Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-One
“Rainy!”
Duke’s voice cut through the fog, pulling me back to reality.
Blinking, I turned away from the mirror and looked up at him. He had me in his arms. Fear gleamed in his dark eyes.
“Oh, thank goodness,” he breathed. “I nearly lost you.”
“What? What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t remember anything from the last few minutes, other than a terrible sense of vertigo, almost as if I’d left the world for a moment.
“You looked at yourself so long in the mirror, you started to fall through it.”
“Fall through it?” I looked back into the mirror.
“Literally. Your hand disappeared into it. How did you do that?”
“Lingering side effect of Wonderland, probably. What was I saying?”
“You saw your twin?”
“My twin? Yes! My twin.” I grabbed the bunny ears off the marble head of William Shakespeare and perched them on my own head.
“It’s Penny,” I said. “Penny gave me the white ears. Hers were brown. It was Penny all along.”
“Penny?”
I faced Duke. “Yesterday was Mad Hatter Day so she was dressing us all up like characters from Alice in Wonderland. Penny was wearing bunny ears. She gave me bunny ears. She joked we were twins. But we’re not twins.
If my ears are white, and hers are brown, then I’m the White Rabbit, and she’s the—”
“—March Hare! Rainy, you did it!”
“ We did it,” I said. “We found her. She’s been staring me in the face ever since she arrived. Trying to be my friend. Trying to help me. I don’t know how or why, but it’s her. Penny Nichols.”
Duke’s beautiful mouth opened slightly. I grabbed his face and kissed him.
He didn’t kiss back.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Her name is Penny Nichols ? That can’t be her real name, can it? Poor girl. Anyway, carrying on. We know who our March Hare is finally, but where do we find her?”
“She said she was going back home for a while.”
“Where’s home then?”
“Uh…” I began to pace, trying to piece together every clue she’d given me about her life before she’d moved to Fort Meriwether. “She said she was from the Midwest, a pretty little river town not even on the map.”
“That’s nonsense. Every town is on the map. Unless…”
Duke fell silent and his eyes glazed over.
This happened sometimes when he was doing higher-level mystery solving.
If I had X-ray vision, I could have probably seen equations and maps and other strange visions floating through his brain as he mentally pieced the puzzle together.
I left him in his trance for as long as I could stand it.
“Duke?” I said, snapping my fingers to no avail. “Come back to me. Only one of us gets to go into a fugue state a day.”
Koshka nosed his way under Duke’s pant leg and gave him a nip in the soft tissue under the ankle bone.
Duke yelped, then blurted out, “Penny isn’t the March Hare.”
“Yes, she is. She has to be.”
“She is, yes, but Penny’s not Penny,” he said. “Penny Nichols isn’t her real name, thank goodness. And yes, the answer has been staring you in the face for years, darling. Years!”
Duke picked up my mother’s copy of The Secret of the Old Clock and held it in front of my face. I studied the cover I’d been looking at my entire life for some clue as to what Duke was going on about. If Penny wasn’t Penny…could she be…
“Impossible…” I breathed.
“Penny said she’s from a pretty little Midwest river town not on any map,” Duke said. “What town isn’t on any map?”
“A town that doesn’t exist,” I said. “But they don’t look anything alike—then again…”
“I look nothing like my book covers either.”
“I need my umbrella, stat!”
Duke grabbed my umbrella from the coatrack, then scooped Koshka off the floor.
Flipping to chapter one, I found a good sentence: There was something about a mystery which aroused Nancy’s interest, and she was never content until it was solved.
I grabbed Duke’s hand, and then, with a flick of my thumb, we disappeared into the book, becoming the dot on the “i” in the word “which.”
—
It was night in River Heights, U.S.A., where Nancy Drew lived with her father, the noted criminal lawyer Carson Drew.
Duke and I stood on a sidewalk outside a lovely house with white wooden siding and a wraparound porch. A warm golden light glowed from a downstairs window that looked into a living room where a man read his newspaper.
The air smelled like road dust, cut grass, and summer. Fireflies flashed under the trees and across the manicured lawn. Crickets chirped. A cool breeze blew, and the garden roses swayed.
A storybook house in a storybook city in a storybook September.
And once upon a time in that house…a storybook romance?
“I should probably go knock on the door,” I said, hanging my open umbrella in the branches of the nearest tree, like a giant Christmas ornament.
“We’ll wait here,” Duke said, hefting Koshka onto his shoulder. “Go on.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” he said and kissed my cheek as I patted Koshka’s back. “Good luck.”
Steeling myself, I walked up to the front door and knocked.
“I’ll get it, Dad!” a girl’s voice called out.
Then, a few seconds later, the front door opened.
A girl with bobbed blond hair dressed in blue.
“You don’t look like your cover picture, Penny,” I chided her.
She shrugged. “We both know characters never look like they do on the cover. Cover artists, am I right? Come in, please, Rainy. And from now on…unless I’m undercover, call me Nancy.”
Once we were inside, Penny, who was, of course, actually Nancy Drew herself, put a finger over her lips to warn me to keep quiet for the time being.
“Who is it, Nancy?” a man’s voice called from another room.
“A friend, Dad,” Nancy called back. “Be there in a minute!”
She waved her hand at me to follow her into the kitchen. She turned a switch, and a gas light slowly began to brighten overhead.
“Pie?” she said. “It’s cherry.”
“I’m not supposed to eat in books,” I said, which was a completely inane thing to say while standing in Nancy Drew’s house and having a mild out-of-body experience.
She grinned broadly as she cut two slices. “I think you, of all people, can bend the rules,” she said.
She set a big slice of cherry pie in front of me, and it did look tempting.
“What do you know?” Nancy asked me as she took a bite of her pie. “Then I can tell you what you don’t know.”
“I think…I think I know this is where my mother was during that year she was missing.”
Nancy nodded. “Yes, she was. Keep going.”
“And if she was here and she came home pregnant with me…”
“So close,” Nancy said, grinning madly, eyes wide. “It’s staring you in the face again.”
I kept going as the answer dawned on me. “…and she left me your book and nothing but your book for a reason…”
“Go on, say it, Rainy.”
It sounded laughable in my own head. Impossible. Unbelievable.
Though my heart was beating in my throat, I whispered the question.
“Are you…are you my sister?”
She grinned and leaned forward. “About time you figured that out.”
“And your father is my…I’m going to faint.”
“Don’t faint,” Nancy said. “The pie will go to waste. Go on. Eat some. You’ll feel better.”
It’s almost impossible to say no to Nancy Drew. So I picked up my fork, chopped off the triangle tip of the pie slice, and took a bite.
Pure sweetness and heaven. I swallowed and the dizziness cleared and my eyes focused and all the tension left my body.
“I do feel better,” I said. “They tell us not to eat here. It’s fairy-tale rules.”
“That rule is for people,” she said. “Humans in fairylands. Even if this is a fairyland…you’re half fairy.” She winked at me and took another bite of her own pie.
“So my mother…and your father? How did that happen?” My mouth fell open at the very idea of it. And since my mouth was already conveniently open, I shoved more pie into it.
“Oh, it was an adventure,” she said with gleaming eyes.
“I was out driving in my blue roadster when a strange man started pursuing me, even hitting my back bumper. He wanted to make me crash. I didn’t know at the time who or what he was, but now I know he was a Burner.
Then it seemed like this woman appeared out of nowhere.
Literally winked into existence to help me.
In the rearview mirror, I saw her run into the road to stop him.
He swerved, and she jumped out of the way, but she landed so hard, she was knocked unconscious. ”
“My mother jumped in front of a car? Sounds like her.”
“You can imagine my surprise,” Nancy said. “The marshal arrived, but the driver had vanished into thin air, it seemed. They brought your mother to our house so the doctor could see to her. Hannah, that’s our housekeeper—”
“I know who Hannah is,” I said. “Who doesn’t?”
“Hannah gave your mother some water.”
“Oh, no.”
“And when she woke up…she had no idea how she’d gotten there. We assumed it was amnesia from her head injury, not because—”
“She drank fairyland water,” I said.
Nancy nodded.
“We nursed her back to health for the next month. She was weak after her injury, but she could talk. I sat by her bedside for hours, reading with her and telling her about our life, trying to help her remember hers. She only knew her name—Ellery March—because it was on her library card in her pocket. Otherwise…she was a mystery.”
“And Nancy Drew can’t resist a mystery.”
“Never! And, it turned out, my father couldn’t resist your mother. The longer she stayed with us, the closer they grew. Of course they fell in love.” She sighed as if recalling one of her happiest memories. “They were married on the lawn. I was maid of honor. Then I had to go and ruin it.”
“How?”
“I’m a fictional sleuth,” Nancy said. “We always solve every mystery. Eventually, I put the pieces together and realized, well, everything. Your mother was real. We were fictional. This was a story we were in, not the real world. I even found her umbrella still in the woods, open, so no one had spotted her in my story. When I told her everything I’d discovered, it all came rushing back.
But by then, she was eight months pregnant with you. ”
“That’s why she finally left? Because she remembered who she was?”
“It was only supposed to be a short visit,” Nancy said. “She needed to see her parents and let them know she was safe and happy. She promised she would come back in a day or two. She told Dad she was going on a quick shopping trip to the big city for baby things.”
“But she never came back,” I said.
Nancy put her fork down and glanced away, and for a split second I could see all the grief and loneliness and sorrow that was so deep and wounding that even her authors had hidden it from readers. For one year, she’d had a stepmother who loved her, whom she had loved, and a new sibling on the way.
“No,” she said. “She never came back.”