Chapter 22

  

I pulled off my blindfold. My eyes watered in the adjustment from darkness to light as I stared into the bright spotlight pointed at Sanjay and a man standing in the aisle at the back of the theater.

The man standing next to Sanjay looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He had black hair and Asian features but with piercing blue eyes that glared at me. The woman seated next to him tugged at his arm. His face softened as he turned to look at her. It was Christine Healy. That’s when I realized why the man looked familiar. He was indeed his father’s son.

Steven Healy’s son carried himself with a different type of assurance than his father. This man wore an untucked dress shirt over skinny jeans, rather than a suit, and his short hair had been styled within an inch of its life with hair gel that shone in the spotlight.

I have to hand it to Sanjay, the consummate performer. He handled the situation better than I would have thought possible. He signaled the booth above the seats with an unobtrusive gesture, and the spotlight on the audience instantly cut out. Two new spotlights began to swirl around a spot on the stage several feet away from where I stood. Before I noticed that he’d moved, Sanjay appeared on the side of the stage with the spotlights, ushering the musical performer back on stage. His back to the audience, I saw him mouth “Thank you” to the musician before scooping me backstage.

  

Less than a minute later, we were in a dressing room with Steven’s son and Christine. Following behind them, Nadia stepped into the room. She was never one to miss a party.

Christine held his arm, as if her gentle touch could hold him back. Nadia’s eyes narrowed as she looked between us.

“I’m so sorry,” Christine said. Unlike the last time I’d seen her outside my office, her face was perfectly made up. But circles under her eyes betrayed her fatigue.

Steven’s son glared at me. Now that I was closer to him, I noticed paint stains on his fingers, and even a spot under his chin. I also smelled alcohol on his breath. I was suddenly very aware that I was wearing a ridiculous slinky magician’s assistant costume. I grabbed a shawl from a costume rack and draped it over me.

“Forgive us,” she continued. “This is my husband, Connor.”

“Jaya Anand Jones,” he said. I might have imagined it, but his glassy-eyed glare softened as he looked at me. “You’re not what I expected. Dad said he was going to see a history professor. You know we’re—”

“We’re so sorry,” Christine cut in.

“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” Connor said, shaking Christine’s hand off his arm, his attention focused on me. “Did you kill him?”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, “but I don’t have any idea who could have killed him—”

“She doesn’t look like she’s lying,” Connor said to his wife. “Is she lying? I thought I’d be able to tell if she was lying.” Christine’s cheeks flushed, and I wondered how often Connor was this drunk.

“How did you find me here?” I asked.

Nadia clicked her tongue. “They told me they were friends of yours. I thought I was helping by telling your friends where you would be.”

“Connor wanted to see you,” Christine said, “because we knew his father was working with you—”

“She wasn’t working with him,” Sanjay cut in.

“I never meant for us to disrupt your performance,” Christine said quietly, her eyes focused on the floor.

“You were the last one who saw him that night,” Connor said, his paint-stained finger pointing at me. “He gave you that map of his that he thought led to some mysterious treasure. You had to have been the one—”

“This is what the police are for,” Nadia said. She spoke in a calming, maternal voice. “They already spoke with her.”

“You know about that?” I asked.

“The inspector came to my front door first.”

“But they didn’t arrest her,” Connor said. He stumbled forward toward me. “They should have—”

“One more step,” Nadia said, her maternal voice replaced by one of pure ice, “and I will call the police.”

“Good,” Connor said. “The police should be working harder on my father’s—”

A crack sounded from behind us. The greenroom door burst open. A small, dark-haired woman stepped into the room.

Sanjay’s assistant Grace stepped toward us—a knife in her outstretched hand.

“Stop threatening Jaya!” she yelled.

Christine screamed as Connor gasped and Nadia dropped her phone. I didn’t blame them. I’d never seen Grace like that before. At least not when she wasn’t on stage.

Sanjay reached Grace quickly and took hold of her wrist.

He moved her hand so the knife hit his arm. Rather than cutting through the fabric, the blade retracted. Sanjay twisted her wrist a little more and the knife clattered to the ground.

“What the hell?” Connor said, stumbling backward.

“It’s a fake knife,” Sanjay said. He picked up the knife and demonstrated more slowly how the blade retracted into the hilt.

“The people in front said someone was threatening Jaya,” Grace said softly to Sanjay. It sounded like she was back to her usual self.

I couldn’t quite figure Grace out, with her combination of shyness and onstage gusto. She was dyslexic and had dropped out of high school, waitressing until she became Sanjay’s magician’s assistant. He’d noticed the way she held herself as a former gymnast and was impressed by how she mentally kept dozens of orders straight—an instrumental skill for a magician’s assistant. Waitressing was one of the things I did during the four years I took between finishing high school at sixteen and starting college at twenty, so I knew what a difficult job it was. It was tougher than getting a PhD in many ways, but I suspected what I’d achieved through my education was why Sanjay imagined that Grace idolized me.

“We’re alright, Grace,” I said. “It’s a misunderstanding.”

“What are you doing here anyway?” Sanjay asked her.

“I drove all the way back here after the funeral to help,” she said, her voice still barely above a whisper. “I didn’t know if Jaya would be able to pull off the show—” She broke off and looked between us. “I wanted to help. But I guess you didn’t need me.”

Christine took Connor’s hand again and pulled him to the door. “We should go.”

“Wait,” I said.

“Let them go,” Sanjay said. “They should talk to the police. Not to you.”

Christine led Connor away, passing a stagehand in the doorway.

“You going to go back on?” the stagehand asked.

Sanjay gave a curt nod. “Five minutes.”

“You up for taking over for me?” I asked Grace.

Her slumped shoulders shot up. “If Sanjay needs me.”

“He needs you,” I said. “Believe me, he needs you.”

  

I went to my campus office to use the computer to pull up a map of Kochi. On the full-size screen, I was even more certain of my conclusions. The two cities and their surrounding bodies of water and land masses were virtually identical. The treasure map was Kochi.

I knew about the historical significance of the port city, but I hadn’t even given much thought to its modern geography.

The Portuguese, Dutch, and British all laid claim to the city at one point or another before India’s independence in 1947. The Portuguese constructed a large fort there, which was later destroyed by the Dutch, but the piece of land that made up the center of the city was still known as Fort Kochi. The peninsula continued to be a strategic trading post with a cosmopolitan population.

I looked up the MP Craft Emporium and The Anchored Enchantress. Both had been a dead end in San Francisco, but not in India. I was onto something with the MP Craft Emporium. There was a whole section of town with craft shops, right where I remembered that building on the map. I couldn’t find the exact name of the store, but a store from over a hundred years ago wouldn’t have an internet presence. The location fit. This was what I was looking for.

I opened a new tab and looked up flights to south India. There were seats left on a flight to Trivandrum, via Hong Kong, out of SFO the next morning. I impulsively clicked “buy” with my new credit card before I could talk myself out of it. Since I was born in India and had a Person of Indian Origin card, I had a long-term visa. I could travel to India at any time.

Trivandrum was over a hundred miles from Kochi, but the University of Kerala was located in Trivandrum, so I could stop and see the archived letters first. Even without the treasure map, I hoped Steven was right that one of Anand’s letters to his brother held the missing piece of the puzzle.

I was finishing filling in the last details to purchase the plane ticket when I was interrupted by someone at my door. Naveen leaned in the door frame and crossed his arms.

“I thought you’d like to hear the news,” he said.

“News?”

“I’ve just signed the contract for a book deal for my work on the historical migration of languages across India.”

I would scream if Naveen got tenure over me because of this lost paper. Not that I’d give Naveen the satisfaction of seeing that.

“Congratulations!” I said. “That’s great.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not great?” I asked in my most innocent voice.

“Well, yes,” Naveen said stiffly. “It’s quite an accomplishment. I wasn’t sure if you’d see it that way. I know you’re still struggling to publish a paper.”

I’d co-authored several well-received papers during graduate school, and published a chapter of my dissertation as an article in a magazine that was more general interest than academic.

This latest paper was the first one I’d authored on my own that had been accepted into a prestigious academic journal. I hadn’t shared the news with anyone yet, since they were waiting on my revisions.

“A book deal is a great accomplishment,” I said. “Not all of us can be so prolific. Especially when on the verge of a major historical discovery.”

Naveen frowned. “A discovery?”

“I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details,” I said. “I know you’ve got a book to write.”

After Naveen left, I tried calling Joseph Abraham, the archivist at the University of Kerala, one more time before leaving campus. My call went to voicemail again. It was morning in India now, late enough that I was hoping the archivist would have been there. I left a message letting him know I’d be stopping by the following day.

The streets were relatively empty at the late hour. I turned up Talvin Singh’s tabla beats on the stereo and drove my roadster as it was supposed to be driven.

  

Back at my apartment, I pulled a suitcase out of the top of my closet and began throwing clothes into it.

A knock sounded on my door. I was really going to have to go get a new phone so people would stop showing up unannounced. I opened the door.

“Miss Jones,” Inspector Valdez said, “may I come in?”

Damn. I should have checked.

“It’s late,” I said.

“I know. I’m sorry, but with your phone stolen it was the only way to talk to you. Connor Healy stopped by the station tonight. I know he and his wife disrupted a magic show you were in tonight. I didn’t realize you were a magician in addition to a professor and musician.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I was only helping a friend. What did Connor tell you? Is he the reason you’re convinced I had something to do with Steven Healy’s death?”

“He’s got some interesting ideas.”

“Maybe he’s the one who did it,” I suggested. “His wife thinks he’s unstable.”

“He’s got an alibi.”

“From what I can tell, his wife would say anything he wanted her to say.”

“They didn’t alibi each other,” Valdez said. “They were both at an art show with dozens of witnesses.”

“I know you talked to the people I was with, too.”

Valdez nodded. “I checked out what you told me. Looks like you were on your own for quite a while that evening, stuck in some pretty bad traffic.” The homicide inspector ran a hand through his wild black hair. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or stifling a yawn. “I’m not here to arrest you, you know.”

“Why did you come?”

“Connor Healy isn’t going to bother you anymore. But you aren’t planning on going anywhere, are you?”

I shifted the angle of the door to block his view of my suitcase.

“My wallet was stolen, remember?”

I didn’t add that my passport hadn’t been in my wallet. It was probably best to not completely lie to the police when one was a suspect in a murder.