The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(27)

David had no snark now. He silently handed her the flashlight. Before she took it, she reached into the front pocket of her bag and pulled out a pair of blue nitrile gloves and snapped them on.

“Really?” he said. “You carry crime-scene gloves?”

“You can get them in any drugstore,” she said, taking the phone from him. “Treat yourself.”

She flattened herself on the floor as best she could and turned her head to the side to get a view into the space. It appeared to be a shallow space, dark, webby. She positioned the phone’s light to get the best illumination she could and reached in, slowly, in case there were wires or sharp edges. She poked finger by finger until she hit the back of the space. It was about as long as her hand. Almost big enough for the tin but not quite.

She lifted her neck and stretched it, then reached her fingers up.

There was space there. The hollow went all the way up. Plenty of space for the tin.

“So there’s a hole?” David said. “That’s pretty good. I mean, you never disappoint with your . . .”

“Shut up for a second.”

She craned her hand around to get a full sense of what might be there.

“Maybe Janelle has one of those laparoscopic little cameras,” she said. “Or . . .”

Her finger hit something. Something fabric.

“I’ve got something,” she said. She wormed her fingers into the space, looking for something she could hook on to. Was it more of the beaded fabric, or the thing the feather had come from? Was it more of the photos, a bag . . .

The thing pulled free and landed on the floor inside the hole. She wrapped her hand around it and was pulling it out when her brain sent her the alert that something was amiss with this object, but sometimes when you start a movement, you can’t stop. She pulled the thing out of the hole.

Whether it was a large mouse or a small rat, she did not know. It was dead, and had been for some time. It still had fur in places, but in others it was exposed to the bone. Overall, it was hard, possibly mummified by being in the wall.

“Oh,” she said, jerking away her hand. It was not an adequate expression of horror, but it was all she had. When you find yourself holding a mummified mouse-rat, words may fail.

“That’s not Ellie,” David said, looking over and grimacing.

Stevie got up and scooted away from the thing, ripping off her gloves. She shoved them in her hoodie pocket.

“Are you keeping those?” he said.

“I can’t put them in the trash in here,” she replied.

“You think they’re checking her trash?”

“I don’t know. You asked me to come in here.”

“Okay.” He held up his hands. “What do you think?”

Stevie surveyed the room again.

“What was she wearing that night?” Stevie asked.

“She had ballet shoes on,” he said. “I remember looking at them.”

“And a little dress. Ballet shoes and a little dress.”

He had a good point. It would be hard to get down the mountain in that.

The room told her about Ellie—that she was a freewheeling artist, an impractical dresser, a French speaker, messy. She liked wine and cabaret. She had a lot of colored pens and drawing books. Her medium was everything. She was color and glitter and chaos.

David was looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to make some kind of proclamation, but she had nothing. The room had no secrets to share. The only thing it had given her was a dead rodent, and now she had to get rid of it.

“Let me think,” she said. “I . . .”

David’s phone buzzed. He looked at it.

“Looks like I have a date. Gotta go up to the Great House. Someone thinks I put a bunch of squirrels in the library.” He tucked his phone in his pocket. “Thanks for looking. Maybe it was stupid. I . . .” He shrugged. “Better go,” he said.

When he was gone, Stevie found herself quaking internally, and it wasn’t just because she had to scoop up the rat with some cardboard and take it out to the woods.





8


DETECTION HAS MANY METHODS, MANY PATHWAYS, NARROW AND subtle. Fingerprints. The lost piece of thread. The dog barking in the night.

But there is also Google.

After dumping the rat, Stevie sat down and looked up the names she had uncovered.

Francis Josephine Crane had lived long before the existence of social media, long before every moment and movement could be tracked, but she still lived in a time where the life events of a prominent young woman could be traced. That she was a prominent young woman was the first thing Stevie found out when she sat down in her own room.

Francis Crane was the daughter of Louis Crane, the founder and owner of a company called Crane Flour. The internet had plenty to say about Crane Flour, one of America’s most popular brands between 1910 and 1945. Many people collected Crane Flour tins. The most important fact about Crane Flour seemed to be that one of their factories exploded in 1927, killing eight people and wounding thirty. Crane was roundly denounced for insufficient safety precautions, and Crane Flour winked out of existence about twenty years later, purchased by some larger company that folded it into another company, and into another.

Francis hid among these stories, concealing herself in the depths of available information. Stevie caught a glimpse of her in a list of attendees at a ball held in New York on September 19, 1936. Then her name appeared in a list of the 1937 incoming class at Vassar. There was no mention of her in any list of graduates.