by Gigi Pandian
Peter narrowed his eyes. “And I can tell that you’re a—”
“Max!” I called out. “We’re over here.”
We didn’t get to hear the end of Peter’s comeback, because as soon as he saw Max, Earl said his farewells.
Max apologized for running late, but said that Ivan was back in the hospital for pneumonia and he’d promised to visit him during visiting hours that day. I hadn’t realized Ivan was in the hospital. I knew I should visit him as soon as I could too.
I traced my fingers along the intricate carvings on the white granite that belonged to Peter’s family. These rose carvings were far older than Peter’s father. But if I was right, the toy maker who knew how to carve clever puzzle boxes would have also been able to add nearly-undetectable segments to an existing structure. It’s a trick alchemists have employed for millennia. For our work to remain hidden, we learn how to hide things in plain sight.
I focused my intent on the pattern, ignoring the people around me. Besides the main door, nothing on the front of the raised crypt looked like it might fit a key. I stepped back and circled the structure. That gave me the answer. The back wall had aged differently than the other walls. Most people wouldn’t have noticed the difference, but I saw it because different plant spores had settled on this surface.
On that wall, I found a tiny hole disguised in a thorn of the rose carving.
“Do you want to do the honors and make this official?” I asked Max.
The slightly charred key fit perfectly.
The key opened a hidden compartment that wasn’t connected to the main family crypt. As Peter had previously said, in 1969 the mausoleum was opened by order of the police, but nothing unexpected had been found inside. This hidden compartment was never found because Franklin Thorne had added a new wall along the back of the mausoleum, making it two feet larger than its original construction. It was a large enough space to hide stolen items, but was small enough to avoid detection.
The interior of the narrow space was filled with moist dirt. There was no proper floor. Franklin might have been a clever thief and craftsman, but he wasn’t a good architect. Rainwater had drastically damaged the hidden compartment. That was how the sapphire necklace became dislodged.
“The Lake Loot,” Peter whispered.
Lying in the uneven, damp dirt, half a dozen jeweled necklaces sparkled through their bed of mud.
Peter took a step forward.
“Don’t touch it,” Max said.
“I was just looking.”
But I wasn’t paying attention to either of the men. Next to the half-buried jewels, I noticed something else. The dirt in the far corner had been disturbed. An indentation in the earth told me we weren’t the first people who’d been there recently. It wasn’t a footprint, but rather an imprint, as if an object had been removed.
I looked from the hiding spot to the Baby Bigfoot flyers clutched in my hand. What was going on?
Forty-Six
I dangled the Baby Bigfoot flyer in front of Dorian. “You were seen.”
“Mais non! How can this be?”
The magicians had dropped me off at my house, where thankfully I’d found Dorian in the attic. He hadn’t gone off on any new ill-conceived adventures.
“We’re not being careful enough,” I said. “Once your foot and leg became a problem, we should have kept you in the house. I’ll tell Heather I can’t bake pastries for a while—”
“It is not possible,” Dorian insisted. “I have been wearing your silk cape over me whenever I leave the house. Even if someone saw me, they would not see me as myself, n’est pas?”
“You’re wrong,” I snapped. “You must not have been careful enough. We have enough to worry about without Bigfoot hunters flocking to Portland.”
He stamped his working foot on the creaky attic floor. “You have not told me what has happened! You have been gone for many hours, yet I cannot see or hear anything in this attic. You said you were taking Monsieur Freeman to the airport, yet you did not return. I thought I heard your loud engine earlier, but you did not come inside, so I believed I was mistaken. You expect me to read your mind? Where did this Baby Bigfoot flyer come from?”
My shoulders sagged. “You’re right, Dorian. It’s been a morning full of surprises. I’m sorry.”
“Merci.”
“I’m sorry for not having a chance to tell you what was going on this morning,” I said. “But I’m not sorry for telling you to be more careful.”
Dorian mumbled something under his breath that I chose to ignore, though it sounded suspiciously like the insult casse couille, a vulgar way to express irritation.
“What we need,” he said, “is a code ring.”
“A code ring? To decipher the coded illustrations in the book, you mean?”
“Non. I speak of the telephone. You do not wish me to answer it, since nobody besides you and Brixton believe me to live here. I am a clandestine companion. A lonely lodger. A secret chimera—”
“Dorian.”
“Yes, yes. As I was saying, you do not check email on your phone, so we have no way to communicate about urgent matters.”
“Normally the house is perfectly safe. We couldn’t have foreseen that search warrant from the police.”
“No, but who knows what the future holds? We must institute a coded system of telephone rings.”
I considered the idea that must have come from one of the Penny Dreadful detective novels he’d read that winter. “That’s not a bad idea,” I admitted.
“I thought so. We will work out the sequence of rings later. For now, you must tell me what has transpired.”
“Remember those treasure hunters you were worried about because they might sully your woods next to River View Cemetery? They’re the ones who saw you.”
“C’est vrai? I do not see how—”
“It’s true. Earl, the treasure-hunting friend of the dead volunteer, was passing out these flyers at the cemetery.”
“But why did you return to the graveyard in the first place?”
“When I got back from the airport, Peter and Penelope Silverman were waiting for me here at the house.”
Dorian gasped and protectively curled his hands around his ears. “I did not hear you and the magicians downstairs. I am losing my hearing as well!” His wings flew out at his sides in agitation. “Quelle horreur!”
I put my hand on his shaking shoulder, careful to avoid his flapping wing. “There’s nothing wrong with your hearing. I didn’t invite them inside. And they wanted my help, so they didn’t aggravate me by picking the lock, even though I’m certain Peter has the skills to do so.”
“Excuse my outburst.” He folded his wings and sniffed. “I am oversensitive at present.”
“We’re all on edge. Those magicians aren’t helping. They lied to us about being in town to clear Peter’s father’s name. They’ve known all along that Franklin Thorne was the murderous thief. Peter wanted to find the loot for the reward and to save face himself.”
“The missing Lake Loot.”
“It’s not missing any longer, Dorian. We found it.”
Dorian sputtered and rolled his eyes as theatrically as a stage performer. “You found the tresor! Yet this was not the first thing you said when you came home!”
“The treasure doesn’t matter. Your safety—”
“Bof.” He sat down and patted the floor next to him. “Tell me.”
I sat down next to the gargoyle and explained how Peter had a complex puzzle box from his father, like the ones I sold at Elixir, and that I’d figured out it contained a key that opened a secret hiding spot at the Thorne family mausoleum at the cemetery. Franklin Thorne had hidden his stolen loot in his hiding place before the police caught up with him later that day, but not thinking he’d be killed that day, he hadn’t had a chance to convey the in
formation about his hiding spot to his wife and son. “But when we went to the cemetery together,” I concluded, “I could tell someone had already gotten into the mausoleum, because the dirt inside the secret room had already been disturbed.”
“Yet you said there was only the single key,” Dorian said. “And you were the one who found it, non?”
“Yes. I also took the precaution of going with Peter and Penelope to the cemetery and asking Max to meet us there. That way the magicians couldn’t get into the crypt ahead of me. I wonder if I underestimated Earl Rasputin, though. If he saw what we were doing … Could he have found another way in?”
The gargoyle drummed his fingers together.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“Tell me everything. Every detail, no matter how small.” He raised a clawed index finger into the air to make his point.
“To what end?”
“As I said, something strange is afoot with these magicians.”
I was wary of my little detective taking things into his own hands. Again. But I could use his insights. I described our trip to the cemetery, from the carving of roses and thorns on the mausoleum to the rose bushes that surrounded the raised crypt, from the tiny hidden room to the indentation in the dirt. I told Dorian how Peter had bundled up like he was cold or feeling under the weather, how we’d met Earl Rasputin handing out Baby Bigfoot flyers with an illustration that vaguely resembled Dorian, that the wind had blown some of the flyers away, and that Max had arrived late at the cemetery because he had to visit Ivan in the hospital.
“It is as I thought!” Dorian exclaimed, jumping up from his perch-like sitting position.
“You know what happened?”
“To test my theory, I have but one question for you.” His claws made a crisp tapping noise as he drummed his fingertips together. “When the flyers blew away, whose hands were they in?”
“Earl was handing them to me and Penelope.”
“Penelope, eh?”
“We both offered to take some flyers. I wanted to destroy them rather than hand them out, and I was afraid Penelope was intrigued because she recognized you.”
“It is obvious what has happened,” Dorian said. “Obvious!” He drew his hands behind his back and paced the floor. He was enjoying this. “The magician, Peter Silverman, has stolen something from the crypt.”
“That’s not possible. I was the one who figured out they had to burn the box. They didn’t have the key until then. I was with them the whole time.”
Dorian dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Have I taught you nothing in these last months, Zoe Faust?”
“What does cooking have to do with this?”
He pinched the bridge of his snout. “The magicians! Peter Silverman got into the crypt while you were distracted by his wife and Earl Rasputin.”
“You think they’re working together?”
“Perhaps, but I think not. Any good magician knows how to read their audience. I believe that because there were two of them and only one of you, they seized on the distraction of Monsieur Rasputin to carry out their deception.”
“If Franklin Thorne used the mausoleum as a hiding place for one treasure … ”
Dorian nodded. “He would have used it for all his treasures he wished to keep hidden. This is why the magician was bundled in a heavy coat, though it is a warm day. If he was an even better performer, like my father, he would have feigned illness to complete the deception. But he did not see this illusion through, and you noticed it as odd. Therefore you remembered he was wearing a coat—a coat he used to hide the additional valuables he pilfered.”
I groaned. “Peter Silverman didn’t want to restore his own good name by returning the Lake Loot to Julian Lake and receiving a reward. He wanted to get his hands on the bigger stash he knew his thieving father had hidden.”
Forty-Seven
I called Max to tell him what I thought was going on with Peter, that the magician had retrieved other items his father had stolen. Max said he’d pass along the information to the investigating detective.
Next I texted Brixton to tell him the news, then drove to his high school, where classes would soon be ending for the day. I had no confidence he’d heed my words and refrain from confronting the magicians.
Brixton rolled his eyes when he saw me, but his demeanor changed when he climbed into the truck.
“I’m supposed to help Mom at the teashop, but I don’t feel like it. Can you drive me home?”
“How about we still go to Blue Sky Teas but I join you for a cup of tea first? It might help.”
Another eye roll. “I know you guys think tea solves all the world’s problems. But it really doesn’t.”
I had a good idea why he was upset. “You’re disappointed about Peter Silverman, aren’t you?”
“He lied to me, Zoe. He never wanted to help his father’s reputation. It was all a lie.” He stared out the window as we drove past rows of blooming spring flowers. “How am I supposed to trust anyone?”
We drove in silence to Blue Sky Teas. When we arrived, Brixton took his mom’s place behind the counter without a word, and Heather joined me at a small tree-ring table. Today, the mason jars were filled with a rainbow of tulips, and the whole teashop smelled like a flower garden.
“I’m worried about Brixton,” I said, keeping my voice low. I hesitated. “Can I ask you about his stepfather?”
Heather’s eyes lit up. “Abel. He’s the best thing that’s happened to me since Brix.”
“Brixton seems to idolize him, and I know he gave Brixton that guitar he loves. Why won’t he talk about what Abel does?”
“What does that even mean, what we do?” Heather studied her paint-stained hands for a moment before she looked back up at me. “Such a loaded expression, don’t you think? I mean, am I a painter because I paint, even though I don’t make much money at it? Or do I work in a café, since that’s what I’m doing for money?”
“I wasn’t trying to be philosophical. I’m trying to help Brixton. He’s really upset, and I think it has to do with Abel.”
Heather looked to the counter. “He looks okay to me.”
I sighed and tried a different track. “Brixton doesn’t have anything to be ashamed of, so why won’t he tell me what keeps Abel out of town?”
Heather plucked a yellow daffodil from a braid of her blonde hair and picked the petals off one by one. “It’s embarrassing,” she whispered.
“Is he in jail or something?”
She crushed the flower stem between her fingers. “In a way, it’s worse. If he was in jail, it wouldn’t be by his own choice.”
I wasn’t sure I followed that logic, but I went with it.
“He works for Big Oil,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her.
“Oil?”
“Shh. Yes, it’s awful, isn’t it? I protest them all the time! He doesn’t want to do it, but he’s great on the oil rig.”
I looked up to the faux blue sky above the weeping fig tree and laughed.
“What’s funny?” Heather’s face flushed. “See, I’m so embarrassed just talking about it to you. I told Brix it would be better if everyone thinks he’s a painter like me.”
“I’m so glad that’s all it is. And you’ve just reminded me how easy it is to be wrong about people.”
I was too tired to stay awake for dinner that night. I didn’t fight Dorian when he brought me a tray in bed and put me to sleep.
At midnight I was awakened, I wasn’t sure by what. I’m used to the patter of Dorian’s feet on the roof.
I got up to walk through the house. I found the source of the noise almost immediately. Dorian had dropped a hefty notepad in front of my door. There was a note on the top sheet.
You are sicker than you will admit. Ivan is in the hospital, so I have taken the libe
rty of taking my book to his home library. Do not fear, it is not missing. I am a fresh set of eyes (how American I am becoming!) and will return home with new ideas.
I sighed. A simple life, Zoe. A simple life.
I drove my truck toward Ivan’s house. It was walking distance, but the truck would be the easiest way to get Dorian home without him being seen.
A plume of smoke rose in the distance, coming from Mt. Tabor. A bad feeling clenched my stomach. It looked like it was coming from the theater. But unlike the fake fire in the Prometheus and Persephone stage show, this fire was very real. My tires screeched as I turned and headed toward it.
I found Dorian outside the back of the theater, hiding next to a dumpster. His wings flapped in earnest. He was horribly upset.
“I went inside because I thought I heard a voice calling out for help, but it was too hot. I dropped my book! It is inside, burning.”
The sound of sirens sounded in the distance.
“Hide, Dorian.”
“I know!” he snapped. “I hid from the men in the theater last week, as I will hide now.”
He’d “hidden” from Wallace Mason and Earl Rasputin, yet Earl had posters that resembled Dorian. Could it really be that simple?
“Dorian,” I said. “I know what happened.”
Dorian heard the urgency in my voice and stopped.
“They didn’t see you in the woods by the cemetery,” I said. “Wallace Mason and Earl Rasputin saw you in the theater. Both of them, when they were spying on the magicians just like we were, when they hoped to get inside information about the location of the Lake Loot. That’s why Wallace was clutching your stone toe, and why Earl had a knife. They were defending themselves from Baby Bigfoot, and in the confusion and darkness, Earl stabbed the wrong man.”
A faint cry of distress interrupted me.
“Merde,” Dorian whispered. He gave me one last look, then followed the sound of the anguished cry into the burning theater.
Forty-Eight