“I can’t take you home yet?” Tempest asked.
Standing next to Nicodemus’s hospital bed, she felt uncharacteristically small in the room that was now crammed full of both dead and night-blooming flowers from old fans and new. There was a pile of stuffed toy black cats as well, with a cute fluffy bat on top. The plan had been for her to pick him up around this time and bring him back to Fiddler’s Folly.
“It’s all been blown out of proportion,” Nicodemus insisted. “The teenage doctor is being overly cautious because he thinks I’m one hundred years old. He wants to monitor me for one more night.”
“What’s the deal with this terrifying cat?” Sanjay held up a plush black cat with its mouth and eyes sewn shut with red yarn. “Whoever made this monstrosity is clearly the person the police should be looking for.”
“It’s based on one of my own illusions,” said Nicodemus. “In one of my earliest routines with the Cat of Nine Lives, I used to wind red yarn around her until she was a mummy. When I unraveled her, only dust remained—but Cat would appear alive and well in the back row of the seats.”
“It’s still terrifying.” Sanjay held the plush cat at arm’s length, before stuffing it underneath the other gifts where they couldn’t see it.
“Even more bits and bobs than an hour ago?” a new voice said from just outside the open door, nearly causing Sanjay to knock over the pile. “Glad to see the cat shoved to the bottom. Bats are where you found your stride. You’re better off without Cat.”
“Sanjay, do you know Brodie Frost?” Tempest asked. “He works with Nicky.” She didn’t know if he had an actual title, or what he considered himself. He was more than an assistant and stagehand but less than a co-star.
“He hates it when people call him that, you know.” Brodie ducked his head to step through the doorway and looked down at Tempest with an expression she couldn’t gauge. Maybe it simply felt odd because she didn’t usually have to crane her neck upward to look someone in the eye.
“Tempest gets away with calling me Nicky,” said Nicodemus. “But don’t you get any ideas.”
“We met at the Fringe a few years ago.” Sanjay extended his hand to shake Brodie’s. “Good to see you.”
“Wish it was backstage again instead of here.” Brodie turned to Nicodemus. “Mary’s got paperwork you’ll need to sign.”
“More?” Nicodemus looked far older than his years as he looked up at the ceiling.
“Different countries, different rules.”
Despite his protestations of good health, Nicodemus was clearly tired after talking with them and reading additional forms related to canceling his tour. Brodie had to leave to deal with more tour cancellation details, and Tempest knew it was a good idea for her and Sanjay to depart as well. The doctor was right that Nicodemus needed rest.
Tempest also knew that he’d be bored out of his mind stuck in the room alone, so she offered to stop by the art supply store around the corner to pick up better paper and scissors for him, so at least he wouldn’t drive the hospital staff mad.
“I don’t want to bother Ash, but perhaps you could also bring me some food from that café near your house that you love?” Nicodemus stroked his devilish goatee and attempted to look as angelic as possible.
“I’ll get you an assortment of their best offerings,” Tempest agreed.
Sanjay had also been splashed by some of the liquid of unknown origin, so Tempest dropped him off at a BART station so he could take the train to his San Francisco apartment to shower, change, and get his truck. Then she swung by Veggie Magic, to bring Nicodemus a late lunch from the outside world, and the art supply store near the hospital, for paper and art materials. Nicodemus was asleep when she returned, so she left the food and supplies with a note.
Back at Fiddler’s Folly, Tempest’s plan was to gather her thoughts in the secret turret above her bedroom, where the walls were covered in inspirational magic show posters and she had space to think. By the time Sanjay got back, hopefully she’d have a plan worked out, and they could meet up with Ivy and Gideon.
But as she passed the cedar-clad barn workshop on the way to the main house from the driveway, she heard voices coming from inside. Her dad, and a woman whose voice she didn’t recognize. Tempest poked her head inside the airy space of organized chaos. The open-plan workshop retained the feeling of a barn, with its gambrel roof with two different pitches visible both inside and out. A woman with long black hair similar to Tempest’s was speaking with Darius at his favorite woodworking table.
Darius spotted Tempest. “Nicky doing okay?”
“Not well enough to check out, but well enough that he’s rebelled against hospital food.”
The woman turned and Tempest saw she was a teenager, so most likely part of this spring semester’s high school student cohort.
For a six-week chunk of each semester, Darius opened the workshop to a different group of high school–age students two weekday afternoons and on Saturdays. It wasn’t a formal apprenticeship, but he taught them basic construction skills and mentored them in whatever related profession they were interested in, often bringing in volunteer guest speakers from the community of people he knew. Grandpa Ash provided homemade snacks. And for the last cohort, Grannie Mor had painted a group portrait of the team standing in front of their creation. It had become a full family affair. Darius would often go even further when mentoring a couple of kids with bad home lives. He’d had a rough childhood until he landed with foster mom Mona Mendez when he was a teenager, eventually taking her name because it was the one that was most meaningful to him. Darius had been the one to recognize that Ivy and her sister Dahlia had had a bad home life before Dahlia left for college.
At the end of each semester, the cohort built a structure of their choice that was donated once built. The only parameters were that it be built to code and be small enough to transport out through the oversize barn workshop doors. Previous projects included a walk-in greenhouse for a nearby community garden, a tree house for a park with structures that had burned down but not yet been rebuilt, and a tiny house for the backyard of a local foster parent whose house was full but whose own parents needed a place to live (the tiny house took more than the regular six weeks to complete, with the project lasting the small group closer to a full year).
“This is Florencia,” Darius said.
“Just Flo,” she corrected him.
“Flo, this is my daughter—”
“Tempest.” Flo grinned and extended her hand. “Great to meet you.”
“Same.”
“You spilled something on your shirt.”
The dangers of white T-shirts. And of angry fans of Nicodemus the Necromancer. Tempest never got anything on her costumes on stage, even when working with illusions that involved red wine. But real life was a whole lot messier. “Thanks. I didn’t think the spring semester program was getting started for another week.”
“It’s not,” said Darius.
“I had a few questions for your dad,” said Flo, “to make sure I’m a good fit.”
“It’s you who’s interviewing me,” said Darius. “I can’t blame you if you want to bail.”
“Way to sell your training program, Papa,” said Tempest.
He ran a large hand across his face. “I’ve gotta be honest. Two other participants dropped out yesterday.”
“You mean their guardians pulled them out,” said Flo. “My uncle doesn’t care what I do, as long as it’s legal. Even legal-ish is okay. I turned eighteen last month anyway, so I can sign the waiver myself. I just don’t know if I’ll fit in as a fat girl, you know? Two strikes against me in construction.”
“It’s true there are fewer women than guys who want to learn about carpentry and construction,” said Tempest, “and there will always be guys who’ll be jerks about a woman’s weight, but I still hear the stories about the ultimate student-led takedown of the one guy who was a total ass.”
Tempest’s dad wrapped his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. “Word gets around that you don’t mess with any women associated with Secret Staircase Construction. The offender was so embarrassed by his peers’ reactions to his bullying that he left before I had a chance to kick him out.”
Tempest’s phone rang. An image of Sanjay wearing his bowler hat on stage showed on the screen so she picked up.
“You wound me, Tempest,” he said. “You haven’t told me the new security code for the Fiddler’s Folly gate.”
“So you can sneak up on me? Not likely. Call me when you get here. I’ll let you in.”
“Why do you think I’m calling?”
“You’re here already? I saw you like an hour ago.”
“You think it takes me more than a few minutes to take a shower and change into clean clothes? I wanted to get back to you as soon as possible. And there was no traffic on the bridge getting back here, for once. Buzz me in already.”
“What’s that weird noise?” Flo asked.
“Buzzer for our front gate.” Darius frowned at the barely audible sound.
“It sounds like a sick frog,” Flo commented.
“It broke when a tree branch fell on it during that big rainstorm,” Tempest explained while her dad hit the button to open the gate. Nothing happened, so Darius grabbed a toolbox and headed to the gate.
Two minutes later, Sanjay stepped into the workshop spinning his bowler hat on the tip of his left index finger. “I wasn’t even apart from you for an hour and the online gossip is even worse. Why am I surprised? I should never be surprised by trolls. Oh.” His gaze fell to Flo. The spinning hat faltered, but Sanjay recovered by flipping it onto his head. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you had company.”
“This is Flo,” said Tempest. “She might join this spring’s student cohort. Flo, this is my friend Sanjay.”
“I’ve seen videos of you online,” Flo said to Sanjay, with a slight blush on her cheeks. “You’re good. You slay that tux and old-school hat.”
He thanked her and gave her one of his most charming smiles. Her blush deepened, and she buried herself in her phone. His smile had that effect on a lot of people. Unfortunately, Tempest was sometimes one of them.
“Big yikes.” Flo looked up from her phone with a horrified expression on her face. “Have you seen that people are saying it’s not that dead guy’s wife who killed him but Tempest’s mom?”
“I know,” Tempest and Sanjay said at the same time.
“So messed up,” Flo whispered. “Families have enough baggage without internet randos accusing dead relatives of murder. But I’ve gotta say, it really is creepy how that booby trap is regenerating. What’s up with that? You don’t think it could really be her ghost, do you?”
“No,” Tempest and Sanjay said at the same time once more, sending Flo into a fit of giggles.
“Sorry!” she said, recovering. “That was totally disrespectful, wasn’t it? But you two are just so cute together.”
“We’re not—” Tempest began.
A loud buzz cut her off.
“Your dad fixed it,” said Flo, and Tempest hit the button to open the gate. “I’ll just see myself out and thank your dad outside. Nice meeting both of you.” She gave a little wave as she left the workshop.
“I’d say there’s a fifty percent chance that she posts rumors about us online within the hour,” said Sanjay once Flo was gone. “Just because two friends are in sync doesn’t mean—”
“Forget about that potential rumor. We need to disprove the more important rumors about my mom. The longer it is before the police catch the real killer who also nearly killed Nicky, the more entrenched those rumors will become and the more likely it is they’ll focus on me next.”
“You make it sound like those two things are equally important.”
They were, in a sense. She believed it would eventually be proven that she wasn’t the one who’d lured Julian to the theater and killed him, even if the mess with the note in her handwriting muddled the situation initially. But in the meantime, there would be even more damage to the memory of her mom, and that was something she couldn’t bear.
The implication that the rumor could be true that Tempest’s mom had rigged ingenious booby traps that would be set off after she had died was far more serious. Even though it didn’t explain the note on the door or the person who’d lured Julian to the theater, the post Is Emma Raj a murderer from beyond the grave? got far more views than the videos giving rational explanations that didn’t involve Tempest’s dead mom.
There was a connection, certainly. Tempest didn’t yet know what it was, but it was there. She’d rented the theater precisely because her mom had disappeared there. She had told her manager, Winston, that she rented it to practice for a final performance she’d agreed to film, and while that was true, she hadn’t told him what she hoped to do for the performance. What Tempest had wanted, more than anything, was to solve her mom’s murder and have that solution be the heart of her story on the stage.
But now, that plan for a happy ending with justice for her mom’s murderer was not only falling apart, but the opposite was coming true. Tempest now had to fight the rumors that her mom, Emma Raj, was a killer.
Tempest looked up at the thick wooden beams above as she spoke, so she wouldn’t have to face Sanjay’s sympathetic gaze. “There are already so many rumors about my family. The Raj family curse. What became of my mom when she vanished. What was behind my sabotaged show last year.” She spun into a pirouette. Then another. That always helped her think. When she stopped, she stood in front of Sanjay, close enough to touch him. But she didn’t.
Instead, she took a large step back. “Anyone who thinks about the idea of my mom being a murderer from beyond the grave for more than two seconds will know it’s ridiculous. I know that. But to have my mom accused of being a murderer, even if it’s absurd … Is it wrong for that to matter to me?”
“No. I get it.”
“Then let’s get out of here and get to work.”
“What did you have in mind?” Sanjay asked.
“How do you feel about breaking into a crime scene?”
Sanjay grinned at her. “I thought you’d never ask.”