The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious #2)(84)

Which is why she needed to talk to Fenton. She stared at her phone.

“Why aren’t you ringing?” she said to it.

The phone sat there, blank and unknowing. She picked it up and texted Hunter.

What is your aunt doing? I need to talk to her right now. Can you tell her she needs to call me?

She stared, waiting to see the message go from delivered to read. Nothing.

Breathe.

She got up and walked around in a circle, running her hands through her short hair, feeling the sides of her fingers slide up and lose the strands. What could she do with this thought she was having? How could she check her work?

There was only one thing, of course. Do it like they did in the stories. Gather the suspects, run through the theory of the crime. Not physically, of course. In her mind. She would call down the dead. Line them up. Go point by point.

Around the cupola, she set a ring of imaginary chairs. In two of them, she placed Edward Pierce Davenport and Francis Josephine Crane. Edward had his flashing, poetic good looks. Francis her blunt, raven-colored bob. Francis was dressed in a chevroned twinset, a sweater and skirt. Tight. Wool. Brown and cream. And she wore a beret tilted sharply to the right. Edward was wearing a white shirt, a tie loose at his neck, and an open black vest. He leaned over his knees to look at Stevie, his eyes flashing, while Francis sat back, cool and considered.

“You,” Stevie said to them in a low voice. There was no one in sight, and talking out loud helped. “You wanted to be outlaws.”

“We were outlaws,” said Francis.

“We wrote the poem,” said Edward.

“It’s a stupid poem,” Stevie replied. “I’ve read your poems. You’re a bad poet.”

Edward drew back in offense.

“Your stupid poem messed up the case for years,” Stevie went on, circling the space. “Everybody thought this was about Truly Devious. But there is no Truly Devious.”

“We were playing the game,” Francis said. “Like in the poem. ‘The king was a joker who lived on a hill and he wanted to rule the game. So Frankie and Edward played a hand and things were never the same.’”

“But you wrote that before you left school,” Stevie said, “before it all went wrong. You had no idea what was coming. You had something else in mind.”

Francis smiled quietly.

“So you’re in this,” Stevie said. “But you’re not responsible. No. You weren’t the person who was never there, the one on a staircase but never on a stair. You take the stair away—that’s what he was saying. Take the stair away and you have . . .”

The figure of George Marsh materialized in the seat next to Francis. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a fedora. He was a large man, strongly built, with a square jaw. He folded his arms and stared at Stevie, challenging her.

“You’ve got nothing,” he said. “I’m in the FBI. I know when you have no case.”

“You’re wrong,” she said to him. “You made a mistake. You were seen by someone who loves mysteries.”

One more ghostly figure appeared in the circle—a girl, with curled hair and a gap between her teeth. She wore a plain brown wool dress and slightly crooked glasses. She clutched a book to her chest. She looked at George Marsh for a long moment, then turned to Stevie and nodded. Stevie nodded back.

The dark forms of trees, the pillars of the cupola, the statues all stood in witness.

“Gotcha,” she said to him.

Her phone rang. The phantom circle vaporized into the night, leaving Stevie alone with the flower petals.

“Are you coming back?” Nate said. “What are you doing?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“I solved it.”

A pause.

“Where are you?”

“The cupola.”

“I’m coming over,” he said.

Stevie lowered the phone from her ear and checked her messages again. Hunter had still not read the text. What the hell was Fenton doing? Not now. . . . The kid is there. The kid is there! Sure, people said stuff when they were drunk, but that was so specific, so insistent.

Suddenly her brain was itching.

Of course, people sometimes don’t answer their phones. Sometimes people say strange things. But these were discordant notes. She looked at the cement she was standing on. The remains of Hayes’s tribute crunched under her shoes. Ellie had been under them all along, all that time. They had walked over her. Had she heard them above, heard her friends passing overhead as the air grew stale, as she shivered, as she starved and dehydrated? The fear must have been extreme, beyond anything Stevie would ever know. Did she realize she was dying, down there in the dark? Did she make friends with that dark, with the thing that came for her in it? That insidious friend in the shadows who came to take her pain and fear away . . .

Why was the phone so quiet?

He said to do it. He said whenever. She clenched and unclenched her fists several times, then made the call. Larry answered on the second ring. Stevie could hear the television in the background and a barking dog.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“All right. Talk me through it.”

“I know who kidnapped Alice and Iris,” she said. “I know who killed Dottie.”