Koshka pressed against me, purring softly.
I looked down at him. “I know, buddy. I like her, too, even if she does speak in exclamation points. Should I go get her?”
Before I could finish the sentence, Mrs. Turner swung open the front double-doors.
“Miss March,” she said breathlessly. “Thank goodness you’re here.”
“What’s wrong?”
Just when I thought I’d escaped exclamation points, Mrs. Turner exclaimed, “We’ve been robbed!”
Chapter Eleven
The safe door hung open, as if the thief had been interrupted in the middle of the burglary. They hadn’t taken the time to close it, let alone rehang the portrait to cover it. There’d only been one thing in that safe…and that one thing was now missing.
“It’s gone,” I said absently, staring into the empty safe above the fireplace. “My mother’s book is gone.”
Koshka rubbed against my leg, and I picked him up, holding him against me.
“I had to run to the shop for sugar,” Mrs. Turner said, rubbing her hands together nervously. “I’d locked the house up as always, and the double-doors were still locked when I returned. After I saw the state of the library, I went round and checked every room but only the safe was cracked. I’m afraid whoever did this is long gone.”
“At least you’re all right,” I said.
“And you and Master Koshka,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing to do but call Scotland Yard and put the kettle on.”
She strode from the library before I could remind her we didn’t have Scotland Yard in Oregon.
I put Koshka down, then dropped my trench coat and bag on the floor and collapsed into my grandfather’s desk chair. Equal parts dread and confusion were brewing inside me. Why would anyone on earth bother to steal a copy of a book you could buy online for a few dollars?The book was valuable—invaluable, in fact…but only to me. Had the thief mistaken it for a rare edition? If so, they were going to have an unwelcome surprise when they tried to pawn it.
Mrs. Turner came back to the library. When she saw my things on the floor, she immediately picked them up, tsk-tsking the entire time. I wasn’t usually this helpless, but it was my first time being robbed and all.
“The police will send someone round when they have a moment. And if the thief returns, send him my way,” she said as she grabbed the fireplace poker and carried it out of the library.
For the thief’s sake, I prayed they didn’t come back for more. Mrs. Turner had a very nineteenth-century concept of justice.
I sank deeper into the chair. Koshka jumped onto my lap, purring to comfort me. I wish I could say it helped.
The one and only gift my mother had left me…gone. My stomach churned, knotting itself up in anger and sorrow. I would have let a thief take anything else in the house. Any or all of it. Every single book and painting and stick of furniture…
And Pops would have too.
Aching with loneliness, I plucked a framed photograph off Pops’s desk. This was my favorite photo ever taken of us together. Pops and Grandma had taken me to a park somewhere with all sorts of storybook and fairy-tale exhibits. Grandma had taken the photo, I remembered. Pops, his beard still mostly brown back then, held me in his arms as we posed inside the open mouth of a giant witch’s head. The irony of two witches pretending to scream in fear of the “witch.” It was obvious from our faces we were trying not to laugh the whole time.
I hardly remembered the day, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt that old happiness, that old sense of safety. But also…I remembered that even back then I was aware that I was with my grandparents and not my mom or dad, and I hoped no other kids there would notice and think there was something different about me.
If only Pops were here now. Instead, he’d run off on some off-the-books assignment. Or had he?
“Duke…” I whispered his name softly like a charm. Duke couldsolve this crime in under twenty-four hours. He worked quickly, partly because his books never broke fifty thousand words and partly because he was just that damn good. In many of his stories, he was working against the clock. TakeThe Velvet Coffin,for instance. A dead man and his coffin go missing the day before the funeral. Who does the widow call? Duke, of course, who solves the case before the first mourners arrived. I was there for the climax—turns out it wasn’t the man’s body the thieves had been after but the coffin. Someone had hidden a fortune in the velvet lining. That’s all I’ll say, in case you’re planning to read it for yourself (which you totally should).
I loved being there for Duke’s big reveals, when he explained the who and how and why of the crime. When I snuck into Duke’s books, usually on the last page, he and I could spend a little time together. At the end ofThe Velvet Coffin,for instance, I dressed in mourning black, hopped into the last page, and joined the other funeral guests. The second that coffin was buried, Duke and I hit the town.
That’s the thing about fictional characters, a thing anyone who’s ever fallen in love with one knows…their “lives” go on even when the story’s over. THE END is never the end. You never see a fictional character going to the bathroom, after all. And they do, especially after drinking a few glasses of bathtub gin.
Oh yes, fictional characters, the ones we love anyway, the ones who steal our hearts and capture our imaginations, do take on lives of their own. And that was the life Duke and I had together, a secret, off-the-pages, between-the-lines, written-in-the-margins sort of romance, in that sweet and dreaming place between the end of one story and the beginning of the next…
Duke was a wonderful dancer. Back in his penthouse suite that overlooked the whole city, we slow-danced cheek to cheek as Glen Gray’s “Blue Moon” played on the Victrola. I could still feel his five o’clock shadow rubbing gently against my neck every time he kissed me.
I had started to hum the song when I heard a loud knock at the front door.
