The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(81)

“Dolores, sit there.”

“Sit here?” A girl’s voice. Dolores Epstein, speaking. Stevie reeled in shock. Dolores was a character, a person from the past, lost. Here she was now, among them, her voice high and clear, with a very thick New York accent.

“Just there. And lean into the microphone a bit,” Albert Ellingham said.

Janelle looked to Stevie with wide, excited eyes.

“Good,” he said. “Now all you have to do is speak normally. I want to ask you a bit about your experiences at Ellingham. I’m making some recordings about the school so people know what kind of work we do up here. Now, Dolores, before I met you you got into all sorts of scrapes, didn’t you?”

“Is this for the radio?” Dottie asked.

“No, no. You can speak freely.”

“I like to look around, that’s all,” she said.

“And that’s a good thing! I was exactly the same way.”

“My uncle is a cop in New York. He says I’m like a second-story man.”

“A second-story man?” Albert Ellingham asked.

“A second-story man is a thief, who, as the name suggests, enters through a second-story window. Slightly more sophisticated than a snatch-and-grabber. But to be honest, it’s my uncle who taught me how to get into places. Police officers know all the tricks. And I’ve always been interested in locks and things like that.”

“What did you think when you first came here? It must be very different from New York.”

“Well, I was frightened, honestly.”

“Of what?”

“I’m used to the city. Not the woods. The woods are scary.”

“The woods are lovely!”

“And dark and deep, as the poet Robert Frost says. When I told my uncle I was coming here, he said it was all right because you have an attic man here.”

“An attic man?” he asked.

“Another colloquialism. What’s above the second story? The attic. My uncle always said cops who could get the drop on the second-story men—that means catch them in the act—needed to be right above them. You have a policeman here from New York. Mr. Marsh. I felt better after that. I like it up here now.”

Albert Ellingham chuckled.

“I’m glad to hear it. And what would you tell the world about Ellingham Academy?”

“Well, I’d say it was the best place I’ve ever been. It takes elements of the system developed by Maria Montessori, though I see elements of the work of John Dewey, who is from here in Burlington, actually, did you know that?”

“I did not. I learn something new every day here at the school. We learn from each other. Like I’ve also just learned about second-story men. Now, let’s talk about what you do every day here. Tell me about your studies. . . .”

Mudge’s voice was suddenly in Stevie’s head. They were looking at the cow’s eye. The one place where all the information goes in, you can’t actually see anything.

There was a kind of flash behind Stevie’s eyes. All the pieces that she had collected and seen over years of reading about this lined up in place. She wanted to move around a little, so she had to keep grabbing them, making sure they didn’t move. She walked quickly to the door. She couldn’t hear anything more, couldn’t talk to anyone or she would lose her grip on it.

“Hey,” Janelle said, stopping the machine. “Where are you . . .”

Stevie waved a hand. The sky had turned a candy-colored pink and the air had a wet, frozen note to it. Good, clear air for thinking. That’s the reason Albert Ellingham had bought this place to begin with—he thought the air was conducive to learning and thinking. Maybe he was right. Once you got used to having a little less oxygen, everything seemed to move a bit faster.

Think, Stevie. What was the thing she was missing? What had she seen?

The Ellingham library stood in stark relief against the pink sky, its spires dark. The library. Dottie left her mark in the library.

Stevie broke out into a run. She blew through the door as Kyoko looked like she was ending her shift for the night. Stevie almost skidded up to her desk.

“Kyoko . . . I need one thing.”

“Can it wait until tomorrow?”

Stevie shook her head.

“The book. Dottie’s book. The Sherlock Holmes.”

“That can’t wait?”

“Please,” she said. “I’ll be so quick. Five minutes. Two minutes.”

Kyoko rolled her eyes a bit, but she reached down and got the keys and opened the back office. Stevie followed her along, past the metal shelving and the boxes, back down to the row where the treasures of 1936 were kept. She removed the sepia-and-white book from the box.

“Be quick, but be careful,” she said, passing it over.

Stevie accepted it like it was a holy object, carrying it over to one of the worktables.

“What do you need this for in such a hurry?” she said.

But Stevie could not hear her. She was busy looking for something she knew she had seen, something so small, a blip . . .

There it was, in A Study in Scarlet. The mark in the book, one rough pencil line: Sherlock said, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”