The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(80)

It took almost two hours. It was in a large cardboard box under a box heavy with records. The machine weighed perhaps thirty pounds. It was silver and maroon, very sleek and art deco, the words WEBSTER-CHICAGO still with a bit of a gleam. She looked at the thick old cords, the spools, the dials. She wasn’t even sure if it was safe to plug in or how to make it work.

Luckily, she knew a genius.





23


“OKAY,” JANELLE SAID, FASTENING HER TOOL BELT. “LET’S HAVE A look at this thing.”

The ancient recorder sat on a cart in the middle of the maintenance shed. Janelle had a look of pure happiness on her face, and a pair of goggles resting on her head.

The one nice thing about the new security setup was that Larry was not there to question the fact that Stevie needed this dusty hunk of garbage from the attic. She said she had been told to bring it over to the maintenance shed to be cleaned up, and the person at the desk nodded. She lugged it over, where Janelle, Nate, and Vi were waiting. There was nothing like a text that said I NEED YOU TO FIX A MACHINE to get Janelle’s attention.

Janelle began by wiping the outside of the machine down delicately with a cloth, then she undid the latch, revealing the four spools of the old mechanism. She got down low to examine the machine, walking around it, peering into the top. Then she closed the box and turned it over.

“This casing has to come off,” she said, going over to a wall of tools and picking up a cordless drill that sat in a charger.

Nate was cross-legged on the floor, looking at his phone. Vi was sitting on a pile of wood, gazing at their girlfriend with an undisguised You look hot with your tools look. Stevie fidgeted, sometimes leaning against the wall or sitting next to Nate or walking to the door. More than once she crossed the room to where the dry ice container had been, the one that had contained the substance that caused Hayes’s death. It had been taken away, possibly for good or maybe stashed somewhere else. A few loose rakes and shovels leaned against the wall in the spot.

There was the quick bzzzzzzzt of the drill as Janelle took out the screws that held the casing.

“It’s going to snow in a few days,” Nate said, looking up from his phone. “A lot. Some kind of monster blizzard is coming.”

“Oh, good!” Janelle said, setting the drill down on the floor. “I love snow. Bet it’s amazing up here.”

“Do you like a lot of snow?” Nate asked.

“Yes, but define ‘a lot.’ I’m from Chicago. It snows there.”

“Three feet. Possibly more with drifts.”

“That . . . is a lot of snow,” Janelle said approvingly. “You probably don’t like snow, right?”

“Oh, I like it,” Nate said. “Snow makes it socially acceptable to stay in.”

Janelle’s laugh rang from one end of the workshop to the other as she carefully turned the machine over and lifted off the casing, revealing the naked mechanism underneath. It was a gray-and-brown mess of spools and wires and grungy metal places.

“Pretty girl,” Janelle said. “Dirty girl. First thing, she needs a cleaning.”

“You think you can get it to work?”

“You gotta have a little patience,” Janelle said, lowering the goggles over her eyes. “I have to do my thing. I’m going to blast it with some air and clean it out.”

She retrieved something that looked like a clunky toy gun with a slender, hummingbird beak of a barrel. She poked it into the machine and began shooting air into it, releasing little puffs of dust and debris.

“Okay,” Janelle said, pushing the goggles back and stuffing the air gun into her belt. “This looks like it’s been preserved pretty well. I think what I need to do is switch out these capacitors and maybe wire on a new power cord. I have capacitors in my supply box, and I’ll find a cord and strip it down, wire it in.”

This was all having an effect on Vi, whose eyes had almost turned to heart shapes.

“Love is in the air,” Nate said quietly. “Love may be on top of your machine in a minute.”

After about an hour of work, Janelle replaced the casing on the machine.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see how this goes.”

She turned one of the dials and the reels began to spin. Stevie and Nate jumped from their places on the floor.

“You did it?” Stevie said. “Seriously?”

“Of course I did it,” Janelle said, reaching into her bra and producing a lip gloss, which she applied without looking. “I’m the queen of the machine.”

Vi wrapped themselves around Janelle.

“Okay,” Stevie said, handing over the wire. “How does this work?”

“Yeah, I was looking that up,” Vi said, detaching themselves from Janelle. “People collect these. Lots of tutorials. This is the best one I could find.”

They passed their phone over to Janelle, who watched a video. She picked up the wire and spooled it, consulting with the video a few times.

“I think that’s it,” she said. “I don’t want to record over it. I think that’s it. Want to try it?”

Stevie nodded and Janelle flipped the switch. The wire turned on the spools. For a moment, there was only a crackling and hissing noise, then a few muffled booms, as if something was hitting a microphone. And then . . . a voice. Deep, male. Albert Ellingham, unmistakably.