“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.
I got up, sat on the stool, and peered deeply into the glass.
At first, I saw nothing, not even my own reflection. But then mist swirled in the glass and as it cleared, I could see into a bedroom.
A room suffused with gold and red light, sunset. Stucco walls. A nightstand covered in pill bottles and water cups. A breathing machine. And nearly hidden under the white quilt, a thin, frail figure nearly the same color as the sheets. White hair, ashen waxy skin, a thin chest rising and falling slowly, slowly, far too slowly.
A man with white hair sitting at her side, head down as if in prayer or exhaustion or both.
“Duke was right,” I said. “You’re dying.”
From behind me, I heard her sigh.
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster,” she said and smiled. “Isaac Asimov said that, bless him. I really wanted to write a Foundation book with you, but we couldn’t get the rights. I think Kubrick had them tied up. Or was it Spielberg?”
I walked back and sat down in my chair opposite her. “You are dying, aren’t you?”
“Pencils down,” she said.
“Pencils down?”
Maxine smiled. “When I’d finish writing one of your books, I’d send it to my editor. We’d go back and forth for weeks trying to get the story right. And then when I did, I’d get a two-word email from him.Pencils down.That meant my work was done. Those were my favorite emails.”
I looked around at the interior of Maxine Blake’s imagination, the long hallway, infinite. She could be thinking of anything here and yet she’d conjured me to sit in the fantasy chair opposite her.
“You’re dying, and you’re thinking of me? Why?”
“Because I need you,” she said.
“For what?”
“Book thirty-seven.The March Hare Mystery.”
“What about it?”
“Look.”
Suddenly the book was in my hands again, the one that saidRead Meon the cover.
“Turn to the last page,” Maxine said. “Read it for me.”
As instructed, I turned to the very last page in the book and read aloud…
“Why did you stop, darling? And why is Shakespeare wearing rabbit ears?” he asked, nodding toward the bust of the Bard where I’d placed the bunny ears Penny had given me yesterday.
I ignored the question, ignored everything but my own reflection in the mirror.
“Darling?” Duke said again. He sounded worried now. “What is it?”
“I saw something in there,” I said, pointing to the glass.
