remarkable and singular independent woman with an intelligence that caused her to shine above nearly all members of her sex.

Watson walked up to Sherlene and stopped just behind her. He noticed that she was looking out into the trees, foliage and slight lingering traces of fog surrounding the house, doubtlessly letting her great mind analyze the data given to her.

"Might be useful to find this um—what she call?—Violet," Watson suggested having remembered Mrs. Maberley had mentioned a young neighboring woman by the name of Violet while the old woman had escorted him and his friend into the house. From what little Mrs. Maberley told them, Violet had been around during Douglas' last days. "He may have confined something to her that he didn't tell his grandmother in his last hours."

Sherlene didn't answer.

"Holmes?"

It was then he noticed the perplexing intensity of her gaze. Sherlene wasn't analyzing at all, he realized. She was almost glaring at a singular patch of dense foliage a little further down the road. Bundling up the skirt, Sherlene tucked the garment under her arm and began to slowly walk towards the foliage while staying on the road. Watson, now understanding Sherlene knew something was amiss, mimicked her movement, staying close behind her just in case she needed him. When she stopped, she gestured with her cane for him to do the same. She then pointed the cane towards the shrub and called out, "Good afternoon, Mr. Dixie."

From an opening in the foliage appeared Steve Dixie's head. He was not wearing this hat this time and his expression was that of dumbfoundedness. There was no doubt in Watson's mind that they were both thinking the same thing along the lines of "How did she know he/I was there?" Dixie had hidden so well that a normal person would not have known he was there. He had not moved or made a sound. But then again, Sherlene always did defy the seemingly impossible.

"The old lady and the house are both under my protection," Sherlene warned as the pugilist stood up. In a lower voice that made her voice go into a very threatening tone that made her eyes sharpen dangerously, she added "And don't you forget it."

With that, Dixie sprinted off, followed by another, smaller, less brawny and white skinned thug. There was no doubt in Sherlene's mind that the two thugs were sent to Three Gables in order to spy on the house by the mysterious rich woman Susan met. She was now also sure that is was this mystery woman who paid Barney Stockdale to send Dixie to intimate her earlier this morning.

Sherlene turned back to Watson to hand him the bundled up skirt and give him two instructions. "Make sure they're gone. Bring your revolver tonight."

With that Sherlene separated from Watson by walking into the foliage and disappearing into it.

It was raining heavily by the time Sherlene reached the wearing down summerhouse she had noticed before when Mrs. Maberley walked them through the gardens to reach the house. She hoped to make use of it as a place of thinking now that she was certain the house was, for the moment, safe. As Sherlene walked towards it, mindless of the downpour of cold rain, she paused when she heard a crunch underneath her shoe. She paused to look down and noticed that there was glass on the ground. On an inspection of the exterior summerhouse, she realized the glass must of come from one of the windows. Some of the windows of the summerhouse were creaked and while other were broken, and many of the windowpanes were without glass.

Walking a bit more carefully to avoid getting any glass hiding in the wet grass lodged into her shoes, Sherlene entered the shelter. Besides a writing desk and a wooden chair, there was little inside the summerhouse. But as Sherlene observed, until recent weeks, there had been much use of the desk. Littered around on the desktop's surface were pen stretches and ink stains ranging from a two months to a month old. There was also some scratch marks made from the chair legs imprinted in the wood floor of the shelter.

Whoever was in this shelter had used this place had done a great deal of writing and had barely left until the job was finished. The shifting of the chair was the only movement the writer had done most of the time.

Not wanting to sit in the chair when she saw that the roof was leaking rainwater onto it, Sherlene sat against the edge of the desk and began to ponder. When she shifted to get more comfortable, a tiny hidden drawer popped out of the desk, startling her momentarily, but enough for her snap out of her pondering and to jerk her hand away from the desktop. After the surprise passed, curiosity emerged.

When she laid her hand on the desktop over where the drawer was hidden, she must have unwittingly hit a hidden switch, which triggered the drawer to open. She peered into it and saw a medium-size gold locket sitting lying in there. She pulled off her glove, reached in and picked up it up, bringing it closer to her face for better examination.

By an examination of the shine on the metal's surface, the locket was either relatively new or extremely well taken care of until of late. The faint smell of polish on the surface indicated it was the later rather then the former. Edged on the front of the locket was a large stylized cursive letter D.

"D…" Sherlene pondered out loud to herself, "…Douglas Maberley." Sherlene blinked her eyes, staring up at the roof in thought, still pondering. "Splendid. Debonair. To morose and cynical." She let out a breathe of air in thought and looked back at the locket. "…strong words…"

She opened the locket and was startled when she saw the condition of the tiny photograph picture inside. There was enough of the picture to make out the image was that of a woman. A woman just about nearing middle age but still young enough to show no strains of gray in her poofy dark hair. She was a wealthy woman from the evidently expensive hairpins in her hair and diamond earrings hanging on her ears. A large, but not large enough to call much attention, brown beauty mark was on area where the chin connected to the jaw just under the month on the left side. But the grotesque thing about the picture was the fact that this lady's eyes have been poked away from the image.

"Oh no!" Sherlene took a deep breath in to steady herself. Douglas apparently had great rage towards this lady, enough to want to see her harmed if he deformed her picture. "Who is this lady with no eyes?"

Disgusted, Sherlene snapped the locket closed, dropped it back into its drawer and slammed the drawer shut.

She roused from the desk when she spotted Watson coming towards her, joining her in the relative dryness the summerhouse provided from the rain. "Our course lies there," she told the doctor motioning with her hand towards the house.

"There must be something that she doesn't know she has," Watson told her. He was still convinced that something had been brought into the house. Whatever it was, it was important enough for someone to go to the trouble of sending spies to the house.

Sherlene nodded her agreement but added, "Or…probably wouldn't tell us even if she did know."

A/N: REVIEW! Tell how much you like or hate it, please! Seriously I won't be offended if someone doesn't really like it.