“The cost being me,” he said. “Us. Us being us.”
“You’re fictional, Duke. I’m real. It can’t happen, no matter how much we wish it could.”
“Do I get a say in this?” he asked. “In my own destiny?”
“Not really.” I winked and elbowed him gently in the side. “What about you? Do you have a green light? Or is that not in your character?”
“Every case is a new green light,” he said. “Every time I’m on a job, I can’t rest until the mystery is solved. But now…maybe it’s because I’m not in my books, but it doesn’t feel like enough. The light’s too dim. There are brighter lights so much closer.”
He met my eyes, a beautiful moment interrupted by a small meow.
“Koshka,” I said. “Did you find the library?” He started for the doorway, and we followed him, but then we saw which way he was headed…
…straight through a mass of inebriated partygoers dancing like it was the end of days.
“We can’t walk through there,” I said. “We’ll have to dance. Can you do that?”
“Darling, you know I can cut a rug like ten pairs of scissors with a sharp sword to boot.” He took me by the waist and practically tossed me onto the dance floor.
I laughed as we whirled through the wildly gyrating bodies, waltzing at triple speed while everyone else kicked and dipped and twirled.
“This working?” he asked with a wide smile.
“Works for me!” I shouted over the din of “Sweet Georgia Brown” played by a live twenty-piece ragtime band. “More to the left!”
We boogied and/or woogied to the left, where Koshka’s small face peered around the darkened doorway. Almost there.
Duke spun me around, and for a split second, I saw a painfully handsome man in a perfectly tailored suit standing alone at a window with a cocktail in his hand, staring at the same green light that had so captured our eye.
“Gatsby,” I whispered, but Duke didn’t hear me. That was good. It’s easy to get starstruck in a book this legendary, but I knew better than to talk to a tragic hero when we were trying to fly under the radar.
The song ended and we pushed through the dancers to the hallway. There was Koshka waiting for us. He meowed, and we followed him down the long hall toward a set of closed double-doors. Duke looked around quickly before opening them, then all three of us disappeared inside.
We entered the library like pilgrims at a shrine, in reverent silence. When Duke closed the doors behind us, the music of the raucous party faded to nothing. The hush that fell over the room was so profound even my footsteps sounded offensive to my own ears.
Gatsby’s library…if anything, Fitzgerald’s description hadn’t done it justice. It looked almost medieval, as if, as the story said, the entire magnificent room had been imported from a castle in Europe and put back together here on fictionalized Long Island.
I coveted the dark wood paneling, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and the chandelier throwing golden light over every surface. At random, I chose a book off a shelf and opened it.
David Copperfieldby Charles Dickens.
Moby-Dickby Herman Melville.
Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. The Count of Monte Cristo. The Three Musketeers.All of them exquisite antiques, maybe even first editions.
“Rainy?” Duke asked. “You all right, love? You look like you’re about to cry.”
I turned a slow circle inside the library.
“Let me bask,” I said. “This is my Camelot.”
—
After a fewmoments of silently basking in the glow of the world’s most beautiful private library, we got down to business. “Split up,” I said, “and find that book.”
Duke and I searched the shelves with our eyes, while Koshka made a slow circuit of the room, sniffing outWonderland.
“I take back my previous assessment,” Duke said. “This library is annoyingly extensive.”
