Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
When the three of us arrived in the book, we were immediately swept up in the flow of the plot. We came to on a sofa in a side room, draped over each other like we’d had too much to drink and passed out.
Slowly, I sat up, rubbing my head.
“You all right, toots?” asked a man in a tuxedo who’d paused in the doorway to light a cigarette.
“I lushed too mush,” I said, playing the part.
“Drink a little water, dame. You’ll be kickin’ up your heels in no time.” He gave me a wink as he did a little Charleston into the next room. Or maybe a Lindy Hop. I’ve never learned the difference.
Champagne flutes, a dozen of them or more, sat on the tables around us. A roar came from close by—music and the stomping of feet that caused the whole house to subtly vibrate.
Next to me, Duke raised his head, blinking like a man waking from either a very long nap or a very brief coma. As soon as his eyes focused, he jumped to his feet and surveyed the room.
“We’re here,” he breathed. “We made it. Look at that wallpaper.” Duke rubbed his hand along the walls. “It feels like…like wallpaper. Gatsby’s wallpaper. Rainy, my love, I have missed this.”
“You missed going on adventures with me?” I asked. Back before we broke up, Duke had accompanied me on several of my assignments.
“I missed going anywhere with you,” he said, smiling. “And the boy, of course. Wait, where’s our boy?”
I glanced around. “I’m going to have to put a bell on that cat if he doesn’t learn to stay close.”
“Anybody missing a pussy?” someone shouted from the next room over.
A man’s voice called back, “Not me! I got too many already!”
“I think we know where Koshka is,” Duke said. He gave a wolf whistle. In seconds a gray streak sped into the room and jumped on the sofa next to me.
“How many times have I told you not to wander off?” I scolded Koshka, pointing my finger at his nose. He licked my fingertip, which was not an apology. “Now, carefully…sneak out of here and find the library. Report back immediately. Go.”
Koshka went into recon mode, tail down, belly close to the ground, as he slinked from the room.
“Shouldn’t take him long,” I said. “He can sniff out a book from a mile away. We better move my umbrella somewhere safe.”
As long as the umbrella stayed open, we could mostly stay hidden in the book.
“Here we go,” Duke said. My umbrella hovered like a bee in the corner of the room. Duke took the handle and hung it upside-down from the chandelier. “A magic umbrella is probably the least bizarre thing ever to hang from this chandelier.”
A young girl dressed in a servant’s uniform entered the room with a tray of champagne. “Anything for you two dolls?” she asked with a flirtatious smile at Duke.
He took a glass of champagne and gave the girl a little salute.
“None for me,” I said. “I’ve had enough.”
She glanced at the empty glasses. “Save some for the rest of us, kitten.”
With a little kick of her heels, she shimmied out of the room.
“Can anyone walk normally here?” I asked. Then I looked at Duke. “Don’t drink that.”
“Not even a sip?”
“You might be stuck here forever. We’re playing by fairyland rules.”
“Hate to waste good champagne, but better safe than eternally trapped in a tragedy.” He poured the champagne out the window. “Rainy, come here.”
“What is it?” I joined him by the window. He pointed to a green light on a dock across the bay.
In The Great Gatsby, that green light on the dock belongs to Daisy Buchanan, with whom Jay Gatsby had a brief relationship years earlier.
Although she is married and has a child, he’s determined to win her heart back and so buys the house across the water from her and throws wild parties hoping against hope that one night, she’ll show up, and they can find their old happiness again.
A foolish fantasy that ends in disillusionment and blood, but still, I felt something stir in my own heart when I looked out at the dock.
“The fabled green light,” Duke said. “I can’t believe I’m seeing it with my own eyes. No wonder you love your job.”
“Everyone who ever read this book has pictured that green light in their minds,” I said. Everyone has their own light that’s just out of reach, the thing they long for, strive for, row toward even as the current pulls them away from it.”
“What’s your green light?” Duke asked.
“Being as good a Book Witch as my mother was, no matter the cost.”
“The cost being me,” he said. “Us. Us being us.”
“You’re fictional, Duke. I’m real. It can’t happen, no matter how much we wish it could.”
“Do I get a say in this?” he asked. “In my own destiny?”
“Not really.” I winked and elbowed him gently in the side. “What about you? Do you have a green light? Or is that not in your character?”
“Every case is a new green light,” he said. “Every time I’m on a job, I can’t rest until the mystery is solved. But now…maybe it’s because I’m not in my books, but it doesn’t feel like enough. The light’s too dim. There are brighter lights so much closer.”
He met my eyes, a beautiful moment interrupted by a small meow.
“Koshka,” I said. “Did you find the library?” He started for the doorway, and we followed him, but then we saw which way he was headed…
…straight through a mass of inebriated partygoers dancing like it was the end of days.
“We can’t walk through there,” I said. “We’ll have to dance. Can you do that?”
“Darling, you know I can cut a rug like ten pairs of scissors with a sharp sword to boot.” He took me by the waist and practically tossed me onto the dance floor.
I laughed as we whirled through the wildly gyrating bodies, waltzing at triple speed while everyone else kicked and dipped and twirled.
“This working?” he asked with a wide smile.
“Works for me!” I shouted over the din of “Sweet Georgia Brown” played by a live twenty-piece ragtime band. “More to the left!”
We boogied and/or woogied to the left, where Koshka’s small face peered around the darkened doorway. Almost there.
Duke spun me around, and for a split second, I saw a painfully handsome man in a perfectly tailored suit standing alone at a window with a cocktail in his hand, staring at the same green light that had so captured our eye.
“Gatsby,” I whispered, but Duke didn’t hear me. That was good. It’s easy to get starstruck in a book this legendary, but I knew better than to talk to a tragic hero when we were trying to fly under the radar.
The song ended and we pushed through the dancers to the hallway. There was Koshka waiting for us. He meowed, and we followed him down the long hall toward a set of closed double-doors. Duke looked around quickly before opening them, then all three of us disappeared inside.
We entered the library like pilgrims at a shrine, in reverent silence. When Duke closed the doors behind us, the music of the raucous party faded to nothing. The hush that fell over the room was so profound even my footsteps sounded offensive to my own ears.
Gatsby’s library…if anything, Fitzgerald’s description hadn’t done it justice. It looked almost medieval, as if, as the story said, the entire magnificent room had been imported from a castle in Europe and put back together here on fictionalized Long Island.
I coveted the dark wood paneling, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and the chandelier throwing golden light over every surface. At random, I chose a book off a shelf and opened it.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.
Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. The Count of Monte Cristo. The Three Musketeers. All of them exquisite antiques, maybe even first editions.
“Rainy?” Duke asked. “You all right, love? You look like you’re about to cry.”
I turned a slow circle inside the library.
“Let me bask,” I said. “This is my Camelot.”
—
After a few moments of silently basking in the glow of the world’s most beautiful private library, we got down to business. “Split up,” I said, “and find that book.”
Duke and I searched the shelves with our eyes, while Koshka made a slow circuit of the room, sniffing out Wonderland.
“I take back my previous assessment,” Duke said. “This library is annoyingly extensive.”
“I know. I think Gatsby has every book in the world in here.”
“Wonder if he has my books? Or is popular detective fiction not good enough for the bootlegger?” he asked.
“ Gatsby was before your time,” I said, scanning the bottom shelves. “It came out in 1925, remember? The first Duke of Chicago book didn’t come out until ’45, when cozy crime fiction turned into noir.”
“But it’s 1930 at home,” he said, running his fingers over book spines as he worked his way to the corner where his wall met mine. “Isn’t it? I could’ve sworn—”
“In your stories, it’s always 1930. But your books came out between 1945 and 1966. Twelve novels, three novellas, and twenty-one short stories. Supposedly your writer left an unfinished book of yours behind.”
“Wait a moment. Remind me what year this is again?” Duke asked.
“In the real world or Gatsby’s?”
“The real world.”
“It’s 2025,” I said.
“So if I was ‘born’ in 1945, and it’s 2025…I’m fifteen years younger than I thought. I’m only eighty, not ninety-two. No wonder I look so good for my age.” He gave a triumphant little laugh.
“Still too old for me,” I said, but gave him a little wink to soften the blow.
“Don’t wink unless you want me to kiss you,” he said as we both reached the same corner.
“I can wink if I want.” I winked again.
“That’s it. You’re getting kissed. Brace yourself.”
It was against the rules, but they were my rules and so I supposed I could break them if I wanted.
Duke bent to kiss me.
Suddenly, the door flew open.
A young woman in a flapper dress burst in.
“Come on, gals and pals! It’s champagne o’clock!” she cried out. Then she took a look at Duke. “I’ve got a whole bottle for you, guv.”
She shook the bottle at him.
“Out,” I ordered her.
“Someone’s feisty. But I get it, honey. He’s a dish and a half,” she sang. Then she spun around and dashed away.
I closed the door behind her and put a chair under the knob. It wouldn’t stop anyone who really wanted to come in, but it would slow them down.
“Now,” I said, turning around, “where were we?”
“About to passionately kiss like we hadn’t a care in the world,” Duke said.
“I do have cares, though,” I reminded him. “Pops.”
“Very well. We’ll find your grandfather, then I’ll kiss you.”
Koshka let out a high-pitched whine, the one he usually reserves for when he’d cornered a toy mouse and wanted me to praise him for his hunting prowess.
“What is it?” I asked him.
Koshka stood on his back paws and stretched himself to his full height of two and a half feet, then batted at a book.
“Victory!” Duke said as he pulled out the book. He held it up. “ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, complete with illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. Good man. You’re officially the world’s smallest librarian. And the most distinguished.”
He gave Koshka an exuberance of pets and scritches.
“Thank you, Jay Gatsby,” I said, taking the book from Duke’s hands.
Thankfully the pages were uncut and as I flipped through them, I could tell it was the full text, words, pictures, and all.
Even better, when I tested its magic, it started to give a little.
This copy wasn’t locked because this copy wasn’t real.
“Perfect,” I said. “Well done, comrade. You earned your tuna today.”
“Shall we?” Duke asked. “Wonderland awaits.”
My elation at having found the book disappeared immediately when I remembered step two of our brilliant plan was actually going into Wonderland.
“We shall,” I said. “But brace yourself. It’s going to be weird.”
“I eat weird for breakfast, love. We go in, ask the March Hare a few questions, and get out. Easy as pie.”
“Easy as extremely strange and difficult pie,” I said. “Remember, don’t eat anything, drink anything, or smoke anything. And if you see the Queen of Hearts, run.”
“Anything else?” he asked.
“If I start to go mad, you have permission to slap some sense into me,” I said.
“I’d never slap a woman. Perhaps a light pinching, however…”
“And if you go mad, I’ll—” I reached under his tuxedo jacket and snapped his suspenders.
Duke cried out and laughed. He rubbed his chest.
“My nipples may never recover,” he said.
“Trust me, it’s better than going mad.” To Koshka I said, “Keep watch, buddy. Don’t let anyone reshelve us.”
I placed the book on a side table open to the page before the famous Mad Tea Party chapter when Alice meets the March Hare.
“Okay, let’s go, Chicago,” I said.
“I have missed you calling me that.” He wrapped his arms around me and held me close. “Now what? Do you need your umbrella?”
“I suppose not. We need to keep it open here. I’ve never attempted a book within book immersion before, so let’s hope the umbrella keeps us covered for both stories.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Duke said, “but I trust your judgment implicitly.”
“It might go easier if you help me. I’ll say Alice’s lines,” I said, pointing to the open page, “and you say the Cheshire Cat’s. Try to believe you’re a part of the story, try to believe the words.”
Duke smiled a little sheepishly. “Never gone undercover as a talking cat before, but I’ll do my best.”
And his best, it turned out, was very good. When he spoke, he did sound almost mad.
“ In that direction…lives a Hatter, ” he began, “ and in that direction, lives a March Hare. Visit either if you like: they’re both mad. ”
“ But I don’t want to go among mad people, ” I said.
“Oh, you can’t help that…we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad!”
The magic was working. Our voices warped and slowed like someone playing a record album on the wrong speed.
The outlines of our bodies wavered and faded.
And if you want to know what it looks like when a Book Witch enters a story, it’s almost exactly like the Cheshire Cat vanishing, as it says in the book, quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin…
“ How do you know I’m mad? ” I read aloud.
“ You must be, ” Duke said, his voice distant and distorted, “ or you wouldn’t have come here… ”
And as we faded away, leaving one mad party for another, I whispered a final warning to Duke.
“By the way,” I said, “I hate Wonderland.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
We faded out of one story and faded slowly into another, finding ourselves standing underneath a tree in a strange wood.
Sunlight streamed through the branches from all angles, because nonsense reigned here, not logic.
I stared at the shadows, the light, the shadows again…
I felt unmoored, faint, not like I was dreaming but like someone was dreaming me.
And hovering in that tree we saw something—not a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat.
“That’s why.”