Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Two
Nancy put on a brave face and carried on. “When your mother left us to go visit her parents,” she continued, “she warned me to be on the lookout for a Book Witch who might appear and charm us into forgetting she ever existed. Sure enough, shortly after she left, a woman appeared.”
“What did she look like?”
“Like a young Dr. Fanshawe.”
My stomach clenched. “I knew it. No, I didn’t know it, but I knew she didn’t like me.”
“Like you or not, she’s terrified of you,” Nancy said.
“Of what you represent. Why do you think she lied all this time about what a perfect, ideal, rule-following toady of a Book Witch your mother was? So you would never ever for even a single second entertain the possibility that you’re the daughter of a fictional character. ”
My mother…she hadn’t broken one rule. She’d broken all the rules. She hadn’t been a follower, but, like Duke had said, a rebel.
“Why is that so terrifying to her?” I asked.
“Because she loves rules, and if you’re half-fictional, that means the rules don’t apply to you.”
I gasped softly. She was right. If Dr. Fanshawe had said it once, she’d said it a thousand times—fictional characters belong in stories and real people belong in the real world.
“I am half-fictional, which means I…I do belong in books.”
“Precisely,” Nancy said. “Which means you can stay in any story you want—no rules broken. Which means you can change any story you want. If you want you could even change this one, and no one could stop you.”
I could change stories…even this one? To test the premise, I glanced in the mirror and suddenly…my dark hair turned blond.
With a wink it went from long and straight to short and bobbed.
“Now we’re twins,” I said, laughing.
“Adorable,” Nancy said. “But—”
“One more,” I said. I rolled up my sleeve and looked down at the ugly pink burn scar on my forearm. I imagined it gone, and just like that, it was. My forearm looked like it had never been touched by fire.
“Wow,” I said. “I am dangerous.”
“It’s nice,” Nancy said, “but I like you just the way you are.”
“So do I. Just because I can change things in stories doesn’t mean I should,” I said.
The scar was back and so was my dark hair.
“Unbelievable,” I breathed, then looked at Nancy. “But why didn’t my mother tell me all this? Leave me a note?”
Nancy smiled sadly at me.
“She tried, didn’t she?” I said. “Of course she did. The book itself was the note. Right? Except Pops did hop into the book back then. He told me he did. He looked around to see if my mother had left a secret message for me, but he didn’t find anything.”
“I was gone on a case,” Nancy said. “He only spoke to Hannah and Dad, and they’d already been charmed to forget your mother. If I’d seen him, I would have told him—”
“No,” I said. “It was supposed to be me. My mother wanted me to come into the story and meet you. I could’ve figured this out years ago, but I was so angry at her for leaving me nothing but a book…”
“It’s not your fault you misunderstood—”
“It is my fault. I’m as bad as the Burners, angry at a book when it was my own failure of imagination to understand what it was trying to tell me.”
Nancy took my hand, squeezed it. “Come upstairs. I want to show you something. It’ll make you feel better.”
Upstairs was Nancy’s bedroom—pin-neat, of course. Pretty floral wallpaper and a brass bed with a white quilt. A few books. Fresh flowers in a vase. White lace curtains. The dream bedroom of your average 1930s gal.
But also…under the bed, an old suitcase. Nancy knelt down and pulled it out. Together we hefted it onto the bed.
She opened it and revealed some clothes neatly packed away in tissue paper—dresses, shoes, gloves, hats. A few books with Ellery written on the title pages.
“My mother’s things,” I said. “How?”
I pored over every little treasure.
“I was more than ready when Dr. Fanshawe showed up at our house. I had a plan in place to make sure she didn’t charm me as well. I hid all your mother’s things away. You can hide anything in a book, you know. Tuck it between the lines, and no one but the most astute reader will notice it…”
She pulled a handkerchief from the suitcase and ran her fingers over the initials embroidered at the corner.
E.V.D.
Ellery Viola Drew.
She pressed it to her chest over her heart, then held it out to me.
“You should have this,” she said. “I made this for her. A wedding gift. She carried it every day.”
My hand trembled as I took it from her.
“A handkerchief embroidered for my mother by Nancy Drew,” I said. “For her wedding to Carson Drew…”
“I never knew my mother’s name,” Nancy said softly, as if afraid of her own heartbreak. “Did you know that? In all the books, the authors never gave her a name.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I think that’s why I liked embroidering your mother’s name so much. Because I knew it.”
Lifting the handkerchief to my nose, I inhaled the faint scent of something.
“It smells like…chrysanthemums?”
Nancy held up a pressed flower. “They had a private wedding that autumn in our garden. Hannah and I made her a wedding bouquet of all pink and yellow mums. That’s what I called her after they were married, as a little joke—Mums.”
“Mums,” I repeated. “She died long before I learned how to talk. I don’t know what I would’ve called her. Mom? Mommy? I like Mums.”
Nancy fell quiet, then spoke again.
“I waited a month before I started investigating. But time gets a little fuzzy in books,” she said.
“What felt like a month to me…the time between my case in The Secret of the Old Clock and my case in The Clue of the Velvet Mask was over twenty years in the real world. When I finally escaped to find out what happened to Mums, to you…she’d been dead for years and you were all grown up. ”
“But I have to ask…if you found me, why all this mystery?” I waved my hands in the air. “If you’d knocked on my door and told me you were my sister, I would’ve believed you.”
“I tried that! Again and again I tried to tell you. The words wouldn’t come out.”
“You didn’t know how to tell me, you mean?”
“I mean the words literally would not come out of my mouth.”
I remembered how yesterday she had tried to say something but then didn’t. Or couldn’t.
“I don’t understand.”
“Rainy,” she said, clutching my hand, “you’re a fictional character. Half-fictional, which is more than enough. You can’t simply tell a fictional character something life-changing about themselves. They must go on a journey of self-discovery. It’s the only way.”
“So you created a whole mystery for me to solve?”
“Exactly!” she exclaimed. “When I realized that Mums was never coming back, I escaped. See?” Nancy raced to her closet, opened the door, and pulled out a plain black umbrella.
“She’d made me my own charmed umbrella to use in case of emergency.
And what bigger emergency than a missing mother and sibling? ”
She hung the umbrella back in her closet, then came to the bed and sat down on the covers facing me.
“It wasn’t a happy day when I learned what had happened,” Nancy said.
“Mums was gone and had been gone for a long time. But you…” She smiled broadly.
“You were alive and a Book Witch too. Believe me, I tried everything. The day we met, I tried writing you a note telling you the whole story, but the words disappeared off the page. I tried calling your phone number, but no one ever answered. Finally, it dawned on me that I couldn’t tell you the truth about who you were…
I could only arrange for you to discover it for yourself. So I threw you a mystery!”
“Who knows more about mysteries than Nancy Drew?” I said.
“No one!” she exclaimed. Then she leaned in, whispering conspiratorially.
“I waited for my chance—Mad Hatter Day. I gave you the clues you needed. Then I had your grandfather make that admittedly annoyingly mysterious phone call. Since you’re half-fictional, like any fictional character, you’d do the most obvious thing first. Someone tells you to find the March Hare, you go to Wonderland.
So I set up the tea party for you. I even tipped off a Burner you had history with to add a little tension to the story. ”
“You tipped off X?”
“Rainy, a story has to have conflict. You know that!”
“I guess you’re right. Who was it who said, the story ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ without the Big Bad Wolf is nothing but a brief paragraph about an uneventful food delivery?”
“I don’t know,” Nancy said, “but they’re right. I had to make things difficult enough for you that it would feel like a real mystery. And I did! It was very clever of me.”
“You’re very proud of yourself,” I said. “But that was pretty dangerous and reckless of you.”
“Dangerous and Reckless is my middle name!” she proclaimed. “Nancy Dangerous and Reckless Drew.”
“Have fun embroidering that on a bookmark,” I said. Hopefully this was the last time I needed to learn something about myself. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted. Being a fictional sleuth was no joke.
Nancy reached out and took my hand in hers. “My baby sister…”
“…who is older than you, remember?”
“Older and younger,” Nancy said. “I’m sixteen, but I’ve been sixteen for nearly a century.”
I rubbed my temples. “This is all very weird.”
“Let’s pretend we’re twins,” she said. “How’s that?”
I liked the sound of that. “Twins,” I said. My face hurt from smiling, but then my smile faded as reality set in. “Wait, I’ll have to go on a journey of self-discovery every time I need to improve or change my life?”
She wrinkled her nose and nodded. “Yes. But there are upsides!”
“They better be good,” I grumbled.
“You can stay young a very, very long time if you want.” Smiling, she tossed her blond bob and batted her eyelashes. Nancy Drew, eternally a teenager. “And you’re a fictional character without a book of your own. So I suppose you can simply pick one.”
“What if I pick this one? What will happen?”