“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 myown 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’sSlaughterhouse-Fiveburned.”
“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’thelp 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 crimesagainstbooks. In other words, Rainy March…you.”
—
How long didI 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.”
