Chapter Four #2
My face turned hot. He smiled at me.
“This is why I was in love with you in high school,” I said.
“And now?”
“No, no, and no,” I said, and perhaps the lady was protesting too much. “Look, hypothetically, even if we did fall in love, we couldn’t ever be together. Rule Number Seven—Real people belong in the real world. Fictional characters belong in works of fiction.”
His brow furrowed and he sat up. “Whose rules?”
“The Book Witches’.”
He shook his head. “Thought witches were a bit freer with their affections than all that. More propaganda, I see.”
“Nope, never dated the devil,” I said. “Or any demons. I had a brief fling with a mildly wicked Coastie, but it wasn’t serious.”
“A Coastie?”
“Coast Guard,” I said. “If you live in Fort Meriwether, Oregon, you are legally required to date a Coastie at some point in your twenties.”
“How about fictional detectives?”
“No, sorry. Strictly verboten.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“Don’t worry. When I leave, I’ll put a spell on you to make you forget this ever happened.”
“I won’t allow it.”
“You don’t have any choice.”
“Outrageous,” he said. “I should not be treated like a second-class citizen simply because I don’t exist. Next you’ll be telling me I can’t vote in elections.”
He couldn’t vote in elections—not because he was fictional, but because he was English.
“I don’t make the rules,” I said, holding up my hands. “I just follow them so I won’t get into trouble.”
“Rainy…what’s your last name?”
“March,” I said.
“Rainy March, I want you to listen to me. And you should listen to me because I’m very wealthy, handsome, and highborn, which foolish people mistake for wisdom and authority. But I want you to make that mistake as well, so you’ll bend to my will.”
I was trying very hard not to laugh at him.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“A person who breaks one rule is a rule breaker. A person who breaks all the rules is a rebel. ” He stroked Koshka’s back like a comic book villain. “Come be a rebel with me, Rainy.”
I crossed my arms and sat up ramrod straight. “No. And give me my cat back. You’re a bad influence.”
He held Koshka to his shoulder like a baby. “Come and get him.”
I exhaled heavily and reached out my arms across Duke’s desk. “Please? Finish the case?”
“A few more minutes, Rainy. It’s all I ask. You said I’d forget all of this once you’re gone.”
“Yes, once I do the spell.”
“Give me one more hour,” he said, “then I’ll do anything you want. Anything. ”
“It’s against protocol but since you did save our lives…” I glanced at the mantel clock. In Duke’s world, it was eleven. We’d have to be gone by midnight. “One hour? You promise?”
“On my honor, whatever I have left. Then you may scramble my brain all you wish.”
“It won’t feel like scrambling,” I explained. “You’ll just remember this all like a dream.”
“Feels like a dream already,” he said. “Probably why I’m, as you say, handling it so well.”
“Also, it’s in your character,” I explained. “The Duke of Chicago is famously unflappable and imperturbable.”
“Perhaps, but not now. I’m feeling both flapped and perturbed.”
“Imagine how I feel,” I said. “I’m in your office, sitting in this chair in front of your desk.
I dreamed about this place. I imagined what it looked like all my life, and now I’m here.
” Something caught my eye, and I rose from my chair, walking over to the fireplace as if pulled by invisible hands.
I pointed. “That’s your actual ducal coronet on the bust of General Cincinnatus.
You like to put it on and shout orders out the window to the ‘peasants’ below. ”
“I only did that once. And it was my birthday.”
“There’s a running gag in your books about how you keep trying to hire a secretary, but every time one shows up for the interview and when you explain the job to them—solving murders and kidnappings while also doing all the typing and filing—they run for the door.
When I was seventeen, I had this long-running very elaborate fantasy that I’d apply for the job, and you’d try to scare me off, but you couldn’t.
And then, of course when you realized how brilliant I was, you’d make me your partner, and we’d fall madly in love. ”
He laughed. “Very sweet, but I don’t believe in child labor or cradle robbing.”
I picked Duke’s magnifying glass up off the mantel and peered through it at him. “In my teenage fantasies, I was older, I promise.”
“Thank goodness. I’m glad to know I wasn’t a cad even in your dreams.”
Koshka bumped his head against Duke’s chin.
“I said ‘cad,’ not ‘cat,’ young man.”
“Something’s not right,” I said and grabbed the copy of Empty Graves that X had left behind. “This isn’t the right painting.”
I flipped to the first chapter of the book, where Edith King’s husband hires Duke to find her after she’s been kidnapped.
“What do you mean?”
Another running joke in the series had Duke constantly changing the painting that hung in his office.
Every book he had something different, and it always reflected Duke’s mental state or the theme of the book.
The painting in Empty Graves was one of girlish innocence, reflecting Edith King’s flight from her violent husband into a new life of peace and safety.
“It says right here that the painting is supposed to be Autumn Leaves by John Everett Millais.” I read straight from the book, page nine.
“ On the canvas above the mantel, four young girls built a pile of fall leaves in a twilight garden. Innocent happy girls and not a man in sight. ” I jabbed my finger at the new painting. “So what is this?”
Now, hanging over the fireplace was a very different image.
“I believe that’s Circe by John Collier,” Duke said. “Don’t like her? She is a witch.”
“She’s a naked witch. A naked witch with a cat.”
Technically a naked witch and two big cats, but still…
Duke tried and failed to look angelic. “Can’t blame a man for accidentally manifesting his subconscious longings, can you?”
“I can. Now put it back.” I said.
He took a breath and when I glanced over the mantel again, the correct painting, Autumn Leaves, had been restored to its rightful place.
“Better,” I said, then turned back to Duke. “Speaking of paintings, can I ask you something I’ve always wanted to know?”
“Anything, darling.”
“Back at your penthouse,” I said, “you have a safe, right? A wall safe behind a mirror?”
“I do. Why do you ask?”
“We have one, too, behind a painting.”
“Mine’s behind the mirror, but go on. I’m intrigued by this line of questioning.”
“I’ve always wanted to know what you keep in it. I’m not being nosy.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really? Sounds rather nosy to me. Good thing I like your nose.”
I laughed. “It’s a literary question. Every Ducky has their theories about it. It’s supposedly symbolic of—”
“Excuse me, what? Ducky?”
I blushed crimson. “Um…so, your readers have their own nickname. We call ourselves Duckies. Duke? Duck? Get it?”
It was worse than it sounded. When I was eighteen, I desperately wanted to get a Ducky tattoo on my shoulder until Pops reminded me that were I ever to hop into a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel or short story, there was a very good chance it would be considered a devil’s mark, and I’d be hanged as a witch. So there went that idea.
“That is adorable, Ducky.”
Still blushing, I cleared my throat. “As I was saying…One person says your wall safe symbolizes secrets that can’t ever be told,” I said. “Another said it’s symbolic of, um…repressed sexuality.”
“That would be my best guess.” Duke nodded sagely.
“Or maybe it’s your underwear drawer.”
“What do you think is in there?” he asked. “What’s your guess?”
“If we’re speaking symbolically, I thought it might be…your grief.”
“I keep my grief in a safe? Why do you say that?”
“I think that’s where I keep mine—locked up.
No father that I know of and my mother died when I was a baby.
I…I sometimes want to talk about her, but I don’t like upsetting my grandfather.
So I hide it away. Part of the reason I think I identified with you.
You’d lost most of your family, too, but you carry on anyway. ”
“I’m so sorry, Rainy.”
“It’s fine, promise.”
He stood up, Koshka in his arms. “You want to know what’s in the safe? I’ll show you.”
“You can’t show me. We’re in your office, not your—”
But in the blink of an eye—or the turn of a page?—we were in his penthouse apartment.
“I do like this power,” Duke said, glancing around in approval. “Good, Nigel’s gone to bed already. Don’t need him around tonight asking questions. Drink? Oh, damn, right. You can’t drink.”
“Stand by.” I held up my hand then dropped onto the sofa arm. “Having vertigo.”
Being in Duke’s office had been like visiting Santa Claus at the mall. Being in his penthouse was like getting to visit the North Pole. If the North Pole were a sumptuous bachelor’s paradise that took up the entire top floor of a swanky Chicago hotel.
“What do you think?” Duke asked, leaning against a black marble fireplace mantel. Koshka lay curled at his feet as if he owned the place.
“This sofa is trying to seduce me,” I said as I slid down the arm and onto the supple cushions.
“It’s not the only one,” Duke said. “Now come here, lass.”
I struggled to get to my feet. Everything in this penthouse made a girl want to lie down and stay down. As I walked to the fireplace, I glanced over at a closed door. Duke’s bedroom.
“I saw that,” he said.
“You saw nothing.”
Smiling, Duke reached up and started to take the mirror down from over the mantel, then paused and looked at me. “I want something in return for opening my safe for you.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Nothing salacious,” he said.
Pity. I didn’t say that out loud. “What do you want?”
“Your hat.”
A glimpse into the Duke of Chicago’s famous top secret safe…in exchange for my hat.
“I think you’re lowballing yourself,” I said, “but if you want it, it’s yours.”
I took off my hat and tossed it to him. He caught it midair and clutched it to his chest.
“Now why did you want my hat?”
“I didn’t. I wanted to see you with your hair down.”
He raised his hand to my hair, touched a strand that had fallen over my face, and pushed it behind my ear.
“That’s all?” I asked. “My hair for your deepest secrets? Duke, you got suckered.”
He shook his head as he went to work on the combination lock, spinning the knob this way and that.
“How wrong you are, Rainy March. That,” he said as the safe door popped open, “was a steal.”