“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 inThe Secret of the Old Clockand my case inThe Clue of the Velvet Maskwas 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 wordsliterallywould 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?”
“Olderandyounger,” Nancy said. “I’m sixteen, but I’ve been sixteen for nearly a century.”
