Tempest had missed several calls while she was at the hospital. Back at her jeep, she texted her dad to let him know Nicky was doing well(-ish), assured Sanjay that he could go on with his show that night knowing nobody else had died and she was safe, and then called Ivy back.
“The reporting online says there was another death—” Ivy began.
“They’re wrong,” Tempest assured her.
“I was worried he’d taken a turn for the worse. So, he’s okay?”
“Depends on your definition of ‘okay.’” Tempest rolled her eyes at her own words. “I don’t mean to be overly dramatic.” Maybe she did. “He’ll live, but his career is over.”
“Where are you right now?”
“Heading back to you at the Whispering House. No, that doesn’t work. My dad is there.”
“You don’t want to see your dad?” Ivy’s voice was hurt on his behalf. In some ways, Ivy was closer to Darius than Tempest. Ivy had lived at Fiddler’s Folly for a year during high school when things at her own home were bad and her sister had already gone away to college, and Ivy had been working for Secret Staircase Construction during the years Tempest was in Vegas.
“I love him, but he’s not a person I want around when we discuss how to solve the mystery of that booby-trapped door.”
“Good point. Except we’ve already finished up work for the day. We knew he’d been up half the night, so Gideon and I insisted he go home. It’s nearly dinnertime.”
“It is?” She was usually so good at keeping track of time, but this was twice in the last twenty-four hours that she’d lost her superpower. This day had been too strange to feel like reality.
“Gideon was still finishing a few things at the Whispering House when I left a few minutes ago. I bet he’s still there, and I can get back there in a few minutes. I can’t believe I’m saying this, since it’s nearly dark, but let’s meet at the house.”
“Right. Since we can’t reach Gideon any other way.” He was the only guy in his twenties she knew who didn’t own a cell phone.
“He’s dying to see you.” Ivy gulped. “Bad choice of words, but truly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so unfocused. He even asked to read more about it on my cell. That’s how I know he’s worried.”
Tempest didn’t think she’d ever seen a cell phone in his hand. She couldn’t actually imagine it. “Be there in ten minutes.”
She made it in eight.
A small wooden box, about the size of a Rubik’s Cube, flew through the air as Tempest stepped into the Whispering House. She caught it before it fell to the floor. “Shouldn’t you be more careful with this? It looks like a puzzle box.”
“I knew you’d catch it,” said Gideon. “Besides, it doesn’t work. It’s going on the scrap pile.”
“Really? It’s too beautiful for that. Even if it’s not a puzzle.” She slid open the top panel. The carved, soft wood smelled of pine. “This isn’t my dad’s woodworking style.”
Gideon took the box from her hands, sending a little jolt of electricity through her as he brushed his calloused sculptor’s fingertips over hers. “When we first started this job, I thought it would be fun to try something new while you worked on that attic puzzle room. I didn’t get it to work, but I found it just now while cleaning up the tool room.”
Gideon Torres. She’d known him for nearly a year. The intensity with which he looked at the world—and at her—still excited her and freaked her out a little. He and Tempest weren’t exactly more than friends, but it occasionally felt like they were headed in that direction. It wasn’t an unpleasant thought. But it was also one she did not have time to think about right now.
He took a step back and stood in a domed archway that the Secret Staircase Construction crew had built to recreate what they believed the original house had looked like before drab, standardized doors were added in the 1950s. The carved arch was beautiful, but the real magic was hidden to the left of the open archway, where the secret stairway leading to the attic was hiding in plain sight. That was a detail that architect Chester Hill had envisioned in the partial original blueprints their client had discovered. As they peeled back the layers of the house, the Secret Staircase crew couldn’t find any architectural evidence that the secret staircase had ever been realized. But now, with a few modifications to meet modern safety requirements and a couple of magical flourishes in the spirit of the old Gothic bones of the house, the original vision was nearly a reality.
“You doing okay?” Gideon asked. “I didn’t even get to see you earlier to ask how you were doing after what happened last night, and now your mentor…” His dark eyes were downcast, and there was something different about his face. Stubble. That was it. He was usually clean-shaven, but it looked like he might not have shaved since the last time she’d seen him three days ago. Gideon’s dark hair was also more unkempt than usual. He often lost himself in his stone carvings, and he’d been getting thinner and thinner all year.
“He’ll be all right.”
“What’s even going on, Tempest?”
“I wish I knew. A booby trap similar to the one that killed Julian Rhodes got Nicodemus’s hand.”
Gideon swore. At least Tempest was fairly sure that’s what the muttered expression was, though she didn’t know the word. Gideon’s mom was from France, and his dad was from the Philippines. He’d been raised mostly in California, making him a similar ethnically ambiguous mash-up to her. He joked that the only languages he spoke fluently besides English were Tagalish and Fragalog—English mixed with Tagalog and with French. Tempest didn’t come close to speaking another language fluently. A true multicultural mutt, besides English she only spoke rudimentary Tamil, Spanish, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic. Enough Tamil and Spanish to order food, ask for directions, and thank people. And enough Scots and Gaelic to understand simple conversations and late-night singing in pubs across Scotland.
“Ivy’s up in the attic.” Gideon led the way.
Tempest studied the wooden box as she and Gideon climbed the stairs. Even though it wasn’t a puzzle that required you to slide pieces of wood in a certain order to open the box, the lid’s delicate carving of an open book surrounded by flowering vines was captivating. She hadn’t realized Gideon was experimenting with mediums beyond stone. There was no way she was letting this box go into the recycling bin.
They reached the attic, where Ivy had rolled up the tarps of the previous night and was now scraping a few errant drops of paint from the wainscoting they’d built into puzzle pieces.
Historical documentation on the house showed Chester Hill’s sketches for the attic, including sliding wooden panels on the sections of wall beneath its steeply pitched roof and visible beams, so one of the requests from Lenore was to convert this attic into something like a puzzle box. Tempest imagined the mechanisms of a magical puzzle box attic, accessed by a series of sliding movements of pieces of wood that, when moved properly, unlocked a secret door.
Ivy ceased delicately removing paint splatter and threw her arms around Tempest. Ivy was almost a head shorter, so Tempest lifted her off the ground for a moment as she hugged back.
“I couldn’t resist fixing that when I saw it,” Ivy said. “But let’s forget about this job now. Tell us everything that’s happened.”
Tempest sat down cross-legged on the attic floor, underneath exposed wooden beams and a skylight. “Someone set a fiendish booby trap at my theater—one that seems to be regenerating. Why would Paloma Rhodes do that? Who would have done it if it wasn’t her? And seriously, how? How is it regenerating?”
“Um, isn’t that what the police are looking into?” Gideon asked.
Tempest shot a glance at Ivy. “You didn’t tell him why we’re meeting up?”
“Tempest thinks they’re on the wrong track,” Ivy said to Gideon.
“Paloma left the hospital just a few hours before Julian was killed,” said Tempest. “She wasn’t unconscious long enough for her to have trouble walking, so it’s technically possible for her to have killed him. But the method doesn’t make sense. Why kill him with a complex series of knife booby traps at a theater that has nothing to do with her?”
“She could have set them beforehand,” Ivy pointed out. “Maybe she and Julian were attempting to kill each other.”
Tempest shook her head. “I’ve been in that theater countless times since Paloma fell into her coma. I’ve gone through that door. There was nothing rigged on that door even a few days ago. It can’t have been her. Besides, based on everything we know about her from having her as a client and from what we learned later, it just doesn’t feel like something she’d do.”
As soon as Julian Rhodes filed a suit against Secret Staircase Construction, Tempest’s grandfather hired former detective Blackburn, now a private investigator, to dig into Julian’s own past. A countermeasure to how Julian was poking into their lives for his lawsuit.
“This is what we know about Julian and Paloma,” Tempest began. “Julian sold luxury travel experiences under the company name Bespoke Rhodes. The experiences were aimed at people, especially men in the tech world, who had amassed wealth early in life and were looking for luxury travel beyond the standard high-end tours that skewed older. He founded the company a decade ago, in his late thirties, so he was around fifty years old when he died.”
“Fifty-two,” said Ivy. “When he questioned my competence when I was welding the floating staircase for their house, he commented that he was exactly twenty-five years older than me.”
“Old enough to look respectable with some gray hair at his temples,” said Tempest, “but not too old to successfully market to his demographic. When Julian heard about Secret Staircase Construction, he decided to renovate his historic home in a way that would get him featured in Architectural Digest. He’d pitched them before—unsuccessfully.”
“I’ll never understand why people care so much about stuff like that,” Gideon murmured. “It felt like he never cared about the beautiful things we were building into his house at all. He only wanted what would get him featured. And how he didn’t want Lenore to have what he did? It’s like a child who no longer wants a toy when they find out their friend got it too.”
It was true. Darius had explained to Julian that there were no cookie-cutter projects, that every home renovation was entirely unique, and that his neighbor’s historic home renovation would be nothing like his modern one. Julian’s rage was one of the reasons they weren’t surprised when something happened to his wife. Nor was it surprising that Julian would look for someone else to blame. They hadn’t realized just how treacherous he could be.
The experience made Tempest understand why her dad had fired bad clients in the past, even when they desperately needed the money. Paloma was a pleasure to work with, and she was the one who gave Secret Staircase Construction the details that enabled them to bring their house to life. Julian wanted a renovation that looked expensive and unique; Paloma wanted a home that captured memories from the travels the couple had taken early in their relationship. The circular stairway was inspired by a stairway based on a circular staircase from a German castle that looked straight out of a fairy tale, but Julian had instead decided that a modern staircase that looked as if it floated in the air, unbound, was better for his image.
“Paloma was a decade younger than her husband,” Tempest continued, “and it was a first marriage for both of them, so there was no motive involving a previous spouse and no kids in the picture. There was no publicly reported drama in their marriage. Paloma had been a librarian before going to work for Bespoke Rhodes when they married. It was Paloma who had the idea of adding a section to their website that recommended books related to travel.”
Paloma had told Tempest she’d wanted to simply call the section of the website “Book Recommendations,” but Julian insisted it should be “Curated Literature.” Still, Paloma succeeded in recommending books she loved to fellow travelers. Tempest loved the small photo of Paloma on that page of the website, dressed in a bright white dress and surrounded by books. Paloma always dressed in white because she said it was a blank slate, like a blank page in a book ready for words to follow. Tempest wondered if the fact that she liked Paloma so much was pushing her into a misguided belief in Paloma’s innocence.
“All of that we knew before the accident,” Tempest continued. “When my grandfather hired a private investigator to look more into them after their lawsuit against my dad, he turned to former detective Blackburn because we knew him from my mom’s disappearance and considered him trustworthy. Blackburn dug up two facts Julian didn’t want known. First, while Julian claimed to be self-made, he’d actually inherited millions from his parents, which gave him ample start-up funds. That was a fact he kept quiet.”
“Since it didn’t fit with his image of being a self-made entrepreneur,” said Gideon.
“And second,” said Tempest, “he was a bully way before we met him. He’d threatened a lot of other people with lawsuits. He simply escalated when it came to us—probably because construction comes with risk, so my dad has good insurance.”
“That could be a motive for why someone would want to kill him,” said Ivy.
“Exactly. We weren’t able to get many details though.” Tempest wished Blackburn had been more unethical because the public record and voluntary interviews didn’t tell them nearly enough. Or maybe she didn’t really wish that. This way, she knew they could trust him, even if that didn’t get them the answers they wanted as quickly as Tempest wanted them. “Still, the fact that Julian threatened to sue several other people is sketchy. As is the fact that he was trying to dig up dirt on my family so he could bully my dad into a big settlement.”
“Everything about that guy was sketchy,” said Gideon. “Which is a problem for motives, since guys like that have a lot of people who’d want them dead.”
“But to kill him at the Whispering Creek Theater with a set of booby traps and a page ripped out of my notebook to lure him to his death?” said Tempest.
“Paloma is connected to you through hiring your dad’s company,” said Ivy. “It makes sense the police are focusing on her, especially since she’s disappeared.”
“She wasn’t physically abused by Julian,” Gideon said. “At least not on parts of her body that were visible, and she didn’t wear clothing like turtleneck sweaters that would cover them up. She didn’t wear makeup that would cover up bruises either.” He paused. “Why do you two look so shocked?”
“You don’t seem like the type of guy to notice a woman’s makeup,” said Ivy.
“But you would look,” Tempest said to him, “if you suspected she might have bruises to cover up.”
Gideon shrugged. “Julian was emotionally abusive for sure. That type of abuse can be nearly as bad. She might have snapped. Detective Rinehart might be right about her, Tempest. Whoever set those booby traps set multiple traps. They had to know it could be dangerous if not all of them were set off at the same time they killed Julian.”
“I know,” Tempest admitted. “My gut feeling isn’t the same as evidence. I just can’t shake the feeling that we’re looking at this all wrong.” What were they overlooking?
“Have you eaten anything since the two bites of lunch you had ages ago?” Ivy asked.
“I’m not wrong just because I’m hungry.” Okay, maybe Ivy had a point—she was starving. Still, she wasn’t wrong.
“Go home, Tempest. Get some food and some rest.” Gideon squeezed her hand. His strong hands were warm and comforting. “We’ll be here in the morning. Ivy will probably read at least one of her favorite classic mystery novels before bed tonight to get investigative ideas flowing. If you still want to investigate after you sleep on it tonight, we’ll help.”
“Harumph,” said Ivy, sounding like her favorite fictional detective, Dr. Fell.
“You don’t want to help?” Tempest asked.
“Of course I want to help.” Ivy pouted. “I’m upset that Gideon stole my line. I’ve already got a book in mind I want to reread tonight.”
“You do?” Tempest knew that Ivy always thought of classic mystery novels as the answer to anything and everything in life, but she was surprised that her friend already had an idea of a book that might help with such a strange crime.
“The Reader Is Warned by John Dickson Carr, under his pseudonym Carter Dickson.”
“Why that one?” Tempest couldn’t remember if she’d read it. As a teenager, she’d preferred Clayton Rawson’s magician character The Great Merlini to Carr’s sleuths.
“It’s a fair-play mystery with all the clues,” said Ivy. “I thought of it because the book isn’t exactly a locked-room mystery, just like our real-life booby-trapped door isn’t exactly an impossible crime. It’s just super creepy because it was made to look like it’s regenerating—to look like it’s supernatural.”
“Thanks for the nightmares, Ivy,” said Gideon.
“Says the man who carves monsters out of stone.” Tempest raised an eyebrow at him.
“In The Reader Is Warned,” Ivy continued, ignoring both of them, “there’s a man who claims he can kill by simply using his mind. Can he precisely predict someone’s death and cause it from afar? Or is it a trick?”
“Come on.” Gideon pulled Tempest up from the creaking floorboards. “Let’s let Ivy get home to her book to see if it gives her ideas about this weird crime.”
“It’s dark outside,” said Tempest. “Nobody is walking out of here alone. We’re all leaving together.”
Before flicking out the light and following Ivy and Gideon down the stairs, Tempest took one last look at the construction around her, knowing it would soon be something beautiful. She turned off the light, but dim light from the window still illuminated the room.
She ran to the window. It wasn’t a light on at the Rhodeses’ house. It was simply a streetlamp near the top-floor window. The Rhodeses’ house was dark.
Was the officer who’d been stationed there gone, or was he simply sitting in the dark? And what had become of Paloma Rhodes?