“A raven,” Tempest repeated.
Lavinia’s face darkened. “I know Corbin’s supernatural thrillers aren’t real. But these last few months have messed with my sense of reality. That’s why I needed this space.”
A bird cawed from outside. Somewhere nearby. Tempest looked out the window, but no birds were in sight. She drummed her fingertips on the glass before spinning around. “What if Corbin isn’t quite that big a jerk?”
Lavinia scoffed.
“He could have simply hidden it,” Tempest said.
“I thought of that. I looked around. Didn’t find anything. I need to take care of some paperwork, but feel free to look for yourself. I thought there might be hidden nooks I hadn’t found yet, but I spoke to your father about it. He said I knew about everything you’d all built.”
“He’s at another job site today, otherwise I’m sure he would have come over as well.”
“That’s what he said. I’m glad you had time to stop by with how much the business is booming.”
It was going so well that Tempest hadn’t had time to catch her breath to plan all the other things she was supposed to be doing in her life. She was at the beginning stages of building her own house (so she wouldn’t be living in her childhood bedroom forever), was planning a farewell stage show her manager had arranged to be televised, and was still trying to find out what had really happened on two of the worst nights of her life.
Tempest began her search for the missing typewriter there on the riverboat. The steamer trunk coffee table was more than it seemed. It was their version of a “smuggler’s nook” on the boat—a place to hide things. There wasn’t room to build it below the faux boat without giving up too much storage space beneath it, so instead the steamer trunk coffee table was more than it seemed. When you first opened the lid of the trunk, you’d see what you believed was the bottom of an empty trunk. That was an optical illusion. The black velvet base was false. Tempest lifted it up. The real bottom of the trunk was empty as well.
“That was the first place I looked.” Lavinia took the false bottom from Tempest’s hands and put it back in place.
Tempest moved on to the Oxford high-street pub. She fed the merry-go-round horse a coin. A faint click sounded as the Oxford Comma pub’s door unlocked. Lavinia had already searched for the typewriter, so it couldn’t be hidden anywhere obvious. But Secret Staircase Construction’s architecture was anything but obvious. Around the central table, the two walls framing the door were lined with high bookcases. The oak shelves, built by her dad, were filled with a combination of books and bookish knickknacks, from pen-filled mugs with cute sayings like “happiness is pie and a good book” to candles with labels that noted the scent as “old books.”
The books on the shelves were old, but not like what Tempest thought of as “movie-set library” old. These weren’t leather-bound tomes with matching spines. Most were decades-old paperbacks with spines so cracked it was a miracle they held together at all. The only shelf containing books that looked remotely uniform showed a cluster of bright spines; modern reprints of classic crime fiction reissued by the British Library. Tempest stepped onto a chair to look on top of the bookcases. Empty. She jumped down.
There was no way Secret Staircase Construction would renovate a space devoted to scenes from books and not include a sliding bookcase. (Though, ironically, they rarely built secret staircases. Most of their work inside homes wasn’t that invasive.) Tempest tugged on a hardback edition of John Dickson Carr’s The Dead Sleep Lightly. Moving the book freed a pin held in place by the weight of the novel. With the bookcase unlocked, Tempest slid it to the side. It only moved two feet, and the opening didn’t lead anywhere since there was nowhere to go. Instead, a shallow cutout left space for two cushions that could make a comfy reading nook if Lavinia or any of her guests were ever inclined to read in a nook like the cozy hand-built forts of their childhoods instead of in a proper armchair.
Tempest lifted the cushions. There was nothing there. It was hardly big enough for a hiding spot anyway.
The back wall held a built-in kitchenette with an electric kettle, a small porcelain sink, a beer-keg tap that wasn’t yet hooked up, and open shelving with accoutrements for tea and coffee. There was no fridge, but a glass jar of cookies rested on the butcher-block countertop next to the kettle.
Tempest’s silver charm bracelet caught a beam of light. The charm bracelet meant even more to Tempest now than it had five years ago when her mom had given it to her as a twenty-first-birthday gift—right before Emma Raj vanished, never to be seen again.
Tempest’s adult life had begun with the tragedy, and it continued to loom over her whole family. How could she truly be free without knowing what had really happened?
Each charm of the birthday gift bracelet represented Tempest and her mom’s shared love of magic. A clue hidden in the bracelet’s charms had gotten Tempest one step closer to figuring out what had happened to her mom when she vanished. But Tempest hadn’t made nearly as much progress solving the mystery as she’d hoped. Cold cases were difficult, more difficult for an amateur, and even more difficult when the official verdict was death by suicide.
“I told you I searched,” Lavinia said as Tempest emerged from the pub. Lavinia was seated at her desk in the riverboat, typing on a laptop. The windows of the riverboat were open spaces, not filled with glass like the sole window of the pub, so they could talk to each other as clearly as if they’d been standing eight feet apart in a living room. Tempest kicked down the doorstop of the pub’s door to hold it open.
Instead of stepping onto the gangplank stairway to join Lavinia back on the riverboat, Tempest opened the storage room beneath. The space was just under five feet high, so she couldn’t stand, but a light illuminated the empty space. It wasn’t completely empty. A mirror rested against the wall. The four-foot square mirror was originally purchased with the idea of reflecting more light into the basement, but when they decided to enlarge the windows (since they had to knock down part of the wall to fix dry rot anyway), the mirror was no longer needed. But Lavinia liked the one they’d sourced, so she’d kept it. Tempest tilted it forward. Nothing was behind it. Not even dust. She squatted and pivoted on the balls of her feet as she looked around the tiny room. Closing her eyes, she thought about where a typewriter could be hidden. The storage space smelled of freshly cut and treated wood.
She bumped her head as she backed out of the storage space—and nearly bumped into someone outside the door.
“Don’t sneak up on an old woman,” the wheelchair’s owner said, but the hint of a mischievous smile hovered on her lips as she turned her head to speak.
Since Lavinia’s mother, Kumiko Kingsley, was temporarily in need of the wheelchair, one of Lavinia’s requests for the Secret Staircase team was that everything be accessible. They’d succeeded with everything in the basement except for the riverboat gangplank, which would have needed to stretch out across most of the room to have a reasonable incline. Kumiko insisted she’d be walking again soon and that Lavinia didn’t want her prying in her home office anyway, so they went with an unfolding staircase for the riverboat.
“How’s Ashok?” Kumiko asked.
Tempest smiled. “Didn’t you see him two days ago when he brought lunch to the crew?” Kumiko and Tempest’s grandfather had gotten to be friends since she’d moved in with Lavinia.
“Two days is a long time. And where’s my daughter?”
Tempest shifted her gaze to the riverboat desk. “Lavinia was here a minute ago.”
“You’re taking the Case of the Missing Typewriter?”
Tempest winced. “I wouldn’t put it exactly like that.”
She pointed a bony finger at Tempest. “Don’t deny it. I know you solved that girl’s murder when the police had the wrong fellow.”
Tempest wished she could forget that on her first job for Secret Staircase Construction, her stage double had been found dead inside a wall that had been sealed for nearly a century.
“Did she tell you I gave it to her?” Kumiko continued. “The typewriter. Not a dead body. I bought it shortly after I met her father at university in Osaka.”
Like her daughter, Kumiko defied stereotypes. Tempest loved her for it. Kumiko and her English husband had taught at several universities across the world before settling in Northern California, where Lavinia spent the later years of her childhood.
Kumiko made a habit of playing along with people’s assumptions until she could speak up and send them off with their tail between their legs. “No English,” she had been known to feign, with a supplicating gesture, when someone had assumed so first. It was an amusing proposition since she’d been a lecturer at Oxford for a time.
Kumiko looked up at Tempest. “You didn’t answer my question about your grandfather.”
“He’s been missing Morag since she’s been away.” Tempest didn’t think Kumiko’s flirtation with her grandfather was anything more than bonding over good food and the shared experience of being Asian foreigners in the U.K. in the 1970s. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to remind Kumiko that Grannie Mor would be back from Scotland next week.
Lavinia appeared around the corner of the hallway entrance, carrying a banker’s box. She dropped it in front of the merry-go-round horse. It landed with a thud.
“The last of Corbin’s papers I found around the house.” Lavinia wiped her hands together, as if washing off invisible dirt. “I’m going to burn them after the séance and read a few lines of his terrible prose as I toss the pages into a bonfire. That’ll rid the last of his spirit from this place.” She gave a satisfied nod.
Tempest looked past the box, into the open door of the pub. An old paperback novel rested in the center of the table. Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case. A stolen typewriter was such a small thing.… Would Corbin have used his key simply to steal the old typewriter, or was something more going on? It’s not like Corbin would have put poison in the coffee or tea.… Would he?
“You’d better replace the coffee and tea.” Tempest pointed toward the kitchenette. “And those cookies.”
Lavinia gave a nervous laugh. “You think the typewriter theft is a diversion from his real motive? No. No! He wouldn’t do that. Corbin is capable of many things, but not hurting me. Not like that.”
Kumiko was already on her way to the kitchenette. She scooped up the containers. “I’ll have them tested.”
“You know someone who can test for poison, Ma?” Lavinia gaped at her mother.
Kumiko gave them an enigmatic smile. “You don’t get to be eighty-seven without meeting a few people who know things. If you’ll excuse me, Tempest, I’m off to test my daughter’s cookies for poison.”
“Here’s the number of a locksmith who should be able to change these locks today.” Tempest texted Lavinia the number, then slipped out of Lavinia’s Lair. She paused underneath the carved wooden archway that represented the Detection Keys. Whatever was going on with Corbin Colt, it wasn’t going to end well.