The next morning, Tempest twisted a key in the grinning gargoyle’s mouth to open the red door of the tree house.
Purists probably wouldn’t approve of calling it a “tree house.” Only the decks of the house were attached to trees. The covered deck that now served as a dining room was the original tree house, built when Tempest was a young child. As Secret Staircase Construction grew, Tempest’s parents, Darius and Emma, experimented on their own land, and the playhouse became a proper two-story cottage in between two old-growth trees, which Tempest’s grandparents now lived in.
The ground-level front door opened into a staircase leading up to the cozy one-bedroom house. Tempest closed the door and climbed the stairs. Keeping her grandfather company while her grandmother was away at an artist’s retreat with her friends seemed like a nicer alternative than eating a bowl of cold cereal above her kitchen sink.
The lines around her grandfather’s eyes crinkled with happiness at the sight of Tempest at the threshold of his kitchen. “Have you eaten?” He pointed to a platter of scones.
It was slightly before eight o’clock in the morning. She’d already showered and fed her fifteen-pound lop-eared rabbit, Abra. She’d never meant to keep Abracadabra in the first place. He was a gift from a friend, a bit of a joke since she was a magician. Tempest had never used live animals in her act, and didn’t think of herself as a pet person, but the curmudgeonly bunny had won her heart when he bit a terribly annoying woman Sanjay was dating. Tempest learned then what a wonderful judge of character Abra was. She hadn’t been able to part with the intelligent bunny.
Since getting into the groove of working with her dad, Tempest had been waking up at dawn. Today her dad had already left with Gideon to get supplies for the building project Secret Staircase Construction hosted each semester to mentor high school students. It wasn’t a formal internship or apprenticeship for academic credit, but since Darius had grown up in foster care before being formally adopted as a teenager, he was keenly aware of how much positive support from a parental figure could do. Though Tempest was his only biological child, he was a father figure to so many others. He was sure to build time into job planning so he could be back at the Secret Staircase workshop two afternoons a week to teach kids who wanted to learn how to construct a simple building. Each semester a different group of kids built a structure of their choice, as long as it was small enough to fit through the barn doors to be hauled away to its new home afterward.
Darius and Gideon didn’t need Tempest to buy the lumber that day. She could have slept in. Yet she didn’t. She hadn’t been sleeping well for months. Now that she knew there was more to her mom’s disappearance and her aunt’s supposedly accidental death, she woke up most days with her heart thudding as her mind processed the snippets of truth she now knew about the Raj family curse.
Her grandfather donned a fedora on his bald brown head as they stepped onto the deck for cardamom scones topped with blackberry jam along with mugs of jaggery coffee. The winter air was crisp, but they still ate outside. Only the fiercest weather would bring Ash inside to the kitchen’s breakfast nook. Tempest wasn’t sure which he loved more: the fresh air or the opportunity to wear one of the hats from his vast collection.
“Dangerous coat for a proper meal.” Ash tilted his head toward the white peacoat Tempest had found while thrifting with her former, and perhaps once-again, best friend Ivy.
“I haven’t spilled jam or coffee on it yet.” Tempest breathed in the uniquely sweet scent of the jaggery coffee and warmed her hands on the ceramic mug. “You don’t have to eat a full second breakfast just to keep me company.”
“I haven’t eaten yet. I was talking with your gran. A storm is approaching Colonsay. They’ve had to shift from painting at the seaside to working from photographs inside.”
“They can’t be surprised. Who thought it was a good idea to have a retreat on an island in the Scottish Hebrides in winter?”
Ash chuckled. “My theory is the ‘artist’s retreat’ is mostly an excuse to catch up with her university girlfriends, since half of the group are from her uni days. One of them had to sweet-talk the cottage proprietors to open in the winter. Now that you’re safe at home instead of tempting the family curse in Las Vegas, she felt she could go. Rentals in more temperate locations were already booked up.”
This was exactly why Tempest couldn’t tell her family she was investigating real crimes being blamed on the ‘family curse.’ Her family wanted to keep her safe. It was understandable after the tragedies the Raj family had suffered for generations. But she couldn’t live in a cage. She’d disproven the family curse. The eldest child dies by magic. The real curse was a killer who’d taken advantage of a dangerous stunt that had ended in a couple of tragedies to create a full-blown curse by killing Aunt Elspeth and then silencing Emma Raj when she got close to the truth about what had happened to her sister.
Ash sniffed the air and jumped up, disappearing into the kitchen. He was already slow-cooking something for lunch. Most of his cooking was a fusion of South Indian, Scottish, and California cuisine—reflecting his own life—which meant a wide variety of delicious meals. One of the perks of working for Secret Staircase Construction was that Ashok Raj made home-cooked lunches for the crew on most workdays. He was a self-proclaimed dabbawalla, the name for the messengers who transported hot meals as part of the complex lunch-delivery system in Mumbai, in which stainless-steel tiffin lunchboxes filled with home-cooked meals were picked up by bicycle deliverymen who would stack the tiffins and deliver them across the city. In addition to giving him joy, feeding people during retirement helped him stay in shape and connect with people. He always brought extra cookies on his bike rides across town, which he’d end up sharing with people he met along the way—usually after he learned their life stories.
Ash was born in South India and had moved to Scotland as a teenager to get a fresh start after a family tragedy, attending the University of Edinburgh. That’s where he met Morag—Tempest’s Grannie Mor. And now they’d been married for fifty-six years. Ash’s mother tongue was Tamil, but like so many people in India, he’d also learned English from a young age. His accent was still mostly South Indian, with a smidge of Scottish and a sprinkling of Californian.
A text message from Kumiko popped up on Tempest’s phone before her grandfather returned: No poison.
That was quick. Tempest wondered if Kumiko had a Rolodex of business cards like her grandfather’s. After departing from Lavinia’s Lair empty-handed the previous afternoon, Tempest felt even more foolish for making the poison comment.
She was lost in thought when her grandfather scooped her mug from her hands to top it off. When he returned the warm and steaming mug, she told him about the case of the missing typewriter. “I was so sure it was just a bad joke,” she concluded, “and that I’d find it hidden beneath the false bottom of the smuggler’s nook.”
“He’s not a good man, Tempest. I’m sure he stole it for spite.” He ran a finger around the rim of his own mug. “Could you get me an invitation to Lavinia’s séance?”
Tempest observed her grandfather for a few seconds while she sipped her coffee. His round cheeks and large brown eyes gave him a cherubic countenance, so it was easy for him to look innocent. Yet he was clearly keeping something from her.
“You,” she said slowly, “hate séances.”
He gave her a charming smile. “I want to support Sanjay.”
“He’d rather you not be there. He’d rather nobody be there.”
“Humor an old man.” Ash chuckled and squeezed the back of her hand.
She narrowed her eyes. He didn’t want to go to see Kumiko, did he? “What aren’t you telling me?”
“What are you talking about? You have the most suspicious mind, Tempest.” He didn’t look her in the eye as he took her half-empty mug back to the kitchen.
She was about to go after him when her grandfather spoke again. This time, it wasn’t to her. “Ah! Have you eaten?”
“Darius heard my stomach rumbling and said I should come up.”
Tempest recognized the newcomer’s voice. Gideon Torres. He appeared a second later. He hovered on the threshold of the deck for a moment as he spotted Tempest, but hunger won out. He went straight for the remaining scones. One was already in his hand before he sat down and greeted her.
She smiled at the sight of Gideon, Secret Staircase Construction’s part-time stonemason and stone carver. Sitting across the table from the handsome (if somewhat quirky and old-fashioned) man who’d helped her solve a murder gave her an added boost beyond the caffeine she’d ingested.
“Don’t skip the blackberry jam.” She pointed at the nearly empty porcelain bowl. “It’s heavenly.”
Gideon gave a moan of pleasure after smearing the last of the jam onto the scone and taking a bite.
At twenty-five, Gideon was a year younger than Tempest. Like her, he was still figuring out his life. He’d recently told his parents he wasn’t actually studying to apply to architecture graduate school and was instead content to work part-time for Secret Staircase Construction while working on becoming an artist, with stone as his medium. He was a multicultural mash-up like her, with a French mom and Filipino dad, both of whom were professionals who were finding it challenging to let their son follow his own path.
Maybe they were right to be concerned. His face was gaunt and dark circles under his eyes dominated his face.
“Sometimes I think I’d starve to death,” Gideon said after swallowing the last of the first scone, “if it wasn’t for your grandfather and my mom.”
Ash chuckled as he dropped off a mug of coffee in front of Gideon. “Let me make some more—”
“No, no,” Gideon insisted. “What’s left here is perfect.”
“It’s only scraps—”
“I’m sure. Please don’t worry.”
Ash shook his head and retreated into the kitchen.
“You look like you haven’t slept,” Tempest commented.
“I didn’t realize I’d been up all night until I heard my phone ringing in the house. It was your dad telling me I was late. He likes to be at the lumber yard when it opens.” Gideon eyed the last scone but opted to pace himself. Instead, he wound his long fingers around the mug of jaggery coffee.
“New sculpture?”
“It’s almost done.” He beamed with a contented smile that made him look like he had everything he could ever need in the world, in spite of the fact that his lips were so dry a new crack split open as he grinned.
“Let me get you a glass of water.” Tempest stepped into the kitchen, where her grandfather was doing dishes.
A haphazard pile of stainless-steel lunch containers had been drying on the dish rack. To make room for the new dishes, Ash was now stacking and locking the tiffins in their neatly assembled forms that made them easy to transport by bicycle. On a single corner of the kitchen counter, they looked completely different than the sprawling mess that had taken up the whole dish rack.
That was it. She knew she’d missed something yesterday.
“Gotta go.” Tempest hastily filled a glass of water for Gideon, sloshing half its contents onto the table as she set it down, then lifted Grandpa Ash’s hat and kissed his bald head. She ran down the tree house steps and out the door.