Tempest only stopped running once she’d reached the campground parking lot a mile away.
She shouldn’t have been breathing as hard as she was. She hoped it was merely proof that burgling wasn’t for her, not that she’d already gotten so badly out of shape now that she was no longer practicing a taxing physical routine and performing on stage most nights.
Dahlia’s station wagon was idling in the parking lot. No other cars were around.
Tempest peeled off her cap and gloves and slipped into the passenger seat. “We good?”
“She hates me,” Ivy said. “Or rather, she hates fake-brunette me who was another of Corbin’s mistresses. But I don’t think she suspected anyone else was in the house.”
Tempest didn’t feel too guilty about their ploy. After all, Hazel herself had been having an affair with Corbin while he was married to Lavinia.
“She wanted me to leave because I’d upset her,” Ivy continued. “I’m sorry I overdid it and couldn’t buy you more—” she broke off as Tempest held up the fat book.
“I got it.” Tempest opened the book, revealing its hidden contents. “A handwritten draft of an unpublished manuscript.”
“No way,” Ivy whispered. “I thought his books were duds lately. Why would an unpublished manuscript of his be worth something to Ash? Did Ash lie about it not being something valuable?”
Tempest removed the papers, noticing that she’d ripped a couple of them in her haste earlier. “Look at the title.” She could barely look herself.
“The Vanishing of Ella Patel,” Ivy read. “Ella Patel … It sounds kinda like your mom’s name, Emma Raj, doesn’t it?”
Tempest swallowed hard. “It’s too close to be anything else. Lots of people called my mom’s disappearance the vanishing of Emma Raj. This has to be Corbin Colt’s barely disguised fictionalization of my mom’s disappearance.”
Patel was a Gujarati name, never mind that her family was Tamil. Indian surnames were tricky anyway. Her grandfather was Dravidian Tamilian, and Tamils rarely used surnames at all until recently. Instead, they used the first initial of their father’s name, along with their own first name. But that was hardly the thing Tempest should have cared about at that moment.
“This,” said Tempest, “is why Ash threatened Corbin Colt. It’s even worse than I thought. It’s not just that Corbin had written an essay about my mom that was in poor taste. He wanted to write a novel about her.”
“That’s even more of a motive. That’s why he wanted it back?”
The car sputtered. Tempest had forgotten the engine was still running. “I don’t think Dahlia’s car likes sitting still.”
“It took me a minute to get it started earlier. I can’t risk turning it off again. I’d better—” Ivy gasped. She grabbed the rearview mirror and stared at whatever horror it showed her.
Tempest whirled around in the bucket seat. “Gideon.” She croaked out a laugh. “It’s only Gideon.”
“I can’t see his face,” Ivy whispered.
“That was the whole point of him wearing that hard hat.”
Ivy grasped Tempest’s arm. “Does he always saunter like that?”
Tempest stared at the man walking toward them with a slightly lopsided gait. Did he?
“It’s fine, Ivy. He’s walking like that because he’s carrying a heavy bag. It’s Gideon.” She was 90 percent certain. Maybe 80 percent.
Ivy let out a sigh of relief as Gideon reached the car and took off the hard hat.
“You got it?” Gideon asked after he dropped the bag into the back and slid into the back seat.
Tempest held up the open book with the false interior.
“The Vanishing of Ella Patel,” Ivy said. “A fictionalization of Tempest’s mom’s disappearance.”
“That’s awful,” Gideon said. “Can we talk while driving? This place gives me the creeps. I could have sworn there was a raven following me back here.”
Ivy pulled out of the lot. “Why would you say that? Don’t say that.”
“As soon as we’re out of this eerie small town, I’ll be fine.”
“Seat belts,” Ivy said as the tires screeched on a tight turn she was driving far too quickly for.
Tempest barely noticed the seat belt pulling tight and cutting into her stomach as she flipped through the handwritten pages. Corbin Colt’s penmanship was neat but simultaneously difficult to decipher. He wrote in cursive, which she’d learned at school, but his handwriting was scrunched together, often overlapping and slanted, reminding her of letters written in Victorian times when the authors tried to conserve paper by writing not only with small, precise lettering, but also at different angles.
As a canopy of pine trees whipped by beside the car. As the small road transitioned to a highway, she squinted at the tangle of looped letters and attempted to read on.
The manuscript notes began with a book club closely resembled his wife’s book club, including a member named Alice who discovered her love of books after being named after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And here it was. On the next page a new character moved into the neighborhood who closely resembled Tempest’s own mother. There was no mistaking it. Even more similar than the name “Ella Patel” was the character herself—a woman originally from Scotland who was a magician who made the Statue of Liberty disappear, like David Copperfield had done. Then, Ella herself disappeared. Vanished. The book club took it upon themselves to investigate.
“You okay?” Gideon asked. “Tempest?”
“There’s no question. This is about my mom.” She stared at Ivy. “Your book club never investigated my mom’s disappearance, did they?”
Ivy took her eyes off the road for a fraction of a second to flash a befuddled look at Tempest. “Why would we do that?”
“Did anyone have an affair with another member’s significant other?”
Ivy reddened. “Just because I found Corbin attractive, that doesn’t mean I’d—”
“I didn’t mean you.” Why was Ivy so flustered? “I was thinking of Ellery. There’s someone in Corbin’s manuscript named after—”
“It’s a piece of fiction, Tempest.” Ivy’s voice was clipped. Was she protesting too much?
“I don’t get it,” Gideon said. “This piece of fiction was hidden inside a book. Was Ash worried the police would find it? Why would they care?”
“I don’t know.…” Tempest flipped through the folded pages. “This will take me a little while to read. His handwriting isn’t meant for a moving car.”
“Wouldn’t there be other copies?” Ivy asked.
Tempest shook her head. “From the look of this, this is just his handwritten draft. I read an old article about him where he bragged about how he followed the writer’s path of the literary greats before him and only turned to a computer as a distasteful necessity.”
“If he didn’t publish anything from those pages.…” Ivy let her voice trail off.
“We’re looking at the only copy in existence of Corbin Colt’s fictionalized version of my mom’s disappearance.”