The Adventure of the Speckled Band is a Sherlock Holmes story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed this was his best Holmes story. Plot: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rise unusually early one morning to meet a young woman named Helen Stoner. Helen fears that her life is being threatened. Helen's twin sister had died almost two years earlier, shortly before she was also to be married. Helen had heard her sister's dying words, 'The speckled band!' but was unable to decode their meaning. Helen, herself is now engaged, and she has begun to hear strange noises and to observe strange activities around Stoke Moran, the impoverished and heavily mortgaged estate where she and her stepfather live.