“If I can handle vampires, ghosts, and Mrs. Danvers, I can handle anything.”
“They will not send a young female Book Witch to Gangland Chicago. It’s far too dangerous, Raindrop.”
“Gangland…Wait, Pops…Is it the Duke of Chicago? Is he in danger?”
The Duke of Chicago, for those who haven’t read the books, is the star of a popular noir mystery series. According to his backstory, the Duke had been the youngest of four aristocratic sons. He’d inherited the dukedom, however, after the tragic deaths of his three older brothers. Feeling as if he were doomed if he stayed in England, the Duke ran off to America and set up shop as a private detective in Chicago. Although christened at birth Bartholomew Maximillian AugustusFitzgerald Nicholas Ardingly, in Chicago he went by the moniker Nick Duke, Private Eye.
Everyone just called him the Duke.
And he was my favorite fictional detective of all time.
Instead of letting Mrs. Turner, our housekeeper, answer the door, Pops practically leapt to his feet with the energy of a man half his age. I, of course, gave chase. He wasn’t going to get out of this conversation that easily.
“Heisin danger, isn’t he? Let me take the case. I’ve read all the books a hundred times. I know where the Duke lives. I know his favorite drink. I know his valet’s name and birthday—Nigel, born August twenty-third, 1860. A father figure to the Duke and a constant source of irritation. Check the books. I know everything.”
Pops opened the front double-doors to find Professor Dodsworth on our porch. The Professor had been a Book Witch longer than Pops, since the days when paperbacks cost fifty cents, hardcovers a dollar, and if you wanted an audiobook, you asked someone with a decent voice to read aloud to you.
The Professor held out a bag. I don’t know how spies usually receive their mission dossiers—manila folders probably—but Book Witches in the Ink and Paper Coven get our mission documents in canvas tote bags from the local bookstore.
Before Pops could grab it, I snatched it away. “Thank you, Professor.”
The poor man opened his mouth to say something, but I’d already closed the doors.
“Rainy—” Pops said in a warning tone.
“I knew it.” Inside was a paperback copy ofEmpty Graves,Duke of Chicago book two. “I’m going.”
“You can’t. You’re too close to the story. We both know you’ve been in love with the Duke since you were a teenager.”
“Pops, that was years ago. I’m over him.”
“Over him? Really?” He crossed his arms and eyed me sternly. “Did you or did you not attend a book conference last year playing a Duke of Chicago love interest?”
“I may haveallegedlyattended Murder Me Con, where I cosplayed as the femme fatale Hennie Fox from book six,Chicago River Red.Iwouldn’t call her a love interest really. She’s a paid assassin hired to kill him, but in the end, she repents and turns herself over to the police, because she’s in love with him in a sort of sociopathic way.”
“Once a Ducky, always a Ducky,” he said, taunting me with the nickname devoted readers of the Duke of Chicago series go by.
“You have a crush on Miss Marple. I know it. Grandma knew it. Even Miss Marple knew it.”
At this point, the conversation turned into a staring contest.
Finally, I broke the stalemate.
“Come on, please? This is my dream assignment.”
If anyone was going to save the Duke of Chicago, it needed to be me. If only to return the favor. A bit of my backstory, in case you haven’t read my previous case files: My mother—a second-generation Book Witch—died when I was a baby. Growing up, I hadn’t dwelt on my loss much until high school, when I began to feel her absence like a missing limb. Turning sixteen without a mother to teach me to drive or attend my apprenticeship graduation had been quietly awful. The only things that gave me real comfort were the Duke of Chicago books and that other, better, wilder life I led with him inside my imagination. Not that I could have told Pops that. He and Grandma had done everything in their power to give me the best possible childhood. Knowing I’d suffered even five minutes would’ve broken his dear old heart.
“Can you be professional here?” Pops asked.
“If I weren’t your granddaughter, if I were any other Book Witch with my skills and background, you’d send me there in a heartbeat, and you know it. No one is more qualified for this mission than I am.”
“You could get hurt,” he said.
“And so could you. We’ve all been hurt.”
I pulled back my right sleeve and held up my forearm to display the burn scar from my mission into Ray Bradbury’sFahrenheit 451,when I pulled a copy of John Steinbeck’sThe Grapes of Wrathfrom a book fire. Inside the world of the story, it was the last copy of the book left on earth. The act had left my right forearm scarred, but I never regretted it for a second.
“Watching you dive for that book,” Pops said, “was the most scared I’ve ever been. And the proudest.”
