Chapter 22: What Joyce Teaches Holmes About Instruments of Perception

The rain came in sideways off the cornfields, not the theatrical deluge of an English autumn but a thin, persistent Midwestern misery that found every gap in a window frame and exploited it without apology. Holmes had been awake since half past two. He was awake most nights, now, though the quality of his wakefulness had changed — he no longer lay cataloguing, no longer organized the day's evidence into ranked columns behind his eyes. He simply lay and listened to a town that was not his town make its small nocturnal sounds, and waited for morning with what he recognized, dimly, as patience.

El was asleep on the narrow cot he had moved from the hardware store's back room. She slept on her side with both hands open, which she had not done in the first week. He had not noted this in the case file. He had noted it privately, in the part of his cognition that was not, strictly, a case file.

The kettle on the hotplate began its preliminary trembling at quarter past three and he killed the heat before it could whistle. He poured water through a paper coffee filter he had been reusing for five days — a practice that would have appalled him in Baker Street and which he now performed without reflection — and stood at the window with the mug warming both hands, watching the rain make rivers in the hardware store's corrugated awning.