The library door opened and our housekeeper wheeled the tea tray in and parked it next to the reading table.
“Tea, Miss March,” she said in a broad English accent rarely heard anymore except on old BBC shows. As usual, Mrs. Turner wore a graydress with a white apron and had her hair tucked under a white bonnet. She was the very picture of Victorian respectability. Once, I’d offered to buy her some jeans and T-shirts to wear around the house, and she’d acted as if I’d told her to put on a bear costume to clean the bathroom.
“Oh, thanks, but you didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“I heard you sneezing your poor head off, Miss March,” she said, tsk-tsking at me. “Tea’s what the doctor ordered.”
Although I was twenty-seven years old, Mrs. Turner tended to treat me like a weak and sickly child. I would’ve been offended, but she did the same thing to my late grandmother and to Pops. Two weeks ago, Pops had gotten a paper cut—occupational hazard. Mrs. Turner wrapped a Snoopy Band-Aid around his finger and ordered my eighty-two-year-old grandfather to take the rest of the day off from handling books to recover. He refused, and an hour later sliced another finger.
“Tea cures sneezing?” I asked her.
“Tea cureseverything.”
She poured a cup of orange pekoe for me, added a single sugar cube, and set it next to my elbow on a saucer, a process that had taken her mere seconds. The woman was a tea-serving machine.
“Your biscuits, Master Koshka,” she said. She set a saucer containing three cat treats on the floor in front of Koshka, who’d spent the past hour asleep in a sunbeam. He woke up at once, rubbed his cheek on Mrs. Turner’s ankles, then ate his treats with feline gusto.
Mrs. Turner returned to the tea trolley. “Dinner for one tonight?”
“Dinner for one,” I said. “Until Pops finally gets back.”
Pops had left a week ago on some sort of secret mission, and I was more than ready for him to come home.
She shook her head. “Hope you don’t mind me saying it, Miss March, but you’re twenty-seven. If you’re not married soon, you’ll be a spinster. You don’t want that now, do you?”
“More time to read,” I said.
“Pretty girl like you already on the shelf.” She sighed as she wheeled the trolley from the library. “Now drink your tea, Miss March, or I’ll take you to hospital.”
This was not an idle threat from Mrs. Turner. I drank the tea.
—
Teacup in hand,I wandered to the fireplace.
On the mantel in our library sat the only picture I had of my mother and me together. In the faded five-by-seven photograph, she’s thirty years old, and though she’s just given birth, she looks very thin and wan. She wears a white bathrobe with her long dark hair in a loose braid. I’m not in her arms, but in the cradle. She’s reading to me from a hardcover. On the illustrated dust jacket, a teenage girl in a blue skirt suit and matching cloche hat carries an old carriage clock through the woods.
The Secret of the Old Clock,Nancy Drew book one. Published in 1930.
The book itself, the very one in the picture, sat inside the wall safe behind the portrait over the fireplace. When you lose a parent when a you’re a baby, like I did, it’s hard to believe that parent was ever real or alive. Sometimes I needed to hold her book in my hands to remind myself that once upon a time she was a real living breathing person with hopes and dreams for herself and for me.
I put my cup and saucer on the mantel, pulled over the ottoman, and climbed up. After removing the portrait, I typed in the combination and the door popped open.
There it was, my mother’s book. I took it from the safe and grimaced at the sight. Although not a first edition, it was old and somehow between the last time I’d read it and now, it had developed yet another tear in the cover and one page seemed to be coming loose from the binding.
Of course, as a Book Witch, I could have charmed it, turned it into a new copy even, but I was worried if I made it too new, my mother’s name and every trace of her fingerprints would disappear from the pages.
No, I would simply have to be more careful with it.
I sat at the reading table, opened the book, and began to read from the first chapter, entitled “The Lost Will.”
“It would be a shame if all that money went to the Tophams! They will fly higher than ever!”
Nancy Drew, a pretty girl of sixteen, leaned over the library tableand addressed her father, who sat reading a newspaper by the study lamp.
“I beg your pardon, Nancy. What were you saying about the Tophams?”
Carson Drew, a noted criminal and mystery-case lawyer, known far and wide for his work as a former district attorney, looked up from his evening paper and smiled indulgently upon his only daughter.
