I shrugged. “I don’t recall ever crossing a novelist in my entire life. In fact, novelists should love me. I put their books back to rights. And, no offense, but your kind doesn’t seem to get out very often.”
“Very true,” Medda said. “Another Book Witch perhaps?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“A Burner with a grudge?” she said.
“X does hate me, but he’s not this clever.”
“What about a fictional character who’s in the mood to torture you for some reason?” Medda suggested.
I looked at Duke. “That’s a possibility.”
He gave me an innocent look. “I would never torture you,” he said, “except in the most pleasant of ways.”
“Behave,” I said to him.
“Rainy,” Duke said, “in all seriousness, you did break my heart when you put me back into my books and said goodbye. Is it possible you broke any other fictional hearts?”
“A good theory,” Medda added. “Maybe there’s a character who wants to give you a taste of your own medicine? See how you like being stuck in a story with no idea what comes next?”
A fair question. I considered it. “I have wrangled lots of fictional characters back into their books, but none who seemed genuinely upset about it. Other than Duke. Especially since we charm them into forgetting the real world. Sorry, I really have no idea whodunit or why they’re doing it.”
“Based on the ‘plot’ so far,” Duke said, “could you give us any idea how we could move things along?” With his hands, he mimed wheels rapidly spinning.
Medda said, “You want me to help you skip to the end? Let you peek at the last page? Cheat, in other words?”
“What? No!” Then I thought about it for a minute. “Well, yes, actually.”
I openedThe Secret of the Old Clock,the new copy Duke had inadvertently shoplifted from Words, Words, Words.
“Look at this,” I said, holding up the book to chapter twenty-five. “The final chapter is called ‘A Reward’ and it sums up the whole mystery. The cruel Tophams are disinherited. Nancy’s lawyer dad helps the poverty-stricken friends and relatives get the money they were promised. And Nancy gets the old clock to keep as a reward. Everything is tied together with a neat little bow. Would it be possible to get one of those epilogues where the writer says, ‘Six months later and everything was back to normal’? Too much to ask?”
“Afraid so,” Medda said. “In a story, you must earn your own ending. But I might be able to point you in the right direction.”
“I’ll take any help you can give us,” I said. “Whatever we do, we end up hitting a wall.” While I didn’t say it out loud, I couldn’t help but think that my mother would have solved this mystery hours ago.
“I know it feels like that,” she said. “But, really, you’re gathering pieces of the puzzle. Once you have all the pieces, you’ll see every wall you hit gave you a clue you needed. Let me show you something. Duke, could you hand me that file next to you?”
He retrieved a manila file off a bookshelf and gave it to her.
Medda opened it and took out a sheet of paper with a chart drawn on it—a single line trending upward until it reached a peak before dropping straight down.
“This is what a book plot looks like,” she said. She picked up a red pencil and drew a circle at the beginning of the line. “This is where you started. In your ordinary life. Then something happens, shakes thingsup. A knock on the door. A phone call out of nowhere. A body hits the floor.”
“My mother’s book was stolen,” I said. “Yesterday evening when I was on a case.”
“Then what’s that?” Medda asked, pointing toThe Secret of the Old Clockclutched in my hands like a lucky charm.
Duke winced. “I may have inadvertently nicked that from your shop last night,” he confessed. “Apparently books cost more than a dollar these days. Highway robbery if you ask me.”
“I’ll spot you this one time,” Medda said with a wink. “The mysterious theft of a book full of secrets is a good way to start a story. That’s what we call your ‘inciting incident.’ Now the ball of the plot is rolling. But it’s rolling uphill,” she said, pointing to the graph, which did in fact look like a hill with a very steep cliff at the end. “The climax is here, at the highest point, right before the end. In a mystery, the climax is the final confrontation between the antagonist and our detective. But it sounds like you’re not there yet. Maybe here? The midpoint?”
She tapped the center of the line.
“What happens there?” I asked her.
“The midpoint is often where the characters take a little rest before their final sprint to the climax. A breather so to speak. And if there’s a romantic couple in a story? The midpoint is usually when they hop into bed together.”
