The Adventure Of Bouncing Betty

by Edward Lodi

About the Author: A frequent contributor to Mystery Magazine, Edward Lodi has written more than 30 books, including six Cranberry Country Mysteries. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies published by Cemetery Dance, Murderous Ink, Main Street Rag, Rock Village Publishing, Superior Shores Press, and most recently Hungry Shadows Press and Black Widow Press. His story “Charnel House” was featured on Night Terrors Podcast.

Excerpt

Over the course of a long and illustrious career, my friend Sherlock Holmes proved instrumental in preventing many an egregious miscarriage of justice. Through deductive reasoning, close observation, and the application of scientific principles, he was able to demonstrate the guilt of the actual perpetrators of crimes for which others had fallen under suspicion—or worse, been falsely accused—thereby not only preserving the reputations of the innocent, but in many instances saving them from the gallows.

Perhaps the most curious of the cases which fall into this category—I might venture to say, the most outré—was that to which I have given the title “The Adventure of Bouncing Betty.” What made the case unusual was not the nature of the crime—although that in itself was shocking—nor in Holmes’s methods in solving it (he considered the case “elementary,” hardly worthy of my recording it)—but rather Betty herself.

“Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,” wrote Shakespeare in one of his sonnets. It was early in the morning of a blustery day in May that the adventure had its beginning. Holmes and I were in our rooms at 221B Baker Street comfortably seated before the gas fire, Holmes smoking his pipe, I a Havana cigar, bestowed upon me by a grateful patient for the painless removal of a boil.

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