Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Eighteen
So we had the wrong March Hare, apparently. Not the one in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books but a different March Hare that was somehow more obvious—staring us in the face, the teapot had said—yet less obvious because, well, I had no clue where to find another March Hare.
Nothing to do but go home and keep looking.
Usually when escaping a story, I chant, “ Our revels now are ended. ” It worked as a charm, popping me out of the story like popping a champagne cork.
But since we weren’t going home but back to Gatsby’s library, I tried a different charm this time: “ I like large parties. They’re so intimate.
At small parties there isn’t any privacy. ”
Jordan Baker’s famous line about parties did the trick. One moment Duke and I were walking swiftly away from the home of the March Hare, and the next, we were tumbling into Gatsby’s library.
“Did we make it?” Duke asked, still groggy from the leap.
“Maybe?” Prying my eyes open, I looked around, saw books, bookshelves, dark paneling, and Koshka, of course, who was half-asleep on top of the open pages. “We made it.”
Luckily, we’d landed on the sofa together, Duke mostly on the bottom. I tried to get up, but admittedly I didn’t try very hard. A wave of dizziness hit me, and I had to close my eyes again and rest my head on Duke’s chest.
“I hate Wonderland. Did I mention that?”
“You mentioned it several times,” he said. “Now I understand why. That was…troubling.”
“Talking teapots are only cute in cartoons.”
Duke stroked my back. “I’m sorry we didn’t find your Hare. We’ll keep looking.”
“It’s staring me in the face, apparently. But the only thing staring me in the face right now is you. Are you the March Hare?”
“I am neither March nor Hare,” he said, then winced.
“What’s wrong?”
“Something is digging into my hip. Hold on.” He wrapped his arm around my back, twisted us both to the side, and yanked a champagne bottle out from under one of the sofa cushions.
I took the bottle and set it on the floor. “Everyone in this book needs a liver biopsy.”
“They’re fictional,” Duke reminded me. “They’ve been partying here a hundred years.”
“Then they really need liver biopsies.” I rested my chin on my hands and looked up at him. “That’s a joke, by the way. I know they’re fictional and therefore immortal, more or less. Lucky them.”
“Immortality is overrated.” Duke brought his hand to my neck, stroking it. “I’d far rather be able to grow old.”
“Really? Why?”
“If I can’t grow old, I can’t grow old with you.”
Ever have anyone say something so violently sweet to you that it felt like a punch in the stomach?
“Stop being wonderful,” I said. “You’re making it worse.”
“Would it make it better or worse if I kissed you?”
“Ground rules,” I said.
“Very well,” he sighed.
He did kiss me then, but only on my forehead. It was exactly what I needed. I laid my head on his chest again and let him hold me.
“I know this is stupid,” I said, “but I thought it would be easy. Jump into the story. Interrogate the March Hare until he spilled the beans about where Pops had been taken and where my book was and all that. Now that I think about it, that really would have been too easy. Too literal.”
“Don’t give up. We did learn we have the wrong March Hare. Therefore there is a right March Hare. We just need to find him. And, if it comforts you, in my cases, I never get it right the first time.”
“No offense, but your cases are fictional. If you got it right the first time, the book would be very short.”
“Longer story, more time with you,” he said.
I lifted my head. “Thanks. I couldn’t do this without you.”
“You could, but I won’t let you.”
Koshka jumped off the book and trotted over to us. Very reluctantly, I pulled away from Duke’s arms and stood up.
Koshka let out a soft mrrwrp, which I knew meant “ Breakfast ?”
“Right, boy. We’re going, I promise. We need my umbrella.”
“I’ll get it,” Duke said. “Stand by.”
He slipped out the door, Koshka following.
My head was still spinning, but I had to check the book.
I picked Gatsby’s copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland up from the table and flipped through the pages from beginning to end.
Good. Although our tea party was abandoned, in the book all the characters were present and accounted for. We’d done the book no harm with our excursion. Wonderland was as bizarre, troubling, trippy, and unnerving as always. Perfect.
Duke returned holding my umbrella open over his shoulder.
He gave it a little spin before returning it to me.
“Luckily no one vomited in it,” Duke said. “I checked.”
“Excellent. Koshka, let’s go.” He jumped onto the table and into my arms. Duke put his arms around me and held us both tight.
“Our revels now are ended!” I said, clicking my umbrella closed.
We tumbled through time and space—the time it takes to read a sentence and the space between one word and the next—and finally landed on the rug in the Pilcrow House library.
I groaned.
Duke groaned.
Koshka squeaked like a child had squeezed him too hard.
“Duke? You alive?” I asked.
“Barely, darling, but give us a moment. Right as rain soon. Or I’ll pass away. Fifty-fifty chance.”
I turned to my familiar. “Koshka?”
He let out another pathetic squeak.
“What about you, love?” Duke asked. “You’re alive, I hope?”
“More or less,” I said, leaving out the grim details. Everything hurt. Arms, legs, chest, heart, lungs, even teeth and eyelashes. “Book within a book? Let’s never do that again.”
Koshka yawned so wide his entire small body shook. Yawning suddenly felt like a great idea, so I let one out as well. “What time is it?”
Duke glanced up at the clock on the mantel. “Nearly eight in the morning.”
“No wonder I’m exhausted. We’ve been awake all night.”
“You should sleep,” he said as he got off the floor and slipped out of his tuxedo jacket.
“Aren’t you sleepy too?”
“Never, darling. A fictional detective is indefatigable until he solves the case,” Duke boasted. “We have drive. We have determination. We have—”
“Cocaine,” I said. “I mean, if you’re Sherlock Holmes.”
“And I am not,” he said. “You go and sleep.”
“I can’t. We have too much work to do. Pops told us—”
“Your grandfather is safe and alive, but you are dead on your feet. I’ll stay up and work on the case, figure out this pesky March Hare of yours. How does that sound?”
It sounded awful, honestly, not that I told him that.
Duke would leave at midnight, case solved or not, which meant we only had sixteen hours left together.
Yes, I had to get a little sleep or I’d be useless, but I didn’t want us spending any time apart when this was literally our last day on earth together.
“Actually,” I said, “I have a better idea.”
—
Technically, we didn’t break any of the ground rules.
After getting Koshka his breakfast, I put on my pajamas—an oversize, gloriously hideously purple Friends of the Fort Meriwether Library T-shirt and sleep shorts—and Duke took off his shoes and tie.
I lay down on my pillow while Duke sat propped up against my headboard to continue working on the case.
Koshka, an excellent chaperone, stretched out between us and fell fast asleep.
Sleep hit me like a sneaker wave, pulling me under the surface into strange but sweet dreams. I dreamed Duke and I were getting married in a library I’d never seen before with tall arched windows and a fireplace so big you could step into it.
Pops was there, holding my hand. And for some reason, I had bunny ears on with my white dress, but hey, that’s a dream for you.
In the dream, Pops squeezed my hand. Almost time.
I wish Mom were here, I said. She could give me away.
Don’t worry. Your father will be here soon. He told me he was on his way.
In the dream, a door started to open, and I knew it was my father. He’d made it just in time.
And I felt that sort of relief mingled with full-body joy that you only experience in dreams when your brain plays such a good trick on you that you think it’s real, that you and the person you love will be together, and you do have a father and he is coming to your wedding and everything is fine now and always will be forever and ever…
Then I woke up.
It felt like I’d slept for days, but when I opened my eyes and checked the bedside clock, only three hours had passed.
With a groan, I rolled over toward Duke.
“Morning, sunshine,” he said with a smile. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like a baby. Or not. Babies don’t usually sleep that well, do they?”
“I slept like a baby when I was a baby,” Duke said. “But that might have been from the opium in our cough syrup.”
I felt a warm, empty spot on the bed. “Where’s Koshka?”
“Having a fit of feline insanity,” Duke said. As if on cue, I heard tiny feet galloping up and down the stairs like someone had let a Shetland pony loose in the house.
“Zoomies. He might be a familiar, but he is still a cat.”
Duke didn’t answer, merely turned a page in whatever book he was reading.
I sat up and eyed it. “Where did you get that?” I asked.
He had a copy of The Secret of the Old Clock in his hand, the same 1930 version as my mother’s book, except his was a brand-new copy.
“The bookshop,” he said. “Don’t worry. I paid for it. Left a dollar bill on the till.”
“Books cost a little more now than they did during the Great Depression, Duke.”
“I’ll mail them a cheque for the difference.”
I almost told him the bookstore also did not take checks, but I decided to let it go. I would buy the book. It was nice to have a copy back in the house, even if it wasn’t my mother’s copy.
“Haven’t you read this before?” I asked him.
“I seem to recall starting it…but never finishing it. Can’t remember what happened. Oh, yes, someone interrupted me. Who was it? And what was she doing?”
He stared out the window, rubbing his chin.
“Oh, you remember. We both remember.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, giving me a look to burn paper. “It’s coming back to me now.”
“Stop looking at me that way. Ground rules.”