I exhaled heavily and reached out my arms across Duke’s desk. “Please? Finish the case?”
“A few more minutes, Rainy. It’s all I ask. You said I’d forget all of this once you’re gone.”
“Yes, once I do the spell.”
“Give me one more hour,” he said, “then I’ll do anything you want.Anything.”
“It’s against protocol but since you did save our lives…” I glanced at the mantel clock. In Duke’s world, it was eleven. We’d have to be gone by midnight. “One hour? You promise?”
“On my honor, whatever I have left. Then you may scramble my brain all you wish.”
“It won’t feel like scrambling,” I explained. “You’ll just remember this all like a dream.”
“Feels like a dream already,” he said. “Probably why I’m, as you say, handling it so well.”
“Also, it’s in your character,” I explained. “The Duke of Chicago is famously unflappable and imperturbable.”
“Perhaps, but not now. I’m feeling both flapped and perturbed.”
“Imagine how I feel,” I said. “I’m in your office, sitting in this chair in front of your desk. I dreamed about this place. I imagined what it looked like all my life, and now I’m here.” Something caught my eye, and I rose from my chair, walking over to the fireplace as if pulled by invisible hands. I pointed. “That’s your actual ducal coronet on the bust of General Cincinnatus. You like to put it on and shout orders out the window to the ‘peasants’ below.”
“I only did that once. And it was my birthday.”
“There’s a running gag in your books about how you keep trying to hire a secretary, but every time one shows up for the interview and when you explain the job to them—solving murders and kidnappings while also doing all the typing and filing—they run for the door. When I was seventeen, I had this long-runningveryelaborate fantasy that I’d apply for the job, and you’d try to scare me off, but you couldn’t. And then, of course when you realized how brilliant I was, you’d make me your partner, and we’d fall madly in love.”
He laughed. “Very sweet, but I don’t believe in child labor or cradle robbing.”
I picked Duke’s magnifying glass up off the mantel and peered through it at him. “In my teenage fantasies, I was older, I promise.”
“Thank goodness. I’m glad to know I wasn’t a cad even in your dreams.”
Koshka bumped his head against Duke’s chin.
“I said ‘cad,’ not ‘cat,’ young man.”
“Something’s not right,” I said and grabbed the copy ofEmpty Gravesthat X had left behind. “This isn’t the right painting.”
I flipped to the first chapter of the book, where Edith King’s husband hires Duke to find her after she’s been kidnapped.
“What do you mean?”
Another running joke in the series had Duke constantly changing the painting that hung in his office. Every book he had something different, and it always reflected Duke’s mental state or the theme of the book. The painting inEmpty Graveswas one of girlish innocence, reflecting Edith King’s flight from her violent husband into a new life of peace and safety.
“It says right here that the painting is supposed to beAutumn Leavesby John Everett Millais.” I read straight from the book, page nine. “On the canvas above the mantel, four young girls built a pile of fall leaves in a twilight garden. Innocent happy girls and not a man in sight.” I jabbed my finger at the new painting. “So what is this?”
Now, hanging over the fireplace was a very different image.
“I believe that’sCirceby John Collier,” Duke said. “Don’t like her? She is a witch.”
“She’s a naked witch. A naked witch with a cat.”
Technically a naked witch and two big cats, but still…
Duke tried and failed to look angelic. “Can’t blame a man for accidentally manifesting his subconscious longings, can you?”
“I can. Now put it back.” I said.
He took a breath and when I glanced over the mantel again, the correct painting,Autumn Leaves,had been restored to its rightful place.
