Short Story : The Adventure of the Cardboard Box
When Antimony Holmes turned six years old, she received a very special gift, one that would stick by her through thick and thin throughout the years to come.
It was a boxed set of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, and having read them she instantly fell in love.
From A Study in Scarlet to The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place, Antimony ate them all up with gusto. And it helped that she could imagine that she was one of Sherlock’s distant relatives, what with them sharing a surname and all. It’s probably why we became friends in the first place.
After all, my name is Watson.
The only problem was, once she’d started reading the fifty-six short stories and four novels contained in the two large volumes, she started to see mysteries everywhere she looked.
At school, if someone lost a pen, she’d assume there was something sinister behind the disappearance, even if it had just rolled under a desk.
At home, if one of her parents was working late, she assumed that there was some sort of conspiracy involved to prevent them from being at home and suspected that someone would break into their house a kidnap her or one of her siblings, holding them to ransom.
But so far none of her imaginings had ever come true.
Until Antimony turned seven.
Her birthday party had been arranged for the Saturday afternoon before she turned actually turned seven, so as luck would have it she’d be getting all of her presents early this year. I was the first of her friends to arrive, and sat patiently at the dining room table. Her fifteen year old brother, Bromine, had been allowed to invite a couple of his friends along, and they were hogging the TV so none of Antimony’s friends could watch when they arrived. They were playing X-Box, and making an awful lot of noise about it. Bromine’s friend Mickey was picking his nose, then touching the pads on the controller. Antimony made a mental note to wipe the controls down before she had a go. The other kid was called Albert, and he looked shifty. He kept looking round the room, examining things, appraising them, as if he was planning on taking something. Antimony narrowed her eyes at him; she’d have to keep an eye out for anything that might go missing and remember to check Albert’s bag before he left.
Her younger sister, Astatine, was sat in a corner, playing with her doll’s house. She was pretending to feed her toys cups of tea from a plastic tea set, which made her look a little on the crazy side in my opinion, but at least she was being quiet. And not hogging the TV like some people I could mention.
Antimony’s oldest friend Violet was the next to arrive. She was holding a large box in her arms, wrapped in paper that was covered in ponies. Ponies were Antimony’s second great passion, after mystery novels.
“Hey, Mony,” Violet beamed, having not seen her friend since the day before, “Happy birthday.”
“It isn’t until Tuesday,” Antimony replied, graciously taking the box from Violet, “but thank you.”
“Welcome,” Violet said, running into the living room to play. She stopped short when she saw the three older boys, then looked at Antimony.
“Where can we play?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about them,” Antimony reassured her, “they’ll be fine, just grab a seat.”
Violet looked at the boys nervously as Antimony took the present into the next room, placing it on the kitchen counter. Violet thought about sitting in the living room, then changed her mind and had a seat at the dining room table next to me. She gave me a little smile. We weren’t close.
“Hello Violet,” I said weakly.
“Hello Willa,” she replied, then turned her attention to where Mrs Holmes had laid out plates of food. There were sandwiches filled with cheese, ham and lettuce, fairy cakes decorated with tiny ponies, bottles of orange squash as well as lemonade and cola, and a box of chocolates – Cadbury’s Favourites, to be exact. They’d been a present from Antimony’s grandma, who hadn’t been able to make it due to an ongoing illness that had left her bedridden. I couldn’t help noticing Violet watching the box, but she looked away when she caught me watching..
I glanced away from the food to where Antimony was standing close to the front door, still waiting for the rest of her guests. As they arrived one by one, she greeted them each cordially and guided them into the living room. Inevitably, they all veered away and ended up at the dining room table with Violet and myself.
Mr and Mrs Holmes soon emerged from where they had been preparing a birthday cake for Antimony – I say preparing, but what I mean is putting candles on the store-bought sponge they’d picked up in the morning. They walked cautiously into the kitchen, carrying the cake box between them, and started to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. All us kids joined in.
As they approached the dining room table, Antimony’s little sister Astatine waddled into the room, carrying one of her doll’s in one hand. It was a character from Frozen – I’m not sure which one; Anna or Elsa, I never watched it – and it dangled from her hand by one arm. With the other hand she started to tug at her mum’s skirt.
“Mum, can you tell Bromine!” she said, not clear on what he should actually be told.
“What’s the matter, honey?” her mum asked calmly, “What has he done?”
“Nothing,” Astatine admitted, “I just think that Antimony should have the room – it is her birthday, after all.”
Mrs Holmes smiled at her four year old daughter, then gave Mr Holmes a look. He rolled his eyes behind his glasses, then headed into the living room.
“But dad!” we could hear Bromine shouting after his father had spoken quietly to him, “You guys said I could play games with my friends.”
“Not in the living room,” Mr Holmes said more silently than his son, “you know it’s your sister’s birthday.”
“I got her a card, didn’t I?” Bromine replied.
“No, your mother and I got her a card and you signed it! You didn’t even get her a present.”
“Well, it’s not like I have a job or anything,” Bromine replied haughtily – I don’t know what he had to be haughty about, admitting he didn’t have a job. He’d never even had a paper round as far as I was aware.
“Just go to your room,” Mr Holmes said in a defeated tone, “you can take the X-Box up there if you want.”
Noisily, Bromine stormed up to his room, his two friends unhooking the game console and following him up the stairs.
“Come on kids,” Mr Holmes said, coming back into the dining room, “let’s take it into the living room.”
Antimony’s guest started to file into the living room as Mr and Mrs Holmes picked up the plates of food and drink to take in to them. As they did so, Mrs Holmes noticed something was wrong.
“Malcolm, honey, have you seen the box of sweets?”
“They were on the table a moment ago,” Mr Holmes replied, gesturing toward the dining room table, “they probably just fell on the floor.”
Mrs Holmes crouched down on all fours, lifting the linen cloth and peering under the table.
“It’s not here,” she said, looking at her husband, “where could they have gone to?”
“I think I have an idea,” Mr Holmes fumed, marching up the stairs to Bromine’s room.
Antimony watched him leave, then approached the table, looking at something on the linen. A chocolate covered finger print was on the table cloth, a perfect smear in the middle of the table. Antimony looked at it closely, picking something from the cloth, then walked back towards me.
“I don’t think this was Bromine,” Antimony mused, silently confiding in me.
“Why not?” I asked, puzzled by her certainty that her rebellious brother wasn’t responsible for the missing chocolate box.
“Call it a hunch,” Antimony grinned, “Come Watson, the game is afoot.”
I rolled my eyes. Sherlock Holmes had, according to Antimony, only said these words once, in the 1904 story The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, but I guess it was such a famous quotation that she couldn’t resist. This was, after all, her first real mystery.
Voices could be heard from upstairs, raised voices as Bromine declared his innocence, “I didn’t take no stupid chocolates! You’re always blaming me!”
Mr Holmes walked back into the dining room, looking dejectedly at his wife.
“He doesn’t have them, Gabby,” he said.
“Then where could they have gotten to?” Mrs Holmes asked rhetorically.
Antimony walked into the living room, where her friends all sat around on the floor playing with her new toys, and I followed her. She walked slowly amongst them, watching them keenly, as I watched her from the corner of the room. She passed her sister Astatine who had somehow managed to worm her way into the birthday celebration with her doll’s house and Frozen toy, and she gave her a smile, then Antimony’s gaze stopped next to Violet, a concerned look on her face.
I think she’d found her culprit.
“Can everyone be quiet please,” Antimony said loudly, causing everyone to stop playing, “there has been a theft.”
Mr and Mrs Holmes heard this from the dining room, and rushed into us, looking appalled that their daughter was accusing an entire room of children of being thieves. I smiled as I watched the action unfold – I’d never much liked Violet anyway.
“A box filled with chocolates has gone missing from the dining room, and I suspect that someone in this room knows where they are.
“At first,” she continued, “I suspected, as my parents did, that my brother Bromine was responsible for the missing sweets. However, although he may have had the motive, he did not have the opportunity. At no time between the chocolates being on the table and going missing did Bromine actually enter the kitchen.”
Mr and Mrs Holmes looked down at their feet, obviously feeling guilty about blaming their innocent son.
“Therefore my suspicions next lay at the feet of Violet Johnson...” Antimony announced. I smiled, waiting for the accusation.
“...Although she may have had ample opportunity,” Antimony continued, “and clearly coveted the said confectionary as I observed from when she’d been sat at the table, it is clear from her clean hands and a lack of any hiding place for the chocolates that she is also innocent.”
I furrowed my brow. If it wasn’t Violet, then who could it have been?
“It was then that I started looking closer to home,” Antimony said, “I noticed when I first checked the area where the chocolate had been that there was a brown, chocolaty fingerprint, most likely left by the thief... even from a distance I could see it was too small to have belonged to my brother, thus clearing him once again, but upon closer inspection I could see, by comparing it to my own hand, that the print was also much smaller than my own.”
Smaller than her own? Then who was left?
“There was also a strange material on the cloth,” Antimony observed, “a small piece of shiny fabric that, although I didn’t instantly recognise it, has since struck a chord.
“Finally,” Antimony concluded, “as I walked around the living room, I noticed another fingerprint, similar to the one on the table cloth. This one was on...
“...The doll’s house!”
Everyone looked at the doll’s house, then at the little girl sitting next to it. Astatine started to cry as Antimony approached her.
“I only wanted my dollies tea party to be more real!” she blubbed, as Antimony opened the front of the doll’s house to reveal the missing box chocolates.
“My word, Antimony,” I said to her from across the room, “However did you know?”
“It was the piece of material that convinced me of the solution,” Antimony revealed, “once I saw the print on the doll’s house I suddenly remembered where I had seen the piece of material before. It was a piece of the snowflake cape on Astatine’s Elsa doll!”
“I don’t know how you put it all together,” I mused, shaking my head.
“Why my dear Watson,” Antimony Holmes smiled at me with pride, “it was elementary.”
Originally Posted 29/1/2015
Result - Joint 2nd Place
It was a boxed set of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, and having read them she instantly fell in love.
From A Study in Scarlet to The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place, Antimony ate them all up with gusto. And it helped that she could imagine that she was one of Sherlock’s distant relatives, what with them sharing a surname and all. It’s probably why we became friends in the first place.
After all, my name is Watson.
The only problem was, once she’d started reading the fifty-six short stories and four novels contained in the two large volumes, she started to see mysteries everywhere she looked.
At school, if someone lost a pen, she’d assume there was something sinister behind the disappearance, even if it had just rolled under a desk.
At home, if one of her parents was working late, she assumed that there was some sort of conspiracy involved to prevent them from being at home and suspected that someone would break into their house a kidnap her or one of her siblings, holding them to ransom.
But so far none of her imaginings had ever come true.
Until Antimony turned seven.
Her birthday party had been arranged for the Saturday afternoon before she turned actually turned seven, so as luck would have it she’d be getting all of her presents early this year. I was the first of her friends to arrive, and sat patiently at the dining room table. Her fifteen year old brother, Bromine, had been allowed to invite a couple of his friends along, and they were hogging the TV so none of Antimony’s friends could watch when they arrived. They were playing X-Box, and making an awful lot of noise about it. Bromine’s friend Mickey was picking his nose, then touching the pads on the controller. Antimony made a mental note to wipe the controls down before she had a go. The other kid was called Albert, and he looked shifty. He kept looking round the room, examining things, appraising them, as if he was planning on taking something. Antimony narrowed her eyes at him; she’d have to keep an eye out for anything that might go missing and remember to check Albert’s bag before he left.
Her younger sister, Astatine, was sat in a corner, playing with her doll’s house. She was pretending to feed her toys cups of tea from a plastic tea set, which made her look a little on the crazy side in my opinion, but at least she was being quiet. And not hogging the TV like some people I could mention.
Antimony’s oldest friend Violet was the next to arrive. She was holding a large box in her arms, wrapped in paper that was covered in ponies. Ponies were Antimony’s second great passion, after mystery novels.
“Hey, Mony,” Violet beamed, having not seen her friend since the day before, “Happy birthday.”
“It isn’t until Tuesday,” Antimony replied, graciously taking the box from Violet, “but thank you.”
“Welcome,” Violet said, running into the living room to play. She stopped short when she saw the three older boys, then looked at Antimony.
“Where can we play?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about them,” Antimony reassured her, “they’ll be fine, just grab a seat.”
Violet looked at the boys nervously as Antimony took the present into the next room, placing it on the kitchen counter. Violet thought about sitting in the living room, then changed her mind and had a seat at the dining room table next to me. She gave me a little smile. We weren’t close.
“Hello Violet,” I said weakly.
“Hello Willa,” she replied, then turned her attention to where Mrs Holmes had laid out plates of food. There were sandwiches filled with cheese, ham and lettuce, fairy cakes decorated with tiny ponies, bottles of orange squash as well as lemonade and cola, and a box of chocolates – Cadbury’s Favourites, to be exact. They’d been a present from Antimony’s grandma, who hadn’t been able to make it due to an ongoing illness that had left her bedridden. I couldn’t help noticing Violet watching the box, but she looked away when she caught me watching..
I glanced away from the food to where Antimony was standing close to the front door, still waiting for the rest of her guests. As they arrived one by one, she greeted them each cordially and guided them into the living room. Inevitably, they all veered away and ended up at the dining room table with Violet and myself.
Mr and Mrs Holmes soon emerged from where they had been preparing a birthday cake for Antimony – I say preparing, but what I mean is putting candles on the store-bought sponge they’d picked up in the morning. They walked cautiously into the kitchen, carrying the cake box between them, and started to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. All us kids joined in.
As they approached the dining room table, Antimony’s little sister Astatine waddled into the room, carrying one of her doll’s in one hand. It was a character from Frozen – I’m not sure which one; Anna or Elsa, I never watched it – and it dangled from her hand by one arm. With the other hand she started to tug at her mum’s skirt.
“Mum, can you tell Bromine!” she said, not clear on what he should actually be told.
“What’s the matter, honey?” her mum asked calmly, “What has he done?”
“Nothing,” Astatine admitted, “I just think that Antimony should have the room – it is her birthday, after all.”
Mrs Holmes smiled at her four year old daughter, then gave Mr Holmes a look. He rolled his eyes behind his glasses, then headed into the living room.
“But dad!” we could hear Bromine shouting after his father had spoken quietly to him, “You guys said I could play games with my friends.”
“Not in the living room,” Mr Holmes said more silently than his son, “you know it’s your sister’s birthday.”
“I got her a card, didn’t I?” Bromine replied.
“No, your mother and I got her a card and you signed it! You didn’t even get her a present.”
“Well, it’s not like I have a job or anything,” Bromine replied haughtily – I don’t know what he had to be haughty about, admitting he didn’t have a job. He’d never even had a paper round as far as I was aware.
“Just go to your room,” Mr Holmes said in a defeated tone, “you can take the X-Box up there if you want.”
Noisily, Bromine stormed up to his room, his two friends unhooking the game console and following him up the stairs.
“Come on kids,” Mr Holmes said, coming back into the dining room, “let’s take it into the living room.”
Antimony’s guest started to file into the living room as Mr and Mrs Holmes picked up the plates of food and drink to take in to them. As they did so, Mrs Holmes noticed something was wrong.
“Malcolm, honey, have you seen the box of sweets?”
“They were on the table a moment ago,” Mr Holmes replied, gesturing toward the dining room table, “they probably just fell on the floor.”
Mrs Holmes crouched down on all fours, lifting the linen cloth and peering under the table.
“It’s not here,” she said, looking at her husband, “where could they have gone to?”
“I think I have an idea,” Mr Holmes fumed, marching up the stairs to Bromine’s room.
Antimony watched him leave, then approached the table, looking at something on the linen. A chocolate covered finger print was on the table cloth, a perfect smear in the middle of the table. Antimony looked at it closely, picking something from the cloth, then walked back towards me.
“I don’t think this was Bromine,” Antimony mused, silently confiding in me.
“Why not?” I asked, puzzled by her certainty that her rebellious brother wasn’t responsible for the missing chocolate box.
“Call it a hunch,” Antimony grinned, “Come Watson, the game is afoot.”
I rolled my eyes. Sherlock Holmes had, according to Antimony, only said these words once, in the 1904 story The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, but I guess it was such a famous quotation that she couldn’t resist. This was, after all, her first real mystery.
Voices could be heard from upstairs, raised voices as Bromine declared his innocence, “I didn’t take no stupid chocolates! You’re always blaming me!”
Mr Holmes walked back into the dining room, looking dejectedly at his wife.
“He doesn’t have them, Gabby,” he said.
“Then where could they have gotten to?” Mrs Holmes asked rhetorically.
Antimony walked into the living room, where her friends all sat around on the floor playing with her new toys, and I followed her. She walked slowly amongst them, watching them keenly, as I watched her from the corner of the room. She passed her sister Astatine who had somehow managed to worm her way into the birthday celebration with her doll’s house and Frozen toy, and she gave her a smile, then Antimony’s gaze stopped next to Violet, a concerned look on her face.
I think she’d found her culprit.
“Can everyone be quiet please,” Antimony said loudly, causing everyone to stop playing, “there has been a theft.”
Mr and Mrs Holmes heard this from the dining room, and rushed into us, looking appalled that their daughter was accusing an entire room of children of being thieves. I smiled as I watched the action unfold – I’d never much liked Violet anyway.
“A box filled with chocolates has gone missing from the dining room, and I suspect that someone in this room knows where they are.
“At first,” she continued, “I suspected, as my parents did, that my brother Bromine was responsible for the missing sweets. However, although he may have had the motive, he did not have the opportunity. At no time between the chocolates being on the table and going missing did Bromine actually enter the kitchen.”
Mr and Mrs Holmes looked down at their feet, obviously feeling guilty about blaming their innocent son.
“Therefore my suspicions next lay at the feet of Violet Johnson...” Antimony announced. I smiled, waiting for the accusation.
“...Although she may have had ample opportunity,” Antimony continued, “and clearly coveted the said confectionary as I observed from when she’d been sat at the table, it is clear from her clean hands and a lack of any hiding place for the chocolates that she is also innocent.”
I furrowed my brow. If it wasn’t Violet, then who could it have been?
“It was then that I started looking closer to home,” Antimony said, “I noticed when I first checked the area where the chocolate had been that there was a brown, chocolaty fingerprint, most likely left by the thief... even from a distance I could see it was too small to have belonged to my brother, thus clearing him once again, but upon closer inspection I could see, by comparing it to my own hand, that the print was also much smaller than my own.”
Smaller than her own? Then who was left?
“There was also a strange material on the cloth,” Antimony observed, “a small piece of shiny fabric that, although I didn’t instantly recognise it, has since struck a chord.
“Finally,” Antimony concluded, “as I walked around the living room, I noticed another fingerprint, similar to the one on the table cloth. This one was on...
“...The doll’s house!”
Everyone looked at the doll’s house, then at the little girl sitting next to it. Astatine started to cry as Antimony approached her.
“I only wanted my dollies tea party to be more real!” she blubbed, as Antimony opened the front of the doll’s house to reveal the missing box chocolates.
“My word, Antimony,” I said to her from across the room, “However did you know?”
“It was the piece of material that convinced me of the solution,” Antimony revealed, “once I saw the print on the doll’s house I suddenly remembered where I had seen the piece of material before. It was a piece of the snowflake cape on Astatine’s Elsa doll!”
“I don’t know how you put it all together,” I mused, shaking my head.
“Why my dear Watson,” Antimony Holmes smiled at me with pride, “it was elementary.”
Originally Posted 29/1/2015
Result - Joint 2nd Place
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