The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(12)

Going to Ellingham was a little bit like that.

It was remote. You could only get to it by the official shuttle. The letters came and invited you and maybe you never fully understood why. Stevie was returning because of an offer—an offer she could not refuse.

Oh, and there had been a dead body.

Hayes Major could not be forgotten in all of this. Hayes—he of the blond hair and beefy calves and even tan, with his honeyed voice and good cheekbones. Stevie had soon discovered that Hayes’s greatest talent was getting other people to do his work for him—his homework, his papers, his projects, his video series. Hayes had loads of people working for him. He was kind of a jerk.

He had not deserved to die, no matter how it happened. And Stevie wasn’t really sure of that herself. All she knew for sure was that Hayes hadn’t written his own show. She had figured out that Ellie had written it in exchange for five hundred dollars and she had hidden the fact. Stevie had also worked out that Hayes was on Skype with his girlfriend, Beth Brave, at the time he was supposed to have been across campus taking the dry ice that killed him. So, someone took that dry ice. And the most likely person to have done that would have been someone who held something against him, like, say, having written a show for him thinking it would go nowhere and then finding it was going to be made into a movie and maybe worth millions. . . .

But loads of people had things against Hayes. And Ellie grew up on a commune and wore garbage as clothes and didn’t seem to care about money. . . .

Thump, thump. Her heart was going faster. There was no reason to go down this mental road, no reason to revisit the guilt. She had pointed out a fact and Ellie had run away and now the crisis was over and she was going back to Ellingham to finish the job she had started.

Edward King had not accompanied her on this leg of the journey. He’d gotten back in his plane and gone off who-knew-where. The last thing he said to her was “It’s up to you, but it’s probably easier if you don’t mention you came back on my plane. All the school knows is that your parents gave you the green light to return. Your mode of transport might not be popular. Probably best to say you flew and leave it at that.” The minivan that met her at the airport was from a local cab service, and the driver paid her no attention, leaving her alone with her thoughts in the dark. She put in her earbuds and tried to listen to music, then to a true crime show, but she couldn’t concentrate on anything. So she let it go silent.

She knew she should call Janelle and Nate, or at least text them to say she was coming, but she found she was paralyzed. They would have questions and she had no answers yet. She barely understood it herself. So she ran mystery plots through her mind and looked at the rock walls that lined the highway.

The minivan pulled into the rest stop and the driver turned off the engine while they waited for someone from Ellingham to arrive. A blue Toyota soon pulled up beside them. Stevie saw the familiar head of steel-gray hair. Security Larry wasn’t wearing his normal uniform—he was off duty, dressed in jeans and a very Vermonty red-and-black-checked jacket.

“Well,” he said as Stevie stepped out of the minivan. “You made it back.”

“Did you miss me?”

“You’re all I could think about,” he said. There was enough of a soft growl in his voice that told her it was in some part true. While she had caused Larry some headaches (going tunneling, interfering with the investigation into Hayes’s death, doing her own independent investigation, little things like that, no need to dwell on them) she had also won him over with her serious study of the Ellingham case and the fact that she had . . .

Well, she’d led him to Hayes’s dead body. And then led him to the person who may have been responsible.

Larry picked up one of the lumpy bags of Stevie’s dirty clothes and put it in the trunk of the car. Her belongings had been transferred several times now, and they didn’t look any less shabby going into the Toyota. This appeared to be Larry’s personal car—her arrival was too late to send out the Ellingham shuttle.

“What’s been going on since I left?” Stevie said once they were both inside the car. Larry lowered the already muted country music he had playing.

“Everything stopped. School shut down.”

“I knew it,” she said.

Larry pulled out onto the road. It was so much darker here. The suburbs of Pittsburgh had more shops and strip malls, more gas stations, more light in general. Out here, the dark settled over the land until it met the rock or the trees, and then the dark fell over everything. The sky above was dotted with stars. Stevie felt a warm familiarity for the signs along the road, the billboards for ski lodges and maple candy and glassblowing. And there were the road signs along I-89 that she loved the most, the ones that just read MOOSE. She had noticed these when she rode up to Ellingham for the first time, the constant moose, moose, moose signs and yet . . .

No moose.

“Ever see a moose?” she asked.

“Yup,” he said.

“What was it like?”

“Big.”

This was a satisfactory reply. At least the moose was not a lie.

“So now that you’re back,” Larry said, “I assume you’re going to be following the rules a bit more.”

“I always did,” Stevie said. “Maybe just . . .”

“You went into sealed tunnels, where someone died. You cornered a possible murder suspect in your house. . . .”