Dundurn, Kinderbücher, Last Song Sung (Englisch, David A. Poulsen, 2018)

There was something Holmesian about it. Cobb and I were sitting in his office, drinking Keurig Starbucks, me looking out the window at 1st Street West below us and watching a beautiful twenty-something blonde cross the street and head toward Cobb's building. My memory told me that was how several Holmes stories began - except, of course, it was Holmes's apartment on Baker Street that he and Watson were in and Holmes was either playing the violin or reading the newspaper. Cobb had spent the last hour invoicing clients and telling me in general terms the nature of their cases. To my knowledge, Cobb did not play the violin. There was, however, a bit of a similarity between Watson and me. Although Holmes's companion was a doctor and I had spent most of my adult life as a crime writer, first for the Calgary Herald and then as a freelancer for the last several years, the fact was that, like Watson, I was something of a chronicler of the cases Cobb and I had worked on together. I was, at that time, working on a couple of articles I hoped to shop to magazines - articles that recounted the details of our recent investigation into the violent deaths of a number of right-wing media luminaries. That was the reason my computer sat at the ready on a small table in one corner of Cobb's second-floor space on the corner of 12th Avenue and 1st Street West in the Beltline, an elder statesman among Calgary neighbourhoods. "You're about to have company," I said, not looking away from the street or the young woman, who had clearly favoured denim when she had made the day's fashion decisions. I was confident of the correctness of my assertion because at the moment, Cobb was the lone tenant of the building, all the others having been temporarily evacuated while renovations were taking place. I'd asked him how it was that a private detective was not inconvenienced with having to vacate his office when other firms with more office space and several actual employees had been. Cobb had smiled as he told me that, as soon as the building manager had mentioned Cobb would have to leave the building for a couple of weeks, Cobb made as if to begin the packing process, pulled several firearms from his closet, and set them on his desk. The manager, apparently not certain whether the weapons were part of the move or had been taken from the closet for some other purpose, decided that Cobb's office looked "okay as it is" and backed out the door with considerable dispatch. "Male or female?" Cobb asked, without looking up from his own computer. "Decidedly female," I told him. "And you know she's coming here because ...?" "Because (a) there's bugger all else on this side of the street, (b) she keeps looking up here as she gets closer, and (c) she's now entering the front door of the building." "Ah ... that last one's a dead giveaway." He closed up his computer in an apparent attempt to look more detective-like for the new arrival and had just completed that task when the knock came at the door. I turned from the window, crossed the office, my slippery city shoes (as Ian Tyson called them) drumming on the aged hardwood, and opened the door. My closer look at the young woman confirmed what I had been fairly certain of from my window view of her. Though the September wind had done her mid-back-length blond hair no favours, she was striking. Young - twenty-ish, I guessed - and ... striking. "Is this the office of Michael Cobb, private detective?" she said in a voice that was breathy but firm. My first impression of her was that she was no-nonsense. "It is," I said, and stepped back to allow her to move into the office. She stepped inside, and Cobb stood up to greet her. There was a momentary look of confusion on the young woman's face as she looked from me to Cobb and back at me. I gestured in Cobb's.