Alejandro, the paranormal investigator with more than a hundred thousand social media followers who had heckled Ivy at her classic mystery lecture, was awake when Tempest messaged him at nearly three o’clock in the morning. He wasn’t kidding about keeping late hours.
He agreed to her terms, and they met at the Whispering Creek Theater parking lot at 3:30 a.m. Tempest didn’t know whether to call that desolate hour night or morning.
“To be honest,” Alejandro said, as he extricated himself from an ancient VW Bug his long limbs barely fit into, “I didn’t expect to hear from you.”
“I didn’t expect to be getting in touch either.”
He turned to Ivy at Tempest’s side. “Sorry about throwing you off your game at your library talk. No hard feelings?”
“It’s already forgotten.” Ivy pulled her pink coat around her. “As long as you get this done quickly, so we can get out of this place.”
Tempest’s gaze fell to the huge camera in his hand with the skull tattoo.
“Top of the line,” Alejandro said. “It’s good for shooting at night and in other dark places. We filming in the theater? We’re not getting in through that door, even if you have a key, but we could break in through one of the windows.”
Tempest shook her head. “Out here in front is best.”
The tarp was gone, but both crime scene tape and extra boards across the door made it clear this was not a door to be messed with ever again.
They were the only ones at the theater at 3:37 a.m., and it felt even more desolate because the bouquets of nocturnal flowers placed among the stuffed animal bats and cats were beginning to decompose. The only living thing in the parking lot was a potted flower that caught the light of the streetlamp above. The delicate white petals of the night-blooming cereus had come to life in the dead of night.
Alejandro positioned Tempest so the spires of the theater were behind her and an overhead light would illuminate half her face, clipped a microphone to her peacoat collar, and set his camera on a tripod. He did a sound check and grinned as Tempest explained to him what she was about to do.
“I’m Tempest Raj,” she said into the camera. She’d practiced the first several sentences she had to say. The ones that were clues for Paloma that she hoped she’d understand without the rest of the world thinking she had lost her mind.
“I’ve been silent until now,” she continued as Alejandro gave her a thumbs-up, “but it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep yet again, so I’m filming this short vlog. It’s true I found the body of Julian Rhodes here at the Whispering Creek Theater. I’m not allowed to say more about an ongoing investigation, but I can share what I feel. I checked out one of my favorite novels, Possession, from a sliding bookcase at my best friend’s library, but it didn’t work to help me get to sleep. I’ve never been much of a philosopher, but the idea of teleology has always fascinated me. Especially today. But I’m guessing most of you aren’t watching to hear me talk about philosophy, or how I wish I could get the answers about who killed Julian Rhodes. Instead, I’ll do what you expect me to do. A magic trick.”
She performed a simple card trick that would have been forgettable, except she added a story to it. The story is what makes a trick memorable. She told the story of her mom and aunt—Emma Raj, the Queen of Hearts, and Aunt Elspeth, the Queen of Diamonds. She ripped the two cards into pieces, but the two queens were restored at the end.
While Tempest filmed the video, Ivy texted Enid, her boss and the owner of the Locked Room Library, about what they needed from her the following day. Enid loved mysteries so they knew she’d be up for it.
Alejandro posted the video just a few minutes after four a.m. Now they just had to wait and see if the hidden message reached Paloma.
It didn’t take long. When Tempest got up at six a.m. after a short nap, the video had been viewed more than 50,000 times.
At 7:10 a.m., Ivy received an email from Enid that someone had requested booking the train car meeting room for 1:24 p.m., just as Tempest had cryptically conveyed in the video. Tempest was certain this was Paloma. Possession by A. S. Byatt was the novel that former librarian Paloma wanted to use as the trigger to enter her secret library. Paloma also knew that Tempest’s best friend, Ivy, worked at the Locked Room Library. And the last piece of the clue was that teleology was number 124 in the Dewey Decimal System.
That afternoon, Tempest would be meeting with missing murder suspect Paloma Rhodes.