Page 41

Aside from birds chirping, Fiddler’s Folly was silent as they came through the front gate.

“Aren’t we building the set in here?” Sanjay stopped and pointed to the barn workshop as Tempest walked past it.

“Not yet.” She kept walking up the hillside toward the tree house.

A sticky note from Grandpa Ash was taped to the front door of the tree house. Platter of cookies is ready for you to take to Mrs. Hudson. Extra for you and your friends. Back soon.

“Guess I’ll be the one delivering cookies.” She crumpled up the note, then texted her gran to ask about borrowing a few art supplies.

Of course , Grannie Mor texted back immediately. Take anything you need. Home with Ash in an hour.

Tempest unlocked the tree house door, but instead of going upstairs as usual, she walked straight into her grandmother’s art studio.

“Um, we’re making art?” Gideon asked.

“We’re getting the scene right before we build it.”

Tempest didn’t spend much time on the ground floor of her grandparents’ tree house. The single room was Morag Ferguson-Raj’s art studio. The stairway leading up to the main level of the house cut through the center of the single room, creating additional wall space and making the room feel extra cozy. Drawers filled with loose watercolor paper and stretched canvas and cabinets filled with paint and other supplies lined the interior walls. Easels and worktables lined the outer walls, with picture windows above giving Grannie Mor an ever-changing view of the trees on their hidden hillside.

But Tempest barely noticed the light. They were here for the building blocks and anatomical figures Morag posed to stage scenes for her artwork.

“The question,” said Tempest as she cleared space on a rosewood worktable, “is why did the killer need to move the furniture?”

“Because bodies are heavy,” Sanjay said. “They accidentally knocked into something on their way back to the trunk.”

Tempest shook her head and pointed to Gideon’s sketch that he’d just laid on the table. “ Everything is moved around. Well, not the bookshelves against the wall, but the couches.”

Sanjay frowned at Gideon’s sketch. “To make room to get Lucas out of my trunk.”

Tempest shook her head. “He wasn’t necessarily in the trunk. Forensics placed his dead body in the trunk at some point, but he wasn’t there when we looked inside it…”

“What are you thinking?” Gideon asked.

“That the steamer trunk needed to be in a certain spot for a trick to work,” said Tempest. “Nobody was in the living room when Lucas Cruz’s body reappeared, meaning there had to be something rigged for the body to reappear. Something that required the furniture to be moved. ”

Sanjay swore. Gideon’s eyes widened as he turned to a side table and grabbed three anatomical sketch study figures made of wood and wires. There were two twelve-inch posable wooden people and one six-inch figure.

“Let’s get testing.” Tempest took the six-inch wooden figure from Gideon and placed it on the table, positioned like Lucas had been. “Gideon, can you make two sketches of the furniture arrangements on each night?”

“Definitely.”

“Then can you approximate the furniture with the wooden blocks from that storage bin in the corner?”

“On it.”

“Sanjay, you’re on set design. Use cardboard and card stock paper to create the house surrounding the furniture. We need to make sure we get the doors, windows, bookcases, and fireplace.”

“What’s the scale?” Sanjay asked.

“The figure is six inches, and Lucas was about six feet tall, so we go with one inch to represent each foot. I’ve got the dimensions of the rooms from our assessment for the renovation. Those notes will show door and window placements as well, but not the furniture, so Gideon’s attention to detail of the furniture placements is key for the interior.” Tempest searched on her phone while the others gathered materials, then jotted down a sketch with the measurements on a sheet of paper.

“What part are you doing?” Sanjay asked.

“While you two build this diorama, I’m delivering cookies to Mrs. Hudson.”