Screams sounded from all sides of the table. Lavinia’s were the worst of all, but several others were screaming in fear or shock, and at least two people were shouting to find a light.
The lights came back on six seconds later, rescuing them from the terrifying darkness. Even though it felt like so much longer, Tempest had learned to keep precise time on stage. No matter what external stresses were thrust upon her—and there were a lot of them in a physically demanding live show—she kept her calm and kept perfect time. Only six seconds had passed.
Sanjay stood with a toppled chair at his side. The light was steady this time. But Sanjay wasn’t. His chest heaved as he took shallow, anxious breaths.
“This isn’t happening,” he whispered, echoing her own thoughts. “This can’t be happening.”
Tempest’s grandfather, who’d been a medical doctor for forty years before retiring, leapt up and leaned forward over Corbin’s body. Did he think it possible that Corbin was still alive with that knife sticking out of his chest?
Tempest’s own reaction ping-ponged between disbelief and fear. This was Sanjay’s show. It had to be part of the performance. Even the handle of the knife had the look of a prop. But it wasn’t. She knew Sanjay well enough to tell from his reaction. Besides, he’d never play such a cruel joke. It wasn’t his style. In a Hindi Houdini show, you knew the exact level of macabre you were signing up for. This wasn’t it.
When the truth sunk in that this wasn’t part of a performance, fear crept in. Corbin Colt was very dead by the hand of a person who could be so cold and calculating as to stage a dead body for them all to see. His face was no longer handsome, but gruesomely terrifying. His features were frozen in an anguished expression. Was that a sticky substance around his lips and cheeks? What on earth…?
Ash felt for a pulse and inspected the wound, but tried not to disturb the knife. Sanjay stood as still as a statue except for a heaving chest as he stared at the body. Tempest was certain now that they were looking at a body, not a patient in need of medical attention. Victor held Lavinia back as she tried to lean forward to help the man she’d once loved but now despised.
“That man ruins everything,” Kumiko muttered, her gaze fixed on Corbin’s pale face.
Ellery backed away, murmuring, “Blood. So much blood.” She stumbled, and Victor moved to help her, letting go of Lavinia in the process.
Freed of his grip, Lavinia leaned over the table with Ash, but he assured her he could do more good if she didn’t interfere. Ash was shaking his head. He must have known at this point there was no saving his patient. He took a deep breath and tilted his head upward.
Tempest followed his gaze. How had Corbin’s body landed on the table? They’d heard a thud in the center of the table, but who—or what—had lifted or dropped him there? Shaking herself out of her stupor, Tempest stepped away from the group and studied the ceiling. Aside from the nearly invisible wire Sanjay had hung for the séance, nothing was visibly out of place.
“What are you doing?” Ellery asked.
The lights went out yet again.
“Not funny, Houdini,” Sylvie seethed.
“That wasn’t me!” Sanjay cried.
Smack. As the sound of a hand hitting a wall echoed in the room, the lights came back on. Kumiko’s hand was raised on the wall’s light switch. “Where are our phones, Houdini? Someone needs to call the police. Because someone else is playing a very nasty game. One of you killed my ex-son-in-law.”
None of them stayed inside the Oxford Comma pub with the dead man. While waiting for the police to arrive, Victor comforted Lavinia in the bamboo forest, Tempest sat with Sanjay and her grandfather in the riverboat lounge, Ellery and Sylvie huddled together next to the merry-go-round horse, and Kumiko blocked the open doorway to the hallway exit in her wheelchair, staying on the line with the 9–1–1 operator.
“There was nothing I could do,” Ash moaned. “He was already dead.”
“We know,” Sanjay assured him.
“The caterers!” Lavinia cried. She rushed from the bamboo forest toward the exit, which her mother was blocking. “We should at least ask the caterers if they saw anyone else around.”
“You’re police now?” Kumiko didn’t budge. “Nobody should leave this room until they arrive.”
“I think she means,” said Sanjay, “that the killer could have run away, and now they’re getting farther away.”
“We all know that’s not what happened,” Kumiko said, then muted her phone so the 9–1–1 dispatcher wouldn’t hear what she said next. “This wasn’t an outsider. It was one of us.”
For the next seven seconds, the only sound in the room was the breathing of its stressed-out occupants.
Then, the sound of the outer door opening and footfalls coming down the hallway, obscured from view. The police, it turns out, arrive quite quickly when a murderer is at large.
Shaken from inaction by the sound, Ellery was the first to speak. “I’ve gotta admit,” she murmured, “the police do act quickly when a murderer is in the room.”
“This isn’t one of those murder-mystery novels you all love to read,” Victor spat out quickly and quietly, before the police rounded the corner into Lavinia’s Lair. “There’s no reason to think one of us killed him.”
“Yet there is,” said the newcomer. A man Tempest didn’t recognize, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit and flanked by two uniformed police officers, strode into the room. His small, dark eyes swept over the room, taking it all in with a single motion.
Tempest’s breath caught. She knew it was her imagination in overdrive after what they’d just seen, but she couldn’t help thinking his observant black eyes looked like those of a raven.
“We spoke with the caterers who’ve been right outside the whole time,” the man said. “Nobody has come in or out since you started this party. Whatever happened, it happened in this room.” He looked from one face to the next. “I’m Detective Rinehart. I’m going to find out what’s going on here. Now, take me to this body.”
Sanjay groaned. “I swear I’m never performing another séance again.”
After giving statements, Tempest and Sanjay sat in the front seats of her unmoving jeep. A streetlamp a few yards away gave them enough light to see by.
The police had questioned them each individually. Searched them and took their fingerprints as well. The séance participants were told they were being questioned as witnesses but also cautioned that they could have legal counsel present. Nobody did.
When someone had sabotaged Tempest’s show the previous summer, framing her and wrecking her career, Tempest had come to appreciate the legal advice to not say anything, but this was different. Someone in that room had to have seen something. There were eight of them, and like Kumiko had said, one of them had to be a killer. What other explanation was there?
“He’s really dead,” Sanjay whispered. “I was hoping…”
“I know.” Tempest squeezed her eyes shut, but it was a bad choice. All she saw in her mind’s eye was Corbin Colt’s dead body. She felt ill.
Sanjay groaned. “Why did someone do this to me?”
Tempest opened her eyes and raised an eyebrow.
“What?” he asked. “That was an overly complicated place to leave a dead body. Someone went to a lot of trouble to stage him in the middle of my séance. They didn’t have to do that.”
“Please at least tell me the raven feathers were your doing.”
He twirled his bowler hat in his tense fingers. There wasn’t much room in the front seats of the jeep, but he managed if deftly. “Would it make you feel better if I did?”
“You didn’t—?”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.” He stopped spinning the hat and grinned at her. But the smile didn’t reach his eyes. He was more shaken than he wanted to admit. “Yeah, the feathers were me. But not the body. How the hell did he get onto the séance table? That detective seems competent, albeit with a bloated ego. He was looking for mechanisms that could have lifted a body onto the table. Rhinestone told me—”
“Rinehart.”
“What?”
“The detective’s name. It’s Rinehart. Did you think that he looked…? Never mind.”
“What?”
“His eyes…” Tempest felt foolish even saying the words. “Did his eyes strike you as birdlike?”
“Absolutely,” Sanjay replied without missing a beat. “I’m so glad that wasn’t just me. I can see the headlines now. RAVEN DETECTIVE CATCHES THE RAVEN’S KILLER. That’s probably why I was so distracted I forgot his name. It’s too creepy to think about. Let’s move on.”
“Right. You were saying Rinehart and his team are looking for hardware that could have moved a body. I’m glad he’s being rigorous, but there aren’t any mechanisms in that room. I helped build it. I’d have noticed if anything was different. Getting the body onto the séance table isn’t the only impossibility. There are two impossibilities for him to solve.”
“Two? We’ve got the fact that there’s no way for Corbin to have landed on that séance table—unless he was really a raven.”
“Which he’s obviously not, in spite of what your outrageous séance script suggested.”
“You wound me, Tempest. That performance needed to be over the top. Nobody was supposed to take it seriously. That was the point. But that’s still only one impossible problem.”
“We’ve also got the fact that his body must have been hidden somewhere in Lavinia’s Lair,” said Tempest. “But we know it wasn’t. We toured the space right before the séance. Everywhere except for the bathroom.…” Sanjay cleared his throat. “I used the facilities right before we got started. No body.”
“Oh.”
Sanjay spun his bowler hat in his hands once more. “Someone must have been using one of your dad’s secret panels for evil instead of good.”
Tempest shook her head. “There aren’t any big ones in this space. No place big enough to hide a body. Only the smuggler’s nook in the riverboat, which we looked inside right before the séance. It’s not like he was dismembered and then put back together. This isn’t a stage show. There aren’t any secret passageways, either. The emergency exits are the windows, which is why there are those big mallets next to them. There was no way for Corbin Colt’s body to get into Lavinia’s Lair after we were inside, yet we know for a fact that it wasn’t there.”
“He had to be somewhere,” Sanjay insisted. “He was clearly tied up and gagged before being killed.”
Her earlier observation clicked. “The sticky substance around his lips. Duct-tape residue.”
Sanjay nodded. “Some kind of tape.”
“You don’t have to constrain someone if they’re dead.… Corbin was alive but bound before the séance. It makes more sense now why my grandfather wanted to see if he could save him. He hadn’t been dead long.”
“As part of staging the body, the tape around his mouth was sloppily removed.”
“But why stage him at all?” Tempest whispered as she looked out into the darkness through the car’s front window, suddenly feeling very cold.
“Oh no,” Sanjay murmured.
“You figured it out?”
“I think I did the opposite of figuring it out. I think we have a third impossibility. I didn’t understand what Rinehart was telling me … but that’s what he must have meant. It also explains why we were all searched. He had the nerve to keep asking if I was sure I didn’t have any retractable prop knives in my magic kit—magic kit! Can you believe he called it that? Like a child’s toy I bought off the shelf.”
“Focus, Sanjay. What are you trying to tell me?”
“It’s a real problem, how much our chosen profession is maligned. We bring people joy. Why are there so many haters?”
“Sanjay.”
He cleared his throat. “Fine. I think I know why the detective was asking me about whether I had any retractable knives in my ‘magic kit.’”
Tempest groaned. She thought back to Corbin’s body. “That’s why the handle looked so flimsy. It was a fake knife.”
“But how did a fake knife kill him?” Sanjay asked.
“That’s the question.”
“One of our three impossible questions.”
Tempest pulled her coat more tightly around her. “Why isn’t Ash done being questioned yet?”
“He told us not to wait for him.”
“I know, but—”
“Your grandfather is a talker. I bet he’s giving them a dozen theories. And I bet I can solve at least the problem of the fake knife before we make it back to your house. That’s the one that feels like a child’s trick.” Sanjay popped his bowler hat onto his head and made a move to open the passenger-side door. “Meet you back at your house. By then, I’ll have worked out multiple ways it could have been done.”
“Oh, I’ve already solved that part of the mystery.”
Sanjay’s hand froze before he could open the door. “You have?”
“Well, part of it. You answered it yourself when you said that’s why we were all searched. The fake knife was never what killed him. There’s a different murder weapon out there. Somewhere. That’s what the police were looking for.”
“But why?” He swore. “Does everyone think magicians have ‘magic kits’ with fake knives? Were they trying to frame me?”
Tempest rolled her eyes. “Stop trying to make this all about you.”
He blinked at her. “It was my séance.”
“At Lavinia’s house. His body was staged for all eight of us. The murderer wanted us to see the scene as they intended. But why? Why did we need to see that the Raven had been killed with a knife?”
Sanjay shivered. “Please stop calling him that.”
Tempest hadn’t even realized she’d done so. The whole scene had been staged so dramatically. A large knife handle as the first thing they’d all notice. The black feathers scattered all around his body. But the feathers were Sanjay’s doing.
“Wait,” she said. “Do you think the killer knew you’d use black feathers in your séance? They fit in so well with the rest of the scene the killer created.”
“Lavinia was the one who suggested them. Oh! And she threatened to kill him just a couple of days ago.”
“Who hasn’t said that about an ex at one point or another?”
Sanjay didn’t reply for three seconds, as a range of emotions flashed across his face. His large brown eyes held a trace of sadness, and his voice was subdued when he spoke. “I’ve never thought or said anything of the sort about you.”
“Dating someone briefly doesn’t bring enough passion to say that.” Tempest regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. It was an emotional self-defense mechanism. She meant it to be flippant, but it wasn’t the time for a flippant comment—and more importantly, it wasn’t true. The spark between them could have grown into something far greater if the timing hadn’t been all wrong the first time around. It was a cruel thing to say, but she didn’t know how to apologize without making it a big, awkward deal.
Sanjay’s only reply was to open the car door and slam it behind him.