Forty-Six

I dangled the Baby Bigfoot flyer in front of Dorian. “You were seen.”

“Mais non! How can this be?”

The magicians had dropped me off at my house, where thankfully I’d found Dorian in the attic. He hadn’t gone off on any new ill-conceived adventures.

“We’re not being careful enough,” I said. “Once your foot and leg became a problem, we should have kept you in the house. I’ll tell Heather I can’t bake pastries for a while—”

“It is not possible,” Dorian insisted. “I have been wearing your silk cape over me whenever I leave the house. Even if someone saw me, they would not see me as myself, n’est pas?”

“You’re wrong,” I snapped. “You must not have been careful enough. We have enough to worry about without Bigfoot hunters flocking to Portland.”

He stamped his working foot on the creaky attic floor. “You have not told me what has happened! You have been gone for many hours, yet I cannot see or hear anything in this attic. You said you were taking Monsieur Freeman to the airport, yet you did not return. I thought I heard your loud engine earlier, but you did not come inside, so I believed I was mistaken. You expect me to read your mind? Where did this Baby Bigfoot flyer come from?”

My shoulders sagged. “You’re right, Dorian. It’s been a morning full of surprises. I’m sorry.”

“Merci.”

“I’m sorry for not having a chance to tell you what was going on this morning,” I said. “But I’m not sorry for telling you to be more careful.”

Dorian mumbled something under his breath that I chose to ignore, though it sounded suspiciously like the insult casse couille, a vulgar way to express irritation.

“What we need,” he said, “is a code ring.”

“A code ring? To decipher the coded illustrations in the book, you mean?”

“Non. I speak of the telephone. You do not wish me to answer it, since nobody besides you and Brixton believe me to live here. I am a clandestine companion. A lonely lodger. A secret chimera—”

“Dorian.”

“Yes, yes. As I was saying, you do not check email on your phone, so we have no way to communicate about urgent matters.”

“Normally the house is perfectly safe. We couldn’t have foreseen that search warrant from the police.”

“No, but who knows what the future holds? We must institute a coded system of telephone rings.”

I considered the idea that must have come from one of the Penny Dreadful detective novels he’d read that winter. “That’s not a bad idea,” I admitted.

“I thought so. We will work out the sequence of rings later. For now, you must tell me what has transpired.”

“Remember those treasure hunters you were worried about because they might sully your woods next to River View Cemetery? They’re the ones who saw you.”

“C’est vrai? I do not see how—”

“It’s true. Earl, the treasure-hunting friend of the dead volunteer, was passing out these flyers at the cemetery.”

“But why did you return to the graveyard in the first place?”

“When I got back from the airport, Peter and Penelope Silverman were waiting for me here at the house.”

Dorian gasped and protectively curled his hands around his ears. “I did not hear you and the magicians downstairs. I am losing my hearing as well!” His wings flew out at his sides in agitation. “Quelle horreur!”

I put my hand on his shaking shoulder, careful to avoid his flapping wing. “There’s nothing wrong with your hearing. I didn’t invite them inside. And they wanted my help, so they didn’t aggravate me by picking the lock, even though I’m certain Peter has the skills to do so.”

“Excuse my outburst.” He folded his wings and sniffed. “I am oversensitive at present.”

“We’re all on edge. Those magicians aren’t helping. They lied to us about being in town to clear Peter’s father’s name. They’ve known all along that Franklin Thorne was the murderous thief. Peter wanted to find the loot for the reward and to save face himself.”

“The missing Lake Loot.”

“It’s not missing any longer, Dorian. We found it.”

Dorian sputtered and rolled his eyes as theatrically as a stage performer. “You found the tresor! Yet this was not the first thing you said when you came home!”

“The treasure doesn’t matter. Your safety—”

“Bof.” He sat down and patted the floor next to him. “Tell me.”

I sat down next to the gargoyle and explained how Peter had a complex puzzle box from his father, like the ones I sold at Elixir, and that I’d figured out it contained a key that opened a secret hiding spot at the Thorne family mausoleum at the cemetery. Franklin Thorne had hidden his stolen loot in his hiding place before the police caught up with him later that day, but not thinking he’d be killed that day, he hadn’t had a chance to convey the information about his hiding spot to his wife and son. “But when we went to the cemetery together,” I concluded, “I could tell someone had already gotten into the mausoleum, because the dirt inside the secret room had already been disturbed.”

“Yet you said there was only the single key,” Dorian said. “And you were the one who found it, non?”

“Yes. I also took the precaution of going with Peter and Penelope to the cemetery and asking Max to meet us there. That way the magicians couldn’t get into the crypt ahead of me. I wonder if I underestimated Earl Rasputin, though. If he saw what we were doing … Could he have found another way in?”

The gargoyle drummed his fingers together.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Tell me everything. Every detail, no matter how small.” He raised a clawed index finger into the air to make his point.

“To what end?”

“As I said, something strange is afoot with these magicians.”

I was wary of my little detective taking things into his own hands. Again. But I could use his insights. I described our trip to the cemetery, from the carving of roses and thorns on the mausoleum to the rose bushes that surrounded the raised crypt, from the tiny hidden room to the indentation in the dirt. I told Dorian how Peter had bundled up like he was cold or feeling under the weather, how we’d met Earl Rasputin handing out Baby Bigfoot flyers with an illustration that vaguely resembled Dorian, that the wind had blown some of the flyers away, and that Max had arrived late at the cemetery because he had to visit Ivan in the hospital.

“It is as I thought!” Dorian exclaimed, jumping up from his perch-like sitting position.

“You know what happened?”

“To test my theory, I have but one question for you.” His claws made a crisp tapping noise as he drummed his fingertips together. “When the flyers blew away, whose hands were they in?”

“Earl was handing them to me and Penelope.”

“Penelope, eh?”

“We both offered to take some flyers. I wanted to destroy them rather than hand them out, and I was afraid Penelope was intrigued because she recognized you.”

“It is obvious what has happened,” Dorian said. “Obvious!” He drew his hands behind his back and paced the floor. He was enjoying this. “The magician, Peter Silverman, has stolen something from the crypt.”

“That’s not possible. I was the one who figured out they had to burn the box. They didn’t have the key until then. I was with them the whole time.”

Dorian dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Have I taught you nothing in these last months, Zoe Faust?”

“What does cooking have to do with this?”

He pinched the bridge of his snout. “The magicians! Peter Silverman got into the crypt while you were distracted by his wife and Earl Rasputin.”

“You think they’re working together?”

“Perhaps, but I think not. Any good magician knows how to read their audience. I believe that because there were two of them and only one of you, they seized on the distraction of Monsieur Rasputin to carry out their deception.”

“If Franklin Thorne used the mausoleum as a hiding place for one treasure … ”

Dorian nodded. “He would have used it for all his treasures he wished to keep hidden. This is why the magician was bundled in a heavy coat, though it is a warm day. If he was an even better performer, like my father, he would have feigned illness to complete the deception. But he did not see this illusion through, and you noticed it as odd. Therefore you remembered he was wearing a coat—a coat he used to hide the additional valuables he pilfered.”

I groaned. “Peter Silverman didn’t want to restore his own good name by returning the Lake Loot to Julian Lake and receiving a reward. He wanted to get his hands on the bigger stash he knew his thieving father had hidden.”