Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The pianist began to play again, a piece everyone in the room—and the world—recognized. A slow, contemplative version of “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz.
Tears flowed freely when four librarians gathered in front, not in mourning black but in their cardigans and T-shirts or polo shirts with the Santa Barbara Public Library orange poppy logo.
They said nothing, made no announcements, but everyone at once seemed to understand who they were and why they were there.
For Maxine Blake, there would be no elegant men in dark suits to act as pallbearers. Not her style. Librarians in their everyday work clothes and comfortable sneakers and eyeglasses that needed a good cleaning…they would be her pallbearers.
Since she had been cremated, there was only the urn, which was actually just a plain wooden box that a male librarian held somberly in front of him.
The three other honorary pallbearers carried other things.
One librarian had a photo of Maxine from her younger years, proudly holding a copy of her first published book and kissing the spine.
Another librarian had a stack of Maxine’s books.
The final librarian carried a composition notebook and a pen.
The four stood by the stage, silently bearing symbols of Maxine Blake’s life’s work.
The crowd was allowed to file past the four librarians.
As Rainy walked by, she could see that the objects they held weren’t symbolic but, in fact, very real.
The photograph wasn’t a copy but a faded original in a cheap frame, likely the only one Maxine could afford in her early days as a writer.
The books weren’t published copies but printed and bound manuscripts covered in editor’s marks, including penciled-in pilcrows, since Maxine had a terrible tendency toward too-long paragraphs.
The notebook too had yellowed pages. They’d laid it open to the middle, displaying Maxine’s own handwriting, and the pen was a simple pink plastic ballpoint from a local bank with the clip broken off.
Someone touched the pages tentatively, as if fearing they’d be scolded, but it was allowed. And then everyone after her touched Maxine’s handwriting.
“Hurry,” Frankie whispered into Rainy’s ear. “Grab your umbrella.”
Rainy did as she was told, though she didn’t understand why. All the gathered filed quickly and quietly out of the atrium and walked swiftly through the library.
“This way,” the woman said. “We’re on the left.”
Again Rainy did as she was told, still not knowing why, but it seemed a procession was being formed. She followed Frankie into an open courtyard alongside the library, where two groups of mourners, one on the left and one on the right, created a center path to the waiting limousine.
A woman who seemed to be the ringleader ran up and down the path, whispering orders. “Wait until the doors open and they all come out,” Rainy heard the woman say. “Go at the whistle.”
Moments later, a couple of wide-eyed library pages opened the double front doors.
The pallbearers came out in a line, followed by the library director, then Jessa Charming, then finally Anthony.
The funeral party started forward.
Someone blew a whistle.
At that signal, hundreds of black umbrellas all opened at once. The whoosh and click were nearly deafening, a crashing ocean wave of sound.
Rainy, caught off-guard, could only watch in silent awe. Frankie nudged her gently. Finally, she opened her own umbrella and raised it over her head.
Anthony stared at the tribute, his hand on his heart.
Then he nodded his gratitude. He and the funeral party walked down the path of the honor guard to the waiting limousine.
As Anthony passed Rainy, she smiled at him. He glanced at her, then started slightly.
As if Maxine had written the right words into her DNA, Rainy whispered to him, “She told me to tell you that you were her favorite story.”
The shock on his face passed quickly.
“Better come with me,” he said.
Rainy whispered a quick goodbye to Frankie, then stepped out of the line and followed him to the limousine.
She closed her umbrella as he opened the door for her.
At the car, he paused and turned to face the crowd. “If you all care to honor Maxine…find someone who needs a story and read it to them.”
Then he got inside, and the driver shut the door behind him.
When they were alone in the back of the limousine, Anthony looked at her. She sat on the bench seat opposite him, her back to the closed partition.
“So…” he said. “It’s you.”
“It’s me,” she said. “Hi.”
He took a deep breath. “It worked, I see.”
“It worked.”
He reached across the small space and held out his hand.
“Pleasure to finally meet you,” he said. “The other woman.”
She laughed and shook his hand.
“She loved you more,” Rainy said.
“How do you know?”
“Her last thoughts were of you.”
“Were they?” He sounded doubtful.
“I was there,” Rainy said. “You were her happy ever after.”
He laughed softly and sat back in his seat.
Something almost like a smile passed across his face.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“I arrived right before the funeral started.”
“The first character to ever attend her author’s funeral,” he said. “I assume.”
He laughed again, but quickly the laugh turned to a single sob.
“Sorry,” he whispered, coughing.
“Don’t be,” Rainy said. “I’m glad I came. It was wonderful to see how loved she was. To me, all this time, she’s been this invisible tormentor. I might want to smack her around, but her readers obviously loved her.”
“There were a few dozen people in that entire place who’d actually met Maxine in person, only five or six who could call her a friend.
You understand that, don’t you? All those people weren’t there because they loved Maxine, Rainy.
They wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a police lineup. It’s you they love.”
—
As they drove to the cemetery, Rainy watched the world pass outside. She didn’t want to intrude on Anthony’s grief, though she still had a thousand questions to ask him. Lost as he was in his own suffering, she was shocked when he spoke up again.
“It’s very strange,” he said, “not knowing what you’re thinking.”
“What do you mean?” Rainy asked.
“I know you only in the first person. Thirty-six Book Witch novels times three hundred pages each equals…”
“Don’t ask me to do math.”
“Over ten thousand pages of your thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears. Now you’re…a blank page,” he said.
“Imagine how I feel,” she said.
“How do you feel?”
“Warm and dry, for starters. There’s so much sunlight here. Do you ever get used to it?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll take it over London in February any day.”
“Or Fort Meriwether,” she said, smiling. “I mean… Astoria. ” She scoffed. “Ridiculous name.”
“Don’t complain. They host a Rainy March Book Fair every March in your honor.”
“Really?” She blushed. “A book fair for me?”
“We used to go there every year when Maxine was feeling up to it. We would’ve lived there except Maxine’s health was too fragile for those brutal winters.”
“So why did she set my stories there then?”
“She’d visited once when she was younger.
In the off-season. March. She didn’t realize how wet it would be, but she said it was the best trip of her life.
She stayed inside and read the whole time.
A weather reporter said something on the radio about it being a particularly ‘rainy March.’ And that’s where your name came from. ”
“I knew it! I was named after a weather report!” She winced and looked at him. “Sorry. Got excited there.”
He gave a little laugh. “I’m sitting in the back of a limousine with a fictional character.”
“I’m sitting in the back of a limousine with the husband of my writer,” she said. “Crazy. Any theories on how this is happening?”
“I have one, but you might not believe me,” he said.
“Anthony,” she said, pursing her lips at him, “I fought Dracula.”
“All right, perhaps you will believe me.” He took a long breath. “Once, Maxine did a good deed. A deed so good, so brave, so self-sacrificial that the entire universe took notice.”
“Rosa,” Rainy said. “Reading the Nancy Drew book to Rosa when she was dying.”
“That was only the first part of the story. There’s more.”
He took a ragged breath and Rainy almost stopped him. Talking about Maxine was so clearly agony for him, like walking on glass, the broken glass that had once been their life together.
“If you don’t want to talk about her—”
“I’ve seen people lose loved ones before,” he said. “The day will come when I’ll want to talk about her, and no one will be willing to listen. If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you.”
“I’ll listen.”
He sat back in his seat and glanced out the window, as if it were easier to speak without making eye contact.
“Maxine was sick for weeks. What was worse, of course, was…Well, you’ve read The Velveteen Rabbit. You know what happens when a child has scarlet fever, what happens to their toys, their clothes…their books.”
“They burned her books?” Rainy asked.
Anthony nodded. “They had to. She stood at the window and watched them make a bonfire in a bin in the back garden. In went her clothes. In went her sheets. In went Nancy Drew and The Secret of the Old Clock. In went her composition notebook and all the little stories Maxine had written starring her and Nancy Drew together.”
“No wonder Maxine was so upset by book burnings. It had happened to her.”
“I think it took some of her will to live. She got much, much worse after that. They finally took her to the hospital. The girls at St. Sophia’s pooled their few nickels and pennies and bought her a get-well gift.
A used, falling-apart copy of The Secret of the Old Clock.
You would’ve thought it was a teddy bear. Maxine slept with it under her pillow.”
He cleared his throat.
“One night,” he continued, “Maxine woke up. A girl with blond hair wearing a blue dress with a matching hat stood by her bed.”
“Nancy Drew?” Rainy breathed.
“The very one. Maxine’s hero, her favorite character, her best friend.
She told Maxine she had a surprise for her.
She worked a little magic, and suddenly the used copy of the book became a nice brand-new copy.
She told Maxine to get better so they could share more adventures together.
It worked. Maxine got better. When she told me that, I thought she’d dreamed it but…
well, now I think that Maxine simply loved Nancy Drew into existence. ”
“I always thought only Book Witches could do that,” Rainy said. “Was Maxine a Book Witch?”
“I would say so,” Anthony said. “In her own way. As much as Maxine loved Nancy, Nancy loved her back. As you know…that does happen sometimes.”
Rainy thought of Duke in Pilcrow House, waiting between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, waiting for her forever.
Anthony started to say something else to her, but the limousine suddenly slowed. It turned into a parking lot and then onto a winding path through the cemetery.
“There will be people here who knew Maxine,” Anthony said. “I’ll tell them you’re my niece, if they ask. But you better come up with a fake name.”
“Right,” she said. “Of course. I’ll be Sunny August.”
He glared at her.
“Joking,” Rainy said.
“You get that from her, you know?”
“The resilience to smile in the face of tragedy?”
“An obnoxious sense of humor.”
“Jessa Charming will be there, won’t she?” Rainy asked.
“She will.”
“Good, I need to have a little chat with her.”
The driver parked and opened the door. Anthony got out first and then helped Rainy out of the low-slung limo. He took a ragged breath. “Let’s get this over with.”
A few men and women in dark suits waited for them at the top of a gentle hill.
Anthony didn’t seem to be in any hurry to reach them.
They walked up the sloping path to a marble monument with two small doors, side by side.
One had Maxine’s name on it, and the other was blank, though in time, it would bear Anthony’s name.
Rainy noted that on other graves there were crosses or Stars of David or crescents and stars.
But Maxine had chosen the pilcrow symbol.
Death, she seemed to be saying, was only another new beginning.
Two of the men in suits wore name tags indicating they worked for the cemetery. Everyone else—a dozen or so men and women—greeted Anthony with careful hugs and firm handshakes, hearty pats on the back, and promises of “anything you need, please let us know.”
One of the men with a name tag spoke softly but clearly. “Ms. Blake didn’t want formalities at her graveside service. If anyone would like to say anything before the interment, please feel free.”
“Please,” Anthony said. “Anyone but me.”
A long, tense silence followed. Everyone was too grief-stricken or scared to speak.
Even Jessa Charming opened her mouth, then closed it again.
But Rainy knew exactly how to say goodbye.
She looked at the little mausoleum, smiled, and said Maxine’s two favorite words.
“Pencils down.”