“This is crazy, Duke.”
“Mad even,” he said.
Suffused with nervous energy, I stood up and started to pace.
“Pops locked the drawer,” I said. “Enchanted lock. He must have felt us breach the lock.”
“He did leave us the key to find,” Duke said. “Makes sense. And according to your grandfather’s final entry in his notes…”
He paused, picked up Pops’s notebook again, and read it out loud…
I think I understand the message now. Of course it was right there all along. But how could we have known? This changes everything we thought we knew about stories. And my Ellery did leave Rainy an inheritance of sorts, a richer one than I ever dared to dream. And poor Rainy and Duke, they’ll be star-crossed no more.
But if I’m right, my God, if I’m right, then…Well, of course Ellery would’ve had to keep it all a secret. This is explosive information. People in charge will want to cover it up. I think…I think perhaps they already have? I must tell Rainy. Except how can I? No, I have to confirm the truth first, otherwise she’ll be devastated. Yet if I’m right…she’ll finally know the truth about her mother.
I can’t believe it was staring us in the face the whole time.
I listened to every word, committing it to memory. I paced back to Duke and stood in front of him.
“Okay, let’s go over this again now that I’m not freaking out. On the phone, Pops said he was right about everything. Which—according to that entry”—I said, tapping the page with my index finger—“means whatever secret message my mother hid in the book will change everything we know about stories. It says I supposedly have some kind of inheritance from her. And when I know it, I’ll finally know my mother.”
“Don’t forget,” Duke said, “it also says you and I could be together.”
“It doesn’t say that. It says we’ll be star-crossed no more. That could mean we’ll be together. Could mean we’ll bedead.”
“I’m thinking positively,” Duke said with a grin. “And according to your grandfather, if we want to decipher this message, know the truth about your mother, find your inheritance, and perhaps even…uncross our stars? We must find the March Hare, odd as it sounds.”
“Very odd,” I said, still puzzling over the question of how a mentally ill leporid was supposed to help me solve the enduring mystery of my mother. “Seems almost too good to be true.”
“Yes, so we should stay on our toes. And paws. Wait,” Duke said, looking around the floor. “Where’s Koshka?”
“Mrs. Turner took him away when she thought I was planning to murder you. Hold on.”
I opened the library door, and Koshka sauntered in as if he’d been waiting for us to finish up our fight and get back to work.
While Duke paced, I filled Koshka in on everything that we’d discovered—the key, the notebook, the phone call from Pops.
“And now we have to find the March Hare,” I told him. “Any ideas?”
At once, Koshka trotted to the bookshelf and meowed. Two shelves above his small gray head sat an old hardcover copy ofAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“Koshka thinks Pops was being literal as well,” Duke said.
I took the book off the shelf and brought it over to the reading table. Duke sat beside me, and Koshka jumped onto the table and sat in front of the book.
“You’ve read it?” I asked Duke.
“Donkey’s years ago,” he said.
Slowly I turned the pages so we could refresh our memories of the story and check for any damage. If someone was hiding my grandfather in a storybook, he might end up in the story somehow, as I had when I’d overstayed my welcome in one of Duke’s books.
We began at chapter one. Little English girl Alice falls asleep on a sunny afternoon. She dreams she sees a White Rabbit and she follows him, eventually falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. She makes a journey through this strange dream world, meeting various odd characters.
“Here he is,” Duke said, as we turned the page to reveal one of the more famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. The Mad Tea Party—at the tea table sat Alice, the Dormouse, the Mad Hatter, and, of course, the March Hare.
I read the chapter out loud to Duke and Koshka:
There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse wassitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head…
