“Can you move that creepy raven?” Tempest asked Ivy.
“Valdemar?” Ivy eyed the stuffed bird sitting high on a bookcase.
“If that stuffed animal starts squawking, I’ll drive back over the bridge, no matter how bad traffic is right now.”
“His sensor is only triggered if you get too close to him. We put him out of the way so his caws wouldn’t disturb the patrons. The ones who want to see him will seek him out.” Ivy pushed Tempest in the opposite direction. “Let’s go into the train-car meeting room.”
It was shortly before nine o’clock in the morning, and Tempest had met Ivy at the Locked Room Library in San Francisco, where Ivy was working part-time as a library assistant. The private library specializing in classic mystery fiction was located on the first floor of a converted Victorian house and open to the public six days a week. The library wouldn’t be opening for another hour, but Ivy was opening that day and couldn’t be late, so they’d agreed to meet there.
Ivy unlocked the door of the train-car replica that served as the small library’s meeting room, which could be reserved by book clubs as a meeting space during open hours. It wasn’t a true replica, but curved, black-paneled walls built to resemble a steam train, with large wheels and gears on the exterior. Everyone could tell it was a train, and mystery fans would also be reminded of the steam train from Murder on the Orient Express.
To work as a meeting room, the interior recreated a lounge car, with a narrow meeting table with plenty of seats for people to gather, and a bar at the far end.
“You look like death,” Ivy said, then winced. “Bad choice of words. But you do look like you didn’t sleep at all last night.”
“It was impossible to sleep.” Tempest slid into the closest seat. Normally this was a comforting room—it was the heart of a library, how could it not be a joy?—but now its close walls felt confining. She stole a glance at the curved ceiling, wondering yet again how something could have been hidden inside Secret Staircase Construction’s renovations for Lavinia. “I was hanging out in a room with an invisible dead body last night—”
“Who mysteriously materialized from more than fifty miles away within minutes. I read about it after I got your text.”
“What you didn’t read,” said Tempest, “is that my grandfather is the prime suspect.”
Ivy’s eyes grew wide. “That can’t be right.”
“The whole situation is like something out of these old books you consume like breathing air.” Tempest stood from the cramped seat and looked out the train-car windows at the library filled with mysteries. “That’s why I’m here, even though I know how busy you are. I’m hoping you’ll have some insights.”
Ivy joined her at the window. “I appreciate that you reached out, but you don’t need to pretend I’m any more than a sounding board.”
“You’re more than—”
“Tempest. You’re the one who figured out what happened to Cassidy. You’re the one who understands misdirection from your years of honing stage magic. I’m happy to help, but you don’t need the false flattery. As a magician, you’ve already spent your life creating the misdirection imagined by my favorite Golden Age of detective fiction author.”
Tempest smiled. “John Dickson Carr.” She and Ivy had become close friends as small children when they realized they were more obsessed with the mysteries in Scooby-Doo episodes than their peers. From there they moved on to reading the adventures of classic kid sleuths like Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and The Three Investigators, then on to Sherlock, Dupin, Poirot, Marple, Queen, Merlini, and John Dickson Carr’s most popular sleuth, Dr. Fell, who gave a famous locked-room lecture in The Three Coffins, in which the portly sleuth described all the possible ways an impossible crime could have been committed. At sixteen, Ivy had continued on their childhood path, disappearing into the world of books, while Tempest threw herself into magic.
“You can do this,” Ivy added.
Tempest filled Ivy in on the restraining order that gave Ash a motive and how he was currently being held by the police.
“Is your grandmother cutting her trip short to get home to him?”
Tempest shook her head. “A storm in the Scottish Hebrides is raging, so we weren’t able to reach her. We’ve been trying, but wireless towers are down from the storm.”
“You know so many people there. Could you send someone from the mainland? I’m sure Nicodemus would—”
“Nicky would if he could perform real magic.” Tempest had known Nicodemus the Necromancer since she was a kid. The Scottish stage magician had been the one to spot the talent of her mom and aunt when they debuted their Selkie Sisters magic act as teenagers at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
“Is his health that bad these days?”
“His arthritis makes it tough to perform some of the sleights he used to, but it doesn’t prevent him from traveling. But Grannie Mor and her friends are on one of the many islands that’s only accessible by boat. There’s no bridge.”
“You mean,” said Ivy, “there’s no way to tell Morag that her husband is the prime suspect in a murder?”
“Grandpa Ash isn’t guilty, so I’m sure they’ll figure that out. Only…”
“Only the whole thing seems impossible.”
“Meaning they’ll go for motive plus the fact that he’s the one who had blood on him.”
Ivy stared at her. “He what?”
“He thought Corbin might still be alive, so of course he was going to try to help him.”
Ivy groaned. “He accidentally drew attention away from the real culprit.” She gasped. “Wait, did anyone ask Ash to examine the body?”
“You’re thinking the person who asked Ash to examine him is the guilty party?” Tempest shook her head. “Except nobody did. He jumped into action all by himself.”
“You don’t think—”
“Of course not,” Tempest snapped.
Ivy held up her hands. “I don’t think so, either. But from everything I’ve heard about Corbin from Lavinia…” Ivy’s hands flew to her mouth. “Lavinia?”
“I hate to think so, and I can’t see how she or anyone else at that table managed it. That’s what I wanted to talk through with you this morning. It seems like nobody could have done it—yet at the same time, one of the people at the séance had to have done it. Lavinia, her mom Kumiko, your book club members Ellery and Sylvie, Victor, and my grandfather. It wasn’t me. It’s not Sanjay or Ash—”
“How do you know it’s not Sanjay or Ash?”
“You’re kidding.”
“I know everyone there. I hate to think it’s any of them.”
“And I hate the helpless feeling of sitting around while my grandfather is being held by the police—how long can they do that anyway? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight?”
“I’ve read too many classic British mysteries to have the faintest idea how the U.S. police and court systems work. For all I know, we have barristers.” Ivy paused and waited for a reaction from Tempest. When she got none, she went on, “That was a joke, by the way. Only the last bit. I know we don’t have barristers here. Um, I think. We need more inspiration. Hang on.”
Ivy moved away from the train-car windows facing the library to the windows facing the wall. There wasn’t much to look at—until Ivy activated the moving faux background that made it look like the train was chugging through the countryside.
Tempest watched as a field of vineyards sped past, accompanied by the chugging sound of a steam train. As the background images sped up, so did the sound of the train.
“If they’re focusing on my grandfather, they’re not looking as hard for whoever really did kill the Raven. And there’s no way the police will be able to wrap their heads around the four impossibilities.”
Ivy perked up. “Four impossibilities? Not just that he was seen fifty-something miles away right before he landed on my book club’s meeting-room table?”
Tempest didn’t have room to twirl around in the cramped train-car meeting room, so she instead took three deep breaths and took herself back to the previous night. “It’s all so messed up.”
“I should have been there with you at the séance. I’m sorry—”
“You had to study. I know that. You need to finish your degree so you can apply to graduate programs.”
Ivy bit a pink, chipped fingernail. “But I didn’t end up studying. I’ve been so burnt out from everything lately that I binge-listened to a true-crime podcast my sister recommended. I didn’t even crack a book.”
“It’s okay. There’s nothing you could have done. Sanjay was running the fake séance. Lavinia sat between the two of us.”
“Meaning you two would know if there was any jiggery-pokery, like using a dummy’s hand instead of her own.”
Tempest couldn’t help smiling at Ivy’s use of one of the expressions her favorite fictional hero, Dr. Fell, used. “True. Unless she used her feet.”
Ivy gasped. “You don’t think—”
“Like you said, we can’t rule anyone out.”
“Victor is the only one who had no connection at all to Corbin.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Tempest said slowly, thinking back on Lavinia’s expression when she looked at Victor. “I think he and Lavinia might be seeing each other. I can’t be sure, but why else would he be invited? And the way she looked at him suggested something was going on.”
“So we can’t rule anyone out based on not knowing Corbin.”
“We did a full tour of Lavinia’s Lair right before the séance, and Corbin’s body wasn’t hidden anywhere. A caterer, with two other witnesses, was stationed right outside the main door—which is the only way in or out—the whole time. There’s no other way out, except for smashing the windows—which have mallets next to them as a safety feature in case of a fire, but nobody got in or out that way. It was impossible for anyone to get into or out of the room we were in.”
“I know. I helped build it, so I know there aren’t any secret passageways.”
“Yet shortly after the séance began and Sanjay summoned Corbin Colt’s spirit, Corbin landed on the séance table, dead, with a knife sticking out of his chest, but none of us had broken the circle. Not only that, but the knife turned out to be fake, like a stage prop.”
“And all of this happened a few minutes after he appeared on a livestreamed video from fifty-five miles away.” Ivy drummed her fingers on the table. “That’s the biggest impossibility.”
“It’s obvious that a fake knife didn’t kill him, so something else did. That part of the situation was only briefly ‘impossible’ in the truest sense of the word. But it’s still baffling, because why do it? He was staged like that for some reason.”
“To draw your attention away from something else!”
“If that was the reason, it was incredibly effective.” Tempest thought back to the séance, when she thought the knife handle was attached to a real knife. “Misdirection. Staged misdirection.”
“Which points to you, Sanjay, and your grandfather—but you three are the ones I know aren’t guilty.”
“I thought you said—”
“I don’t really think one of you three is guilty. I’m merely pointing out that you’re all viable suspects to the police. Even if Corbin could really turn himself into a raven—which I’m not saying is the case,” Ivy added hastily, “someone still stabbed him to death. Oh! His new girlfriend. That Happy Hour with Hazel woman.”
“She wasn’t there at the séance. She has the best of all alibis: she both wasn’t there and was seen on a live-broadcast show. She could have faked the interaction and instead recorded it earlier. Except that we know it wasn’t recorded ahead of time.”
Ivy raised an eyebrow. “How do you know?”
“Because people were asking questions. Which she responded to. Live.”
“Tricky, yet doable.” Ivy drummed her fingers together. “It’s one of the key methods of making a crime appear impossible. A time shift is a classic device.”
“But why would she do it? She wasn’t at the séance, so what did it get her? It’s also complicated and so many things could go wrong. That’s one thing I never understood about so many of those puzzle-plot classic mysteries. I love their clever plots, but there needs to be an answer to why someone would go to such effort.”
“To kill Corbin.”
“How would making it seem impossible help her do it?”
“Because,” Ivy said, “it gives her a fake alibi.”
“She doesn’t need one. She truly wasn’t inside Lavinia’s Lair with us.”
Ivy raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”
“Very. Even if I’m wrong—which I’m not—I can’t imagine how she’d fake that live interaction without one of her fans catching on. So yes, she’s suspicious, but I don’t know how or why she’s involved yet.”
“There’s way too much we don’t know. Not like when we had all the pieces of the puzzle last summer, but just couldn’t see it.” Ivy hesitated. “I’m sure the police are investigating all this, so you’ll learn more soon. I appreciate this as a cerebral challenge, but you don’t really need to—”
“Hang on.” Tempest grabbed her buzzing phone from her pocket. The goofily smiling face of her dad lit up the screen, but when she picked up, his voice was the opposite of lighthearted.
Tempest gripped the edge of the train-car’s meeting table as she listened to his unbelievable words. She tried to calm herself by focusing on the faux scenery speeding by, but the vineyard background had given way to a tumultuous mountain pass.
“What’s going on?” Ivy whispered as Tempest hung up.
“I no longer have a choice.” Tempest’s voice shook as she spoke. “This isn’t just an intellectual puzzle. I have to get involved. My grandfather has been arrested for the murder of Corbin Colt.”