Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Five
A cardboard box appeared on the table, slightly bigger than a breadbox.
Maxine took a book from the box—a slim hardcover with a picture on the front of a young woman holding a black umbrella over her head in the rain, a dark Victorian house behind her in the distance, and the unmistakable shadow of a vampire falling onto her path. She handed it to me.
“ The Children of the Night, ” I read aloud in astonishment. “By Maxine Blake.”
“The first of the Book Witch stories,” she said. “Dracula escapes the prison of his pages, and only Book Witch Rainy March, with the help of Dr. Van Helsing, can catch him and return him to his story. First edition, first printing.”
“The cover is insane,” I said. “Could it be any more Gothic?”
She leaned forward and snatched the book from my hands.
“Everyone’s a critic. It was the seventies.
” Maxine held the book up. “This edition is worth a small fortune, I’ll have you know.
No series title, no number. By the second printing, my publisher knew it was going to be a hit and added the series title—The Book Case Files of Rainy March, Book Witch—and put a number one on the spine. ”
“Is that supposed to be a pun? Book Case Files… like a bookcase ?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” she said. “I didn’t like it either. So I’ve been mocking puns in your books ever since as payback.”
She began to pull other books from the box.
A Pleasure to Burn. That was about my mission into Fahrenheit 451 when the Burners attacked the most important novel ever published on book burning.
“Book fifteen,” she said. “We had to get permission from Mr. Bradbury to use his book, but he was more than happy to sign off on it. His editor’s daughter was a fan of your series. And this is book twenty-nine.”
This Deplorable Folly. My mission into Poe’s “The House of Usher.” It still gave me the chills to remember that vile house, the scent of death and rot in the walls.
She pulled another from the box. “This one was fun. I didn’t usually send you into children’s novels since my series was technically for adults, but Jack Masterson’s editor arranged for a crossover event.”
Do Clocks Wish for the End of Time? My assignment on Clock Island, where I helped the famous Mastermind grant a child’s wish to meet her hero, Lucy Maud Montgomery.
“And my personal favorite,” Maxine said. “But don’t tell anyone writers play favorites. Book thirty-five.”
The Dragon Gate. My mission with the Count of Monte Cristo, the title coming from the famous quote, was technically for adults.
I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily.
Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.
“My goal was to write thirty-six,” she said. “And I did before I had to retire.”
“Had to? Why?”
“We’ll get to that,” she said.
She put the books back into the box, and the second she shut the lid, it disappeared.
“Wow. Magic.”
“Fiction,” she said. “I think it, it happens. At least in here.”
“Really? Can you bring Duke here?”
“It would be better if I didn’t. We have important things to discuss, and we both can concentrate better without him around being handsome and overprotective. But…how about…that?”
She glanced down the hallway where a small form moved through the shadows, trotting toward us—a streak of fog-colored fur.
“Koshka!” I cried out. He ran straight to me and jumped onto my lap. “Oh, buddy, I missed you.” I cupped his small face in my hands and kissed him between the ears on that flat part of his head I called his landing pad. His warm, small body purred against me.
“Thank you, Maxine. This doesn’t make up for all the horrible things you’ve done to me over the years, but I appreciate it.”
“My pleasure,” she said. Koshka leapt lightly from my arms and jumped into her lap. She scratched him between the ears. “ What greater gift than the love of a cat? Charles Dickens supposedly said that. Of course, you and I both know—”
“—it’s a misattribution.”
“Exactly,” she said, stroking Koshka’s back. “You know because I know.”
“I know because you…” My voice trailed off as the enormity of what she was saying dawned on me. I didn’t know everything she knew; I only knew what she wanted me to know. But now we were face-to-face, and I had questions…and she, almost certainly, had all the answers I was owed.
“You know the identity of the March Hare,” I said. “I mean, I have a theory but—”
“We’re getting to that. I told you, no skipping to the last page. We have more story to get through first.”
“Fine, go on. But I’m starting to dislike you again,” I said. “Which, come to think of it, is weird, if you’re in charge of everything I do and feel and say.”
“No one is more self-loathing than an artist,” she said with a laugh.
“And I don’t really blame you, kiddo. When I say I feel your pain, I mean it literally.
I lost my family too. I think I wrote you as an orphan because…
I didn’t know how else to write you. They say writers should write what they know. That’s what I knew.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “Is that why you liked Nancy Drew so much? No mother?”
“Oh, that was part of the reason. Really, I wanted to be her best friend, wanted that more than anything. When I was a girl, I wrote my own Nancy Drew stories. Childish fan fiction before there was even a term for it. Then I grew up and tried to create my own Nancy in her honor. A teen girl detective, Rainy, that’s who you were supposed to be.
Maybe a little more modern, a little hipper.
But I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and nothing worked.
Everything I wrote was Nancy Drew Lite. Derivative drivel. Eventually, I simply gave up.”
“You quit?”
“I decided to stop wasting the office’s paper supply on pages that always ended up in the wastebasket. I’d killed enough trees already. And that’s when it happened.”
“What happened?” I leaned forward in my chair.
“I would always bring a book to read during lunch, but I’d accidentally left mine on the bus.
Bored, I read the newspaper instead. November sixteenth, 1973…
On the third page, there was an article about a school board in North Dakota.
They’d ordered thirty-six copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five burned. ”
“Burned?” I asked. “Literally burned? In a fire?”
“Burned. And the order had been followed. The custodian threw them in the school’s incinerator.
” She met my eyes, and I saw the pain in them.
Fifty-year-old pain that had never healed.
“They were burning books in Chile too. The military was, I mean. The fascist military. And in North Dakota, America. I couldn’t believe it. ”
I sat back in my chair, stunned.
“There are Burners in the real world?” I asked.
“Like X? No. But people who burn books out of ignorance and fear? Yes, I’m afraid so,” Maxine said.
Was this how Duke felt when he learned World War I had been real?
“It came out that most of the school board hadn’t even read the book, only a few paragraphs taken out of context.
Some of the kids tried to hide their copies, but their lockers were searched, their books confiscated.
Some lied and said they’d lost their copies.
Some offered to buy the books from the school.
I couldn’t get those kids out of my mind.
The ones who’d put up such a valiant fight to save a book.
To save their own homework. Can you imagine?
” She raised her hands and shook her head.
“The adults in town either couldn’t or wouldn’t help them.
I realized then that kids didn’t need another kid hero book.
Kids weren’t the problem. It was the adults.
I needed to write to the adults. So I created the champion those kids needed.
Someone, a grown-up, who would fight the burners for them.
Someone who would dedicate her life to protecting stories, guarding stories, saving stories.
A traveling angel character. Instead of solving crimes in books, like Nancy Drew, she would solve crimes against books. In other words, Rainy March… you .”
—
How long did I sit there, letting her words sink in? Maybe a minute. Maybe an hour. Did time have any meaning in this place anyway?
“Me?” I finally said.
“You. Now are you still mad at me?” she asked.
“Less mad. You did call me an angel, which was very nice of you.”
She laughed softly. “Traveling angel,” she said. “It’s not a compliment. It’s a literary term for a certain type of fictional character who exists to help people solve their problems. You’re in good company, Rainy. Sherlock Holmes. Nancy Drew, of course. Even Jack Reacher.”
“I’m like Jack Reacher? Hasn’t he used the same toothbrush for almost thirty books?”
“You’d have to ask Lee Child,” she said.
“But I’ll put it this way—if fictional characters unionized, you two would be in the same trade union.
Traveling angels go from place to place helping people, changing lives for the better, but you yourself, you don’t change.
In fact, you can’t change, Rainy. You wouldn’t be you if you changed.
Sherlock’s never going to become a schoolteacher instead of a detective.
Jack Reacher will never retire to the country and keep bees.
Nancy Drew will never give up sleuthing to become a lawyer like her father and marry Ned.
Thank God. She can do so much better. For fifty years and thirty-six books…
you haven’t changed, and that’s how it is, kid.
Or was. Until now. Now things have to change, especially if you want to solve the mystery of the March Hare. ”
“Why do things have to change now?”
She lowered her head, then lifted it slowly. “You know why, Rainy.”
Maxine gestured to a delicate white vanity table with a stool and a mirror.