Chapter Nineteen #2
“Then I’m coming in. Brace yourself.”
Duke dropped his hand, then sighed. “My kingdom for a snorkel.”
I popped one bubble with my fingertip.
Duke raised his eyebrow as he took a towel from the rack and dropped it on the floor. Then he went onto his knees by the side of the bathtub and faced me.
He furrowed his brow. “Are you reading a novel?”
“What? This?” I glanced at the paperback in my hand as if I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it. “It’s against the law to take a bath without a book.”
He plucked the book out of my hand and examined it. The title was Out with a Bang!, and the cover featured an old-fashioned prop gun with a flag hanging from the barrel that read, BANG!
“You’re cheating on me with another detective,” Duke said. He sounded positively aghast.
“It’s Medda Baker’s new book. She’s the writer who owns the bookstore. And don’t be jealous. Her fictional detective isn’t my type. John Odin is a seventy-five-year-old psychic.”
“Too old for you?”
“I don’t trust psychics. Now why are you in my bathroom?”
“You said yourself it feels like we’re inside one of my stories. Yes?”
I sat up a little in the tub. “I did. If only because everything seems harder and more complicated than it needs to be. Why wouldn’t Pops tell me what he meant? Why be so mysterious? Why all the false leads and red herrings and inscrutable clues?”
“Why so mysterious, indeed?” Duke repeated. “One has to wonder, doesn’t one?”
“What is one wondering?” I asked him.
“Rainy…what if we are in a story?”
“I’m a Book Witch, Duke. I know the difference between the real world and story worlds.”
“Yes, of course, but what if…what if someone, whoever is behind all this, wants us to feel like we’re in a story? A mystery story? I don’t know, a mystery reader or perhaps even an author?”
“An author. You think an author is behind all this? Have you met authors, Duke? They aren’t criminal masterminds. Authors are anemic agoraphobes who sit in dark rooms and hallucinate. They’re more like moths than people.”
“But think about it, darling. Only a fictional story”—he brandished the paperback of Out with a Bang!
at me like a prosecutor holding up Exhibit A—“would be this purposefully and annoyingly difficult to solve. And the one clue we have—‘Find the March Hare’—that’s straight out of a novel.
No real criminal would be so elaborate and difficult. And literary.”
He wasn’t wrong. One of the great comforts of mystery fiction is the inherent cleverness of the villains.
Intelligent criminals, driven by powerful motives to commit crimes they considered perfectly justified.
We all want to believe crime happens for a reason, don’t we?
Better than the alternative—that crime is meaningless, arbitrary, and utterly random.
“I did sort of accidentally get magic book powder all over myself yesterday,” I said.
“I was performing a charm on a Little Free Library. It’s supposed to bring the book you most need into your possession.
And the next thing I know…someone gave me a copy of your book, which led to me unwittingly pulling you out of it.
So clearly the universe thought I needed your help.
A fictional detective for a fictional crime. ”
“Exactly. Precisely. Indubitably.”
My heart raced with excitement. It felt like we were on to something here.
“I like this. This is good,” I said, nodding. “But why would a writer want to put me through all this? And why drag Pops into it? Any theories?”
“I’m afraid I can’t answer as to their motive,” Duke said, “but the means seem quite clear. Whoever is doing this to you is putting you through the wringer of a mystery plot.”
Medda Baker was staring back at me from the back of her book. While I didn’t know her very well, Pops and Medda were old friends. She wouldn’t be the one to put me through the wringer like this, but—
“Rainy?” Duke said.
“I was just thinking,” I said. “Koshka loves Cary Grant films.”
“Koshka does, does he?” Duke asked, raising his eyebrow.
“There’s this famous story about the Cary Grant film North by Northwest —after your time,” I said before he could ask.
“The screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, and the director, Alfred Hitchcock, hit a snag in the screenplay. They had written most of it but couldn’t figure out the ending.
So Hitchcock being Hitchcock, said no worries.
They would get Patricia Highsmith to come in, read their script, and tell them how it should end. ”
“Who?”
“Also after your time,” I said. “Patricia Highsmith was a famous mystery writer, she wrote Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Hitchcock’s thinking was…who better to solve a fictional mystery than a mystery writer, right?”
“Did it work?”
“They ended up figuring it out for themselves, but…I mean, it’s worth a shot.”
“Then let’s pay this Medda Baker person a call and hope she’s home,” Duke said.
“Hope she’s home? Have you ever met a writer?”
After shooing Duke from the bathroom, I dried off and dressed as quickly as I could.
I knew Medda Baker’s address, of course. Everyone did. You don’t even need to know the house number or the street. You wanted the woman who wrote murder mystery novels…you found the house that looked most like the setting of a murder mystery novel.
She lived on the opposite side of the town, high on the hill and overlooking the bay in a cottage painted black with white trim and two stone gargoyles standing guard on either side of her arched front door, which was painted a garish blood red.
I parked the Sun Buggy on the street, and Duke peered at the house through the car window.
“She lives in a black house?” He was mildly aghast. “Did it used to be a funeral home?”
“It’s a storybook cottage.”
“It’s black,” he said again.
“Well, she writes very dark storybooks. Ready?”
Duke, Koshka, and I strolled nervously up the cobblestone path to her front door.
“What about the boy?” Duke asked.
“You mean my cat? Again…have you ever met—”
“A writer? Right. Yes. Understood. What about me? Cover story?”
“I’ll tell her you’re my friend Nick.”
“Of course,” he said. “You ring though. I’m too nervous.”
“You’re scared of Medda Baker?”
“She kills people,” he said.
“Only in books.”
“Yes, in books, where I live, ” he reminded me.
“I’ll protect you from the big bad writer,” I said, patting him on the back.
I rang the doorbell twice and waited.
After a few tense seconds, we heard steps and the floor creaking and a lock unlocking.
The door slowly opened to reveal a woman, approximately five feet tall and eighty years old. She looked like the platonic ideal of a grandmother. Cut her and she would bleed doilies and Werther’s Originals.
“Rainy March, is that you?” She perched her reading glasses on the tip of her nose.
“Hi, Ms. Baker. I was hoping you could help me with something story-related.”
“Of course, of course, come right in.” She shuffled back and held the door open for us. “Who’s your handsome friend?”
“This is Koshka, my cat, and this is, um…”
“Nick,” Duke said. “Nick Baron. Ma’am. Madam. Miss…tress. Mistress ma’am. Milady.”
Medda looked at me.
“He’s nervous that you’ll murder him,” I explained. “Since you kill people on paper.”
She laughed and held her hand out to him.
“Little ole me?” she said with a sweet grandmotherly smile. “Don’t you worry about that, young man. I’d never murder the Duke of Chicago.”
We stared at her, shocked, jaws scraping the porch.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Medda said to me. “Of course I know who he is. I’m a Ducky too.”