All eyes were on Sylvie as she stepped past the merry-go-round horse and into the Oxford Comma.
She gave them a thin-lipped smile. “Don’t be so shocked. I’m not dead. Only a little worse for wear. I had no idea a head wound could bleed so much.”
Sylvie had taken time to go home and clean herself up. If not for the bandages on her wrists barely peeking out from the cuff of her blouse, and the discrete square of gauze on her head that was mostly hidden by her hair, you’d never know she’d been attacked less than twenty-four hours before. In indigo slacks and a white cashmere sweater, she was the most put together of any of the attendees.
“Have they figured out what happened to you yet?” Ellery asked.
“It’s a mystery.” Sylvie’s reply was even more clipped than usual.
“Don’t be modest,” Tempest said. “Sylvie was getting close to figuring out what happened.”
Sylvie glared at her. “It’s on your conscience if they try again.”
Ivy gasped. “You don’t really think—”
“Nobody is getting hurt.” Blackburn stepped in front of Sylvie. “Why don’t you all take your seats again?”
Two minutes later, they were seated again around the book-club-cum-séance table. They sat in their original seats. Sanjay at the nominal head of the circular table, with Lavinia at his left, followed by Tempest, Ellery, Gideon (as Ash’s stand-in), Sylvie, Victor, and Kumiko. With Sylvie’s return, Ivy was relegated to the sliding bookcase seat nook. Darius and Blackburn flanked the faux pub’s doorway. Nobody was required to join hands. Lavinia asked if people would like tea or coffee—the beer tap still hadn’t been installed—but those who wanted drinks opted for water.
“I talked with Hazel Bello earlier today,” Tempest began, “and I know how Corbin got here the day he was killed.”
Murmurs rippled around the table, but Tempest launched into her explanation before anyone could speak. She went over exactly what she’d learned from speaking with Hazel, concluding with the revelation that led to the rest of the pieces of the puzzle falling into place: “That’s how Corbin had left Forestville long before Hazel’s livestreamed video. He tricked her so she wouldn’t know he was visiting Lavinia. He never thought he’d be killed. It was never meant to be impossible. Only a lie to slip away.”
“The biggest impossibility solved,” Sanjay whispered.
“He had a reason for coming to the séance,” Tempest added. “He wanted to get back the book notes he thought he’d left behind when he heard that Lavinia planned on burning them. He didn’t want to tell his girlfriend he was coming to see his ex. He came here of his own free will.”
“It doesn’t matter if he was alive when he arrived,” Lavinia said. “Where was his body when we started the séance? I gave you all a tour of the space right before Sanjay started the séance. There was no body hidden. You know the space as well as I do, Tempest. There wasn’t even anyplace big enough for a typewriter to be hidden.”
“Because he wasn’t yet a body,” said Tempest. “It would have been impossible for a body or a person tied up to be hidden—but not a person hiding from us.”
Tempest took a breath as a ripple of gasps floated through her audience. It was the easiest thing in the world. Tempest hadn’t seen it because it was impossible to see without the timing trick being solved first. When they thought it was impossible for anyone to be hiding in the space, they had been thinking of the impossibility of hiding a body.
“If Corbin was both alive and came to Hidden Creek of his own free will,” said Tempest, “if he wanted to remain hidden, he would have had ample opportunity to move from place to place as people toured the different areas.”
Kumiko scoffed. “That wouldn’t have been easy.”
“It would have been much easier,” said Tempest, “if he had someone helping him.”
More gasps.
“Corbin Colt was alive,” Tempest concluded, “when he managed to evade us as we toured the space. He was also still alive when he maneuvered past our unbroken circle and onto the table.”
“We all clearly saw him dead.” Kumiko crossed her arms and gave Tempest a glare that rivaled her own famous glare.
“Did we?” Tempest let the words hang in the air. For six seconds, nobody spoke.
Sanjay broke the silence with a groan.
“You understand?” she asked Sanjay.
He nodded and looked chagrinned.
“I don’t get it,” Lavinia said. “I have perfect vision. And great attention to detail. He was right in front of me. I saw his blood—”
“You saw what he wanted you to see,” Tempest said. “With the shock of seeing him there on the table, with only a couple of seconds to process what we were seeing, he manipulated the situation exactly as I would have done it for an illusion. That’s why he needed to use a fake knife. It was never meant to be perceived as real for more than a few seconds. That’s all he needed. He and his accomplice controlled the situation. Until his accomplice betrayed him.”
Ellery gasped. “His accomplice?”
“Yes. He wasn’t dead when we saw him with the knife sticking out of his chest—or rather, the fake knife. We had all assumed Corbin was the one to ruin and hide Lavinia’s beloved typewriter because it was in line with his sick sense of humor. He couldn’t have been the one to break the typewriter.”
“He was on the other side of the country,” Sanjay said, “when the typewriter went missing.”
“It was so easy to think it was him,” said Tempest, “because he would do something like that. So it’s not a stretch that when he came here to get back what he thought were additional handwritten book notes he’d left behind, he’d also play a trick on you. Since Lavinia was essentially mocking him by having a séance to cleanse his old office of his spirit, he’d mock her by showing up ‘dead’ at the séance, then get up and have a good laugh. Except his accomplice had other ideas. His conspirator made a light flicker on—just long enough for us to see Corbin’s staged body. Staged with the fake knife to look like he was dead. A red silk scarf around the knife is what we took to be blood in the brief flicker of light. But he wasn’t dead. His accomplice killed him when the room plunged into darkness again.”
“When there was chaos,” Sanjay murmured. “Very smart.”
“Why didn’t he cry out if someone was stabbing him to death?” asked Ellery. “You think he’d just lay there while someone plunged a real knife—”
“I’m going to be sick.” Lavinia held her hands to her mouth and ran from the room. Victor was on her heels and followed her out.
Darius caught Tempest’s eye. “I’ll go after them—”
“Just make sure she uses the bathroom in here to be sick. Not the main house. Nobody leaves yet.”
Her dad ran after them.
Blackburn hesitated, unsure whether to stay or go. “You mean she—”
“She didn’t kill him,” said Tempest. She was nearly certain she was right that Lavinia didn’t kill her ex-husband. “And neither did Victor. They don’t need to hear the rest.”
“Hear the rest of what?” Ellery asked. “It’s ridiculous. He’d cry out if he was being killed. He was so close to us. He was—” she broke off and shivered.
“Remember,” Tempest cut in, “it was pandemonium after we saw the flicker of light came on and we saw what we assumed to be a dead body. We did hear screaming. We assumed it was our own voices. Both male and female voices were screaming. It never occurred to us that a dead man would cry out.”
Another gasp.
“Corbin Colt wasn’t a raven like the character of his most famous novel,” Tempest continued, “and there’s a rational explanation for everything that initially seemed impossible. He didn’t want his girlfriend to know he was going to see his soon-to-be ex-wife so he tricked her into thinking he was writing in his office and then left for a walk when he knew she couldn’t chase after him; there was no invisible hidden body, simply a man who moved from place to place as we moved around; Corbin jumped onto the séance table himself to play a nasty joke on Lavinia by making her think he was dead, no mechanisms to drop his body required or fake hands for anyone to hold onto at the séance table; and the fake knife was the pièce de résistance to make sure we’d think he was dead. His accomplice created even more misdirection to make sure it wouldn’t even occur to us he wasn’t dead.”
“The tape residue.” Sanjay grimaced.
“An added layer to the trick. If they put on tape and immediately ripped it off, the police wouldn’t know how long the tape had been there and assume he’d been bound for a longer period of time, confusing things further. Maybe the killer even applied the tape to stifle any scream.”
“Four impossibilities solved,” said Sanjay. “Brilliant. That was brilliant, Tempest.”
Gideon groaned. “I don’t understand any of you. You’re treating this like it’s a game.”
“Because that’s exactly what it is.” Kumiko wheeled up to him. “We didn’t make this a game. The person who killed my ex-son-in-law did. Treating it like a game is the only way to beat them at the game they’ve created. Getting emotional won’t help anything. Someone is playing a sick game. I applaud Tempest for assuming the role of sleuth.”
Sanjay cleared his throat.
Kumiko glared at him. “You’re her sidekick at best.”
Sanjay sputtered. Tempest put her hand over his mouth before he could speak. “My grandfather wasn’t supposed to be here that night. He was a last-minute addition. His medical-doctor instincts kicked in. He wanted to check in case he was still alive and could be saved. His presence is what muddled everything.”
“I was following you up until now,” Sanjay said, removing Tempest’s hand and glaring at her. “Wasn’t it in the killer’s interest for someone else to take the blame?”
“It was,” said Tempest. “But if Ash hadn’t been there, there was one other person who would have rushed forward and gotten blood on themselves.”
“Lavinia,” Ivy said. It was the first time she’d entered the conversation. “It would have been his wife. Lavinia. Even if someone has come to hate someone they once loved … She would have gone to him.”
“None of us were thinking rationally yet,” Tempest said softly. “Just reacting.”
“Why didn’t the killer get blood on them when they stabbed him in the darkness?” Ivy asked.
“The police never searched us for gloves, which can easily be hidden. They searched us for the murder weapon. Because they didn’t yet know the blade was inside his body. Only that a fake knife was sticking out.”
Sanjay groaned. “Misdirection to the nth degree.”
“Exactly as the killer wanted.” Tempest spun on the heel of her ruby-red sneakers and came face to face with Corbin Colt’s killer.