Tempest arrived at the Whispering Creek Theater seven minutes later. It was twelve minutes to midnight.
It wasn’t an ambush. Blackburn hadn’t been held at gunpoint and forced to lure her there. The theater parking lot was dark and empty, except for Blackburn and his old sedan. Underneath the light of the repaired streetlamp, Blackburn’s prematurely white hair made him stand out like a beacon in the deserted lot.
The tarp around the theater’s door was back in place, this time tightened so it wouldn’t blow away, and copious amounts of police tape made sure nobody would accidentally cross it. The outdoor lighting had been fixed, and three large security cameras had been mounted high up on the Gothic building, pointing to the areas immediately surrounding the theater and discouraging anyone trespassing. Dozens of bouquets of dried or dying flowers and a pile of creepy stuffed animals remained off to one side, but there was nothing to see here tonight, so the crowds had dispersed.
“Why the clandestine meeting?” Tempest stepped out of her jeep and wrapped her white peacoat around herself.
Blackburn didn’t wait for her to reach him. “That missing manuscript bothered me a lot. It got me thinking. As did the fact that I have a nagging feeling that Rinehart is on a wild-goose chase looking for Paloma Rhodes. Her cell phone sporadically turns on, out in Michigan, but the woman herself can’t be located.”
“You think she’s dead?”
“I don’t know. But there’s too much else that doesn’t sit right.”
“What happened to thinking those files I asked about were ‘misplaced’?”
“I dug deeper, looking for the file from your mom’s disappearance from the Whispering Creek Theater.”
“I didn’t ask for—”
“I know. You were there for the investigation, so you already had those details. But it’s a good thing I checked.” Blackburn paused, a look of fatherly concern crossing his face, as if he wasn’t sure how to tell her whatever he wanted to say.
“Go on, tell me.”
“Tempest.” He spoke softly. “The original file is gone.”
“Like someone else was looking at it?”
He shook his head. “The physical evidence should be there, but it’s not. It vanished.”
Vanished? Tempest stared at the former detective she’d known for so many years. He’d aged so much since her mom had vanished, but his kind eyes remained the same, filled with so much concern.
“Like my mom,” Tempest whispered. “And you thought it would be fun to have a midnight chat to tell me this disturbing news?”
“It’s even worse. That’s why I needed to see you right away. I reached Edinburgh right before I called you. It’s already morning there. The report from your aunt Elspeth’s accident ten years ago is missing too.”
She’d been right. Someone was covering up the Raj family curse.
Two old murders intimately connected to Tempest that occurred in theaters, and now a third this week. Julian Rhodes’s death was bigger than the murder of an unlikable man. Something bigger than Julian—bigger than Tempest—was happening right now.
Her knees didn’t buckle, and she didn’t sink to the ground. Instead, she felt oddly calm.
Even though she wished Blackburn had found something different, the weight of uncertainty was now lifted from her shoulders. It was one thing to have a theory but another to be proven right. The police records from both her mom’s disappearance in Hidden Creek and her aunt’s supposedly accidental death in Edinburgh were gone. There was no more ambiguity. But another piece of the puzzle was waiting to be assembled.
She couldn’t help but think that somewhere in her mind she already had the answer. That the puzzle pieces were nearly all there, if only she could see how they fit together. Some of the pieces were shrouded in shadows, making it difficult to see the true picture. But it was there, waiting for the light that would cut through the shadows.