It wasn’t like a book. Nobody resisted the invitation. If anything, each invitee was overly eager. They were curious, too. Except for one of them who was pretending. One of them was a killer who would try to misdirect the conversation. But Tempest was ready for them.
She hoped.
Sylvie wasn’t sure if she’d be kept overnight at the hospital, and Ash couldn’t leave the tree house, so Tempest brought in two stand-ins she could trust to play their roles: her partners in crime Ivy and Gideon.
There were too many secrets swirling around, so she’d told everyone in her family that she was recreating the séance. She’d already told Grannie Mor, whose idea it had been to involve Blackburn. Her dad and grandfather objected until she told them the former detective had agreed to help. Blackburn was still wary of endorsing the ploy, but he knew Tempest would go through with it without him, so he at least wanted to be there for her. Darius insisted on being there as muscle, but Morag stayed behind with her husband.
Before heading from Fiddler’s Folly to Lavinia’s Lair, Tempest climbed her secret staircase to clarify her thoughts in a notebook. She had dozens of paper notebooks in which she’d created various illusions. This time, she was solving one.
She scribbled furiously, making sure she had her thoughts organized. Had she missed anything? No. Her ideas were solid. She was right.
Each time she paused to think, her fingers kept moving. Perhaps it was the year she’d spent practicing cardistry, something she’d never kept up, but her fingers often felt like they took on a life of their own. Tonight, they sketched ravens.
Dozens of ravens filled the margins of the paper notebook. They started small, but as the muscles of her hand grew tired, the beaked figures became larger and looser. On the last page where she completed her thoughts about the trick she was unraveling, the last raven appeared. She hadn’t meant to draw what she did, but there he was, staring back at her from the page.
A long-beaked raven mask formed a plague-era doctor’s mask.
The costume worn by medieval doctors during the plague was meant not to conceal their faces but to keep bad air from reaching those attending to plague victims. Yet it also served the purpose of disguising the person wearing it. That was the trickiest piece of the puzzle. Who was hiding behind a mask?
The killer of Corbin Colt—the Raven—had disguised themselves as one of the innocent spectators at the séance. It was time to pull back the mask.
She traced her fingers over the lines of the raven mask. Her fingers slid off the page and toward her phone. Before she realized what she was doing, she hit the button to call someone she didn’t think she’d be calling again.
What was she thinking? Before the phone could complete its first full ring, she hung up. She had her dad and Blackburn as backup that night. She didn’t need a morally questionable person helping. She believed Moriarty when he said he wanted to help. She wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.
Tempest slammed shut the notebook and gripped it as she ran down her secret staircase.
At twenty-seven minutes to midnight, Tempest pulled up in front of Lavinia’s house. Her dad was right behind her.
The police had finished with the crime scene at Lavinia’s Lair and a cleaning crew had cleaned the space. The ceiling had been damaged by the authorities while they searched for a spot from which they thought a body could have dropped, and the sliding bookcase had been taken off its slider, but otherwise the space was much as it had been before.
Two minutes before midnight, Tempest seated her guests around the séance table in the same arrangement as they’d been on the night of the murder.
Seven chairs were again set around the table, with room for Kumiko’s wheelchair. Sanjay sat at the spot facing the entrance doorway to the Oxford Comma pub. Lavinia and Kumiko sat to his left and right. Tempest was next to Lavinia, followed by Ellery, Gideon (originally Ash), Ivy (previously Sylvie), and Victor. Detective Blackburn and her dad stood in the pub’s doorway, just inside the pub. On the other side of the door, the silent gargoyles kept watch. This time, everyone kept their cell phones and they left the lights on.
“Good evening,” Sanjay began. “If you’ll all join hands.”
“We’re not recreating the séance precisely, are we?” Kumiko asked as the guests complied.
“I’d hoped it wouldn’t be necessary,” Sanjay said, “but our host is keeping me in the dark about what exactly is planned.”
The lights went out.
Several gasps reverberated around the table.
“Who touched my cheek?” Kumiko snapped.
“Has anyone felt a hand in theirs let go?” Tempest asked.
Nobody answered affirmatively.
“It wasn’t my imagination,” Kumiko muttered.
“Was that a feather?” Ivy whispered.
“Is that what I felt?” Ellery asked. “It was, wasn’t it?”
“I felt the same thing.” Victor sounded like the words had been dragged out of him. “Feathers.”
“Anyone else?” Tempest asked.
“This is really weird,” Gideon said. “When you take away one sense, I thought my other senses would be stronger. But really, they’re just confused. It’s like that Halloween game where you touch peeled grapes and are told they’re eyeballs, rice is supposed to be maggots—”
“And we’re told spaghetti noodles are brains,” Sanjay added. “We get it already. I don’t think Tempest wants to hear about Halloween games.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I want to hear anything people are feeling right now. Anyone have any other sensations?” She waited.
“I thought the noodles were guts,” Victor said. “Not brains.”
“Really?” Sanjay’s voice. “I always thought—”
“Something touched my cheek.” Lavinia’s voice. “I’m not sure if it was a raven’s feather. It felt like silk fabric, but that’s more what I’m used to touching my face.”
Tempest counted silently to five, making sure everyone who wanted to speak had done so. “Thank you all. Lights, please.”
The lights clicked back on. They were all seated exactly as they had been, with their circle of clasped hands unbroken. She nodded thanks to her dad, standing at the light switch.
“What was the point of that?” Kumiko glared at her.
“Nothing touched your faces.” Tempest made an “o” with her lips and blew out her breath.
“Nice,” said Sanjay.
Victor scoffed. “You’re trying to tell us nothing touched us? Only air from you blowing your breath?”
“In the darkness, you felt something, so you all fed on each other’s imaginations. By the time everyone spoke, you were convinced a raven’s feather was floating around the table. Even though none of you had seen it, or even felt it. I needed you all to understand how easy it is for that to happen.”
“Can we let go of each other’s hands now?” Kumiko asked. “Victor’s hand is sweating.”
He grunted, but bit back whatever it was he clearly wanted to say.
“Just one more minute,” Tempest said. “I had a purpose for—”
She broke off as loud banging sounded. Hands unclasped. From the Oxford Comma’s doorway, Darius frowned and ran into the main section of Lavinia’s Lair, where the sound originated. Tempest followed suit as the pounding continued.
When she reached the bamboo forest, her dad and Blackburn had reached the site of the sound. Someone was knocking calmly on the glass.
“Am I too late?” Sylvie asked through the window. “I couldn’t stand another minute in the hospital so I forced them to let me out.”