“Why so mysterious, indeed?” Duke repeated. “One has to wonder, doesn’t one?”
“What is one wondering?” I asked him.
“Rainy…what if wearein a story?”
“I’m a Book Witch, Duke. I know the difference between the real world and story worlds.”
“Yes, of course, but what if…what if someone, whoever is behind all this, wants us tofeellike we’re in a story? A mystery story? I don’t know, a mystery reader or perhaps even an author?”
“An author. You think anauthoris behind all this? Have you met authors, Duke? They aren’t criminal masterminds. Authors are anemic agoraphobes who sit in dark rooms and hallucinate. They’re more like moths than people.”
“But think about it, darling. Only a fictional story”—he brandished the paperback ofOut with a Bang!at me like a prosecutor holding up Exhibit A—“would be this purposefully and annoyingly difficult to solve. And the one clue we have—‘Find the March Hare’—that’s straight out of a novel. No real criminal would be so elaborate and difficult.Andliterary.”
He wasn’t wrong. One of the great comforts of mystery fiction is the inherent cleverness of the villains. Intelligent criminals, driven bypowerful motives to commit crimes they considered perfectly justified. We all want to believe crime happens for a reason, don’t we? Better than the alternative—that crime is meaningless, arbitrary, and utterly random.
“I did sort of accidentally get magic book powder all over myself yesterday,” I said. “I was performing a charm on a Little Free Library. It’s supposed to bring the book you most need into your possession. And the next thing I know…someone gave me a copy ofyourbook, which led to me unwittingly pulling you out of it. So clearly the universe thought I needed your help. A fictional detective for a fictional crime.”
“Exactly. Precisely. Indubitably.”
My heart raced with excitement. It felt like we were on to something here.
“I like this. This is good,” I said, nodding. “But why would a writer want to put me through all this? And why drag Pops into it? Any theories?”
“I’m afraid I can’t answer as to their motive,” Duke said, “but the means seem quite clear. Whoever is doing this to you is putting you through the wringer of a mystery plot.”
Medda Baker was staring back at me from the back of her book. While I didn’t know her very well, Pops and Medda were old friends. She wouldn’t be the one to put me through the wringer like this, but—
“Rainy?” Duke said.
“I was just thinking,” I said. “Koshka loves Cary Grant films.”
“Koshka does, does he?” Duke asked, raising his eyebrow.
“There’s this famous story about the Cary Grant filmNorth by Northwest—after your time,” I said before he could ask. “The screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, and the director, Alfred Hitchcock, hit a snag in the screenplay. They had written most of it but couldn’t figure out the ending. So Hitchcock being Hitchcock, said no worries. They would get Patricia Highsmith to come in, read their script, and tell them how it should end.”
“Who?”
“Also after your time,” I said. “Patricia Highsmith was a famous mystery writer, she wroteStrangers on a TrainandThe Talented Mr. Ripley.Hitchcock’s thinking was…who better to solve a fictional mystery than a mystery writer, right?”
“Did it work?”
“They ended up figuring it out for themselves, but…I mean, it’s worth a shot.”
“Then let’s pay this Medda Baker person a call and hope she’s home,” Duke said.
“Hope she’s home? Have you ever met a writer?”
After shooing Duke from the bathroom, I dried off and dressed as quickly as I could.
I knew Medda Baker’s address, of course. Everyone did. You don’t even need to know the house number or the street. You wanted the woman who wrote murder mystery novels…you found the house that looked most like the setting of a murder mystery novel.
She lived on the opposite side of the town, high on the hill and overlooking the bay in a cottage painted black with white trim and two stone gargoyles standing guard on either side of her arched front door, which was painted a garish blood red. I parked the Sun Buggy on the street, and Duke peered at the house through the car window.
“She lives in a black house?” He was mildly aghast. “Did it used to be a funeral home?”
“It’s a storybook cottage.”
“It’s black,” he said again.
