Chapter 1
Tempest Raj was late.
A former stage performer who relied on split-second timing, Tempest didn’t do late.
Yet here she was. So ridiculously late that even Gideon had texted her to make sure she was all right. Gideon. A man who’d only grudgingly been dragged into this century and bought his first cell phone this year.
She had no excuse. She couldn’t even blame traffic. The Bay Bridge had been astonishingly empty for a weekday afternoon. She had only her curiosity to blame. Even that hadn’t been satiated. What had happened was impossible.
Tempest specialized in creating mystifying illusions—once for spectacular stage shows and now through architectural misdirection for her job at Secret Staircase Construction—yet she had no idea how an invisible intruder had ransacked former client and friend Enid’s library. She’d spent far too much time attempting to help Enid already—and, if she were being honest with herself, to satisfy her own curiosity. Nobody was invisible. Yet the security cameras showed objects in the library being tossed around—with nobody in sight.
Pulling up in front of Gray House, she flew out of the car so quickly that her wrist twisted painfully as she yanked out the key. Her long black hair came within an inch of getting slammed in the door before she hurried up the cobblestone path. But as soon as she caught sight of the home she was working on turning into a library, the magic of the house cast its spell.
Gray House looked as if it had been plucked from a European countryside of centuries past, or perhaps out of an illustrated fairy tale. A steep roof with narrow peaks stretched into the cloudy sky, punctuated by narrow dormer windows shrouded in shadows. The rooftop shingles formed a warped pattern that resembled a medieval thatched roof. You could easily imagine Hansel and Gretel being lured into this house. Cozy and welcoming on the outside, but hiding many secrets inside.
A wrought iron weather vane on the roof squeaked from the light breeze as she opened the mahogany front door. Exposed beams of wood stretched across the ceiling. A wide, arched doorway showed the separation of the large living room from the kitchen and dining room. Next to the arch, a small half bathroom was tucked discreetly next to the wide stairway that led to the second floor.
“You’re late.” Ivy Youngblood stood from where she was crouched at the baseboard molding near the stairs. As usual, Tempest’s best friend and coworker was dressed from head to toe in shades of pink, including short fingernails painted bubble gum pink. The only not pink thing about her was the nail gun she brandished in her hand. A natural redhead, even her hair was pink adjacent.
“You were at Enid’s library again,” Ivy added, “weren’t you?”
“If I said no, would you believe me?” Tempest kept her eyes on the nail gun.
Ivy raised an eyebrow before pulling the battery pack from the nail gun and setting it down. “I thought I was going to have to replace this old model with a boring new one when I misplaced it the other day. It’s rather intimidating, isn’t it?”
“Not nearly as fierce as you.”
That got a smile. “Don’t change the subject, Tempest. I can’t believe you not only left us to finish up on our own and missed lunch, just to figure out who played a practical joke on Enid.”
It was more than a practical joke. Tempest was sure of it. But nothing had been stolen from the library, so Enid was ready to move on. Ivy was right that there were more important things to do today.
“It won’t happen again.”
“No need to lie to me.” Ivy pointed a pink-tipped finger at Tempest. “But you can help with the sliding bookcase that’s stuck. Your dad got called away to work on another site, so he’s not here to check it out.”
This evening was their dress rehearsal for an interactive murder mystery play taking place at Gray House. The broken bookcase was part of the show. It needed to slide open to reveal clues to the solution of the mystery play. Tempest and Ivy had written the script that three local actors would be performing.
The murder mystery play was part of Hidden Creek’s summer stroll, as was a literary-themed escape room that was housed on the second floor of Gray House. They’d already tested the escape room clues several times, so the “Escape from the Haunted Library” room was ready to open to the public this weekend.
This fairy-tale house was perfect not only for the book-themed mystery play and escape room, but also for what Gray House would become later that year: a library comprised exclusively of classic detective fiction.
Secret Staircase Construction had been hired by Harold Gray earlier that year to renovate the house. Like all projects the Secret Staircase team worked on, it aligned with their mission of bringing a touch of magic into homes. There was nothing remotely supernatural in their offerings. Their magic was made through woodworking details like hidden compartments in a built-in bookcase, or secrets carved in stone like a gargoyle whose wing was a lever to an underground room.
In Harold Gray’s case, that meant helping him turn his home into a library brimming with books from British queen of crime Agatha Christie and hard-boiled American Dashiell Hammett to famed Japanese writer Seishi Yokomizo and little-known pulp authors that he’d collected for more than seventy-five years.
Harold was in his early nineties when they began the project. He wanted the Gray House Library of Classic Detective Fiction to be his legacy. He got the idea from Enid Maddox’s Locked Room Library across the bay, which he’d frequented until his health declined. The Locked Room Library focused on impossible crime fiction, an even more specialized niche than Harold’s dream. Harold hadn’t lived to see his own library’s completion, but his grandnephew was seeing it through.
Renovations to the house weren’t yet completed, but the opportunity to get initial publicity by being part of Hidden Creek’s once-a-year summer stroll was too good to pass up. Tempest had been tasked with creating the library’s literary-themed murder mystery play and escape room for this coming weekend’s stroll, which promoted local small businesses.
“It would be great to have this bookcase fixed for tonight,” Ivy said, “but my own checklist is a long one.”
“I’m on it.” Tempest was good at this type of fix. It was the kind of thing she often needed to troubleshoot at the last minute before going on stage.
“I’ll be testing the invisible ink on those faux-antiquarian books.” Ivy held up three books that Tempest’s grandmother, an artist, had hand-bound for them to use as clues in the interactive mystery play. None of them had liked the idea of defacing vintage books, so they’d created their own.
After Ivy departed to check the props, Tempest flipped into a headstand to look at the bookcase casters, which was probably where the problem lay.
In jeans, a fitted gray T-shirt, and ruby-red sneakers, Tempest was well dressed for flipping upside down to inspect a broken sliding bookcase, but decidedly unglamorous compared to her previous life. After years dressing in elaborate outfits and multiple costume changes for each show, she could now wear casual attire for her job at Secret Staircase Construction. The adjustment still felt surreal in many ways, but she’d surprised herself by how satisfying it was to work with her hands in a different way.
She would have gotten a better view if she’d flopped onto her belly and looked, but the aforementioned belly wasn’t nearly as taut as it had been when she needed to leap from one spot on stage to the next with precision. She didn’t get nearly as much exercise these days, so she added it where she could. Flipping upside down and balancing with the strength of her arms and abs—that was the key to proper form for a headstand—her body protested the exertion.
She didn’t mind the blood flowing to her head. She was used to that. In some ways, it helped her focus on the matter at hand. Like now. She might not have spotted it if she’d looked from a normal angle. But here, from her focus, she saw the sharp marks on the bent casters. From a flathead screwdriver? This wasn’t normal wear and tear, and definitely not shoddy workmanship—her dad would never have allowed that.
Before she could look more closely, a pair of black boots covered in dust came into view. Not just any dust, but stone dust. Which could only mean Gideon.
Tempest flipped right side up to see him properly, but immediately stumbled backward. Not because she was lightheaded or had lost her balance. The problem wasn’t her admitted loss of physical stamina. It was that it wasn’t Gideon’s face in front of hers.
Facing Tempest was a wax bust of Agatha Christie. At least that’s what she guessed it was. Half of the face had melted like a figure from a horror movie.
“Where did you get that monstrosity?” she asked.
“Tucked behind a stack of those uncataloged books in the garage. I was looking for a few more old books to add to the set for tonight.”
There was, of course, no room for even one car in the detached two-car garage. Only thousands of books. Most likely, more than ten thousand. And, apparently, a ridiculous wax replica of Dame Agatha’s head.
Gideon lowered the dusty bust. His dark brown eyes met hers with an intensity that she’d never encountered before she’d met him last year. There was something about him that made Tempest feel like he belonged in another century, before the world was full of so many distractions. Gideon didn’t know the meaning of multitasking. If he looked at you, his attention was entirely focused on you.
“That head isn’t only half melted.” Tempest pointed at the bust resting in Gideon’s arms. “It’s also broken on top.”
“Which is too bad, really.” He set it on the mantelpiece above the hearth. “It’s so creepy that it would make a perfect addition to a display in the horror-mystery section, but I’m worried it’s about to break apart completely. People should really use more stone.”
Tempest grinned. “Says the stone carver.”
“What?” asked Gideon in all seriousness. “Stone is what lasts.”
A stonemason by training and sculptor by passion, Gideon Torres was one of the Secret Staircase Construction crew members. Over the past year, with what they’d been through together, he’d become one of her closest friends. There were moments when she wondered if they were becoming more than that, but later this week, he was leaving for a three-month internship with a stonemason in France. Because when was life ever simple?
“Don’t distract me.” Tempest scowled at him. “I made an important discovery.”
“You fixed the broken bookcase while standing on your head? Impressive.”
“I didn’t fix it,” she said. “But I figured out what’s wrong with it. And it’s not good. This wasn’t an accident. Someone wrecked it on purpose.”
Chapter 2
“Sabotage?” Ivy scratched a pink fingernail over the jagged grooves cut into the casters. “Why would someone do this on purpose? It has to be a fluke.”
They’d dumped all the books from the noir and hard-boiled detectives section onto the floor so they could lift the bookcase and properly examine the damage.
Tempest attempted to spin the wobbly wheels, but only got a half-spun squeak in return. “This isn’t a fluke. The wheels were fine when we built this.”
“But who could even have done it?” Ivy’s eyes swept over the books strewn across the floor and over to the other bookshelves in the room filled with classic mysteries.
Tempest knew exactly what her friend was thinking. Ivy Youngblood had been her best friend since childhood, when they’d bonded over their shared love of mysteries. Ivy was the most well-read person she knew, and Ivy firmly believed that the solution to any real-life mystery could be found in the pages of a classic mystery novel or short story. Ivy intimately knew the twisty plots of the golden age “Queens of Crime”—Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham—but her favorite author was John Dickson Carr, the master of the locked-room mystery, and Tempest suspected Ivy not-so-secretly wished to be as clever as Carr’s most famous sleuth, Dr. Fell.
“Someone invisible,” said Tempest.
Ivy snapped her gaze back to Tempest.
“Enid is officially in charge of the Gray House Library as it gets up and running,” Tempest continued, “and last week, her own library was ransacked by an invisible intruder.” She didn’t like the connection.
“Anyone could have wrecked these casters,” Gideon said. “We’ve had the house unlocked during the day while we’ve been working on it. A bunch of subcontractors were coming and going. I doubt we’d have noticed if someone else slipped in.”
“A bunch of people don’t want this library to open.” Tempest looked toward the front windows. “One person in particular.”
“Mrs. Hudson?” Ivy asked. “You think she snuck over here to wreck the sliding bookcase?”
Tempest shrugged. “There was also the water damage last week that we wasted a bunch of time looking for the source of. That could have been done on purpose as well.”
The front door handle turned, and the door squeaked open. In walked the new owner of the house, Harold’s grandnephew, Cameron Gray. Fair-haired with gray eyes that matched his name, those eyes grew wide as he took in the sight of his once-beautiful living room.
“I know Uncle Harold always said these books contained lives of their own,” he said, “but will someone please tell me how they flipped that bookcase upside down?”
“Didn’t you notice it’s the bookcase that was holding noir novels with brooding detectives?” Ivy asked with a straight face. “Unfortunately, they found our drawing room décor too cozy and comfortable. They needed some extra drama.”
Cameron grinned. “I’m glad they’ve broken free, but will they be back in place by tonight?”
“As soon as we fix this bookcase,” Tempest said. “It won’t take long.”
“We just need to get a new set of casters.” Ivy straightened a stack of books they’d removed.
“And what is that?” Cameron’s eyes fell to the Agatha Christie bust now resting in between two piles of books.
“A broken Agatha Christie head,” Tempest said as she lifted the half-melted terror from the floor.
“We’ll toss it onto the junk pile,” Gideon added.
Ivy rolled her eyes. “You two are ridiculous. It’s not broken. Only a little melted. That hole on top is obviously for flowers. It’s a vase.”
“No way,” said Gideon.
Tempest turned the bust in her hands. Huh. Ivy was right. The edges were smooth. “No doubt meant for flowers from a poison garden.”
Agatha Christie had been Harold Gray’s favorite author, and she was well known for using poison expertly in her books. Harold’s interest in poison was close enough to an obsession that before Secret Staircase Construction began work on the house, they’d hired a local botanist to look through the backyard garden to make sure there was nothing poisonous. Harold found their concern amusing, but he hadn’t objected.
The botanist told them the most poisonous thing in Harold’s garden was oleander, a surprisingly common plant for home gardens. Most people didn’t even realize it was poisonous. They hadn’t renovated the garden area yet, but they wanted to remove the oleander before the library officially opened.
Ivy squinted as a bright flash of light shone across her face. Less than a second later, the blinding light was gone.
Copyright © 2025 by Gigi Pandian
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