“Not really,” I said. “She’s not a March and she has nothing hare-like about her.”
“Better keep looking,” Medda said, crumpling her plot graph into a ball and tossing it over her shoulder. “The midpoint is a bit too early to figure it all out anyway. But you’re well on your way.”
“I hope you’re right. Supposedly when we find the March Hare, we’ll know what my mother was trying to tell me. And hopefully we’ll find Pops too.”
“And we’ll know how to be together,” Duke said, looking at me.
“That would be a happy ending, wouldn’t it?” Medda said.
We’d gotten all we could get from her—tea and information and my book back.
She led us to her front door.
“Thank you again,” I said, still holding my book. “For this anyway. Can I pay you back? Maybe hop into your new book with you so you can tell John Odin goodbye?”
She furrowed her brow. “An author meeting her own main character…now that’s an idea. Let me think about it.”
“You know where to find me,” I said and gave her a hug. She patted my back, then let me go.
“Wish I could solve this case for you, Rainy, but that’s not how it works. Every story, in one way or another, is a journey of self-discovery.”
“I’m not giving up yet,” I said. “No rest until Pops is home.”
“Good girl,” she said. “And tell him to come visit me the minute he’s back.”
She opened the door, and we stepped out into the silver light of early afternoon. Duke, Koshka, and I stood on the porch while she leaned against the doorframe.
“It was nice to meet you,” Duke said. “Thank you for not murdering me.”
“You know, I met your writer once,” she said.
“You did?” Duke asked, visibly shocked.
“Tom Hightower. Met him at a book signing in New York when I was a teenager. He lost his brother in the Great War, liberating Belgium. He said he came up with the idea for your books by imagining a young man who said ‘No, thank you’ to all that, and found a way to make the world a safer, better place without picking up a gun. Which you did.”
“Not this world,” he demurred. “Only a fictional version of it.”
“Oh, yes, this world,” she said. “Did you know that when Hightower died, he left an unfinished manuscript for the thirteenth Duke of Chicago mystery?”
“Does anyone know what happened to it?” Duke asked.
“I know exactly what happened to it,” Medda said. “About twenty years ago, his estate asked me to finish writing it.”
“What?” I said. “Are you kidding?”
She shook her head. “I gave it a try, but there was nothing to go on except the first chapter and half a page of notes. I couldn’t do it. Like a kid trying to color inside the lines of a Picasso. One of my few regrets in life is not finishing the book. The estate dropped the idea after I gave up.”
“Maybe you’ll try it again?” I asked.
“Yes, and put a love interest named Rainy March in it for me,” Duke said. “I’ll be forever in your debt.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, handsome.”
Duke caught her hand in his, raised it to his lips, and kissed the back of it.
“Charming devil. Your writer knew what he was doing.”
A question occurred to me then that I was a little afraid to ask, butwith time running out, I asked it anyway. “In a mystery, what comes after the midpoint?”
