The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(25)

“What the hell did you do?” she said.

“I’m excited you think I’m so powerful, but I don’t control the local wildlife. God. So jumpy.”

I am your mandatory friend, she thought.

For a second, she considered giving up, right then and there. No way. No way could she carry on with whatever weird pretense.

The case. The tin. The evidence. Her one chance.

Pix was hurrying across the green with some kind of box or carrier in her hand. She cast a look at David as she went, but did not come over to them or stop moving.

“Did you know,” he said as Pix hurried on, “that Dr. Nell Pixwell is a trained wildlife conservator? One of her many skills.”

“What are you doing?” Stevie said. “Why did you send Pix to pick squirrels out of the library?”

“I need your help,” he said. “Now. We’ve got maybe an hour?”

“For what?”

“Ellie’s room,” he said. “I need you to do the thing you do. Look through it.”

Stevie rubbed her face in disbelief.

“It’s what you do,” he said.

She was about to snap back that it wasn’t what she did, except it was what she did. She had gone through David’s room once, when left alone in there, just to try to find out what he was hiding from her. It turned out he was hiding a lot, so that was fair enough. And she went through Hayes’s room after his death when she’d had the idea that something wasn’t right, and it turned out something wasn’t right, and Hayes was gone, so no harm, no foul.

“No,” he said. “It’s a good thing.” He was being serious, and his entire expression and bearing changed. “Let me ask you a question. Does Ellie seem outdoorsy to you?”

“Outdoorsy?”

“She’s the only smoker I know who can’t light a match, Stevie. I saw her try. It was amazing. She uses a lighter because matches are too complicated. Last winter, I seriously thought she would kill herself trying to deal with the snow. She doesn’t own boots. She has zero sense of self-preservation. She can’t drive. She’s made to live in cities and make art stuff. Now, think about what it would take to get down off this mountain by yourself. The answer is: a lot. I’ve tried it.”

“I thought she snuck off all the time to go to Burlington,” she said.

“With me. She had friends down there with the cars. I helped get them on campus by messing with the camera at the entry gate. Ellie has a lot of talents, but she’s not handy. So you’re telling me that she ran away from here on no notice, carrying nothing, with no phone, no one waiting on the back drive . . . that she got herself across the river. She didn’t use the bridge. As soon as she took off, Larry had someone on the road. That river is about ten feet deep, rapid, and cold. So she runs, alone, for miles, through the woods in the dark, downhill, over a mountain river, to the road, which is now being watched. . . .”

“Okay,” Stevie said. “Okay. So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying something doesn’t make sense and I want you to do the thing you do and look through her stuff before it’s gone, because you are really good at that and I can’t think of anything else. She’s my friend. And I don’t know where she is. If anyone could figure out where she’s gone or if she’s okay, maybe it’s you.”

Was this a trap? Because it seemed like a trap.

Yet he said it plainly enough that Stevie felt it was probably the truth. David and Ellie had always been close friends. When Stevie had first arrived at Ellingham, she had watched the way they fell all over each other. Stevie thought they were dating. They weren’t. They really were just friends.

Also, David was not stupid. He knew that once this idea was introduced to Stevie’s brain, it could only take root and grow. The vines would twist around her every waking thought until all other brain activity would be squeezed out and all that would be left would be the leafy jungle of desire to search.

And the tin had come from Ellie’s room.

“You know you want to,” he said. “Janelle is over in the maintenance shed working on her project, and Nate won’t notice.”

They had been reunited for all of ten minutes, and already the library was infested with squirrels and he was calling on her to break into a room.

This was home. It all checked out.

Minerva was quieter than normal when David and Stevie walked into the common room. The moose head on the wall was the only witness, and for a moment, Stevie wondered if it had been mounted with cameras. Moose eye cameras. Did Edward King want to watch and see when his son got back to his dorm?

A stupid thought. A nervous thought. Her palms were sweating. David was just behind her, and she could feel his shadow on her back like it was made of fingers.

“Janelle?” she called.

Nothing.

“Nate. You here?”

The moose just stared ahead.

“Told you,” David said. “All ours. Nice and cozy.”

Just her and David alone in the house—the whole house. Alone.

“Is the door locked . . . ?”

David produced a key from his pocket.

“Where did you get that?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

Even in the bright midday sun, the hallway in Minerva was very dark, lit only by a very tiny stained-glass window by the stairs at the end of the hall. There was a wall sconce, but no one ever turned it on during the day. Stevie walked gently past Janelle’s room and her own, down to the end, where room three lay waiting.