Tempest called her dad once more. He still didn’t answer. She grabbed her keys.
Ten minutes later she screeched to a halt in front of the house where her dad’s calendar said he’d be that afternoon.
“Can I help?” asked a woman kneeling in a bed of white and yellow flowers in the front yard.
“I’m Darius’s daughter. Is he—”
“Are you Tempest?” She pulled off dirt-covered gloves and stood up. “It’s lovely to meet you. Did your charming father leave something at the house?”
“He’s not here?”
“Afraid not. He left an hour ago.”
“Sorry to bother you. We must’ve gotten our signals crossed.” Tempest stumbled back to her car. Where was her dad?
She arrived back at Fiddler’s Folly eight minutes later. Her dad’s truck wasn’t in the driveway, so she hurried to the tree house to speak with her grandfather.
“Have you eaten?” Ashok was stirring a pot of something that smelled delicious, wearing a smile on his lips and a plaid newsboy cap on his head.
“I promise I’ll eat something shortly. But we might not have much time.” She’d wasted too much of it already. “Why did you ask Fleur to steal a book from Corbin’s new girlfriend’s house?”
The smile vanished from his lips and the wooden spoon slipped from his fingers and clattered to the kitchen floor.
“You shouldn’t have interfered.”
“You shouldn’t have asked someone to steal—”
“The man is dead, Tempest. His notes are irrelevant.”
“Except that they’re clearly not. Otherwise, you would have accepted the small risk that his draft would have been discovered where it was hidden.”
With a shaking hand, Ash turned off the stovetop burner, then collapsed into a seat in the breakfast nook. Tempest rushed to his side, but he held up his hand and shook his head. “I’m all right. And you’re wrong. It wasn’t a small risk. Rinehart would have found it when he dug into Corbin’s past for motives.”
“Why would he keep digging?”
“I don’t think he truly believes I’m guilty. It was the prosecutor who insisted on my arrest. A high-profile case where I had motive and physical evidence against me. I was trying to beat Rinehart to finding Corbin’s notes. Because—” he stopped himself.
“Because you knew that the manuscript would implicate Papa.”
Ash nodded sadly. “You got it from Fleur? How did you know she—”
“She wasn’t able to get it,” Tempest explained. “Hazel’s house has a good security system.”
“Then how?”
“It doesn’t matter. But I found it.”
“And read it?”
“Most of it. I didn’t think to take photos of it before Rinehart showed up.”
“He has it now? Ada-kadavulae. You let him—”
“I didn’t let him do anything. He’s a law enforcement officer and I had stolen property.” She softened her tone as she added hastily, “He didn’t arrest me, or anyone, even though Gideon tried to take the blame and say I had nothing to do with it.”
Ash grunted. “Gideon is a good lad. But you two shouldn’t have put yourself in the position for the detective to seize the manuscript.”
Tempest raised an eyebrow. “If you’d told me what you were doing and why it was important, we wouldn’t have needed to.”
“I was protecting you.”
“And look where that got us.”
Ash clicked his tongue. “How bad does the manuscript make your father look?”
“Bad.” Tempest looked at her phone again. No missed messages from her papa. “I know his story isn’t true, but it gives him a motive—if he knew what Corbin Colt wanted to do.”
“He knew,” Ash said. “Your father and I both knew.”
“That’s why you really threatened him when he got a restraining order against you. It wasn’t just that essay he wrote on the first anniversary of her disappearance.”
Ash nodded. “That’s what we thought at first. But when I ran into him in town and expressed my dismay at exploiting our family’s tragedy, he laughed and said I needed to get used to it. He couldn’t resist gloating about the novel he was writing, so he told me some of the ideas he was playing with—but then said he’d said too much.”
“I can’t believe Lavinia was okay with him writing about our family.” Tempest said.
“Lavinia didn’t know anything. At least not that she admitted. I believed her. They hadn’t been close in quite some time, and she never read his work. I looked up more about him online to learn more about his weaknesses. He knew a lot about the occult, for his thrillers. In some of his interviews he said things that made me suspect he believed, or at least was frightened by people he interviewed for book research. With the history of our family curse, I thought I could use superstition against him. That’s when I went to his house to talk with him. I was hoping to reason with him, but if that didn’t work, I thought I could frighten him by saying if he published such a novel that the Raj family curse would come for him.”
“Did my dad know what you were up to?”
“He wanted to come, but I know his temper. I’m better at controlling mine. I went alone. I thought I could be more … convincing. I couldn’t stop Darius from emailing Corbin, though. Corbin wanted to get a restraining order against your father as well, for the email, but it wasn’t a threat of physical harm, only a message expressing anger. I was the only one who’d ‘physically assaulted’ him. By glaring at him so menacingly that he fell and hurt his ankle. Supposedly. He wouldn’t let me look at his ankle, but I suspect he was faking the injury.”
“That’s why he tried to have you arrested for assault.”
Ash clicked his tongue. “That nonsense was thrown out. But something I said got through to him.”
“Because he never published it.”
“The pages he waved in my face were enough for me to know how far he’d gotten,” Ash said. “I saw where he put them. It was a big Agatha Christie volume, including that book of hers where everyone is hiding something—which I’m sure Corbin found amusing. He didn’t know I had seen where he put it, thinking himself clever to wait until I left to get his wife after he’d fallen. I lingered in the doorway longer than he thought, because I hoped to see him walking normally on his ‘injured’ ankle. I didn’t catch him in a lie, but I saw his hiding spot. I didn’t know if it would still be there for certain, but I expected an author would never throw away his own work.”
“You could have easily stolen it before now. When it was at his house he shared with Lavinia. Why didn’t you?”
“Don’t you see? It was never the pages themselves that were a threat. It was the man himself. What he could do with the idea for his book. It wasn’t a polished manuscript. It was a draft of a story filled with thinly veiled lies about our family. If that was the only place the story was left, I had to get it.”
Tempest groaned. “That’s why you wrangled an invitation to the séance!”
“Darius said Lavinia was having a bonfire with the book notes he left behind, to banish his presence. I wondered if it might be there. If it was, then we could be done with it for good. That’s why I wanted a tour of the space as well, but I saw that it wasn’t in the box.”
“That’s why you were so nosy.”
“I didn’t know she was going to kill him.”
Tempest studied the lines on her grandfather’s face. Lines from a long and interesting life, filled with both love and tragedy. He looked as if he truly believed what he was saying, yet he wasn’t judging Lavinia for killing Corbin or blaming her for his own current predicament.
“You still think she did it?”
Ash let out a long breath before speaking. “I wouldn’t blame her. If she’s guilty, I don’t believe she’ll let me take the blame, if this goes to trial. But no, I’m not absolutely certain.”
“Oh! I just thought of one thing we can be certain of that’s good news for once. Even though I made things worse by finding that manuscript that implicates Papa, he can’t be implicated. He wasn’t there at the séance.”
Ash lifted his hat and ran a handkerchief across the beads of sweat on his head. “Technically, that’s true.…”
“Technically?” Tempest repeated.
“Your father wasn’t in the room with us, but he was there. Right outside. I was going to search the papers Lavinia was going to burn and toss any pages related to our family out the window for Darius to pick up—”
“Because she’s said she’d read from the pages first,” Tempest whispered.
“But they weren’t there. I texted Darius right before the séance began that the plan was off.”
Tempest groaned. That was bad. “Does the detective have your cell phone records?”
He tugged at the tip of his newsboy cap, straightening the hat before yanking it off with frustration. “I believe that’s part of the evidence against me.”
Only then did Tempest notice the kitchen counters were filled with food. Cardamom scones, at least three varieties of cookies, multiple mason jars filled with blackberry preserves, two jars filled with a bright yellow spread of some kind, and various breads. This wasn’t his usual balanced assortment of food.
He was stress-breaking.
Following her gaze, Ash’s eyes lit up for the first time since the start of their conversation. “You can taste-test for me.” He scooted out of the breakfast nook and opened the two glass jars with the mystery yellow substance. “Try these two versions of lemon curd on a scone and see which you prefer.”
“We were talking about—”
“Humor an old man.”
Tempest scowled at him, but she accepted a plate. Sinking her teeth into the first taste test, Lemon Curd Number One on a bite of cardamom scone, she closed her eyes and let the sweet and tart flavors blissfully intermingle and make her forget her troubles.
“Chuvaru irunthalthan chithrangalum padamum poda mudium.”
Tempest opened her eyes and smiled. Though her knowledge of Tamil was virtually nonexistent for the purposes of proper conversation, she remembered many of the sayings her grandfather had taught her. These words were familiar. “‘Only when you have a wall can you paint or hang pictures.’”
Ash smiled. “Very good. Which means we must keep up our health and energy, because unless we have strong walls, whatever we hang on them will collapse.”
She took another bite. “This is amazing. Your scones are even fluffier than I remember. Is this topping so sweet because it’s from the bag of lemons Natalie brought you from her beloved lemon tree?”
“Don’t be silly, Tempest. It’s the sugar.”
Tempest started laughing so hard she couldn’t stop. She threw her arms around her grandfather.
“Good. Now finish the scone and I’ll make us dinner.”
“Anybody home?” a voice called from the foot of the stairs. Her papa was back.
Tempest flew down the stairs and met him halfway. “You weren’t answering your phone, and you weren’t where your calendar said you’d be. Is everything okay?”
Darius kept walking and ran a hand across his face. “I was in a meeting.”
“Can’t new jobs wait—?”
“Vanessa found us a good private investigator, not the guy Dad has in his Rolodex. She’s looking into Corbin’s fans.”
Ash clicked his tongue and frowned at his son-in-law. “Shouldn’t I have been consulted?”
“I okayed it.” Darius poured himself a glass of water and drank it over the sink before turning back to them. “I knew you wouldn’t do what’s necessary—”
“Stop it!” Tempest screamed. “Both of you. You’re each trying to protect each other, and me, but by keeping things from each other, we’re all making things worse—myself included. We need to start telling each other everything. That’s the only way to clear both of you.”
“Have you eaten?” Ash asked his son-in-law. “Tempest has a lot to report. It’s going to be a long night.”