The Curator's Conundrum
When a priceless artifact vanishes from a locked room in a museum, the recently retired curator is called in to solve an impossible crime.
Retirement was supposed to be quiet. For Arthur Pendelton, former curator of the Grand Antiquities Museum, it was anything but. A week into his newfound freedom, he was summoned back. The Serpent's Eye, a ruby of legendary size and cursed history, had vanished. It was taken from the Grand Hall, a room sealed with a time-locked vault door and monitored by a dozen cameras. There was no forced entry, no glitch in the system. The gem had simply ceased to be there.
The police were stumped, calling it the work of a ghost. But Arthur knew that every puzzle has a solution. He walked the marble floors of the museum not as a curator, but as a detective. He knew the building's secrets, every hidden passage and forgotten storeroom. He interviewed the nervous staff, his old colleagues, searching for the slightest inconsistency in their stories.
The clues were subtle: a faint scent of almonds in the air, a microscopic scratch on the display case, a guard's unusually scuffed shoes. To everyone else, they were meaningless. To Arthur, they were the threads of an intricate web. He realized the thief wasn't a ghost, but a genius who had used the museum's own systems against itself. The crime wasn't about what was taken, but how. Arthur had one chance to piece it all together before the thief, and the Serpent's Eye, disappeared forever.