The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(69)

“You’re going to want to get the iris from between the cornea and the lens,” Pix said, circling the room.

Mudge held out the half an eyeball with a you want this? gesture. Stevie shook her head no. He set it down and continued working. The smell of formaldehyde stung the inside of Stevie’s nose, and it made her think of the smell in the tunnel.

Don’t think about that.

“How did she get down there?” Stevie said, out loud.

“Ellie?” Mudge said. “She was always like that. She liked looking for liminal spaces.”

“But I was down in that basement,” Stevie said. She didn’t really mean to talk to Mudge about this, but now that he had elicited her comment, it was coming out. “I don’t see how she could have found that opening. She must have been down there before.”

“You know,” he said, “there are miles and miles of tunnels under Disney World. They’re called utilidors. Walt Disney got upset when he saw a cowboy walking through Tomorrowland to get to Frontierland—this was in the California Disneyland. So in Florida he had all these tunnels built. So it’s a little like here. This is sort of like educational Disney World.”

Stevie had no idea what to say to that.

“Disney World is on a swamp,” Mudge went on. “Everything there has to be built up. So the tunnels are ground level. Disney World is actually built on raised ground, on an incline. People don’t even notice because it’s so gradual.”

Mudge triumphantly pulled a clear, squidgy thing out of the eye, about the size of a quarter. It looked a bit like a jellyfish.

“The lens,” he said.

He set it down on the tray.

“The lens,” she said.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she surreptitiously pulled it out. She had gotten an email. The name of the sender confused her for a moment—Ann Abbott. But then she remembered. The flour lady. The Jell-O and salad lady. She knocked the probe off the edge of the lab station so she could bend down for a moment to read:

Dear Stevie,

Thank you so much for your note! I’m sorry I took so long to respond. I am terrible with email. I am so pleased that you enjoyed Better Than Homemade! I didn’t even know copies of it were still around.

To answer your question, there is very little information I know of on Francis Crane. Most of the family fortune went to her older brother, who died sometime in the 1960s. There was some kind of argument within the family, I believe, which resulted in Francis largely being taken out of the will.

I did speak to someone else in the family when I was writing the book, and I seem to remember they said that Francis may have gone to France right before the war, and that she lived in Paris and had a daughter. I’ll see if I can find out more. You have me curious now.

How wonderful that you are at Ellingham Academy. It seems like a magical place!

Sincerely,

Ann Abbott

Well, it was something. The Francis trail wasn’t completely cold.

“Did you lose something?” Pix asked from the other side of the lab station. Mudge gave nothing away as he glanced down at Stevie. She slid the phone under her bag and reappeared with the probe.

“I’ll get you a fresh one,” Pix said, taking it. “Always use clean instruments, even in things like this. Work clean.”

Mudge continued with the incision.

“This here . . .” Mudge poked into the eye, showing her a bit of filmy substance. “The retina. Here’s where the nerve bundles attach. And anything that hits directly where the nerve bundle attaches is the blind spot. The one place where all the information goes in, you can’t actually see anything.”

He put his hands on his hips for a moment, then scratched behind his ear with his gloved hand.

“Some people,” he said, “want the Country Bear Jamboree to go. It’s not a ride. It doesn’t have a movie. But that’s not the point. I think if you get rid of the Country Bear Jamboree, you get rid of the heart and soul of Disney World. It’s not about the money. It’s about the bears.”

As they walked out of class, Stevie hoped that she might see David sitting there, as he had been that one day in his stupid sunglasses. But the bench was empty except for a bird. Her plan had been to go back to her room and sit in her warren of takeout containers and books until the heat death of the sun, or at least until she had a better idea.

She had a better idea. Or, at least, an idea. What had Mudge just said? “It’s not about the money?” The money. Fenton believed in the money. No one serious believed in the money. The money was fool’s gold, a rumor—the kind of thing flat-Earthers believed, or people who were convinced that the moon landing was fake. There was no Ellingham treasure to be had.

However. Fenton was serious. Maybe Fenton was a little off. Fenton had problems. But Fenton did know the material. She wouldn’t fall for that so easily.

And . . . Stevie found herself walking toward the Great House . . . something she had heard . . . what was it? Something about money. Somebody had just said something about money. Who was it? She flipped back through her mind, rewinding conversations. Money.

There. She found it. When Jenny Quinn approached their table in the cafeteria. She said the school was about to expand. Expansions cost money. Money could come from anywhere, of course. A donor. Maybe Edward King. But this sounded like a lot of money. Like, a major-inheritance-freed-up kind of money.