Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
No time to waste. I climbed onto the ottoman once more to retrieve my umbrella.
Book Witches use umbrellas as wands, of course, but we also use them as umbrellas.
Book Witches, not unlike certain vampires, spend a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest and out here umbrellas are a must-have.
Summers are very nice, but the rest of the year?
Rain. Endless, driving, pitiless, merciless rain.
Biblical rain. End of the world rain. Name your daughter after the rain, because around here, the rain is in charge and it never hurts to suck up to the boss. That kind of rain.
I pulled my umbrella out of the safe. Pops had taken his with him on his top secret mission.
I told myself he was likely tucked away in some eccentric billionaire’s private library, being paid handsomely to catalog his collection of ancient occult tomes and magical cursed codices.
He was Ink and Paper’s go-to guy for that sort of thing.
He was probably having the time of his life.
Still, he was almost never gone this long, and I couldn’t help but worry a little.
Into the safe I placed The Secret of the Old Clock.
Before Duke, I’d always kept it in my bedside table in a locked drawer, but after learning what Duke kept in his safe—all the treasures from his brothers—I started storing the book in our wall safe too.
Why? I don’t know. Romantic silliness, really.
Plus a touch of paranoia courtesy of Pops.
For some reason, all my mother’s papers and case notebooks had been seized when she died.
Pops said the Coven’s leaders took them for “reasons,” and he worried they’d want to take the book too if they thought she’d left some sort of secret message behind in it.
If you asked me, there were too many secrets in this house.
The Secret of My Grandfather’s Mysterious Mission.
The Secret of My Mother’s Missing Year.
The Secret of The Secret of the Old Clock.
Not to mention the continuing saga of The Secret of How to Get Back into My Boss’s Good Graces.
Hopefully if I handled this new mission skillfully enough, that would be one less mystery to solve.
I locked the safe, hung the portrait back in place, and stepped down off the ottoman.
“Come on, Koshka. We’ve got a job.”
At once, he woke up from his deep sunbeam sleeping and was on all four feet. He might take a catnap every chance he got, but when there was work to be done, the boy was a consummate professional.
As I put on my gray trench coat, I called out to Mrs. Turner.
“Dinner for none tonight! We’re working.”
Mrs. Turner peeked her head out of the kitchen door at the end of the hallway. “You have to eat, Miss March.”
“I’ll get something in town.”
She nodded as if agreeing. “I’ll put something in the icebox for you.”
Koshka and I left the house by the side door.
Usually we’d walk to the Coven’s bookstore, a mere six blocks away on Seventeenth Street, but it sounded like I was going to have to leave on my mission immediately.
So we went to the garage. I hit a button on my key chain and the door yawned open, revealing a metallic gold VW Bug, vintage 1974, a.k.a.
the Sun Buggy. Cute but about as sturdy as a soapbox derby car, so I always strapped Koshka into his safety harness and carrier, even if we were only going a few blocks.
True, I was a Book Witch, and he was my magical familiar, but that didn’t make us immortal. If only.
We drove to the bookstore down the quaint, quiet streets of Fort Meriwether.
Nearly five o’clock in the evening, yet the sidewalks were mostly deserted but for a few people walking their dogs.
The houses were all weather-beaten Victorians or craftsman bungalows that were listing a little.
Our town was built on the side of a hill overlooking the Columbia River.
Gorgeous view, but you needed to be sure your car’s brakes were in good working order unless you wanted to pull a Thelma and Louise off the docks and nose-dive into the drink.
You might not know from looking at it, but Fort Meriwether is a veritable hub of literary magic.
Fictional characters tend to be drawn to either charming small towns or dramatic coastal vistas, and we have both in spades.
When a fictional character escapes the bounds of their book, they gravitate to settings similar to the story worlds they left behind.
This is a port town, built on the junction of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean, and it is charming as heck, if slightly overpriced.
Even better, from our little city, you can travel south and stop in at glorious beach after beach after beach.
It’s fictional character catnip, especially for female leads in emotional turmoil.
I mean, look at every other cover of a women’s fiction book or historical novel.
What’s on it? A woman looking at the ocean.
We parked on the street in front of a sky blue Queen Anne house with a sunshine yellow door, the home of Words, Words, Words, Fort Meriwether’s only bookstore. The name came from Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act Two, Scene Two.
POLONIUS:
What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET:
Words, words, words.
Classic.
The bookstore, as the white wooden yard sign explained, was owned and operated by mystery writer Medda Baker.
She was our sole local celebrity, an author who had lived in our town all her adult life.
She wasn’t a Book Witch herself, but she was on our team in more ways than one.
And she let the Ink and Paper Coven meet on the second floor.
Once inside the bookstore, I started for the cookbook section to rendezvous with my boss. I turned a corner, and right there in front me was the Duke of Chicago.
—
Not literally. Metaphorically. Poetically. He wasn’t there in the flesh, but his books sat on a front table display with a sign.
With the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841,
detective fiction was born!
I didn’t like that exclamation point, but I kept reading.
His character C. Auguste Dupin is literature’s first fictional sleuth!
On October 7, 1849, Poe would die under mysterious circumstances.
In memory of his final mystery, read a work of detective fiction this October!
Two more exclamation points? Something needed to be done about this punctuation abuse.
On the table sat books featuring all the great fictional detectives in history—Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot; Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey; Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins; Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew (of course); and Tom Hightower’s Duke of Chicago.
I couldn’t help myself. I picked up a slim paperback copy of The Velvet Coffin, a Duke of Chicago novella that had been reprinted with the original 1949 pulp cover: Duke in a purple velvet-lined coffin, his eyes closed, playing dead.
Of course Duke didn’t look quite like Duke. Fictional characters never look like the cover art, and no artist could adequately capture how handsome he was in the flesh.
“I miss you,” I whispered, touching the cover.
“Rainy?”
At the sound of Dr. Fanshawe’s voice, I hid the copy of Duke’s book behind my back. If she knew that I was even within ten feet of a Duke of Chicago book, I might never get an assignment again.
“Dr. Fanshawe,” I said, stepping away from the table like it was radioactive. A mistake as I was still holding The Velvet Coffin. I grabbed the nearest hardcover and hid Duke’s book behind it. “I was on my way to African Cuisine, I swear.”
“Hi, Rainy!” Penny Nichols jogged to me, grinning and waving as if she hadn’t seen me in years. “And, hello, Koshka!”
I could hear the exclamation points in her voice.
Penny was one of those effortlessly stylish girls who I’d always mildly envied. She couldn’t have been a day over twenty but dressed to the nines every day. She wore her hair in a chic dark bob and skipped around Fort Meriwether in kitten heels.
Dr. Fanshawe, however, looked like a librarian. Specifically, a librarian from the Library of Alexandria, and she was still furious about that fire. She scared me frankly, which is why I needed to distract her.
“Um, great sign, Penny,” I said, nodding to the mystery display on the table. Both of them took the bait. They looked at the sign while I slipped the Duke of Chicago book I was hiding back onto the shelf. “Your work, I see.”
“You’re so clever!” Penny said. “How did you know I made it?”
All apprentices in our coven worked in the bookstore part-time. Truly, nothing prepares one better to battle evil than working retail.
“Call it a wild guess,” I said. Then I noticed something I’d missed while I’d been panicking.
“You’re wearing bunny ears.” The bunny ears were dark brown, almost the same color as her hair.
“Are you seeing this, Dr. Fanshawe? Wait, you’re wearing a crown.
What is happening? Am I losing my mind? Again? ”
“Apparently, it’s Mad Hatter Day,” Dr. Fanshawe said drily. “Penny is insisting we celebrate it.”
“Good old Mad Hatter Day!” Penny said. “October sixth. Don’t miss it!”
I blinked at her. Exclamation points tended to make my eyes water.
“This is a real holiday?” I asked.
“In Alice in Wonderland, ” Penny began, “the book’s famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel feature a drawing of the Mad Hatter with a price tag in his hatband that reads 10/6. Ten shillings and six pence. And 10/6 is also October sixth, therefore…Happy Mad Hatter Day!”
“In England, they do the day before the month so we really should celebrate it on June tenth,” I reminded her.
“But we’re not in England. Here. I brought you these. We can be twins!”
She stepped forward and placed a pair of white bunny ears on my head.
“Koshka can be the Cheshire Cat,” she said. “Would you like that, you handsome boy? I won’t make you wear a hat. You don’t even have a forehead!” She bent down and scratched Koshka under the chin. He was in heaven. I, however, was not.
“You know, I only celebrate one book holiday a week, and tomorrow,” I said, nodding to the table display, “is the anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s tragic unsolved death, which is a big day in the March household. So…”
“What is that?” Dr. Fanshawe demanded, eyes narrowed.
While I didn’t say my favorite four-letter word at that moment, I thought it. Loudly.
“What is what?” I asked.
“Do you have a book behind your back?”
I gripped it tight, praying she didn’t notice the slim paperback tucked inside.
“Uh…it’s, uh…a Nancy Drew book. Book two. The Hidden Staircase. ”
“And why do you have it?”
My bunny ears were forgotten as I scrambled to think of an excuse.
“Never read it,” I said, sweating and stammering. “I read the first one a long time ago. Ages. I can’t even remember the title.”
“ The Secret of the Old Clock, ” Penny offered from the floor, where she had Koshka on his back while she stroked his gray belly.
“Yes, that was it. I thought it was time I should, you know, read book two.”
“You can read them out of order,” Penny offered helpfully, yet not helpfully.
“Great,” I said. “Good to know.”
She gave me an encouraging smile, as if suffering a little secondhand embarrassment on my behalf.
Meanwhile Dr. Fanshawe stared at me so hard I was surprised laser beams didn’t shoot from her eyes into mine.
(Thankfully not a magical skill Book Witches possess.) I stood still, sweating and praying she was buying this story.
Dr. Fanshawe had personally confiscated my Duke of Chicago book series, every last copy, and my stomach still churned with the memory of being an adult having my books taken away from me, shamefaced as a child caught stealing money from her mother’s purse.
“Put it down,” she finally said. “You have more important things to do than read children’s books.”
“Right, right, the mission,” I said and slid the book back onto the table, nearly fainting from relief. I hadn’t gotten caught, not this time anyway.
“The file, Penny.”
Penny rose off the floor and held out a small canvas book bag to me.
I peeked into the bottom of the bag and found a paperback copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
“Didn’t expect her to go rogue,” I said. “Bad news.”
“Very bad,” Penny agreed somberly, no exclamation points in sight.
Bad enough when a minor character escapes their book. A story can usually survive without them for at least a few weeks.
But when the hero gets out? We had three days tops before the book would be damaged almost beyond repair. This is why I never let Duke out of his books for more than a day. You can have a book without a hero, but would you really want to read it?
“What’s the situation?” I asked, all business again.
“Two days ago, our M.C. landed in Portland, Oregon,” Penny said, using Book Witch shorthand for “main character.” “She joined a dragon boat team practice, had her first Thai food, went to Powell’s City of Books, and came very close to pawning her engagement ring to buy the complete works of Charles Dickens. ”
“Well, that would be modern lit to her,” I said.
“This morning she caught a bus to the coast,” Dr. Fanshawe said. “We tracked her as far as Sunset Beach.”
“Beach,” I said, nodding. “Typical.”
“I want her back in her book before sunset,” Dr. Fanshawe said. “Can you do that?”
I knew what I had to do, and if she’d been gone two days already, we had no time to waste. “Come on, Koshka. Let’s get Elizabeth Bennet to the church on time.”
We started toward the door. Had I gotten away with it? Was I home free? I hadn’t been caught with Duke again?
“Rainy?” Dr. Fanshawe’s voice stopped me in my tracks.
I slowly turned to face her, feeling doomed.
“You’re still wearing the bunny ears.”
“Oops.”
I took them off, tossed them in the tote bag, and went to work.