He smiled at me again.
“I was wrong,” I said. “It’s not your grief in your safe. It’s your heart you keep locked up.”
“I’ve only ever unlocked it for you.”
“When you say things like that, I lose my ability to reply coherently,” I teased him. “I’m worried I’ll say the wrong thing.”
He shook his head. “Say something true, even if you don’t think it’s the right thing to say. I like hearing your voice.”
“What if I say I’m jealous?”
“Jealous? Really?” He didn’t sound insulted, only intrigued.
“I have no idea who my father is, and I never got to know my mother. She was a legendary Book Witch. My boss tells me constantly how perfect she was. Saved dozens of stories, never broke a single rule. But when she died, the only thing she bequeathed to me was a Nancy Drew book—The Secret of the Old Clock.”
“Only one book?” Duke sounded horrified, which I appreciated. Sometimes I felt guilty for expecting more from my mother. She was gone, after all, and couldn’t defend her decisions to me, although I liked to think she had her reasons.
“I assume it was her favorite? Must have been to leave it to me. I love the book, too, but I can’t help but want more. An old toy from when she was a kid or a piece of clothing I could wear or a message?”
He stared at me and the moment grew heavy with waiting and meaning, though I couldn’t say what this all meant, only that it meant something, maybe more than it should have.
“We should go,” I said. “We’ve been here too long and you need to—”
“Finish the story, yes,” he said. “I will, of course. I always do. I’ve never not solved a case, and I don’t intend that to change. But I can’t help but wonder…if I’m not real and Edith King’s not real, what’s the point of it all?” He asked this while petting Koshka, who had buried his head in the hatbox, sniffing for treats or more toys. “He’s a real cat. Isn’t it more important that I pet a real cat than help a fictional girl?”
I pulled the copy ofEmpty Gravesfrom my pocket.
“Here’s what happens at the end of the book,” I told Duke. “You follow Edith King to the harbor, where she’s going to get on a boat that will eventually sneak her into Canada. Her parents and husband told you she was kidnapped. But you finally put two and two together and realize she’d faked her kidnapping to get out of the country and away from her violent husband. You have your chance to catch her, but this happens instead…”
I cleared my throat and read the passage aloud to him.
Duke watched Edith watching him from the dock, waiting for him to make his move, nab her, drag her back home. If he ran, he could stop her. He didn’t move.
“Go,” he mouthed. “Now, Edith.”
Even at a hundred yards, he could see her smile.
“Thank you,” she might have said before she turned and ran across the boat ramp, aboard the ship waiting to take her away forever.
Few people are more despised than the soldier who deserts his unit or the wife who deserts her husband. But at that moment, they werethe only people who made any sense to Duke. The war had never ended. Maybe it never would. Not until the world stopped sending its sons through the meat grinder of battle and selling its daughters off to brutes.
Tonight, however, the war ended for Edith. If Duke had ticker tape in his pocket, he would have thrown her a victory parade.
The boat pulled away from the dock. As it drifted from view, he thought he saw Edith crying, but no…she was laughing.
“Go and don’t look back,” he said to Edith, words he wished he could’ve said to Davey, to Charlie, to Eddie. “The world has corpses aplenty but not nearly enough laughing girls dancing the Lindy Hop on their own empty graves.”
Edith King danced away.
Slowly, I closed the book.
“Those paragraphs are whyEmpty Graveshas been banned or challenged in a dozen middle and high school libraries.”
“Those Burners at it again?”
“Real people do it too. No magical powers required, just a fatal lack of imagination and compassion. They say this passage is ‘anti-military’ and ‘anti-family.’ That’s not how other people read it, though. There was a march against domestic violence not long ago. I saw it on TV…which hasn’t been invented yet. Imagine small movies inside your house.”
“Very nice,” Duke said.
