"Hello, Tracey!" Harriet piped, spinning around to face her, "Did we catch you at a bad time?"
Harriet smiled up to Tracey as if she were trying to distract her from Bentam's own cold demeanor. Tracey glanced towards Bentam before sighing and focusing her attention back on the girl.
"Of course not, Harriet. Come in," Tracey said. She stepped aside to allow the two to walk in.
"I'm sure you must be wondering why we've come here," Bentam finally said, rolling up and tucking his portable document into his pocket.
"Yes," Tracey sharply replied, closing the door with a little more force than necessary. "I thought that you would have found everything you needed by barging in on Mrs. Pinot. Rather careless, don't you think?"
"And you must've found an abundance of information by revisiting what you already have, hm?" he retorted. He cleared his throat. "Anyways," he continued, "we did find some information of interest to you."
"Why don't we sit in the sitting room," Tracey said, whisking past the two and reclaiming her seat in the room. "I believe we all have new information that everyone would like to hear."
"What happened here?" he asked in bewilderment as they navigated fallen items from the earlier-toppled table.
"Attempted burglary not ten minutes ago."
"I should create a report on this," he muttered, scanning the room and perching onto a nearby sofa. "Hello, Mittie."
"Hello, Bentam! How did your constable report go, by the way?" Mittie cheerfully said. "The last time I've seen you two, didn't you say you were going to file a missing person's report?"
"We changed our mind," Harriet replied. She sat next to Bentam. "Constables make me a little nervous, so I thought it'd be better if we just continued with our own searching."
"And for the record," Bentam added, "we did not barge into Mrs. Pinot's residence last night. We visited her this morning."
"How?" Tracey asked incredulously. "She didn't want to see us again the last time we saw her."
"Correction," Bentam said. "She didn't want to see you. I had a better guise for our visit."
"And what was that?" Mittie said.
"I simply went to go over some more paperwork with her. We've been working on this case for a few weeks now, so she wouldn't suspect much of that. In the meanwhile, Harriet looked around her home under the guise that she was checking all of Mrs. Pinot's fireplaces."
"I still can't believe that worked, to be honest," Harriet said. "I couldn't find any sign of Mr. Porter or Charlie, though, and I searched every corner of that house."
"No hidden rooms?" Tracey asked, thinking back to The Marketplace's hidden entrances.
"Not even that. All I found were some old blueprints in Mr. Pinot's old lab."
"Oh? Could they've been blueprints for Mr. Porter's keeper book?" Mittie asked, leaning forward.
"No, but they were kind of interesting. That's why I still remember it! They were some sort of miniature self-defense devices. I couldn't tell how they worked exactly, but I recognized one of its designs to be the same brooch Mrs. Pinot always wears!"
"That adds up," Mittie thoughtfully said. "Mrs. Pinot did say her husband had given that brooch to her, so he very well may've made it."
"Since we didn't find anything of too much interest at her residence," Bentam continued, "we decided to look more into what exactly keepers do since I couldn't understand why everything about them is so secretive. At the library, I found an interesting fact."
"What was it?" Mittie asked.
"Some keepers are part of a sort of society called the Keeper Embassy. I even found Mr. Porter to be a part of this said society."
"We did find out earlier today, yes," Tracey said. "Mr. Matthews dropped by our home during the storm."
"Oh?" Bentam said. "Interesting." He frowned, looking down at a book that Tracey now noticed that he had been holding this entire time. "What else did you learn, may I ask?"
"Not much," Mittie said with a shrug. "Other than there's an underground marketplace in The Undertown where you can buy combustible paper, my beau is a supplier of it and co-owner of the entire place, and that we got another combustible note that didn't really tell us much other than we need to look for a funhouse. Not in that order."
"Wow," Harriet said. "That's a busy day!"
"I'd say," Tracey agreed.
"I'm going to ignore that matter of the underground marketplace," Bentam said with a squint. "What did the note say?" he continued.
Tracey frowned. "We didn't get a chance to write it down," she started, "But it said something along the lines of 'I'm disappointed in you, Tracey, why don't you look at the funhouse?'."
"It said your name this time?"
"I paraphrased it, but yes."
"Whoever is sending this is getting more aggressive," he muttered. "We need to pick up the pace," he said louder, straightening in his chair. "I believe what this book has may be a breakthrough for us."
"What's in it?" Mittie asked.
"This is the book that discussed the workings of the Keeper Embassy. Not in much detail, but enough for us to find some crucial information." He flipped the book open and set it down on the coffee table in front of them.
On the open pages was a picture that spanned across the two sheets, showing a complex drawing of the letter K.
"This is the emblem of the Keeper Embassy," he said. He leaned over and outlined a thicker line on the sheet. "Notice this shape, however. It goes around part of the K, but then branches off into the surrounding patterns."
"Looks like a key," Mittie said.
"Precisely. Harriet and I have a hunch that it may have something to do with the keeper book."
"I recognized this design," Harriet supplied, "because it's the same as on the book. Charlie was able to get it to that design, but we didn't know why it wouldn't open after that."
"So I'd like to test this theory on the book. May I?" Bentam held out his hand, to which Tracey promptly handed it over. "Perhaps we were on the right track with lining up the design," he said, clicking away at the gears. Soon enough, the 'K' appeared. "But we didn't try one last step."
Following the outlined shape in the book's drawing, Bentam proceeded to tap gently against the designs. Subtly, pieces began to sink into the cover, sounding a small click. He worked across the cover, tapping in various spots until the outline of the key came to shape. Upon pushing in the last spot, the book softly popped open.
For a moment, the room stilled in hushed silence. "It actually opened," Mittie quietly said.
"What do we do now?" Harriet asked.
"We should be looking for any reasons of why Mr. Porter may have been kidnapped," Tracey said. "...thank you, Bentam."
Bentam looked up at her. "Glad to help...Tracey."
Mittie and Harriet looked between the two. "Does this mean that there's a truce now?" Mittie said.
"Yes," Tracey replied, clearing her throat. "May I see the book? Now," she said, flipping the pages open, "the best place to look at would be his last entry."
Quietly, Tracey scanned through the numerous scribbles of Mr. Porter's handwriting, familiar names of previous clients standing out to her. The torrent of words slowed to a trickle, and at last, she reached the final entry. "Here it is," she said. "It's dated the day before his disappearance." She read out loud the passage:
I can no longer condone these actions of Mrs. Pinot and allow her to continue down this path. I plan to take this evidence in the morning to the High Constable. This breaks every code of the Keeper Embassy, but I can no longer passively watch.
"So it was Mrs. Pinot?" Harriet asked, her face crestfallen. "That just seems so unlike her!"
"Criminals often can fool those around them," Bentam replied.
"Do you think Mr. Porter wrote any more on what exactly Mrs. Pinot was doing, Trace?" Mittie asked.
"Let me see." Tracey flipped through. "Oh, here's something. It appears there are more documents on those fraudulent performances."
"She must've been trying to hide the fact that she was ruining Jon's reputation by sabotaging him with those fake ones," Mittie said. "Maybe she was blackmailing him, hence why you saw Jon's men at that theater, Trace?"
"That makes sense."
"You must've seen Jon's men kidnap Mr. Porter, Harriet because she was using them," Bentam said, slowly nodding. "She probably couldn't have done it herself, so she used whatever resources she had to help herself."
"Gears, that's positively ruthless!" Harriet cried.
"I'm almost certain that Mrs. Pinot is working with Jon Starr's employees," Tracey said. "She's wealthy enough to own a steam car, and it's plausible that her husband could have had a silencer on theirs. Not to mention that I found a handkerchief with the initials of RN abandoned at the office and that Jon's chef Rollo has the last name of Nicholson. She could have had Rollo there to kidnap Mr. Porter, used her steam car to transport him, and used him as security at her fraudulent performance!"
"That's very plausible...," Mittie said thoughtfully.
"Mrs. Pinot doesn't own a steam car," Harriet piped.
"But Jon Starr does, no?" Tracey replied. "Seeing that she doesn't hesitate to use his men, could she probably use his vehicle as well, correct?"
"It's a possibility...," Bentam said.
"And along that line," Mittie said, "if she'd use him for all of those things, why wouldn't she use Jon's home as a place to hide Mr. Porter and Charlie? It'd certainly keep any suspicion from herself."
Tracey looked at all of the evidence in front of them, then slowly stood. "Let's put these away," she said. "I have a safe where they should be protected from any more unwanted guests." She grabbed up a few of the items and led the way as the others followed her. "I think it's time we paid Mr. Starr a visit, don't you think?"