Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
Present Day
Reader, I regretted it.
Two years have now passed since I woke up to find Duke in my bed.
For one glorious year, he and I secretly dated.
I’d visit him in his stories, or I’d pull him out to visit me in the real world—sometimes on purpose, sometimes simply by dreaming about him.
He’d assist me with my missions, and occasionally I’d help with his cases.
It was a passionate affair, clandestine, forbidden… and utterly doomed.
We got caught. Of course we got caught. And we got caught by the worst person who could possibly catch us—my boss, Dr. Fanshawe.
Duke and I were forbidden from seeing each other, which effectively broke us up without even a proper goodbye.
Even worse, because I did have a bad habit of yanking Duke out of his stories by the sheer force of my love and longing for him, my Duke of Chicago books had been seized by Dr. Fanshawe like illegal contraband.
Bad enough to lose Duke, but to lose his stories as well?
I tried to move on, but it wasn’t easy. Yes, I was living in Fort Meriwether with Pops, but I’d left my heart in Chicago.
Which brings us to the present. Even after a full year of penance, I was still in the doghouse with Dr. Fanshawe.
So while the rest of Fort Meriwether was outdoors, enjoying what was probably the last sunny day before the winter doldrums set in, I was in my home library up to my eyeballs in Gothic romance novels.
An army of young women in white nightgowns raced across fields and moors, fleeing bad men and burning castles. And it was my job to save them.
The books, I mean, not the girls in nightgowns. The ladies were on their own.
All these books had come out in the 1960s and ’70s and had never been digitized.
The only remaining copies were these decaying mass market paperbacks.
My job was to magically heal the broken spines, mend the torn covers, and return the loose pages to the fold.
When I’d finished with that, I had to not-so-magically catalog them so they wouldn’t be entirely lost to the ravages of time.
Come to think of it, The Ravages of Time would have made a good Gothic romance title. In the stack of books I was currently working on, we had some banger titles. The House of Doom. The Castle of Evil. The Mirror Never Lies. And my personal favorite, A Dark and Wicked Desire.
That one…I might set aside to read in bed later.
True, the titles were a little melodramatic, and all the couples in the books needed marriage counseling, divorce lawyers, or restraining orders, but they were fun reads. Lust, corruption, sinister patriarchs guarding scandalous family secrets! Heady stuff wrapped up in moonlight and silk.
Plus, I identified with these heroines. I also felt like my life was one castle fire after another.
I couldn’t help but think Dr. Fanshawe had an ulterior motive for assigning this particular genre to me, as each musty book was a vivid reminder that romance was more trouble than it was worth. After my seventh full-body sneeze, I was willing to entertain that possibility myself.
Every time Nixon-era dust shot up my nose, I reminded myself that I was helping to preserve the secret history of women warning other women that they shouldn’t always trust the authority figures in their lives. And when all else fails, burn the evil castle to the cursed ground and run for it.
The library door opened and our housekeeper wheeled the tea tray in and parked it next to the reading table.
“Tea, Miss March,” she said in a broad English accent rarely heard anymore except on old BBC shows.
As usual, Mrs. Turner wore a gray dress with a white apron and had her hair tucked under a white bonnet.
She was the very picture of Victorian respectability.
Once, I’d offered to buy her some jeans and T-shirts to wear around the house, and she’d acted as if I’d told her to put on a bear costume to clean the bathroom.
“Oh, thanks, but you didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“I heard you sneezing your poor head off, Miss March,” she said, tsk-tsking at me. “Tea’s what the doctor ordered.”
Although I was twenty-seven years old, Mrs. Turner tended to treat me like a weak and sickly child.
I would’ve been offended, but she did the same thing to my late grandmother and to Pops.
Two weeks ago, Pops had gotten a paper cut—occupational hazard.
Mrs. Turner wrapped a Snoopy Band-Aid around his finger and ordered my eighty-two-year-old grandfather to take the rest of the day off from handling books to recover.
He refused, and an hour later sliced another finger.
“Tea cures sneezing?” I asked her.
“Tea cures everything. ”
She poured a cup of orange pekoe for me, added a single sugar cube, and set it next to my elbow on a saucer, a process that had taken her mere seconds. The woman was a tea-serving machine.
“Your biscuits, Master Koshka,” she said. She set a saucer containing three cat treats on the floor in front of Koshka, who’d spent the past hour asleep in a sunbeam. He woke up at once, rubbed his cheek on Mrs. Turner’s ankles, then ate his treats with feline gusto.
Mrs. Turner returned to the tea trolley. “Dinner for one tonight?”
“Dinner for one,” I said. “Until Pops finally gets back.”
Pops had left a week ago on some sort of secret mission, and I was more than ready for him to come home.
She shook her head. “Hope you don’t mind me saying it, Miss March, but you’re twenty-seven. If you’re not married soon, you’ll be a spinster. You don’t want that now, do you?”
“More time to read,” I said.
“Pretty girl like you already on the shelf.” She sighed as she wheeled the trolley from the library. “Now drink your tea, Miss March, or I’ll take you to hospital.”
This was not an idle threat from Mrs. Turner. I drank the tea.
—
Teacup in hand, I wandered to the fireplace.
On the mantel in our library sat the only picture I had of my mother and me together.
In the faded five-by-seven photograph, she’s thirty years old, and though she’s just given birth, she looks very thin and wan.
She wears a white bathrobe with her long dark hair in a loose braid.
I’m not in her arms, but in the cradle. She’s reading to me from a hardcover.
On the illustrated dust jacket, a teenage girl in a blue skirt suit and matching cloche hat carries an old carriage clock through the woods.
The Secret of the Old Clock, Nancy Drew book one. Published in 1930.
The book itself, the very one in the picture, sat inside the wall safe behind the portrait over the fireplace.
When you lose a parent when a you’re a baby, like I did, it’s hard to believe that parent was ever real or alive.
Sometimes I needed to hold her book in my hands to remind myself that once upon a time she was a real living breathing person with hopes and dreams for herself and for me.
I put my cup and saucer on the mantel, pulled over the ottoman, and climbed up. After removing the portrait, I typed in the combination and the door popped open.
There it was, my mother’s book. I took it from the safe and grimaced at the sight. Although not a first edition, it was old and somehow between the last time I’d read it and now, it had developed yet another tear in the cover and one page seemed to be coming loose from the binding.
Of course, as a Book Witch, I could have charmed it, turned it into a new copy even, but I was worried if I made it too new, my mother’s name and every trace of her fingerprints would disappear from the pages.
No, I would simply have to be more careful with it.
I sat at the reading table, opened the book, and began to read from the first chapter, entitled “The Lost Will.”
“It would be a shame if all that money went to the Tophams! They will fly higher than ever!”
Nancy Drew, a pretty girl of sixteen, leaned over the library table and addressed her father, who sat reading a newspaper by the study lamp.
“I beg your pardon, Nancy. What were you saying about the Tophams?”
Carson Drew, a noted criminal and mystery-case lawyer, known far and wide for his work as a former district attorney, looked up from his evening paper and smiled indulgently upon his only daughter.
Every time I read those lines, I felt a stab of jealousy.
Nancy and I had so much in common—we were both girls without mothers who had a penchant for getting ourselves into and out of scrapes.
And while I’d had a wonderful childhood with my grandparents, Nancy had a father, Carson Drew.
To an orphan, even an absentee or neglectful father sounded like the height of luxury, but Nancy had one who clearly adored her.
I envied her like a twin sister who had gotten an extra Christmas present.
According to The Secret of the Old Clock, Nancy’s mother had died when she was ten.
That meant she’d also gotten ten years with a mother in her life, and I’d only gotten a few months, months I didn’t even remember.
Of course I’d asked my grandparents everything they knew about my mother, and they’d told me wonderful stories about her.
Young Ellery March, like me, had been obsessed with books.
First it was anything with unicorns, then sharks, then anything set in space, then Nancy Drew by the time she turned ten.
Before me, she was the youngest Book Witch, joining the Ink and Paper Coven at only fifteen years old.
She took on every assignment fearlessly, making her a legend by the age of twenty-one.
And then…something happened. At age twenty-nine, she disappeared for an entire year without a trace.
And when she showed up on my grandparents’ doorstep, she was eight months pregnant with me.
She would answer no questions about where she’d been or say who my father was, not even to her own parents.
Pops said that shortly before she died, my mother had given him The Secret of the Old Clock and told him to pass it on to me when I turned eighteen or became a Book Witch myself, whichever came sooner.
He’d always assumed she’d left a secret message in the book for me, a letter or something, but when Pops gave it to me the night of my initiation into the Ink and Paper Coven, the only note I found inside was her name on the title page written in peacock blue ink.
There was a message in the book for me, however.
And you didn’t even need Nancy Drew’s help to decipher it.
It came through loud and clear. The book was about a girl growing up without a mother.
Nancy Drew turned out fine, more than fine.
She was clever, courageous, good-hearted, intelligent, strong-willed, and happy.
So happy she barely even thought of her dead mother and certainly never grieved for her.
Be clever, courageous, and happy. Don’t think too much about what you’ve lost, and you’ll be all right. That was the unwritten message from my mother. In other words, be just like Nancy Drew.
When the red hotline phone on the desk suddenly rang, I dove for it like a drowning girl diving for a life preserver. The secure landline was for Coven business only.
“Hello? Rainy March at your service. Please.”
“Hi, Rainy, it’s Penny Nichols!”
Oh, joy. Penny. Penny, the pretty, perky apprentice Book Witch. Penny Nichols, the crown princess of exclamation points. She’d only been with Ink and Paper for about a month, and it seemed she’d spent that entire month trying to be my new best friend.
“Hi, Penny,” I said and tried not to sigh audibly.
“How are you, Rainy? Doing anything fun today?”
“Having an allergy attack.”
“Is that fun?” She sounded skeptical but open-minded. I couldn’t help but like her, even if she did make me feel about fifty years old.
“Even less fun than it sounds.”
“Would you like a break from having an allergy attack?”
“I would kill for one,” I said. Was I finally out of the doghouse with Dr. Fanshawe?
“What’s the situation?” I asked.
“Rogue main character. Burner set her free for some reason.”
A runaway main character was an important assignment, much more important than mending spines and making Excel spreadsheets of book titles and publication dates. The Mark of Sin and Loving Lucifer would have to wait their turn.
“Dr. Fanshawe says to meet her at the bookstore in African Cuisine in fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll be there in ten.”