“What?”
“My twin.”
“Of course you saw your twin in the mirror. Who were you expecting?”
I put my hand on the glass.
And then I…
“I what?” I demanded, turning to Maxine. “What did I do?”
“I don’t know. I never finished writing your book…and I never will.”
“You’re dying with the book unfinished?”
“When I started it, I’d been retired for five years. Heart trouble,” she said. “But about a year ago, I had an idea, an idea I couldn’t let go of. Now I’ll never finish it. Which brings us to why I brought you here. Your mission, if you choose to accept it…”
“My mission?”
She led me to the mirror over the stone fireplace, the one I’d first looked into and spied the red-haired woman on her sofa. Koshka jumped lightly onto the rug. Maxine stood up and sighed happily, then laughed at herself.
“Word of advice, kid—enjoy your young knees while you have them.”
Side by side we stood on the hearth to peer through the mirror.
The redheaded woman had finished reading the book, which I knew now wasn’t really a book but an unfinished, incomplete manuscript. I watched her toss it onto a glass coffee table. Even though the words were backward on the front cover, I could make out what they said.
Read Me.
“That’s my book, my last book,” I said. “The March Hare Mystery.Why does she have it? Wait, is she the March Hare?”
“No, Rainy. Her name is Jessa,” Maxine said. “She’s the MarchHeir.”
“Heir,” I said in disbelief, pronouncing it like “air.”
She looked at me and nodded sheepishly.
“You know how I feel about puns,” I said, narrowing my eyes at her in fury.
“Couldn’t help myself,” she said.
“That young woman is a mystery writer,” Maxine said. “She’s the one I’ve chosen to carry on the series, to be the new me. My handpicked heir.”
The writer, Jessa Something, picked up the book again and lightly slammed it against her head, as if that could somehow shake the ideas loose. Luckily for her, my books weren’t massive doorstops. She would have had to hit herself with a box set to do any real damage.
“Will she do it?”
“She feels inadequate to the task,” Maxine said. “Ridiculous girl. She can write circles around me, but she idolizes me for some foolish reason.”
“But if she doesn’t finish the book, I’ll never solve the mystery. I’ll never go home again. I’ll never see Pops or Duke or Koshka or…She has to finish the book!”
“Exactly,” Maxine said, nodding. “And it’s all there. All the clues. All the hints. Quite frankly, I probably made it a little too obvious. Any mystery writer worth her salt can put the pieces together. But she’s the one I want.”
“So what do I do?” I asked.
“Go out into the real world and convince her to finish the story.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
