The unwounded paramedic pulled his injured partner away from the booby-trapped vaulted door. The second blade wasn’t as big as the sword that had killed Julian, and luckily it had only nicked the side of his shoulder.
There was something about that knife that triggered a memory, but everything was happening so quickly that it was all Tempest could do to focus on what people were shouting in the semidarkness.
“Get back!” the injured paramedic yelled. “I can’t see where they’re hiding. It’s too dark.”
“Suspect at the Whispering Creek Theater is at large,” Quinn’s shaking voice shouted into his radio as he motioned for Tempest and Nicodemus to get back to her jeep. “Armed with knives. When is that backup getting here?” He turned to Tempest. “How many back and side doors? And didn’t I tell you to stay back?”
“One back door and an emergency exit on the right, but they’re not still here. It’s a—”
“Did you get that?” Quinn said to whomever he was speaking to. “Two doors besides the main entrance I’m looking at.”
“It’s a—” Tempest tried again to explain that it was a booby trap. And not a good one. She’d heard the mechanism activate. But Quinn wouldn’t let her finish her thought.
“Suspect is inside the theater with two doors besides the one I can see.” Quinn spoke over her into his walkie-talkie before turning to Tempest. “You have the keys?”
Tempest slipped the keys off her key chain and handed them to him. “Here, but—”
“Now get back. Lock yourself inside your car. Go.”
“We’re going.” Nicodemus took Tempest’s hand and pulled her back toward the car.
“You don’t believe me either about it being a booby trap?” Tempest planted her sneakers firmly on the ground and refused to be dragged away.
“Oh, I do. I simply think a booby trap doesn’t in itself mean the killer isn’t still here.” His hand shook in hers. “Please, Tempest. I dinnae like what’s going on here one bit.”
He was right. Now Tempest was the one who rushed them away from the theater.
A patrol car raced into the parking lot, followed by an unmarked car. From the relative safety of the locked jeep, Tempest and Nicodemus watched as the man from the unmarked car quickly conferred with Quinn and the two other officers who’d arrived, and the uniformed officers moved quickly to circle the exterior of the theater. Tempest didn’t know the two officers who’d just arrived, but she recognized the plainclothes detective. Detective Rinehart. She’d last seen him when he’d arrested someone close to her earlier that year.
Dread knotted her stomach as his gaze turned from the theater to Tempest, but he didn’t approach. Instead, he joined his team to search for the suspect they believed to be inside.
“I should tell them to watch out for more booby traps.” Tempest reached for the door handle, but Nicodemus stopped her.
“They’re trained. They’re expecting knives to be thrust at them through doors now. They can handle it.”
“I should at least tell them about the Shadow Stage.” She left her hand on the door handle. “That would be a good place for someone to hide if the person who set the booby traps is still here. The door is hidden.”
“Tempest. I know you hate sitting on the sidelines. Let them do their job. They can handle the Shadow Stage.”
The old theater’s second stage got its eerie nickname long before Tempest was born, but its nickname had been mostly forgotten until five years ago. The Shadow Stage was the name of the secret stage that had been rediscovered behind the main theater. A full duplicate of the stage, hidden behind it and built on the back of a revolving platform.
The hidden stage had remained a secret because of some clever architectural misdirection. Everyone who visited the theater knew about its “hallway-to-nowhere”—a twisting hall along the side of the lobby angled like a labyrinth—as a quirky feature of the lobby during the intermission. It’s architecture was part of the performance. But when the authorities ripped apart much of the theater interior in their search for the woman who’d vanished on stage five years ago, they found that it was far more than a quirky architectural anomaly—they discovered a cleverly hidden door in the wall. A door that led to the Shadow Stage.
The Shadow Stage was a badly kept secret during the initial days of the Whispering Creek Theater. The whole stage, including both sides of the stage, rotated like a lazy Susan, enabling incredibly intricate set changes. It worked well until a stagehand was crushed to death by the gears that rotated the stage. That’s when the first rumors of a haunted theater began. The Shadow Stage was no longer used after that tragedy, nearly a century ago.
The entrance to the Shadow Stage was hidden so that only the cast and crew could find it, but it was boarded over after the tragedy and had gone unused for so long that everyone had forgotten about it—until Tempest’s mom used the theater for her final performance.
From the back of the parking lot, Tempest focused on the theater façade as the police continued to search for the killer she was convinced was long gone. Moonlight mixed with the light from the sole streetlamp cast an eerie glow over the old stone building. A fox hovered on the edge of the parking lot where it met the lush greenery of the steep hills, not quite setting foot on the asphalt, but clearly intrigued by the strange people on his hillside.
She stole a glance at Nicodemus. He’d removed a few sheets of cardstock paper and a pair of delicate scissors from his inner jacket pocket.
“Need something to calm my nerves,” he said, not looking up from the thick black paper he was snipping. Though the movements were confident, Tempest caught the slight tremor in his hands. He wasn’t handling the situation any better than she was.
The shadows of the recessed areas of the stones grew more ominous as the search stretched on. Tempest was usually good at keeping time, but she lost all sense of it as they waited for the full search of the area to conclude. The police didn’t drag anyone from the theater or surrounding area, and when the crime scene team arrived and cordoned off the area around Julian’s body, a weary Rinehart asked them to accompany him to the station to give witness statements.
Hidden Creek police station wasn’t like the kind you see on television shows. Even in the dead of night, it had a cozy charm. Which made sense given that it was located in an old Victorian- era house. All the buildings in the civic center were like that. Periodically, there was talk of modernizing the buildings, but the complex had such charm that the city council never approved the ideas.
Nicodemus went with Officer Quinn to give his statement and Tempest stayed with Detective Rinehart. Before giving him a statement, she insisted on knowing what they’d found.
“You know that’s not how this works,” Rinehart said. He was dressed smartly in a tailored charcoal-gray suit, and his dark eyes were as attentive as ever. “But you already know more than you should, since we had to act in the moment to conduct our search.” He paused and rubbed his eyes. “The back door was crudely forced. That’s how they got inside without Mr. Rhodes noticing anything was amiss. Preliminary estimates put the time of death before you and Officer Quinn arrived on the scene. The perpetrator had time to get away before anyone arrived. That doesn’t explain how they were able to stab Mr. Mason.”
“The paramedic? I tried to explain to him and Officer Quinn. It was a booby trap. That’s why none of us saw anyone come out of that theater. And why you didn’t find anyone on your search.”
His chair squeaked as he sat back and appraised her. That was the thing Tempest remembered most about him. Those intense, birdlike eyes. His clothing told her he was a man who cared about appearances, but his eyes told her he observed more than you thought.
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
She could have asked why they hadn’t listened to her when she tried to explain this hours ago. But she didn’t. She wasn’t being treated as a suspect, so she could have explained how, as a former stage magician, she knew all about creating mechanical devices, including what they sounded like when they sprang. But it wasn’t herself she was worried about. She wasn’t the only one who knew about building mechanical devices that could be considered booby traps. It was knowledge possessed by her dad, her grandfather, Nicodemus, and the whole Secret Staircase Construction crew—in other words, nearly everyone important in her life. Only her artist grandmother didn’t know how to build mechanical devices. If you didn’t count the complexities of easels that could withstand painting outdoors in inclement Scottish weather.
“I thought I heard the sound of a metal spring,” she said instead. “Like a jack-in-the-box.”
He nodded and scribbled a note. “We’ll look into it. Now let’s go through what happened tonight once more.”
She went over everything she’d seen as quickly as she could, so she could stop reliving it. Her thoughts kept returning to her mom, since the murder had taken place at the theater where her mom had vanished.
“We’re just about done with your statement,” Rinehart said after asking her to repeat it a second time. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. Why did you ask Mr. Rhodes to meet you here?”
Tempest tensed. Was this more than a witness statement? Should she call Vanessa right then? But if she called an attorney, there would be even more legal bills. And she really didn’t have anything to hide. She hadn’t called Julian. There would be records that showed that.
“He said that on the phone when he called me,” she said, “but I didn’t call him. The phone records will show that. I didn’t—”
“I’m not talking about the phone. You left him a note on the door to come inside.” He held up a note and read the three words. “Come inside, Tempest.”
She stared at the note. It was her handwriting.
There was no mistaking her combination of looped and blocky handwriting. Her writing was neater than that of many of her peers, and distinctive. Half cursive, which her mom had insisted she learn, and half block letters, because her dad thought cursive was a foolish pursuit and that people should write in a way that was clear to everyone.
Come inside, Tempest.
It could be read as an invitation. That’s why Julian had tried to go inside the theater. Her words had been used to lure him to his death.
“The left and bottom edges are ripped,” she said with a quiver in her voice. “Where did you get this?”
“It’s your handwriting?”
“Yes, but I didn’t write it for him. The cream paper. The torn edges. This must be from one of my notebooks.”
“You write invitations inside your notebooks?”
“It’s not an invitation. It’s part of a script or stage direction.”
Rinehart frowned as a sharp rap sounded on the door. “I’ll be right back.”
“Can I see—”
“No.” He turned and left the room, taking the note with him.
Tempest had driven to the police station in her own jeep. Detective Rinehart couldn’t really think she was a suspect or he wouldn’t have allowed that. Right? She stood and stretched her legs, but there wasn’t space in the small room to do much more than that. She wasn’t claustrophobic in the least, but she preferred larger spaces where she had room to move her body. Especially when presented with a note that was used to lure a man to his death.
Rinehart returned five minutes later, looking simultaneously less angry but more worried. “You can go home,” he said simply.
“That’s it?”
“We know who we’re looking for now.”
“You do? Who—?”
“I’m sorry you had to see that tonight.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, looking tired. “Go home. Get some rest. Mr. Nicodemus is in the waiting room already.”
It was clear he wasn’t going to say any more. But who did he think had killed Julian Rhodes?