Chapter 25: The Case That Cannot Be Closed

Three days after Will Byers came home, Holmes moved out of the hardware store.

He did not announce this. He carried his possessions — the notebook, the pencils, the pocket torch, the pipe he had not smoked in a week because the tobacco had run out on day thirty-one and American cigarette tobacco was a different instrument entirely — down the back stairs and across the loading dock in two trips, and stood for a moment with everything arranged at his feet in the November light, which was thin and specific and fell at an angle he had spent seven weeks learning to read.

He had paid the month in full. He left the aluminum coffee can on the windowsill because it belonged to the room.