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Ash clicked his tongue once more as the four friends and a rabbit walked into the tree house kitchen. “You’re all skin and bones! When did you last eat?”

Tempest doubted they’d lost weight after skipping one meal, getting a dreadful escape room trap instead of delicious Himalayan food, but if she looked half as frazzled as her friends, she could understand his concern.

“Our dinner got interrupted earlier, so it’s been a while.”

“I could eat,” Sanjay said, apparently having decided he wasn’t going to spontaneously combust. Ivy and Gideon chimed in with their agreement.

“Don’t look so solemn,” Ash said as he gathered two platters of cookies from the counter. “It’s a bit chilly for the deck, so we can gather in the breakfast nook if you don’t mind getting cozy.”

“Cozy’s good right now,” Ivy said.

“I invited Officer Kwan inside, but he said he was obligated to wait outside. I hope those police cars have good heat.”

“What’s this about an actor being killed at Gray House?” Grannie Mor asked as she came into the kitchen.

“Sit,” Ash insisted, pushing them toward the banquette in the corner of the kitchen barely big enough for four people to squeeze around.

“I’ll put on the kettle for tea,” Tempest’s grandmother said.

Morag Ferguson-Raj evoked glamour no matter the setting. It was partly effort, visiting her hair salon once a month, and she always had her favorite lipstick on hand. But there was also something inherently graceful about her small, angular frame, currently draped in a white dress dotted with a beautiful palette of colors.

“And you need something more substantial than these cookies.” Ash’s head disappeared behind the door of the fridge.

As the friends explained what had happened, Morag fixed them tea, and Ash threw together a “simple midnight snack,” which, of course, was far from simple.

He began by reheating Rajaloo on the stovetop. Rajaloo was Tempest’s grandfather’s variation on the British-Indian dish vindaloo. Ash was the self-described dabawalla for the Secret Staircase Construction crew. It was well known that one of the perks of working for Tempest’s dad, Darius, was that his father-in-law, Ashok Raj, delivered home-cooked lunches to the crew if they were working on a local job site. He’d never lived in Mumbai, but he still called himself a dabawalla after the Indian city’s complex lunch network, in which skilled bike messengers would pick up home-cooked meals packed in tiffins—the multilayered stainless-steel lunchboxes—and deliver them across the city. Ash was both cook and bike messenger. He loved cooking for others, riding his bike all over the Bay Area was his exercise, and meeting people along the way was a perk. No matter how much the team shrank or grew, one tradition that remained firmly in place was the perk of lunches from Ash. Today, he’d brought tiffins of Rajaloo to three landscapers on a job in Richmond.

Ash also defrosted a frozen stack of homemade chapatis, which he served with a fresh salad of cucumber, tomatoes, and sliced avocados, plus pulled a container of homemade coconut ice cream from the freezer for anyone who wanted something sweet.

“ Ada kadavulae ,” Ash whispered when Tempest and her friends were done with their story of Lucas Cruz’s strange murder at Gray House. “That’s terrible. But I know how we can help.”

“You do?” Sanjay looked up from his bite of ice cream with a face full of hope.

Ash locked eyes with Morag, and with only the slightest of nods, Tempest knew that a whole silent conversation had taken place between them. After being married for more than half a century, it was inevitable that they’d be as close to telepathy as humanly possible.

“The book?” Ash said to her.

“Aye,” his wife answered. “And your cards.”

“Good,” Ash agreed with a nod, although nobody else in the tree house kitchen had a clue as to what either reference meant.

“I’ll begin,” Morag said. “You’re all too close to what happened tonight. You cannae see the simplest thing you’ve overlooked.” Even though she was admonishing her granddaughter, her Scottish accent gave the words a jovial lilt.

Ash nodded. “Harold Gray’s collection has yet to be cataloged.”

“Which is why whoever is going to steal a valuable book needs to do so before we realize it’s missing,” Tempest said.

“Then why would they not simply have taken the book already?” Morag asked.

“They were still searching for it,” Tempest explained.

Ash and Morag shared another look before Morag continued, “For your theory to hold up, you cannae have it both ways. If an unethical person with expertise in antiquarian books found a valuable book that had not yet been cataloged, they would simply take the book . Or, if they’re searching for a book, there must already be a catalog record of it .”

Tempest’s gran gave her a kiss on the cheek before walking out of the kitchen. The weight of her grandmother’s words crashed over Tempest; she’d been so certain it was a good theory.

Sanjay swore. “Morag and Ash are right. There’s no reason Lucas would need to clandestinely hide out in Gray House to look for a book. If he spotted it to know it was there, he’d have already taken it.”

“Never fear.” Ash clasped him on the shoulder. “There’s something else we can help with.”

Morag returned to the room carrying Ash’s Rolodex of business cards he’d collected over the years from people he met on his bike rides through Hidden Creek and surrounding towns.

“Your grandfather knows more people than all of us combined,” Morag said.

“As soon as we’ve finished this midnight snack,” said Ash, “I’ll begin seeing who knows something about this unfortunate chap who was killed.”

Whoever had killed Lucas Cruz shouldn’t have done it in a way that affected people Ashok Raj cared about. Tempest was well aware that while Grandpa Ash might appear to the outside world to be a sweet grandfather, and indeed he was 99 percent of the time, but if you messed with his family, you’d find out just how big a mistake you’d made.