Chapter Three: Emily Hankins

Disclaimer: Fun. And. Games!

"To your left is Radio City Music Hall, where you'll notice the large round Art Nouveau designs representing earth, wind, and fire." A young man in a striped shirt and yellow ball cap waves his hand at the building across the street.

"Excuse me!" Joan Watson calls out loudly enough to be heard over the traffic of West 50th Street. The group of twenty or so tourists listening to the young man swivel their heads in her direction.

"That's not Art Nouveau. It's Art Deco. And the rondels you are pointing to don't represent earth, wind, and fire at all. They depict dance, drama, and song."

"Oh, uh, whatever. Sure," the young man says, shrugging. He turns back to the crowd. "The, uh, rondels? They were designed by Mr. Rockefeller himself to show his appreciation of, uh, dance, and drama and, uh, opera."

"No, you're wrong!" Again Joan calls out so loudly that several suited businessmen detouring around the tourists on the sidewalk glance in her direction. "The rondels were designed by Hildreth Meiere at the request of Abby Rockefeller. Her husband didn't really like art all that much. Or music. Or dance."

The young man in the striped shirt looks less unsure and more decidedly put out now. Hands on his hips, he says, "Excuse me, but who's leading this group?"

"My question exactly," Joan says. "Where's your official guide badge?"

The young man rolls his eyes. "You're serious? What are you, the cops?"

Joan can sense the tourists around them shifting uneasily. She presses her advantage. "I've been on this tour five times this week and every other time I was issued a headset to make hearing the guide easier on the noisy street. Yet you didn't give us any. Why not?"

"Listen, lady—"

"I don't think you work for the Rockefeller Center at all. I think you're running a scam here—tricking people into listening to your made-up garbage instead of following a legitimate tour group."

"And why would I do that?" The young man crosses his arms and glares at her.

"To solicit tips at the end. You're probably giving the real guide a cut of what you make as a kickback so he'll look the other way while he takes a break for an hour."

"You're crazy, lady!" The young man uncrosses his arms and laughs. Joan notices more than a few smiles among the tourists. Clearly their sympathies are with the guide—which is not a surprise. No one wants to admit to being scammed.

"If you are a real guide, it should be easy to prove," Joan says. "Show me your tour guide license. Every guide in New York City has to pass an exam and be licensed."

The young man throws up his hands and turns to the crowd around him. "So I get a few details wrong! Can you believe this? She's trying to get me fired! And I'm already having the worst day of my life. My mother's sick in the hospital, and then my girlfriend calls and says she's moving back to Oklahoma. Oklahoma! Is that even a real place?"

Someone in the crowd guffaws and the laughter spreads.

"And to make it worse," the young man says, pointing at Joan, "this woman didn't even pay to come on this tour, but I was being Mr. Nice Guy and didn't say anything. Just let her join the tour, nice-like, and this is what I get. You ever feel like the harder you try to be nice, the worse they kick you when you're down? Yeah, me, too."

More than a few expressions in the crowd are darkly disapproving and with a sigh, Joan says, "Okay, you know what? You want to listen to this guy, go ahead. I'll just report this to the management and let them handle it."

She walks back up the street to the ticket office.

One more bad moment in a day full of them. Somehow she'd slept through her alarm, the first time in ages she's done that. Not since her time as a sober companion has she had any difficulty rising—which she's sure Sherlock would say is a hint, if she needed one, that this case isn't what she wants to be doing.

Then the hot water cut out halfway through her shower and she'd had to leap over the side of the claw-footed tub, teeth chattering, feet slipping on the wet floor tiles.

Worst of all was the spoiled yogurt for breakfast. She gagged so hard that Sherlock came into the kitchen from the other room, concerned.

"It must have expired," she said, taking a swallow of coffee and burning her tongue. Sherlock picked up the yogurt carton and lifted an eyebrow before handing her the box of cereal from the counter.

And now this. It was Emily Hankins' fault, this silly detective work Sherlock had dismissed as beneath him.

"Beneath you, too," he said two days ago when she asked him to help.

"I know it's…odd," Joan said, "but Emily's convinced there's something weird going on with the Rockefeller Center tours. She's writing a newspaper feature about things to do in New York—you know, tourist stuff that's actually worth a visit. She went on the Rockefeller Center tour and it just didn't feel right."

"Why does anyone pay for a veritable blitzkrieg of questionable facts that are best forgotten as soon as possible? Why fill one's brain attic with useless trivia? That might be a better journalistic question for your friend to plumb."

"I'm not arguing with you about brain attics," Joan said. "You don't want to help? Fine. We aren't busy at the moment. I'll do it by myself."

And for the next two days she had, going on the tour at different times of the day. Each guide had his own patter and spiel and rhythm, though most of the details seemed to square. Joan was about to tell Emily that, her feelings notwithstanding, the tour was like most tours, a harmless if expensive way to spend an hour in the city.

Until this afternoon. Clearly the real guide is working in cahoots with this unlicensed one, but why? Just to take a lazy hour off? It doesn't make sense. Now all she can do is report her suspicions and hope someone follows up. Not a satisfactory conclusion at all, and Emily won't be happy, unsure whether or not to mention the tours in her article. If Joan hadn't tipped the imposter off that she was on to the scam, she could have followed him after the tour and figured out the details.

As she makes her way to a uniformed woman inside the Rockefeller Center, Joan has the unmistakable conviction that Sherlock would have handled this better.

X

"Excuse me!"

Sherlock Holmes' voice is loud enough to turn the heads of the customers in the small bodega near the brownstone.

"Excuse me!" he says again, flagging down one of the owners, a thin man with a heavy Pakistani accent. "Your dairy products are expired!"

"Can I help you?" The owner angles his body between Sherlock and the milling customers, an imperfect visual shield at best. "Is something wrong?"

"This yogurt," Sherlock says, lifting the carton to eye-level. "It has the distinctive appearance of being contaminated with mucor circinelloides, a mold that can cause serious health problems for people with compromised immune systems. The smell and taste, too, are definitely off."

He thrusts the open container at the owner.

"You opened it! Now you have to pay!"

"I think not," Sherlock says, putting the top back on the carton. "As you can see, the original expiration date has been marked out and a later date written in. Very neatly, too. If you weren't looking for it, you might miss it. Fortunately, I was looking for it. The inspectors at the health department will want an explanation. Other than, of course, your greed and willingness to put your customers' health in jeopardy."

The owner snakes out a hand and grabs Sherlock's forearm. "It's not like that," he says, sotto voce. "You mustn't say that. I don't want anyone to get hurt."

"Then explain why you are fraudulently selling expired products."

The owner lets go of Sherlock's arm and motions for him to follow him behind the counter to a recessed door that opens onto a small storage room. Boxes are stacked halfway to the ceiling along two walls. A desk sits askew in the center of the room, papers piled on top. As Sherlock enters, the owner closes the door behind him.

"You cannot call the health department," he says. "They will close me down."

"You are perpetrating fraud. You should be closed down."

The owner flushes hard, his face gleaming in the light of a single overhead bulb. From the look of his spare inventory, the bodega is clearly struggling financially. Any other grocery would have plenty of stock ready for turnover. Sherlock waves his hand at the boxes.

"Is this recent? This lack of business?"

"The new place on Atlantic, the big store that opened up a couple months ago. They're cutting into our sales. We might not be able to stay open much longer."

It's true that a discount grocery store, Key Food, has opened up several blocks away. However, something in the owner's manner is off—not that he's lying but he's omitting some crucial piece of data. Sherlock narrows his eyes and leans forward.

"And?"

"And what? I changed the dates on the yogurt. It shouldn't matter! You can eat it weeks or months after the expiration! I eat it all the time!"

"The markup on a case of yogurt can't make the difference between staying in business and insolvency. You're hiding something."

Now the owner looks truly panicked. "I'll stop changing the dates! Please, you have to believe me. Don't tell the health department!"

Better to void the field for now. Sherlock moves toward the door and the owner scurries ahead of him and pulls it open. "Please," he says, almost cringing.

"I live around the corner," Sherlock says. "I will know if you continue."

"Yes, yes. Thank you!"

As he walks home, Sherlock calls up the public health inspection records on his phone. No prior citations for the local bodega—which is surprising, given how worried the owner seemed to be.

From the corner of his eye Sherlock sees a motion on the stoop of the brownstone. Emily Hankins, Watson's friend, her finger still on the doorbell.

"She's not home," Sherlock says, fishing his key from his pocket as he climbs the stairs. "Out doing your bidding, I believe."

"Actually," Emily says, "I was here to see you. If you have a few minutes."

At once Sherlock is on uneasy alert.

"You wish to discuss Watson."

"If you don't mind."

"And if I do?"

Emily shrugs. "Then I'll leave. She doesn't even need to know I was here."

It's a dilemma, whether to hear her out and possibly share his own growing concerns, or send her on her way. Certainly sending her on her way is less messy, easier. If it were about anyone other than Watson, he would. With a sigh, he motions Emily inside. She takes a seat on the end of the sofa and he sits back in the chair opposite. For a moment no one speaks and the only sound is a car horn in the distance. Then Emily leans forward slightly and crosses her arms, a contradictory posture indicating both a willingness to share and a reluctance to do so.

Not a surprise, really. He feels the same.

"So," Emily says at last, "I've been worried about Joan since…well, you know. Since Andrew died."

"I, too." Emily's expression flickers enough to register surprise and Sherlock feels himself bristle. Why shouldn't he be worried. Watson's guilt about Andrew is like an undercurrent in everything she does these days. He sees it as well as anyone—better than most.

Apparently his expression gives him away more than he intends. Emily blushes visibly and says, "I mean, I know you care about her, too. I didn't mean to imply you don't. It's just—"

She lets the sentence hang in the air and Sherlock finishes it for her. "It's just that sometimes I do not choose to express that concern."

Emily uncrosses her arms. "Look, I don't really know you. But I know Joan. And she trusts you. I wasn't sure she was making the right decision when she gave up her medical career—and I wasn't sure about that whole sober companion thing—"

She glances up at Sherlock as if asking permission to continue. He nods and says, "Go on."

"And she probably told you that it took me awhile to come around to the idea that she might be a detective."

"Not might be. Is."

Emily bobs her head. "Is. I get that. And until…Andrew…she seemed happier than I've ever seen her. Energized. Not that she wasn't great at what she did before, but she was excited about what she was doing."

"And now? Not so energized? Not so excited?"

"Surely you've noticed."

Sherlock takes a deep breath and settles back in the chair. Emily Hankins isn't the first person to talk about Watson's emotional state since Andrew Mittal's murder. Detective Bell has broached the subject as well.

"My suggestion that she speak to someone about her feelings has fallen on deaf ears," he says. "I don't see what else I can do."

A flash of anger crosses Emily's face. Anger with him? With the situation? On behalf of Watson? A bewildering conundrum—just the sort of interaction he finds so exhausting with people he doesn't know well.

"Her confidence is shaken," Emily says, her tone more forceful than her words call for. Anger at him, then. Sherlock tips his chin down and considers.

"And you believe I can remedy that somehow."

"Last week she told me about the Carpenter case."

"The missing wife who absconded with the family savings."

"Joan's case. The one she was working hard on, until you stepped in uninvited and solved it."

Sherlock sits upright. "Watson appreciates my help. She often solicits it."

"And sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes she is perfectly fine doing things on her own."

"Ms. Hankins, it may have escaped your attention that the point of being a consulting detective is to illuminate mysteries and, hopefully, bring any wrongdoers to justice. Watson and I are not competitors. When we work in tandem, her insights are invaluable—"

"Right! When you work in tandem. But Joan was working on the Carpenter case alone and she was surprised when you stepped in without being asked."

"She told you this?"

"She's my best friend. Of course she did."

It's not Emily Hankins' almost-smug expression that exasperates him but the idea that Watson hasn't confided in him about something so personal. He has no hesitation in saying that Watson understands him better than anyone else—better than his immediate family, better, even, than Jamie Moriarity. That she does not feel he understands her is…disappointing.

Sherlock gets to his feet. From the look on her face, Emily is startled, but she gets up slowly.

"Thank you for expressing your concern," he says, one arm at his side like a soldier, the other indicating the way to the door. Emily blinks twice.

"I didn't mean to upset you," she says.

He isn't upset, not exactly. Discomfited, perhaps. It's vexing, this news about Watson's failure to trust him. It shifts what he thought he knew about their collaboration—the easy give and take that feels comfortable and productive—though apparently only to him.

He sees her to the door, still musing. "Shall I tell her you came by?"

Emily pauses long enough to shake her head. "I don't want to upset her either."

X X

The walk to the subway station is an obstacle course of baby buggies and older people pulling chrome shopping carts behind them. Emily dodges a young boy bouncing a ball and gives the woman she assumes is his mother a dirty look. Why do hipster New Yorkers feel entitled to let their children run wild?

Well, her own seven-year-old has been known to dart into traffic and knock other kids out of the way on the playground. Petite and brunette like her mother, Devin can power through a crowd like a tornado when she's overly excited—which to be honest, is much of the time.

In many ways Emily feels like an imposter as a mother. She watches her daughter navigating the world like someone watching a bug under a glass—curious and mildly amused but slightly removed, an annoyance to the bug when she does interfere. Although she knows mothers who swear they move in psychic, synchronized orbits with their children, Emily has never felt that way—has, in fact, struggled to understand her daughter. They are nothing alike—Emily calm and measured, her daughter quixotic and impassioned—one moment in furious argument with a playmate, the next tender and weepy over a wounded park pigeon.

Yet when she watches her daughter sleeping, leaning close enough to hear her whisper-soft breaths, Emily's heart gives a lurch and she knows without a doubt that if anything happens to her child she will die.

She feels like an imposter, in part, because she never imagined that she would have children. Nor marry. Nor live in a big city, let alone New York. Nor work for a newspaper writing features and sometimes getting an interesting assignment on the crime beat. Her life still feels alien to her—the settled steadiness of it after drifting without any real goals for so long.

One of the things she's always admired about Joan is her unwavering determination to reach her goals. Even back at the University of Michigan when they'd met, Joan had always known what she was going to do: Pre-med, medical school, a surgical residency, a practice in New York.

"You grew up there," Emily said. "Don't you want to try living somewhere else for a change?"

"That's why I came to Michigan for college," Joan laughed. "But I found out that after New York, there is nowhere else."

She'd made New York sound so enticing that although Emily had always imagined herself moving back home to Lansing, when she graduated she moved into a tiny walk-up apartment in Queens that she shared with Joan and two other medical students.

An English major, Emily worked first in a miserable job as a receptionist and then secretary for a small law firm. She was the go-to person when a customer wanted a recommendation at the independent bookstore where she worked on the weekends. By the time Joan was finishing her residency, Emily had had enough of both jobs and was considering going back to the Midwest.

"I'll miss this," Emily said one afternoon as she and Joan sipped coffee at a sidewalk café. "But I'm not really moving forward, you know? Nothing's really happening for me."

"Why not?" Joan said. "You're the only one who can make it happen."

Emily was taken aback.

"It's not that simple," she said. "I don't even know what I want to be doing."

Joan took a slow sip of her coffee. "You always liked writing," she said. "What about doing something with it?"

"Like writing advertising copy? No, thanks. I'm not willing to sell my soul."

"Like writing for a newspaper. Or a magazine. There are lots of publishers in New York."

Emily sighed. "In case you haven't noticed," she said, "the newspaper business is struggling. This is the age of citizen journalists publishing blogs. No one reads newspapers anymore."

"I do," Joan said. "I can't be the only one."

"I haven't even studied journalism," Emily said, ending the conversation with a dismissive wave of her hand.

But the idea had lingered. She'd never get a job at the New York Times but to her astonishment she was able to convince a small online publisher to take her on as an unpaid intern. Six months later she moved on to a paying job with a bigger paper—and now here she was, her life put together in a way she could never have imagined a few years ago.

Her phone vibrates in her pocket. Joan—probably calling with an update about the Rockefeller thing. Surely Sherlock hasn't told her about the visit?

"Hey, what's the news?" Emily says, trying to sound nonchalant and breezy. She hears Joan sigh on the other end.

"Not good," she says. "You were definitely right about the guides. Most of them are legit but there's at least one who's sitting out his assigned tour and letting a friend take over for an hour. Maybe he's just lazy and wants a break—or he might be up to something else. I couldn't find out. I did report it and the manager took all my information. That's no guarantee they'll do anything about it."

She sounds so downcast that Emily considers whether to comment on it.

"You still there?" Joan says.

"Oh, yeah. Well, you did what you could."

"What about your article?"

"Don't worry about that. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. I'll tell the readers to take what the tour guides say with a grain of salt. They should anyway. Who needs to know all the facts they throw at you on one of those tours?"

"That's what Sherlock said," Joan says. "You two should have a conversation sometime."

X X X

Before he actually hears the door open, Sherlock feels the change in air pressure.

"I'm home!" Watson calls. "Where are you?"

"In the study," Sherlock says. "Working."

Joan's footfalls are brisk and in a moment she's standing behind him. Swiveling his chair around, he notices at once her expression—not as haunted as it has been, her shoulders back like someone waiting to deliver news.

"You solved your case."

Joan shifts slightly and frowns. "No, not exactly. I mean, I confirmed that something shifty is going on with the Rockefeller tour guides, but I didn't solve everything. But that's okay. I solved something else, something that affects you and me directly."

"Which is?"

"You know the bodega on the corner?"

"The one that sold you bad yogurt."

Joan jumps slightly and then regains her composure. "This morning. You remember the yogurt I had for breakfast."

"I do indeed," Sherlock says. "In fact, I decided to investigate it."

Joan's shoulders fall. She takes a step back. "What do you mean, you decided to investigate it?"

"I mean," Sherlock says, eyeing her closely, "that I wondered why the expiration date on the yogurt carton had been marked out and rewritten."

"And you found out." A flat statement laced with disappointment. Sherlock rubs the fingers of his right hand together—a tactile distraction that keeps him focused on the present.

"I did not pursue it after all. I have been busy with other concerns this morning."

Immediately Joan's mood brightens. "Well, I know what's going on. Mr. Bhati, the owner—"

"You know his name?"

"Of course I know his name. I shop there all the time. His wife works there, too, and sometimes his son, Tahir, helps out."

"You know them? You've spoken to them?"

"Why do you look so surprised? They're our neighbors. Sort of. People we see all the time. Of course I speak to them."

He loves moments like this—if love is the right word—little windows into Watson's world, glimpses into how she sees and moves and knows things that have inexplicably escaped his attention.

"The thing is," Watson says, one hand on her hip, "that Mr. Bhati has been changing the expiration dates on his dairy because he's being blackmailed."

"Explain," Sherlock says, genuinely surprised.

"A couple of months ago a new health department inspector started pressuring the small businesses in this area to give him a 'donation' or he'd report violations and get them fined. At first Mr. Bhati agreed to it because the fine was so much more than the amount the inspector was extorting."

"And then the inspector raised his demands," Sherlock says. That explains the shrinking revenue, the scaled back inventory, the expired dairy products that couldn't be thrown out and replaced.

"When I confronted Mr, Bhati about changing the expiration dates, he told me about the blackmail. He's been too afraid to report it. He doesn't know who to trust in city hall."

"He confided in you. He trusted you."

"I guess," Joan says. "He seemed relieved when I started questioning him."

Even in the relatively dim light of the room Sherlock can see that Joan's face is lit, that she exudes self-satisfaction.

As she should, of course. He nods and says, "Well done, Watson. You've probably saved that family from losing their business."

"I thought you could call your contacts at the health department," Joan says. "I'm filing a report, but it might help if you—"

"I have no doubt that your word will be sufficient to launch an internal investigation," Sherlock says, turning his chair back around so he can see his laptop—and to hide any untoward expression that might linger on his face. "You are, after all, a respected professional, Watson. You hardly need me to hold your hand."

A/N: Real life got in the way of a quicker update! Hope you enjoy this tardy one! Thanks to everyone who reads, and double thanks to everyone who takes the trouble to leave a review.