For the plan to work, Tempest couldn’t do it alone. They all had to play a part. Not only her friends, but also her family: Darius, Morag, and Ashok.
Her family were the ones who needed convincing, which is why she got her friends on board first. But soon, it was decided.
Darius would make sure Fiddler’s Folly was secure, and then run interference with Detective Rinehart.
Grannie Mor would illustrate the posters.
Ash would visit the local printer he’d met on one of his dabbawalla bike rides and print hundreds of posters and thousands of smaller flyers.
Gideon would blanket the town with the posters and flyers.
Ivy would use social media to get the word out digitally.
As for Sanjay, he had a secret mission for the show itself.
Tempest would reveal all at midnight. This was the story she had always wanted to tell, but didn’t know how to. And now, through Pop-Up Justice, she could finally pull it off.
It was all coming together, and fast. It had to be tonight.
Morag sketched the image slightly differently from Tempest’s vision, but she made it even better. The Tempest in Grannie Mor’s poster was a powerful shadow with long hair swirling around her, peeking out from behind a gnarled oak tree on the Hidden Creek hillside. The woman’s shadow held an open book. A handful of words emerged from the pages, shaped as if they were carried by the wind, a winding river, or perhaps followed the path of the musical notes of a score.
The Tempest invites you to Pop-Up Justice.
Four murders across ten years.
Solved tonight.
This story begins at midnight in the
Hidden Creek town square.
At the local copy shop, Ash photocopied the black-and-white flyer, as Tempest had requested, but went a step further. He stopped by each of the local businesses to get their support by leaving a stack of flyers at their front counters and a poster in their windows. This was Ash, who knew everyone’s life story and dreams within minutes of meeting them, so not a single proprietor turned him away.
Ivy photographed the artwork, and stayed hunched over her laptop posting it on every social media platform she could think of, hoping it would go viral. Gideon had an idea that would spread the word even further: After borrowing Ivy’s projector she used to watch movies on a white wall of her home, he asked Lavinia Kingsley, owner of café Veggie Magic, if he could project a huge image of the artwork onto the brick wall siding of the café that had a prominent spot on Hidden Creek’s main street. Lavinia owed a great debt to Tempest, so she quickly agreed.
Darius made sure that Rinehart knew that Tempest wouldn’t be breaking any laws with the brief performance and that she wasn’t going to reveal anything confidential from the investigation, such as what she’d been able to do at the theater that Rinehart hadn’t. His words and his physique might have held a hint of coercion, but Tempest didn’t think her papa had crossed a line. She also knew he wouldn’t reveal to the detective what she really had in store. It was better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission for something he never would have agreed to.
Everyone in her circle had gone above and beyond what she’d asked of them.
With their help, she was ready.