I gripped it tight, praying she didn’t notice the slim paperback tucked inside.
“Uh…it’s, uh…a Nancy Drew book. Book two.The Hidden Staircase.”
“And why do you have it?”
My bunny ears were forgotten as I scrambled to think of an excuse.
“Never read it,” I said, sweating and stammering. “I read the first one a long time ago. Ages. I can’t even remember the title.”
“The Secret of the Old Clock,” Penny offered from the floor, where she had Koshka on his back while she stroked his gray belly.
“Yes, that was it. I thought it was time I should, you know, read book two.”
“You can read them out of order,” Penny offered helpfully, yet not helpfully.
“Great,” I said. “Good to know.”
She gave me an encouraging smile, as if suffering a little secondhand embarrassment on my behalf.
Meanwhile Dr. Fanshawe stared at me so hard I was surprised laser beams didn’t shoot from her eyes into mine. (Thankfully not a magical skill Book Witches possess.) I stood still, sweating and praying she was buying this story. Dr. Fanshawe had personally confiscated my Duke of Chicago book series, every last copy, and my stomach still churned with the memory of being an adult having my books taken away from me, shamefaced as a child caught stealing money from her mother’s purse.
“Put it down,” she finally said. “You have more important things to do than read children’s books.”
“Right, right, the mission,” I said and slid the book back onto the table, nearly fainting from relief. I hadn’t gotten caught, not this time anyway.
“The file, Penny.”
Penny rose off the floor and held out a small canvas book bag to me.
I peeked into the bottom of the bag and found a paperback copy of Jane Austen’sPride and Prejudice.
“Didn’t expect her to go rogue,” I said. “Bad news.”
“Very bad,” Penny agreed somberly, no exclamation points in sight.
Bad enough when a minor character escapes their book. A story can usually survive without them for at least a few weeks.
But when the hero gets out? We had three days tops before the book would be damaged almost beyond repair. This is why I never let Duke out of his books for more than a day. You can have a book without a hero, but would you really want to read it?
“What’s the situation?” I asked, all business again.
“Two days ago, our M.C. landed in Portland, Oregon,” Penny said, using Book Witch shorthand for “main character.” “She joined a dragon boat team practice, had her first Thai food, went to Powell’s City of Books, and came very close to pawning her engagement ring to buy the complete works of Charles Dickens.”
“Well, that would be modern lit to her,” I said.
“This morning she caught a bus to the coast,” Dr. Fanshawe said. “We tracked her as far as Sunset Beach.”
“Beach,” I said, nodding. “Typical.”
“I want her back in her book before sunset,” Dr. Fanshawe said. “Can you do that?”
I knew what I had to do, and if she’d been gone two days already, we had no time to waste. “Come on, Koshka. Let’s get Elizabeth Bennet to the church on time.”
We started toward the door. Had I gotten away with it? Was I home free? I hadn’t been caught with Duke again?
“Rainy?” Dr. Fanshawe’s voice stopped me in my tracks.
I slowly turned to face her, feeling doomed.
