The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(33)

At daybreak the other girls were awoken and told to dress.

“What’s happening?” said Gertie, scuffing out in her heeled slippers.

“Nothing to worry about,” Miss Nelson said stiffly. “A bomb threat was made. Nothing will happen, but for safety’s sake you’re all being sent away from campus.”

There were cries and shouts and excitement about this change in routine. There was a rush for the bathroom and dresses and coats. What would they bring? Would there be breakfast? In the melee, Francis stole down to her room and slipped inside. There were things she would need, things that were concealed in her room, things she could not leave behind. She got next to her bureau and began to push. When she had moved it about a foot, she got down on the floor with a nail file and was about to start working the skirting loose, when Miss Nelson was in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” Miss Nelson said.

“I dropped an earring,” Francis replied coolly.

“Come back into the common room.”

“I need to change.”

Miss Nelson went to Francis’s closet, grabbed a dress, and handed it to her, then pointed to Francis’s decorative screen.

“Change, then.”

Francis took the dress and stepped behind the screen.

“I’ll just say this,” Miss Nelson said. “What is happening here is very serious. Talking too much could get people hurt. Do you understand me?”

Francis stopped with her dress halfway over her head.

“I don’t care what you think you know,” Miss Nelson went on. “There are lives at stake. I know you like your games, Francis, but this is real. People could die. And one of your own housemates could be in danger.”

Francis gulped in some air, pulled the dress down, and stepped out from behind the screen. Miss Nelson was no longer the gentle and meek head of Minerva. She was a woman standing like a wall in her doorway. And for the first time that whole night and morning, Francis was afraid. She looked down at the spot in the skirting board. What was behind that board could cause more trouble than she wanted. Her secrets were sealed in that wall.

“Could I just . . . have a moment?” she asked as meekly as she could.

“No,” Miss Nelson said. “I will pack your things. You will go.”

Francis Josephine Crane walked out of her room, having no idea it was for the last time.





9


THERE WAS THE MOOSE SIGN AGAIN.

There would never be a moose.

The Ellingham coach was going on its Sunday run to Burlington. Only a few people were on today—not people Stevie knew well. Everyone had headphones on or was reading or playing something. Stevie was reading her tablet, where she had a copy of Truly Devious: The Ellingham Murders by Dr. Irene Fenton open. It was one of the first books she had ever gotten on the subject. She had flipped to the part about the discovery of Dottie Epstein: May 16, 1936, was a soft day with hints of an early summer. It was five thirty in the morning, and Joseph Vance had started his milk run from Archer’s Dairy Farm. He had thirty-five deliveries of milk, cream, and butter in the back of his truck and a vacuum flask of coffee for his journey. He had just made the first ten deliveries to houses outside of Jericho, Vermont, and it was a good time to pull off to the side of the road and have a mug of coffee and his breakfast roll. He parked on a bit of rough grass across from Babbett’s Farm, drank and ate, and when he was finished, he went to relieve himself by a tree some twenty feet back from the road.

Joseph would later say he had no idea what moved him to go so far from the truck; this was a quiet area; no one was around for miles. Still, he moved back to the privacy of the tree, and while he was going about his business, he saw what appeared to be a sack on the ground. He moved closer. This is when he realized there were two legs coming from the sack—or, at least, parts of legs. They were discolored, ravaged by weather and wildlife. The rest of the body was still under a bit of dirt and some loose bits of wood. When Joseph moved these away, he saw the girl’s curly hair, the remains of her face, and even a pair of glasses.

He ran several feet away and was violently ill. Then he got in his truck and drove directly to the police station. Little Dolores Epstein, the brilliant young student from the Ellingham Academy, had finally been found. When the body was removed and examined, a massive fracture would be found on the right side of her skull.

At that point, the Ellingham kidnapping became the Ellingham murder. In all of the publicity around the missing mogul’s wife and his daughter, many would forget that the first known victim was a student, a poor little girl from New York City—a girl who taught herself five languages and showed a prodigious gift for translating ancient texts, a girl who did college-level chemistry and physics, who had a near-photographic memory of everything she ever read.

Later, Dolores’s movements on that fatal day would be retraced. It is likely that she was in the dome in the sunken lake when the kidnappers came there to receive the ransom money. Dolores liked to hide herself away and read, and she had a well-known penchant for getting into out-of-the-way spaces. That day, she had taken a volume of Sherlock Holmes stories with her into the dome. It would be found on the floor.

It is possible, even likely, that Dolores Epstein saw the face of the Ellingham kidnapper, and that is why she had to die.

The coach rolled into Burlington. Burlington was a pleasant town—very college, touch of hippie, small-town America but with good coffee and snowshoes and yoga and crude profiles of Bernie Sanders spray-painted on walls. There were darker things too—signs of homelessness, some scenes around the courthouse that looked grim.