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 ofThe Secret of the Old Clockand held it in front of my face. I studied the cover I’d been looking at myentire 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 nightin 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.
