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A crash of thunder sounded. The soundtrack of the evening had begun.

“Welcome to the Hidden Creek Manor House,” said Kira Kendrick. She was playing the role of Dr. Keys, a research librarian working at this “manor house.”

“I know the circumstances aren’t ideal.” She paused and wrung her hands together. “This fierce storm has brought you here. The creek has overflowed, and your tour bus can’t get past. You’d think in our modern age—1935—after we’ve survived the war and the Depression, that we’d have better roads. It’s almost as if our town is cursed.”

Thunder crashed once more over the speakers. This time, more loudly.

Enid jumped. She hadn’t seen their staged reading earlier that week.

“I’m Dr. Keys,” Kira continued. “Not the medical kind, but a research librarian. I hope you’ll forgive me if I seem a bit distracted as I welcome you to this isolated estate and its library.” She swept her arm in front of her body, indicating the bookshelves that lined the walls. “I completed my PhD in library science only last year, but I’ve already made an exciting discovery. And it happened right here in this very library! Oh, but none of you are interested in these dusty old shelves. I won’t bore you with those details—”

“Go on, Dr. Keys.” Milton Silver stepped into the room from the kitchen serving as backstage. “It’s an important discovery.”

“This is my colleague and mentor, Dr. Locke,” Kira said. “He’s a world-renowned archivist. He helped me authenticate the discovery I made here at the library. A centuries-old document that confirms the existence of something very special here in Hidden Creek.”

Tempest had learned that Kira and Milton had a similar mentor-mentee relationship in real life, so she and Ivy wrote to that dynamic. Kira was around the same age as Ivy and Tempest, and Milton was around the age of Tempest’s dad. The pair had bonded during the first Creekside Players show they’d performed together several years ago.

The idea was for this to be an interactive murder mystery at a country manor house straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. Dr. Keys, Dr. Locke, and their assistant, Archie V.—played by Kira, Milton, and Lucas—were doing archival research in the stately home and had made an important discovery in the library.

Members of the audience entered the house as if they were members of the stranded tour group. But when one of the characters is murdered, the audience members are the witnesses who must uncover the culprit. In this house filled with thousands of books, creating clues had been a delight for Tempest and Ivy.

The background sound of a violent storm played on a speaker from the moment the audience arrived. After everyone had been given drinks and a short time to chat and look around the room, the actors would perform a ten-minute scripted skit, and then the more interactive portion of the games would begin.

“Dr. Keys called me as soon as she made her exciting discovery,” said Milton. “Go on, tell them all about it.”

Kira beamed at the audience. “This old manor house is filled with secret passageways. They were added because the man who built it needed more space for all his books. Keep in mind that this house isn’t far from the creek. Down in his labyrinthine secret hallways, he also had a secret desk where he kept a diary. In it, he recorded sightings of a mythical creature known to live in the water. A kelpie .”

“Yes, a kelpie from Scottish folklore!” Milton wriggled his eyebrows like a villain from a silent film. It was more than a bit over the top, but it caused both Cameron and Enid to laugh, which was the point. The audience was supposed to have fun.

Tempest wanted to have fun with it, too. She based the play on the folklore she’d learned from her Scottish grandmother.

“Kelpies,” said Kira, “are shape-shifting spirits that haunt lochs and other waterways. They appear as large black horses. If you see one, you might notice there’s something not quite right about them. Maybe they’re a little too big. Or strike you as too human. Which makes sense, since they then shape-shift into human form.”

Milton rubbed his tweed-covered arms as he shivered dramatically.

“Don’t confuse kelpies with the selkies of Scottish mythology,” Kira continued. “Selkies appear in the water as seals and transform into beautiful women on land. But kelpies look like horses, are more often male—and are far more dangerous .”

“As Dr. Keys also discovered in documents here in the library,” Milton said, “a kelpie has been sighted at the water’s edge in Hidden Creek for more than a century before our town was founded. Our very own Dr. Keys here discovered the documents after her curiosity was piqued by the diary.”

“The evidence was here the whole time.” Kira paused and looked wistfully at the sliding bookcase, causing the audience to follow her gaze, as she intended. “I only thought to look in the archives where others hadn’t. The original owner of Creekside Manor was an immigrant from Scotland. He believed he was cursed and that he unwittingly brought the spirit with him to America. Was he right? This is what I’m still researching in these archival materials. There are still many secrets to be found in this house.”

“Perhaps our guests would like to help with our research?” Milton asked. “We believe there are secrets hidden in the pages of the books in the library of this manor house.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Sanjay charged into the room, glowering at the librarians.

“Archie V.,” said Milton, his voice clipped. “I don’t believe you’ve met our guests yet.”

Archie V.’s name was a play on the word archive , but the joke of the rearranging of the letters of the word was too subtle to pick up on verbally. The real audience this weekend would be handed a simple one-page program that included the cast list along with hints for where to look for clues.

“Our unexpected guests are a convenient cover for you to slip forged historical documents into the library,” Sanjay continued. “Perhaps one of them will accidentally stumble across something you’ve planted.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Milton sputtered, stepping protectively in front of his protégée. “How dare you accuse Dr. Keys of impropriety in our noble profession!”

Kira’s glasses slipped down her nose. “Don’t mind him, Dr. Locke. Archie is simply jealous that I’m the one to have made the discovery. That I’m the one who’ll get the credit. That I’m—”

The lights went out, and the room was plunged into nearly complete darkness.

The cap gun popped. The gun thudded to the floor, as did a body. Another thud sounded. Another one? Had Sanjay shifted position for some reason?

There was a sliver of light, but Tempest’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted for her to see what was going on when the lights came back on.

Sanjay lay on the carpeted floor, but he was on his stomach, not his back as he was supposed to be. In the role he’d taken over from Lucas, he needed to be face up to say his last line as Archie V., and to point at the bookshelf to give the audience a “dying clue.”

For four seconds, everyone was silent, waiting for Sanjay to say his next line. Which he’d clearly forgotten.

In the script, the actor playing the now-dead character would take on the role of the detective. With the detective trapped at the isolated manor and unable to summon backup, they were all in it together. The audience would need to follow clues to catch the guilty party.

“You forgot your line.” Milton stepped away from the light switch he’d been in charge of turning off and on, and kicked Sanjay’s shoe.

His shoe… Tempest frowned. Something wasn’t right about his shoes. They weren’t his. Why had he swapped his shoes in the darkness? There must have been some purpose for his trick, but she couldn’t think of what it might be.

“Come on, Sanjay,” said Kira. “You’re supposed to be face up so we can see your fake bullet hole and you can point to the bookshelf while you say your line.” She looked at Tempest. “We can’t fault him for not remembering the staging or his lines, since he’s just filling in.”

“Something’s wrong.” Tempest knelt down and shook his shoulders. “Sanjay?” He didn’t move.

Even more disturbingly, as soon as she’d touched his shoulders through that thick fluffy sweater, she knew something was very wrong. His body felt nothing like the Sanjay she knew. Her heart thudded more frantically than it ever had on stage in front of thousands. Something was very wrong.

His body was a deadweight. Had he hit his head on the steamer trunk? Something both looked and felt entirely wrong about his body. Tempest had the most horrifying thought that Sanjay’s soul had left his body and that’s why he felt so wrong. She flipped him over.

A bullet hole was in the center of his chest.

But that wasn’t the most shocking thing about the body in her arms.

This wasn’t Sanjay. It was Lucas, the missing actor who’d recently moved home to Hidden Creek. And he was dead.