The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(79)

So it was a coincidence, maybe. Or someone used that letter, folded it into the plot.

And what about Dottie? Stevie was walking across the base of the green now, past the statues of the Sphinx. Dottie understood myth. She would have known all about the riddle of the Sphinx. She read constantly.

Stevie stopped and looked at the Great House from this, the farthest point you could survey it on the campus. The music had changed to an up-tempo jazz song. This is the kind of music that would have played that weekend before the kidnapping, when the party was going on in the house. The house, the heart of this place, beating with life and song . . .

What had Fenton told her, about the last thing Albert Ellingham said to Mackenzie? “It was on the wire.” Wire? Wireless? Had he heard something on the radio? Was it meaningless? He was just going out for a boat ride. He had no idea he was going to die. He could have been talking about anything.

But . . .

He had been updating his will. The codicil that had long been rumored, what if that was real? What if he had put together a fortune for anyone who could produce his daughter, dead or alive? What if he knew something was about to happen to him? He wrote a riddle. He finalized his business. And he told Mackenzie it was on the wire.

Stevie once went to one of those sushi places where the food comes by on a little conveyor belt. That’s what her mind felt like sometimes—facts floating by on a little track. Sometimes she’d have the urge to reach for one, pick it up, feast on it. The wire.

“The wire,” she said out loud.

She walked toward the house. It seemed to swell as she approached it. The Neptune fountain was switched off for the season, leaving the god of the sea to regard her from his dry perch.

There was someone in Larry’s place by the front door—a younger guy with a uniform from a security company, the same one Edward King had hired to install the cameras. He stopped her as she tried to walk in, but Call Me Charles called out from the balcony above.

“Stevie! Could you come up a second?”

Stevie continued up the steps, passing the Ellingham family portrait. Charles was standing on the landing with Jenny Quinn.

“Have you seen David Eastman, by any chance?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “In Burlington.”

“Since then?”

She shook her head. Jenny looked to Charles as if to say, See?

“Has he called you, or . . .”

“No,” she said. “Sorry.”

There was no point in telling him that David said he wasn’t coming back. This was not her circus, and he was not her clown on the loose. All of that business would come crashing down on its own. No need to rush it.

“All right,” he said. “Thanks. You going up to the attic?”

Stevie nodded.

“If he happens to call you, would you tell us?”

“You saw the video,” Jenny said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’ll let you know if I hear from him,” Stevie said, continuing up, and then heading to the back staircase that led to the attic.

Stevie usually noodled around when she first got up here, letting herself have a look around, peering into boxes, pulling things from shelves. Not today. There was one thing she had come here for, and she had to find it. It was in the boxes that contained objects from Albert Ellingham’s office. The dust and smell of old paper itched the inside of her nose. So many things from Albert Ellingham’s office—thumbtacks, petrified rolls of tape that had turned amber with age, yellowed unused notepads with his name embossed on them, scissors, paperweights, letter openers, dried up pots of ink . . .

And a bunch of spools in maroon and white with the words Webster-Chicago written on them. Next to that, on a scrap of paper taped down with yellowed tape were the letters: DE. She dug down farther, pulling something from the bottom of the box that had been meaningless. It was a cardboard box, the packaging for the spools. She could tell because there was a picture of one drawn on the package. It read: WEBSTER-CHICAGO RECORDING WIRE.

“Recording wire,” she said out loud. “Recording wire.”

If this was a recording, the question was, what the hell would play it? If you had tapes, clearly something made them. Stevie spun around in the tight confines of the aisle. The music changed again, and so did Stevie’s thinking. Albert Ellingham had handily made her a guide of things in his house and where they were, and he did it in the form of a giant dollhouse. Stevie hurried to the other end of the attic, pulled off the cover, and carefully opened the dollhouse. She squatted down in front of Albert Ellingham’s tiny office, feeling like a giant looking down on this great man’s life. There were so many recognizable things in there—some had moved around a bit, but surprisingly little had changed in terms of placement and decor. There were the leather chairs, the trophy rugs, the two desks covered in tiny papers and telephones no bigger than Stevie’s thumbnail. The bookshelves were full of impossibly small volumes. There was the globe, the green marble clock on the mantel, and . . .

A cabinet with a weird little object on it, about the size of a computer printer. (Well, this thing was about the size of a matchbox. But it represented something the size of a printer.) She reached down and pinched the thing up. It could have been a radio, but it had words painted on it with what must have been a fine brush: WEBSTER-CHICAGO.

The device.

She had the little thing for reference, and now she had to find the big one. The Ellinghams had so much stuff—hundreds and thousands of things, but nothing mattered right now except this thing. She worked methodically, starting on the first shelf that contained office materials. She pulled down one after another, sneezing into documents, hauling down old phone directories, staining her fingertips with dust and muck. She climbed the metal shelving when it was high, not really testing to see if it could hold her. The thing had to be found.