Tempest didn’t step into the workshop. She would never be one of those characters in Ivy’s books that her former-maybe-once-again BFF deemed Too Stupid To Live.
The masked man held a whirring circular saw in his large, calloused hand. He switched off the saw as soon as he saw his visitors. He raised the face shield covering his face. Victor’s bearded face came into view.
Tempest let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The mask wasn’t a disguise. It was to keep out dust and debris from the wood he was sawing through. It was foolish of her to have been so on edge when she first saw him.
Or was it?
Victor grinned at her. “Hi, Tempest. And who’s this?”
Tempest trusted Victor to help her build her own house and to have her dad’s back on a building site. But she’d been wrong about people before. Victor had only been working with Secret Staircase Construction for the past three months. What did she really know about him? He was one of the people at the séance, and he wasn’t supposed to be working on any building project she knew of. That’s what had put her on high alert even when she saw who it was.
Tempest kept hold of Abra as she crouched down at Natalie’s side. “I’ll show you Abra’s house a little later. This workshop is dangerous, with lots of power tools like that one. I’ll meet you back at the tree house with everyone else in a minute. You can follow the path back up the hill?”
Natalie nodded. She waved goodbye and ran off.
Victor pulled the face shield all the way off his head and stretched his neck. “You don’t trust me.” He didn’t look hurt. More amused than anything.
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?” Abra attempted to kick free of her arms, sensing her continued discomfort.
“There’s a reason you should. I’m here because I want to help clear your grandfather.”
Tempest eyed the wooden panels on the tabletop where he’d been working. “You have a theory about how the killer maneuvered Corbin Colt’s body into place.”
He grinned. “I was working on ideas on paper at my place. But I had to test my theory. That’s what I’m doing here.”
“Is that a jungle gym?” Tempest stepped around the table to a set of bright blue bars like you’d find on a playground. There were often strange new things that appeared in the barn-like workshop, but she hadn’t seen a jungle gym in there before.
“Borrowed from my sister’s backyard. Actually, ‘borrowed’ is the wrong word. Her kids are in college now, so she’d rather have the space for a garden.”
“You’re going to outfit the jungle-gym bars with the contraption you built.”
“Bingo.” He rubbed his hands together with excitement. “I started off with really complex ideas, but quickly realized it had to be as simple as possible to work in practice.”
Tempest could imagine him as a kid dreaming up Rube Goldberg machines to perform simple tasks with overly complex, but fun, engineering.
“I thought of it,” he continued, “as soon as the shock of seeing him…” Victor trailed off and his eager smile fell away. “I’ve never seen a dead body before. Not outside of a funeral, I mean. That was … terrible isn’t even a bad enough word to describe it.”
“Horrifying,” Tempest whispered. “Absolutely horrifying.” Abra nuzzled her hand, sensing her sadness just as he’d sensed her fear moments before.
“That has to be why I didn’t think of it right away, when I could have checked—”
“I did. I checked. Sanjay did, too.”
“Did you—”
“We didn’t see anything.”
“It would have been disguised. The mechanism and its harness could have been painted to look like the ceiling.”
Tempest shook her head. “Sanjay attached things to the ceiling when he set up for the séance, and the police arrived before anyone could take anything away.”
“A smart criminal could hide it so they wouldn’t find it in their first pass,” he suggested, but his voice was no longer confident. He must have known he was grasping at straws at this point. “Those walls of the little pub in Lavinia’s Lair don’t reach the ceiling. Something could have been rigged to move a body into the room.”
“Something we’re just not seeing?” Something hidden in plain sight … What were they missing?
“Don’t be so skeptical.” Victor tugged nervously at his beard. “I have to be right.”
“Why?”
“Because if I’m wrong,” Victor said, “it would mean that someone at the séance is truly responsible for his death. But if I’m right, it could have been anyone.”
“I want to believe that, too, but you’re forgetting one important thing. Even if your contraption works and the killer used something similar; even if the police didn’t find it in time and the killer had time to sneak in and remove it; even if all those things are true, there’s the time of death. Corbin was killed once we were all in that room together. So even if we find a cleverly concealed hiding spot where he was tied up or unconscious, it doesn’t answer the question of how someone slipped away.” Or how he traveled fifty-five miles within minutes. Or why they staged him like they did.
Victor gripped the edge of his wooden contraption in frustration. “Maybe there’s a way to add an automated knife-thrower.…” He caught her eye. “I guess none of this is too realistic since there was no evidence of tampering with our design when the room was searched.”
“It was a good idea, though.”
He kicked the table, sending three large screws to the concrete floor below. “A good idea doesn’t clear your grandfather or—” He broke off abruptly.
“Or what?” Tempest struggled to keep hold of Abra, who didn’t like kicking.
“I don’t like accepting what that means.”
“I know.” Tempest held Abra close. “That there’s no getting around the truth that someone in that room killed Corbin Colt.”