Chapter Twenty #2
“Can’t you Book Witches bedazzle an old book into a new book?” Medda asked, miming waving a magic wand over the cover.
“We don’t call it ‘bedazzling,’ but yes, we can. But how…”
Duke took the book from me.
“Rainy, darling, I swear I got this off the shelf in the children’s section. The spine wasn’t even cracked.”
“?‘The Purloined Letter,’?” Medda said.
“The Edgar Allan Poe short story?” I asked, hands still shaking with shock, joy, and more than a little confusion. “What about it?”
“In the story,” Medda began, “the detective Dupin is hired to find a letter that has been stolen from the queen. The man who stole it is blackmailing her with it. The police have searched the suspect’s home high and low, but the brilliant Dupin finds it sitting out in the open with the suspect’s other mail. ”
“Hiding in plain sight,” Duke said.
“Exactly,” Medda said. “Someone wanted to hide this book but in such a way that you could find it and no one else,” Medda said.
“Fiendishly clever.” Duke nodded. “Who else would immediately buy this book except someone who’d just lost their copy?” He pointed at Medda. “You are very good.”
She crossed her arms and smiled. “Three Edgar Awards can’t be wrong.”
“Thank you,” I said, tenderly holding the book to my chest. “If only finding Pops were that easy, but I’ll take what I can get. What do you think this means? A Book Witch is behind all this? They stole my book? Then why get it back to me?”
“We know you have a secret enemy,” Medda said. “Maybe you also have a secret ally? But don’t ask me who.”
“I’ll ask you this, Lady Edgar,” Duke said, leaning in to meet Medda’s eyes. “Who is the March Hare?”
“Ah, well, you see, this is where you figure that out,” she said, tapping her pencil tip on the graph, distressingly far away from the midpoint. “You have to get closer to the climax for that.”
“What about Dr. Fanshawe? Could she be the March Hare? She did confiscate my umbrella.”
“I’d guess she is involved somehow, but I can’t see her as being the key to all of this. Can you?”
“Not really,” I said. “She’s not a March and she has nothing hare-like about her.”
“Better keep looking,” Medda said, crumpling her plot graph into a ball and tossing it over her shoulder. “The midpoint is a bit too early to figure it all out anyway. But you’re well on your way.”
“I hope you’re right. Supposedly when we find the March Hare, we’ll know what my mother was trying to tell me. And hopefully we’ll find Pops too.”
“And we’ll know how to be together,” Duke said, looking at me.
“That would be a happy ending, wouldn’t it?” Medda said.
We’d gotten all we could get from her—tea and information and my book back.
She led us to her front door.
“Thank you again,” I said, still holding my book. “For this anyway. Can I pay you back? Maybe hop into your new book with you so you can tell John Odin goodbye?”
She furrowed her brow. “An author meeting her own main character…now that’s an idea. Let me think about it.”
“You know where to find me,” I said and gave her a hug. She patted my back, then let me go.
“Wish I could solve this case for you, Rainy, but that’s not how it works. Every story, in one way or another, is a journey of self-discovery.”
“I’m not giving up yet,” I said. “No rest until Pops is home.”
“Good girl,” she said. “And tell him to come visit me the minute he’s back.”
She opened the door, and we stepped out into the silver light of early afternoon. Duke, Koshka, and I stood on the porch while she leaned against the doorframe.
“It was nice to meet you,” Duke said. “Thank you for not murdering me.”
“You know, I met your writer once,” she said.
“You did?” Duke asked, visibly shocked.
“Tom Hightower. Met him at a book signing in New York when I was a teenager. He lost his brother in the Great War, liberating Belgium. He said he came up with the idea for your books by imagining a young man who said ‘No, thank you’ to all that, and found a way to make the world a safer, better place without picking up a gun. Which you did.”
“Not this world,” he demurred. “Only a fictional version of it.”
“Oh, yes, this world,” she said. “Did you know that when Hightower died, he left an unfinished manuscript for the thirteenth Duke of Chicago mystery?”
“Does anyone know what happened to it?” Duke asked.
“I know exactly what happened to it,” Medda said. “About twenty years ago, his estate asked me to finish writing it.”
“What?” I said. “Are you kidding?”
She shook her head. “I gave it a try, but there was nothing to go on except the first chapter and half a page of notes. I couldn’t do it. Like a kid trying to color inside the lines of a Picasso. One of my few regrets in life is not finishing the book. The estate dropped the idea after I gave up.”
“Maybe you’ll try it again?” I asked.
“Yes, and put a love interest named Rainy March in it for me,” Duke said. “I’ll be forever in your debt.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, handsome.”
Duke caught her hand in his, raised it to his lips, and kissed the back of it.
“Charming devil. Your writer knew what he was doing.”
A question occurred to me then that I was a little afraid to ask, but with time running out, I asked it anyway. “In a mystery, what comes after the midpoint?”
“Things will seemingly get better. Something will jump out at you, give you a brand-new idea. But then things will get much, much worse. In a murder mystery, another body would hit the floor.”
“Someone will die?” I asked, horrified.
“In my stories, yes. In your story? I imagine it’s only a metaphorical body. A failure or a false lead. Still, watch your back.”
Always good advice.
“But don’t you worry. Eventually you’ll figure it all out,” she told us. Then she gasped.
“What?” I asked, hoping she’d thought of something wildly helpful.
“Wait here.” She went back into her house and returned a minute later, holding a book and a pen. “Would it be gauche of me to ask for a signature?”
Medda held the book out to Duke—it was Kiss Me Once, Kill Me Twice, the Duke of Chicago book ten. On the vintage painted cover, a man kisses a woman who holds a gleaming silver knife behind her back.
“I’m having an existential crisis again,” Duke said. “I’ve never been asked to autograph one of my cases before. People died.”
“I suppose it is a bit offensive to ask—” Medda began.
“Not at all.” Duke eagerly reached for the book and pen. “They were bad people.”
Medda half laughed, half coughed at that. She took the book back from Duke and held it tight to her chest. “You two run along. I have to clean my office, and you have a March Hare to find.”
“If you think of anything else, let us know,” I said.
She tapped her chin in deep thought, then she pointed at me.
“I can tell you this much. Writers, critics, and scholars squabble all the time about how many types of stories there are in the world. One says there are two—comedy and tragedy. Another says there are seven—quest, voyage and return, et cetera, et cetera. But I firmly believe there is only one type of story in all the world through all the ages. Every story is a mystery story if you don’t know where it’s going.
Or, in other words…” she said, lowering her voice dramatically, “things are never what they seem.”