She left then, and a deep uncomfortable silence filled my bedroom.
I looked at Duke. He didn’t look at me.
“Well?” I finally said.
“That was uncalled for, Rainy. I know perfectly well who and what Mrs. Turner is.”
“Then you should knowthatis your future if you stay here.”
“That isnotmy future. And you’re being unfair.”
“Sherlock Holmes. She couldn’t even remember Sherlock’s name. People all over the world know who Sherlock is, but in her addled mind, he’s a kid she used to babysit a million years ago.”
Duke turned away and stared out the window, down to the garden, where we would never have a June wedding.
I’d made a devastating counterattack. Mrs. Turner, as Duke knew, was a fictional character herself. Or had been. Once upon a time, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had a housekeeper at 221B Baker Street named Mrs. Turner. But somehow—perhaps it was a Burner, perhaps she simply wandered off in a London fog and got lost—Mrs. Turner escaped her story, and by the time a Book Witch found her, it was too late. She’d been replaced in almost all the Sherlock stories with a character named Mrs. Hudson. Over the years, various Book Witches had taken her in, given her a place to live, a job to do. She was a housekeeping machine. Because all her character had ever done was make tea and tend house, all she could do now was make tea and tend house. She was living proof of what could happen to a fictional character who stayed out of their story too long.
“She wants to be back in a story,” I said. “You can tell how much she misses her old life. But it’s too late. There’s no place for her in those books now.”
“That would never happen to me,” Duke said, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself.
“You don’t know that. And I’m not the only reader in the world in love with you.”
“But you’re the only one I love back.”
“I know,” I said. “But I don’t want you to stop being the Duke ofChicago. The Duke of Fort Meriwether doesn’t have the same ring to it,” I teased, trying to make him smile.
“The only case I’ve never been able to solve,” he said. “How you and I can be together.”
“Maybe some mysteries,” I said, “aren’t meant to be solved. So let’s focus on the one wecansolve, all right?”
It wasn’t all right. I could tell that from his face, but he also knew when to drop it, if only for the moment.
“If you insist,” Duke said. “I do have some questions for you.” He picked up his notebook and flipped through the pages.
“Fine,” I said. “You can interrogate me in the bath.”
—
“Have you everowned a hare or even a troubled-looking rabbit?” Duke called out. He sat at my desk outside the bathroom door while I soaked the soreness out of my muscles.
“Not a one. We Marches have always been cat people.”
“Hare statues? Hare artwork? Painting? Tapestry? Anything that could be in the house that is a hare belonging to the March family?”
“Nope.”
“I recall,” Duke went on, “that hares have some meaning in mythology. When I was a boy, our groundskeeper was a rather half-mad, half-pagan Irishman named Oisín. He always warned us boys that when we were out stalking to never lay a finger on a hare.”
“Why not?”
“If you followed one through the mists, you might find yourself in the Otherworld,” Duke continued. “One myth tells the story of a hunter who wounded a hare in the leg, then followed the hare through a magical door into another kingdom. There he found a beautiful young woman on a throne with a wound in her leg.”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t follow hares?” I asked as I washed the back of my neck.
“Well, you simply don’t know where they’ll lead you.”
“Interesting, but not helpful,” I said.
