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

Time to work. Okay. She would do it this time. She would read. Her sightless gaze dribbled down the first paragraph. . . .

She tapped Nate under the table with her foot.

“What?” Nate said, pulling off his headphones.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Stevie said. “Go over to the dining hall and get some cake?”

Nate glanced at his screen, looked back at his friend, and sighed.

“Fine,” he said. “But only because I love cake.”

Stevie sagged with relief when he agreed. She had been dangerously close to almost reading three entire sentences.

Fall nights in Vermont were crisp. The air had an edge to it that snapped you awake. There was a general crunchiness to everything—leaves, frosted grass, cold gravel pathways. When you stepped on a stick, it sounded like a firecracker going off under your foot, and every pile of organic detritus rustled with some life-form. The moon tonight was full and huge—a massive yellow eye suspended overhead, casting its gaze down on the mountaintop.

“You get any new ones today?” Nate asked.

“Visions. Industrial dryer. Community garden.”

“It’s been a while since you got a vision.”

“It’s a nice change from everyone who has a neighbor who gets a boat and an oversized cooler,” Stevie said. “A lot of people buy boats and coolers. Only, like, half of them are serial killers.”

“How many of these messages are you getting now?”

“Just a few a week,” she said. “Maybe ten.”

“That’s still a lot of people who want you to solve their weird crap.”

“They don’t want me to solve anything,” Stevie replied. “They want to tell me about something they saw. And everyone sees stuff. There’s nothing to do. I’m just . . . itchy.”

“I’m aware. This is what you’re like when you don’t have something to work on. It’s not great. Once it gets dark and you’ve already talked to David, you basically turn into a zombie. Which is why I’m out here walking with you now, to keep you from eating the sheep.”

“I’m not going to eat a sheep,” Stevie replied. “Maybe an owl, though.”

“Crunchy, hollow owl bones. Delicious owl meat.”

“Or a moose. If I ever see one.”

They reached the central green, in front of the Great House—the school’s administrative heart. The green was the wide oval of pristine lawn that rolled out in front of the building, with a marble fountain depicting the god Neptune at the top and a cupola at the bottom. Normally, there was nothing but open space in the middle, but one of the new students, a girl improbably named Valve, who’d grown up on a farm sanctuary and wore at least seven crystals at all times, had introduced three sheep to the school. They meandered around the grounds but preferred the green. They noodled around under the moonlight, largely in the vicinity of the little wooden structure that had been erected for them.

Free-range sheep might be a strange sight at most schools, but this was not most schools. This was Ellingham Academy.

Ellingham was in the mountains of Vermont. Its story was the stuff of legend, its reputation gold-plated, its illustrious graduates legion. Its story was long but can best be summarized thusly: Famous rich guy Albert Ellingham climbs a mountain in the roaring 1920s, gets loopy from the limited oxygen, decides to build his dream school—a place where learning is a game. He even decides to build himself a massive mansion in the middle of said school so he can be a part of the whole process. He dynamites the face off the mountain and empties his bottomless pocketbook, building the most elaborate and fantastic campus. Yale and Princeton would bite their ivy-covered knuckles in jealousy over the red and gold bricks; tree-lined paths; sculptures; twee, twisting pathways; and Gothic spires.

Albert Ellingham declared that his school would have no admissions criteria; students applied in whatever way they thought was right and expressed their passion. If the school chose you, the experience was free for two years, which was the length of the program. The school would design bespoke learning experiences for each student. Only fifty students were accepted each year. It was competitive. It was egalitarian. It was forward-thinking. It was perfect in all ways except for the murders.

Murders. Plural.

Some had occurred in 1936, when Ellingham’s wife and daughter were kidnapped and a student killed. This turned into one of the great crimes of the twentieth century. Stevie had gotten into Ellingham with the stated purpose of solving this case. The other murders had been more recent—just one year ago. Last year at Ellingham had been, as the administration called it, “a time of challenges.” That was a polite way of saying, “we had a minor murder spree and a mass evacuation.” (This explained why the incoming class all seemed a bit on the nervous or excited side. They were jumpy.)

Stevie topped off this experience by working on another cold case on her summer break, this one in Massachusetts and dating from the 1970s. This should have gotten her a pass on reading something like “Defining Bias: How We Interpret What We Read.” But that is not the way the world works, because the world didn’t care what she did last year, or last month, or even earlier tonight when she had bravely tried to read three sentences. If the world is feeling super charitable, it might take a passing glance at what you are doing now. What matters is what you are doing next. And high school was nothing if not about the next box you had to check.