Nine Liars (Truly Devious, #5)(50)

“It looks like . . . she’s gone,” Stevie said, pointing out the obvious. “No sign of forced entry. No sign of a struggle. It seems like we ate dinner with her, and then, she left. You asked me to look and . . . I looked.”

She indicated the pile of trash she was lording over as proof.

“I know,” he said.

What was that tone in his voice? It was dispirited, but what did it mean? She had failed. The great Stevie, the one who busted into places and turned up things—she had nothing. She had not performed the trick. All she’d done was spill a lot of garbage. She wanted to say something, explain herself, but before she could, Izzy called them.

“You should come in here,” she said.

They found Izzy on her hands and knees on the floor. She had pushed back an armchair that was tucked into the corner where the stairway met the wall. The bottom half of her body was sticking out. She crawled backward and looked up at them.

“Doorknob dragged the chicken bone back here. There’s a little opening. Look.”

She pushed back the chair. The paneling under the stairs had been papered in a lush tropical print, and at the corner, the panel had been pushed back a few inches, just enough for an enterprising cat to squeeze through. Izzy felt the panel and found that it was hinged. It was the opening to a very small cabinet.

“I didn’t know this was here,” she said. “So, this is where the Hoover is. And this is where Doorknob has been keeping things.”

Stevie leaned in to look. Sure enough, this was the spot Doorknob collected his little treasures. His toy mouse. Part of what looked like a real mouse. A used tea bag. Two buttons. A crumpled tissue. A dirty cotton swab. A grape stem.

Izzy pulled out the canister vacuum cleaner and stuck her head into the opening. She dragged out a heavy, blocky briefcase.

“Look at this,” she said, pushing it farther into the center of the room so they could see it.

“It’s a fire safe,” Stevie said. “Document storage.”

This model had no key lock. It had a keypad instead.

“No chance you know the code, is there?” Stevie asked.

Izzy shook her head.

“I had no idea she had that. What’s it for?”

“Important documents, usually,” Stevie said. “Records. Wills. Insurance. Passports. Important stuff. It’s a safe, basically, that keeps your papers safe in fires and floods.”

“I think she keeps all that kind of thing in her office. So what’s in this?”

“Unless we have the code, we won’t know.”

“People tend to use bad passwords and codes,” David said. “The password really is ‘password’ a disappointing number of times. What’s her birthday?”

“The ninth of February.”

“So, 0209,” Stevie said, putting in the digits.

“No. 0902. Other way around.”

Right. England. Many things were flipped here. She tried both versions. Neither worked.

“Birth year?”

Izzy counted back.

“1974.”

That didn’t work either.

“Okay,” Stevie said, standing up and making a circuit of the room, peering at the bookshelves. “She’s a historian. Loads of dates in history.”

“It’s pretty much all dates,” David pointed out.

“But she does Henry the Eighth a lot, right?”

“Her specialty is the Tudor period,” Izzy replied. “Which is . . .” Izzy consulted her phone for this information. “1485 until 1603.”

Those two dates were tried and did not work. Nor did the year Henry the Eighth became king, the beheading of Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth the First becoming queen. Eventually they tried every number between 1485 and 1603.

“What about 1066?” Izzy said. “That’s the big year in English history. 1066 and All That.”

It was not 1066.

“This group,” Stevie said. “They’re called the Nine. Is it something to do with that?”

The only thing they could think of that would work was 9999, which did nothing. Nor did 1995, the year of their graduation and the event at Merryweather. For good measure, Stevie also tried the default 1234, just to make sure Angela hadn’t kept the factory setting. She had not. The box refused to divulge its secrets.

“Could we force it open?” David said.

Stevie shrugged to indicate this was worth a try. They looked around the flat for something to use to pry it open, finding a large flathead screwdriver in the utility closet. They all attempted it, but the box resisted.

“It’s pretty solid,” Stevie said. “It’s designed to take a beating.”

“What now?” Izzy said. Her frustration at not being able to open the box, at the sight of the house and the growing evidence that something was wrong—all of it was making her tearful.

“I think we take this with us,” Stevie said. “If she turns up, we just bring it back to her. But we keep trying to get it open. Is that okay?”

Izzy nodded emphatically.

“But there has to be more we can do,” she said. “I’m going to talk to the police tomorrow. I’ve walked around the area; I’ve even talked to some neighbors to see if they saw or heard anything, but no one did. What do I do now?”