Tempest slipped down the secret staircase and out the door, and headed up the hill toward the two figures. It was definitely Brodie at the gate. His lean, towering frame and spiky hair gave him away.
Brodie was speaking softly with someone on the outside of the gate. This side of the property had a chain-link fence and gate, so Tempest could see through it. But not well enough. Brodie’s towering figure blocked her view of the smaller person outside the gate.
Before she could decide whether to give up stealth to get closer, the figure hastily departed. But as soon as Brodie turned, Tempest stepped into the path.
“What were you doing?”
“I’m the one who has to deal with the canceled tour.”
“What does that mean?”
“That you should leave things alone you don’t understand, Tempest.”
She raised an eyebrow and directed her fiercest scowl at him. A weaker man would have shrunk back, or at least laughed nervously. But Brodie, as Tempest was coming to realize, was far more devious than she’d ever suspected. It was a mistake to underestimate someone simply because they were an assistant.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll wake Nicky and see what he thinks.”
Brodie was at her side before she realized he’d moved. He grabbed her elbow with greater strength than his knobby limbs suggested they had in them. His breath smelled of whisky and decay, as if Nicodemus had truly raised him from the dead.
“You’ll do no such thing,” he hissed in her ear.
“Are you seriously threatening me?” Tempest easily twisted out of his grip. It had been more of a scare tactic than something meant to constrain her.
He looked up at the trees above them. “You have to understand. I’ve never been the one in the spotlight. I like it like that, but I would’ve liked the paycheck that came with it.” He returned his gaze to Tempest. “He’s been more than fair with my pay, but I hadn’t planned on his forced retirement coming so soon. He has no use for the magical apparatus I’ve lugged around for him all these years.”
“You were selling his props?”
“They’re not just his,” Brodie snapped. “I helped him more than he ever gave me credit for. But I couldn’t go through with it. I’d like the money, but not that badly.”
“You want me to believe you backed out at the last moment?”
He lifted a puppet on strings from an inner pocket of his jacket. “The first shadow puppet Nicodemus used on stage for his Nicodemus the Necromancer act. Worth a lot.” He paused and ran his fingers over the strings. “I was angry. I am angry about that damn booby trap that’s wrecked our lives.”
“But not angry enough to sell that out from under him.”
Brodie nodded. “It’ll kill him if he finds out I was thinking about it, you know. You’ll shove another dagger into him if you tell him. Only this one’ll be in his heart, and you’ll be the one to have done it.”
“I don’t like being manipulated.”
“And I don’t like being out of a job. We both have to make decisions from this point forward.”
Tempest glared at him. “I’ll check, you know. I’ll make sure his props are all where they’re supposed to be.”
“Have at it.” He strode back toward his room without waiting for a reply.
Tempest hated to admit it, but he was right. It would crush Nicodemus to know what Brodie was doing. She wouldn’t tell him if she didn’t have to. The security system her dad had installed included video, but only of the front gate, not the back one. No wonder he’d chosen the back gate as a rendezvous. It wasn’t marked as an official address, and was only met by a path up the hillside to the old wishing well.
Several curious onlookers were still hovering outside the front gate as Brodie disappeared back into his room in the guest wing. Most of the items for their planned tour had been shipped directly to Los Angeles, where their tour was supposed to begin, but the items that had traveled with them on their flight were locked in the Fiddler’s Folly workshop.
She waited a few more minutes to make sure Brodie wasn’t leaving his room and unlocked the workshop door.
Tempest smiled to herself at the steamer trunk, wondering if they really were better than regular suitcases, or if only stage magicians with a fondness for the past thought so. She told herself it wasn’t an invasion of privacy to look through their props. She only wanted to see if it appeared as if Brodie had removed anything. How would she tell?
Damn. She couldn’t even get inside.
If Sanjay had been there, he’d have been able to pick the lock, but that was a skill she’d never taken the time to master.
She sat down with her back against the trunk and looked across the workshop. She thought about her life that was nearly ready to begin. She had told herself that she’d fully embraced her role as creator of architectural misdirection for Secret Staircase Construction, but it wasn’t exactly true. She was still waiting to move on from her past life. To fully understand what had happened to her family.
Screw this. She needed to get inside the trunk for Nicky’s own good. She stood up, grabbed a hammer, and smashed the lock.