“Did your mother ever have a case involving a hare? Stop that. I’m trying to take notes and this is not helping.”
I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could guess. “Is Koshka eating your pencil?”
“This is an outrage. Desist, feral beast.”
“Use a pen. He never eats pens.”
I heard Duke drop the pencil into my pen cup and pull out a pen. “Now back to my question.”
“Not that I know of. Her case notebooks were taken by the coven when she died.”
“Yes, you mentioned that. Is that normal practice?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Who took them? Did your grandfather say?”
“Dr. Fanshawe. She had just been put in charge of the Ink and Paper Coven.”
“She took your umbrella. She took your mother’s notebooks.”
“Almost twenty-seven years apart,” I said. “This is so frustrating. I really do feel like the answer is staring us in the face, but I can’t see it. Why couldn’t the teapot have been a little more helpful?”
“I’d say it’s because the story would end too quickly,” Duke said, “but we’re not in one of my stories.”
“Feels like it,” I grumbled.
Duke was quiet a moment, then I heard my desk chair squeak. He stood in the doorway with a hand over his eyes, a pointless courtesy considering what had been going on less than an hour ago.
“What’s the bubble situation?” he asked.
I moved my arms through the warm bubbles covering me like the lightest of blankets. “I’m at full rolling boil.”
“Then I’m coming in. Brace yourself.”
Duke dropped his hand, then sighed. “My kingdom for a snorkel.”
I popped one bubble with my fingertip.
Duke raised his eyebrow as he took a towel from the rack and dropped it on the floor. Then he went onto his knees by the side of the bathtub and faced me.
He furrowed his brow. “Are you reading a novel?”
“What? This?” I glanced at the paperback in my hand as if I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it. “It’s against the law to take a bath without a book.”
He plucked the book out of my hand and examined it. The title wasOut with a Bang!,and the cover featured an old-fashioned prop gun with a flag hanging from the barrel that read, BANG!
“You’re cheating on me with another detective,” Duke said. He sounded positively aghast.
“It’s Medda Baker’s new book. She’s the writer who owns the bookstore. And don’t be jealous. Her fictional detective isn’t my type. John Odin is a seventy-five-year-old psychic.”
“Too old for you?”
“I don’t trust psychics. Now why are you in my bathroom?”
“You said yourself it feels like we’re inside one of my stories. Yes?”
I sat up a little in the tub. “I did. If only because everything seems harder and more complicated than it needs to be. Why wouldn’t Pops tell me what he meant? Why be so mysterious? Why all the false leads and red herrings and inscrutable clues?”
