Ivy and Gideon dropped Tempest at home, where Tempest wanted to be alone while she made sense of Corbin Colt’s handwritten manuscript pages.
Tempest had already fixed her flat tire, so she could have gone anywhere, but she knew where she wanted to go. The secret garden in her own backyard.
The garden was tucked away behind the kitchen at the back of the main house and hidden behind a high wooden fence covered in ivy. There was no gate in the fence. Nor was there a door from the house to step into the garden. Not a visible one, at least.
Next to the kitchen sink and its picture window with a view of the magical garden sat a grandfather clock. The clock itself told time perfectly, yet it was only an illusion that it needed a pendulum. A separate clock face had been placed atop a cabinet of secrets that had been built to look like a clock. Past the ornamental copper pendulum was a door to the secret garden. The five-foot-tall door of the cabinet remained locked until you gave a boost to the carved griffin climbing the side of the clock.
Tempest helped the griffin climb an inch higher, activating the glass door showing the pendulum. Pushing the pendulum aside, she crawled through the grandfather clock and emerged in the secret garden.
The garden was one of her mom’s projects. Grannie Mor had kept it thriving in recent years and left one of her easels there to paint inside the private garden. Snapdragons and English primroses filled the cozy space with vibrant pops of color. Tempest’s favorite was the red hummingbird sage, which did indeed entice hummingbirds to visit the garden.
She went back to the beginning of the manuscript. After the title page with the looped cursive title, The Vanishing of Ella Patel, the first page began with the book club. And with a bang. Alice ducks as a glass vase hurtles toward her head. The glass vessel shatters into hundreds of miniature shards that gleam like diamonds in the light beaming into the room through a stained-glass window. Several of the diamond-like fragments of glass land in Alice’s brightly dyed hair. Melodramatic dialogue follows, with an accusation that Alice is having an affair with another member’s husband.
The next page jumped from the unnamed small town to New York City, where Scottish immigrant and stage illusionist Ella Patel meets the sinister Angel Diablo. Angel fools her with his superficial charm and secretly steals her money. The two are soon married by a minister, but the minister is actually the Devil in disguise. When the fictionalized version of Emma Raj vanishes, the book club puts their differences aside to investigate.
Even removing the bit about the Devil, the story in the manuscript was nothing like Tempest’s parents’ true relationship. In real life, Darius and Emma joked that their partnership could be summed up with two sentences that said it all: What happens when a carpenter and a stage magician fall in love? They form a business that builds a touch of magic into people’s homes. Tempest’s parents created Secret Staircase Construction after falling in love. They were inseparable from the day they met, shortly after Emma arrived in California from Edinburgh, and had more than twenty happy years together before Tempest’s mom vanished.
The sunlight shifted through the trees overhead. Tempest’s charm bracelet caught the light. She paused reading to run her fingers across the smooth charms that always calmed her mind and reminded her of so many good memories of her mom. The top hat, Janus-faced jester, handcuffs, lightning bolt, selkie, book with the title The Tempest, fiddle, and smallest of them all: a key. With Ivy’s help, she’d figured out the secret of the charm bracelet last summer. Though it no longer held a mystery, it was the last gift her mom had given her and it brought together so many elements of their shared love of magic.
Tempest shoved the handwritten pages back into the book. The words made her memories of her mom feel tainted.
She wanted to scream, but that would only worry her grandfather, who would no doubt hear her from the tree house. Instead, she twirled three pirouettes, coming to a stop in front of the purple snapdragons. There wasn’t enough room to do anything in the garden besides spin, but she didn’t care. She arched her back and flipped into a backbend kickover.
She landed with her feet stomping a patch of nasturtiums. The destruction didn’t help her feel better. She was avoiding the manuscript. She flipped open the cover of the book so violently the spine cracked and several sheets of paper fell to the ground. She snatched the pages from the earth, grabbing a clump of dirt in the process. Which was appropriate considering the words her eyes fell upon. Grave robbing.
Tempest’s breath caught. The manuscript described not a fictional plot device, but a real-life event. One that had befallen Tempest’s family. One that wasn’t public knowledge.
Corbin Colt knew about the body snatching.
In a final indignity to Tempest’s beloved aunt, her body was one of several moved during a string of grave desecrations that took place ten years ago, shortly after Elspeth Raj was killed. A macabre prank that went way too far. One that paralleled a grisly crime from over two hundred years ago.
Edinburgh’s most famous body snatchers, Burke and Hare, were neither Scottish nor body snatchers. They were Irishmen and murderers. That small issue of truth didn’t stop a mythology from developing around them, which continued to the present day, with everything from pubs to escape games named after the infamous pair.
The University of Edinburgh was a hub of education during the Enlightenment. Breakthrough medical advances were on the horizon, except there was a problem. There weren’t enough bodies for students to learn on. When two skilled laborers who’d traveled to Edinburgh in the 1760s for the backbreaking work of building North Bridge realized how much money body snatchers made by selling fresh corpses to medical schools that needed cadavers, they saw an opportunity. Burke and Hare didn’t wait around at cemeteries for new bodies. They formed a plan to get lonely men drunk enough to smother them without much difficulty. They killed sixteen people before they were caught.
Tempest admitted the chilling story held a certain gory appeal for people who enjoyed horror films and ghoulish ghost stories. She would have been one of them herself, if not for how the story had touched her own family two hundred and fifty years later.
Shortly after Aunt Elspeth was killed on an Edinburgh stage on that fateful day ten years ago, a group of drunken university students thought it would be fun to dare each other to dig up graves, like body snatchers had done. It might have been an initiation into some college club. They didn’t actually do anything with the bodies, but desecrated half a dozen graves and animals got to the bodies that had been removed, carrying off the extremities of several bodies, including one of Aunt Elspeth’s hands.
Elspeth’s right hand was never recovered.
As if Tempest’s grandparents hadn’t been through enough, they had to suffer this indignity for their beloved daughter. The press and public expressed outrage and summarized the macabre history that had led to such a horrific desecration. The authorities succeeded in keeping names out of the paper, so it was never publicly reported that Elspeth Raj’s grave was one of the ones disturbed.
But now, here in Corbin Colt’s manuscript of The Vanishing of Ella Patel, Ella’s sister had died in an accident, and her grave desecrated in the exact same way it had been in real life, with her right hand taken.
In the manuscript, the hand was taken by a person collecting body parts for a supernatural entity who derives power from taking the body part that helped that person be special—the eye of a painter, the ear of a composer, the hand of a magician. That wasn’t what had happened in real life, but still, the parallels couldn’t be a coincidence.
How did Corbin know?
What else did he know about her mother’s vanishing?
She kept reading, but her phone startled her and she dropped the pages once more. The wind was picking up and they scattered across the secret garden. She glanced at the screen as she chased pages. She didn’t recognize the number, so she silenced it and scooped up the pages, no longer in any sort of order. A short time later—or it could have been longer, since she’d lost all sense of time—a loud knocking sounded at the front door of the house. She ignored it and kept turning pages.
The plot was even worse than she thought possible. Her hands were trembling as she turned over a sheet of paper with the words “the final chapter” printed in block letters at the top of the page. She knew she’d missed several pages of plot after scooping up the scattered pages, but she couldn’t look away from the ending. Angel Diablo was the murderer who orchestrated the grave robbing of his sister-in-law, killed his wife Ella Patel, and hid her body where nobody would ever find it.
Corbin Colt was implicating Tempest’s father, Darius, as his wife Emma Raj’s killer.