Hidden in plain sight

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I discovered Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid. I had a couple of the books that were maybe from the 1920s. They were starting to fall apart, so I hated reading them. Then fifteen, or twenty years ago I found a copy of the Complete Sherlock Holmes that had all the stories in a brand new book. I put the old books away in a box somewhere. Anyway, a couple years ago, I noticed some plot points in episodes of Sherlock or Elementary that came from the stories. I figured I should reread the stories to refamiliarize myself to the originals, and maybe write up short reviews for each one. So I took my Complete Sherlock Holmes off my bookshelf and set it on my “To Read” pile. Well, one of my “To Read” piles because there are too many books for one pile to be structurally sound. With the New Year, I thought maybe I should actually get around to this project. I’d been thinking about it for years probably, perhaps I should just jump in and get it going. So I looked in my piles of books, but couldn’t find it. It’s a big book, so it’s kind of hard to miss. But I couldn’t see it. I looked through all my piles, two or three times because, maybe I missed it somehow. I didn’t think I put it back on the shelf, but I went and checked anyway, but still couldn’t find it. I was starting to get a bit angry because I knew I had the book, and I knew it had to be one of my rooms. This went on for a couple of days. I’d have five minutes to kill, so I’d look around but could not find this book. Then the other day I was on my computer and happened to glance over at the little book shelf (the one I hadn’t checked) next to my desk and saw it sitting right there. How did it end up there? I wondered. Then I remembered that a month or so ago I was working on a story where a character was reading a Sherlock Holmes story and I had grabbed it to check some detail. I then set it two feet from the spot I spend hours every day. And it disappeared. There’s a Sherlock Holmes mystery any schmuck could have solved.