Chapter 7: What the Girl Demonstrates

The lights in Joyce Byers's kitchen were the ordinary kind — a single bulb over the sink, a brass fixture above the table missing two of its three sockets — and they did not flicker.

Holmes noted this without pleasure.

Joyce had opened the door before he knocked, which meant she had seen them coming up the path, which meant she had been at the window, which told him the night had not been quiet for her. She looked at the girl with the particular attention of a woman who has recently lost a child and finds other children briefly unbearable to see. She kept the expression off her face with visible effort.