“No way,” said Ivy.
“Breaking into a crime scene?” added Gideon. “I’m with Ivy on this.”
“I knew you shouldn’t have brought in the rest of the Scooby gang.” Sanjay tugged at his collar and paced the length of the small turret above Tempest’s room where the four friends had gathered. “Are you two committed to helping Tempest or not?”
“What can we do to help,” asked Gideon, “that doesn’t involve committing a felony?”
“Do you actually know it’s a felony?” Sanjay tapped on the screen of his phone. “You don’t even have a cell phone to look it up.”
“People got by just fine before cell phones,” Gideon said. “I don’t care about the level of offense. I don’t think it’s the best way to help Tempest. If I knew it would sort out this mess, I’d be the first one inside.”
He wasn’t lying. He’d taken the blame for something she’d foolishly done earlier that year before she could stop him.
Despite the overwhelming task at hand, Tempest was overcome with affection for her friends, as she realized she now had so many people supporting her. It was so different from what her life used to be like.
But she didn’t have time for warm and fuzzy feelings. She jumped up, slipped past her friends, and climbed down the steep, secret stairs that were more like a ladder. She jumped down the last two steps, landed on the hardwood floors of her bedroom, and crossed the room to the steamer trunk underneath the window that looked out over the steep hillside.
Ivy’s evening reading hadn’t given them any answers to their real-life murder, so Tempest knew it was time to act. By the time Ivy, Sanjay, and Gideon reached her side, she’d removed an outfit of chain mail armor.
Sanjay gaped at it. “What illusion did you need medieval chain mail for?”
“A time-travel transposition. The story fell flat so I ditched the idea and didn’t end up using it, but it was custom made, so I saved it.”
Story was everything in an illusion. It didn’t matter how skilled a magician was or how big the mystery of their reveal, if your audience wasn’t invested in the story you were telling, any trick would fall flat. That’s what people who watch online videos exposing the secrets of magic tricks don’t understand. The technical mechanics of a trick are only a small part of the overall effect. The misdirection that makes a trick work is in place from the moment the audience meets the magician.
She donned the body armor and spun into a pirouette. It wasn’t as smooth as usual because the outfit was bulky and weighed her down.
Sanjay held out his hands as she peeled it off.
“It’s heavy,” she warned.
“Oh, please. You just did acrobatics in it. I think I can handle—” He fell to his knees as Tempest placed the chain mail into his hands. “What the hell is this made of?”
“Thousands of little iron rings,” Ivy answered. “This suit of armor is amazing.”
“Isn’t it?” Tempest grinned.
“It’s real iron?” Sanjay looked at the chain mail as if it had personally offended him. “That’s why it feels like I’m holding a dozen cast-iron skillets. You should have warned me.”
“I did,” Tempest pointed out.
He stood a little unsteadily and placed the armor on her bed. The mattress sank a couple of inches under its weight.
Tempest scooped it up and put it back into the trunk. “This helps with the potential extra booby-trap issue. I’ll be perfectly safe.”
“Except for the felony,” Gideon said once more. “I could go in your stead.”
“This isn’t medieval Europe,” Sanjay snapped. “She doesn’t need a knight in shining—”
“Thanks for the offer, Watson,” Tempest said to Gideon, “but if anyone is going somewhere we think this is needed, it should be me.”
Tempest and Ivy had dubbed Gideon “Watson” after he inserted himself into an investigation right after Tempest had moved home. But Gideon was far more than that. He was someone who noticed things that others didn’t. As annoying as it was sometimes that he didn’t have a cell phone, not being attached to the appendage enabled him to truly focus on the things around him. That was how he’d become such a talented sculptor by his midtwenties, and how he picked up on things that a distracted person wouldn’t.
Like now.
“Forget about the armor,” Gideon said. “And forget about what you’re reading online. You’re all getting distracted by what people online are saying, but none of them know anything. Have you even stopped to consider the real evidence the police are looking at?”
“That’s the problem.” Sanjay gave Gideon an exasperated glance. “We’re not the police.”
“And they’re focusing their attention on Paloma,” Ivy added, “since she’s their main suspect.”
“I guarantee they’re also examining the booby-trap blades,” Gideon said. “The blades that Tempest saw.”
Tempest groaned. “He’s right. I saw two of the blades up close.”
“Have you stopped to think about what you really saw?” Gideon asked.
She closed her eyes and thought back to that night. “The first one. It wasn’t a knife. It was a sword.” Panic began rising as she remembered the blade that had run through Julian Rhodes. “I thought at first that the hilt of the sword had broken off, before I realized that it had come from the door itself. We didn’t yet know it had sprung from the door. Then there was a second blade … the smaller one.” That’s the one that had made her think of her mom.
Tempest’s eyes popped open, her heart racing. “I recognized the knife.”
“Damn,” muttered Sanjay. “This was a good idea after all, Gideon.”
Tempest reached for Ivy’s hand to steady herself. “It was my mom’s knife.”
“What?” Ivy whispered.
“It was a sailor’s knife,” said Tempest. “The knife used in the booby trap was the same kind my mom and her sister used in their illusion, The Tempest.”
“I take it back,” said Sanjay. “This was a terrible idea.”