Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(48)

“What’s under this apartment?” Stevie asked. “Another apartment?”

“No,” Izzy said. “Someone rents it for storage. They run a catering business and leave extra tables and chairs and things down there.”

“Did you check upstairs?” Stevie asked Izzy.

“Of course! I checked the whole house. I’ll show you.”

Angela’s home office was just off the landing. It was a small space, with file cabinets, stacks of books, pinboards filled with references and business cards and pictures. Her laptop was open on the desk. Stevie tapped it awake. It asked for a password.

“I know what it is,” Izzy said, sitting down. “I had to use her laptop once when I couldn’t find my phone. It’s Cleves. As in Anne of.”

“Anne of?”

“Anne of Cleves. Henry the Eighth’s fourth wife. The lucky one. But I went through this already. I opened every folder and file. There’s nothing on here but script notes and parts of the book she’s working on. I looked through all her email. There’s nothing of note. Her schedule says she has a meeting at the BBC in two days.”

“What about her search history?” Stevie asked.

They checked. Angela had a mundane online life. She updated her social media. She searched furniture sites for rugs and cat supplies. She looked up simple recipes and ordered takeout. She paid some bills. Most of the time she was using libraries and online archives to do Tudor research. It wasn’t promising, but Stevie copied it anyway and sent it to herself.

Stevie took a moment to open the file cabinet drawers. They contained bills and household records—utilities, insurance, a passport.

“She didn’t leave the country,” Stevie said, holding it up.

They then examined Angela’s bedroom, which was slightly less tidy than the rest of the house, but within the bounds of reason. She had some clothes on a chair, but the bed was made and decorated with a small silver throw pillow.

“If we’re going to look,” Stevie said, “we need to look. That means the drawers, everything.”

The three of them set about opening all the drawers, the cupboards, the closets. They found nothing out of the ordinary. Stevie examined the bathroom. Every single sign pointed to the fact that Angela had left the house sometime after their visit and had not returned.

“You see?” Izzy said. “She left after we were here. I’m worried we said something—I said something—something that upset her. This isn’t her. She wouldn’t just go and not tell me.”

Izzy and David looked at Stevie expectantly. Everyone was waiting for her to do something—to pull a rabbit out of her hat. But all Stevie could see was a house with a missing owner. She went into the bathroom in an attempt to look busy while her wheels were turning. She felt the towels (they were dry), opened the medicine cabinet (just normal stuff, nothing marked POISON), checked for a toothbrush (an extremely fancy electric one that looked like it connected to an app).

It was hard to look like a brilliant detective.

“There’s still the box room,” Izzy said.

“The box room?”

Izzy motioned them back out into the hall. She reached up and pulled down a hatch that Stevie had not noticed. This revealed a folding set of steps. Izzy pulled them down and Stevie climbed up.

The box room was just barely a room—it was more of a glorified crawl space with shelving taking up three of the walls, and a sloping roof that made it impossible to stand up. These were full of standing magazine boxes full of papers and binders. There were slim document boxes with labels like, “Star Chamber, primary document copies,” “Thomas Cromwell 1517–18,” “Naval history, lecture notes.” A whole room of documents, as you might expect from someone who researched for a living.

Stevie sat down, and Izzy and David came up and crushed into the little space with her. There were boxes of materials from her time at Cambridge—course catalogs, syllabi, printouts of research papers. In with these was a box of scripts from the Nine, rustic early computer printouts with gray lettering. The three of them opened every box, but it became evident that these were Angela’s old academic records and archived research materials.

Stevie’s phone began to ring. Quinn. Of course. The evening call.

“Hi,” Stevie said, trying to look casual.

“Where are you?”

“At the historian’s house,” Stevie said. “The one from the other night?”

Always tell the truth when you can. Lie only when necessary. This was true.

“You look like you’re in her closet.”

“In her attic—or, her archive. She’s letting me go through her research.”

She slapped her hand around until she found something printed out on an ancient printer, titled “Burning Faith: England During the Dissolution of the Monasteries.”

“Are you developing an interest in the Tudors?” Dr. Quinn asked.

“Yeah,” Stevie said. “The Tower got me really interested. In . . . Henry the Eighth. It’s sort of about crime, right? He was a murderer, really. What else do you call a man who kills two of his wives?”

This was a direct swipe from Angela, but Stevie didn’t think she would mind.

“An interesting point,” Dr. Quinn said. “Are you doing this on your own?”