Chapter Five
Chapter Five
After the slightest of pauses—I think Duke was steeling himself—he reached in and removed a plain black hatbox. He carried it over to the sofa and set it in front of us on the coffee table.
“I had to hide everything I took,” Duke said. “You know the saying…keep it under your hat.”
He lifted the lid, and sure enough, a black silk top hat sat inside. When he took out the hat, I could see it was only a cover for an assortment of small things carefully wrapped in linen handkerchiefs.
Duke picked one up and unwrapped it.
“Davey’s watch,” Duke said. “A Cartier. He showed it off to everyone. They were still quite novel then. On men especially.”
“Wristwatches were for women?”
“Back then,” Duke said, “they were like bracelets with timepieces. Davey had his pocket watch stolen once, and when he bragged about how hard it would be to steal his watch later, I nicked it while he was sleeping.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten,” Duke said. “I gave it back the next day. A few years later, before he shipped out, he joked that I could have his watch if he got his head knocked off. I would rather have his head on than the watch, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
He wrapped the watch up again and returned it to the hatbox. Koshka strolled over to the coffee table and eyed the treasures with curiosity.
Duke untied a piece of twine wrapped around a small brown paper rectangle. A book?
“ The Rose, ” I said when Duke revealed the cover. “By W. B. Yeats.”
“Charlie wanted to be a poet. He thought he’d be a poet-soldier, like Siegfried Sassoon.” Duke glanced at me then back down at the pages. “He wrote poetry and love letters to another officer. I hope I haven’t shocked you.”
I smiled at him. “That’s not shocking where I’m from.”
“Where are you from?”
“The future,” I said. He opened his mouth to ask a question and I raised my hand. “And no, I can’t tell you about it.”
He smiled, then turned a page in the Yeats book.
“Mother had all his papers burned when he died. A maid stole this from the bonfire for me.”
“Did she think you might catch typhus from them?”
He thought about that question a moment before answering.
“Truly, I think she burned his poetry for the same reason everyone who burns books does—because it’s less trouble than burning the people who wrote them.”
He opened a page marked with a scarlet ribbon and read aloud:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…
“Keep going,” I begged.
Duke cleared his throat. “Better not. Let’s see…what else have we here? Oh, yes, Eddie’s toy horse.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, marveling at the intricate metalwork. It had tiny wheels on the hooves so a child could pull it on a string behind them.
Koshka stood on his back legs and lightly batted at the horse.
“No, buddy, be careful,” I said. “That’s not—”
“Let him play with it.” Duke pushed it toward Koshka. “Eddie loved animals. He was always sneaking food to the cats in the stables. Father would catch him and whip him for it, telling him the cats wouldn’t hunt mice if they weren’t hungry. But Eddie didn’t care. He’d do it again the very next day.”
Koshka sniffed the horse, then batted at it again, then again, until he pushed the toy to the edge of the table.
I caught it as it fell and gave it back to Duke.
“Is my writer still alive, by any chance?” he asked me.
“Dead since 1969.”
“Pity,” Duke said. “I would’ve liked to have had a word with him. Was it really necessary to kill all of my brothers off?”
“Fictional detectives tend to have tragic backstories that make them obsessed with saving other people. Since you couldn’t save your brothers, you try to save everyone else.”
“I still say I’m owed compensation. A beautiful girl madly in love with me, at least,” he said, as he wrapped the horse in its linen shroud and placed it back into the hatbox.
“If they’re only characters in a book,” Duke asked, “why do I love them so bloody much?”
“You can love fictional characters. At times, it’s almost easier to love them than to love real people.”
He smiled at me again.
“I was wrong,” I said. “It’s not your grief in your safe. It’s your heart you keep locked up.”
“I’ve only ever unlocked it for you.”
“When you say things like that, I lose my ability to reply coherently,” I teased him. “I’m worried I’ll say the wrong thing.”
He shook his head. “Say something true, even if you don’t think it’s the right thing to say. I like hearing your voice.”
“What if I say I’m jealous?”
“Jealous? Really?” He didn’t sound insulted, only intrigued.
“I have no idea who my father is, and I never got to know my mother. She was a legendary Book Witch. My boss tells me constantly how perfect she was. Saved dozens of stories, never broke a single rule. But when she died, the only thing she bequeathed to me was a Nancy Drew book— The Secret of the Old Clock. ”
“Only one book?” Duke sounded horrified, which I appreciated. Sometimes I felt guilty for expecting more from my mother. She was gone, after all, and couldn’t defend her decisions to me, although I liked to think she had her reasons.
“I assume it was her favorite? Must have been to leave it to me. I love the book, too, but I can’t help but want more. An old toy from when she was a kid or a piece of clothing I could wear or a message?”
He stared at me and the moment grew heavy with waiting and meaning, though I couldn’t say what this all meant, only that it meant something, maybe more than it should have.
“We should go,” I said. “We’ve been here too long and you need to—”
“Finish the story, yes,” he said. “I will, of course. I always do. I’ve never not solved a case, and I don’t intend that to change.
But I can’t help but wonder…if I’m not real and Edith King’s not real, what’s the point of it all?
” He asked this while petting Koshka, who had buried his head in the hatbox, sniffing for treats or more toys.
“He’s a real cat. Isn’t it more important that I pet a real cat than help a fictional girl? ”
I pulled the copy of Empty Graves from my pocket.
“Here’s what happens at the end of the book,” I told Duke.
“You follow Edith King to the harbor, where she’s going to get on a boat that will eventually sneak her into Canada.
Her parents and husband told you she was kidnapped.
But you finally put two and two together and realize she’d faked her kidnapping to get out of the country and away from her violent husband.
You have your chance to catch her, but this happens instead… ”
I cleared my throat and read the passage aloud to him.
Duke watched Edith watching him from the dock, waiting for him to make his move, nab her, drag her back home. If he ran, he could stop her. He didn’t move.
“Go,” he mouthed. “Now, Edith.”
Even at a hundred yards, he could see her smile.
“Thank you,” she might have said before she turned and ran across the boat ramp, aboard the ship waiting to take her away forever.
Few people are more despised than the soldier who deserts his unit or the wife who deserts her husband.
But at that moment, they were the only people who made any sense to Duke.
The war had never ended. Maybe it never would.
Not until the world stopped sending its sons through the meat grinder of battle and selling its daughters off to brutes.
Tonight, however, the war ended for Edith. If Duke had ticker tape in his pocket, he would have thrown her a victory parade.
The boat pulled away from the dock. As it drifted from view, he thought he saw Edith crying, but no…she was laughing.
“Go and don’t look back,” he said to Edith, words he wished he could’ve said to Davey, to Charlie, to Eddie. “The world has corpses aplenty but not nearly enough laughing girls dancing the Lindy Hop on their own empty graves.”
Edith King danced away.
Slowly, I closed the book.
“Those paragraphs are why Empty Graves has been banned or challenged in a dozen middle and high school libraries.”
“Those Burners at it again?”
“Real people do it too. No magical powers required, just a fatal lack of imagination and compassion. They say this passage is ‘anti-military’ and ‘anti-family.’ That’s not how other people read it, though.
There was a march against domestic violence not long ago.
I saw it on TV…which hasn’t been invented yet.
Imagine small movies inside your house.”
“Very nice,” Duke said.
“At this march, one woman wore a T-shirt that read, ‘Dance, Edith, Dance.’ Edith King came to symbolize every woman who escaped and started a new life. The Statue of Liberty isn’t a real person either, but she means something, right? Something worth fighting for?”
Duke was silent for a moment, then stood up. “I’ll finish the story tonight. And all my cases. I’ll finish them all. If only for you.”
I looked up at him. “Thank you,” I breathed. “It’s nearly midnight. We need to get back to the alley by the Bathtub—”
“I can take you. Let me get my coat.” He stood and reached for the lid to the hatbox, then stopped and sat back down again. “Wait, please. One more thing.”
“You’re stalling,” I said.
“Not stalling. I have a gift for you.”
He took a small black velvet bag from the hatbox and untied the string. Into his palm dropped a ring. He held it out to me. A small gold ring, the band delicately engraved with vines. The setting was black enamel with a white flower, five petals, made of tiny seed pearls.
“When David died, my grandmother had this made for my mother. It’s a mourning ring. That flower is a forget-me-not. There’s a locket compartment on the back. She said Mother could take a strand of David’s hair and put it in the locket.”
Duke turned the ring over and with his thumbnail carefully popped open the tiny locket compartment. It was empty.