“There’s only one explanation that ticks all the boxes,” Ivy said.
“Which I thought I figured out.” Tempest tossed the bowl of cold popcorn remnants aside. “But I was wrong.”
“You were right about everything except the killer,” Ivy insisted. “You just didn’t follow your four explanations through to their rational conclusion.”
“I’m pretty sure I did. Which led me back to it being impossible for anyone at the séance to have killed Corbin.”
“Because none of them did.” Ivy leapt off the couch with a dramatic flourish, scattering puffed kernels of popcorn everywhere. “Corbin Colt killed himself.”
Tempest brushed popcorn from her jeans. “I don’t see how.”
“It fits, Tempest. It was a stressful time in his life, and this would be a grand finale. Can’t you see—”
“You’re saying Corbin came back from the grave to temporarily get Sylvie out of the way? And he was so stealthy that he acted alone yet nobody saw him when he moved around Lavinia’s Lair during our tour? Neither works. He’s only guilty of trying to play a joke on Lavinia when he came to get his papers back. He was there, but he had an accomplice.”
Ivy deflated and began picking up popcorn. “Since he’s dead, I guess their secret died with him.”
“There has to be evidence of who it was.” Tempest joined Ivy on the floor to pick up popcorn but stopped after grabbing only two puffed kernels. “I can’t let go of thinking we can get the answer from Corbin himself. He wove so many elements of real life into his fiction, I keep thinking he must have left a clue. Not on purpose, like foreseeing his own death, but something hidden. He loved symbolism and playing with words. Like how he called my dad ‘Angel Diablo’ in The Vanishing of Ella Patel. Why the specificity of a character named Alice having an affair with one of her book club member’s spouses, making the point that she was named after Alice from Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
“It could be a coincidence,” Ivy suggested. “They do happen.”
“What’s more likely is that Ellery was lying about not having an affair with him, but it doesn’t actually relate to who killed him. Ugh. I think I just sat on popcorn.”
“Sorry. I was excited about my suicide theory. Your affair motive doesn’t make much sense, either. Ellery is decades younger than Corbin.”
“So is Hazel.”
“Fair point.”
“Why did someone need to get Sylvie out of the way today?” Tempest could understand wanting to permanently get rid of someone who saw something they shouldn’t have, but they hadn’t killed Sylvie.
“It’s after two a.m., so technically she was kidnapped yesterday. Oh! Evidence the killer needed to dispose of.”
“At Sylvie’s apartment? Why not just wait until she left? That’s far less of a risk. The timing has to be important. But why?”
“Misdirection?” Ivy suggested.
“I’m beginning to hate that word.”
“Blasphemy.”
Tempest crept into her house, trying not to wake her dad. She knew she’d never sleep, so she needed a book to wind down with.
The hearth in the living room looked like a real fireplace. But like so many architectural details from Secret Staircase Construction, this one wasn’t what it seemed. Through the fire screen, you’d see logs and a brick backdrop. When you pulled the screen aside, you might notice the logs and bricks weren’t quite right. The bricks were a painting on plywood and the logs were bolted into place. All but one of them.
Tempest lifted the log on the back of the stack. The painting of bricks slid to the side, revealing a secret room. The small-but-mighty library.
Stepping through the hearth, Tempest emerged into a room that was only six feet in each direction, but it stretched two stories high. Two walls were lined with built-in bookshelves that climbed to the skylight ceiling. A sliding ladder kept the shelves functional.
Two narrow-yet-comfy armchairs had been wedged into the space along with a small end table large enough for each reader to set a cup of tea or coffee or a cocktail.
Most of the books still on the shelves had been there since Tempest’s childhood. They’d never moved houses, instead expanding this one, so the only books that had left the house were ones that had been given away. Books were never sold or thrown away. This was nothing like Ivy’s collection of classic mysteries. Kids’ picture books with teeth marks (Tempest suspected the teeth marks were why these hadn’t been given to friends), chapter-book mysteries (the largest section), books on the craft of magic and the history of magic, other history books, travel memoirs, the Gothic novels her mom had loved, and books on an assortment of other topics. Her dad’s carpentry books and magazines were in his workshop. The books in the library weren’t especially well organized, since with the tall bookcases it was difficult to move more than a couple of books at a time. It might take a while to find what she was after.
Tempest climbed a few steps of the ladder. Henning Nelms’s Magic and Showmanship was next to Barbara Michaels’s The Sea King’s Daughter. Children’s classic From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was next to two books on Cambodian folklore. The books were even less well organized than she thought.
She held the sides of the ladder and stepped higher and higher. Until she found them. Corbin Colt’s books. Only five of them. His most recent release wasn’t there, but The Raven was. She lifted it off the shelf and climbed down.
She opened the jacket flap and ran her finger over Corbin’s headshot. She wished she could remember him like this, the handsome face with a mysteriously veiled expression she’d found intriguing as a teenager, not the angry man who’d given up on his wife and played a cruel joke that ended up with him dead.
She turned to the cover of The Raven. A man with a hidden face is walking away from the reader on an urban street. Ominous shadows surround him. Two of the shadows on the asphalt street are the wings of a raven. It’s up to the viewer to decide whether the wings have come from the man himself.
With the book in hand, Tempest climbed both of her secret staircases. High in her turret, surrounded by posters that should have made her feel a part of something, she felt utterly alone.
“I’m a terrible magician,” she said to her wall of heroes. “Why can’t I figure out this trick?”
She tossed the book aside and spun and spun, coming to a stop in front of the poster of her mom and aunt performing as the Selkie Sisters. “Corbin Colt knew more about my mom than I ever thought. I don’t know what to believe.”