The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(15)

“Tell her about the screaming,” Janelle said. “Because I can’t.”

“The screaming?” Stevie repeated.

“The other morning he started something called ‘screaming meditation,’” Nate said. “Guess what happens in screaming meditation? Did you guess screaming? For fifteen minutes? Because that’s what happens in screaming meditation. Fifteen. Minutes. Outside. At five in the morning. Do you know what happens when someone screams outside for fifteen minutes at five in the morning at a remote location in the mountains, especially after a . . .”

The implied dot dot dot was “student dies in a terrible accident or maybe murder and another one goes missing.”

“When security got to him he claimed it was his new religion and that it is something he needs to do every morning now as a way to talk to the sun.”

So this is what Edward King had been referring to.

“Sometimes,” Nate went on, tapping the books into place so that the spines lined up perfectly, “he sleeps on the roof. Or somewhere else. Sometimes the green.”

“Naked,” Janelle added. “He sleeps on the green naked.”

“Or in classrooms,” Nate said. “Someone said they went into differential equations and he was asleep in the corner of the room under a Pokémon comforter.”

“Your boy has not been well,” Janelle said. “Nothing was right here without you. But now you’re back! Everything will be okay again.”

Nate left not long afterward so that Janelle and Stevie could talk. Stevie found she was exhausted, though. Earlier that evening, she had been at the Funky Munkee. Now she was back at Ellingham. Everything that happened in between made no sense. Sensing that Stevie needed to sleep, Janelle made up the bed to her personal satisfaction and watched as Stevie drank a full bottle of water to help her readjust to the altitude. Then she put a second bottle by Stevie’s bedside.

“Vi’s going to meet us at brunch tomorrow,” she said. “Get some rest. I’m right next door if you need me.”

Janelle knew that Stevie sometimes had panic attacks at night.

“Thanks,” Stevie said, “for everything.”

When Janelle was gone, Stevie stood at her window for a long time, looking out at the dark and her own reflection. Like the stairs, the window came with a memory. The night before Hayes died, she had a dream. At least, she was pretty sure it was a dream. She remembered light, and looking at her wall, and seeing words on her wall, like the Truly Devious lettering. She had not been able to make them all out and the message was scrambled in her mind. Stevie had awakened with a jolt and rolled out of bed, crawled along the floor to this very window. She had pushed a heavy textbook out of it, hoping to strike anyone who was lurking underneath, but no one was.

It never made any sense that anyone would project a message like that on her wall. It was too much work, making the image, getting something to project it, hiding in the dark. People did complicated things at Ellingham, but there was no one she could think of who would do something that elaborate to her. . . .

Except maybe David. David was probably capable of an elaborate joke. But he liked her, as it turned out, so why do it?

And this had happened right before Hayes died. What were the chances?

Janelle had spoken to her that night, talked her through it, about dreams that were so vivid they completely mimicked reality. It was why some people think they see ghosts in the night, or figures by their bed. The space between sleep and consciousness can be thin. And Stevie had been fully immersed in the Ellingham story on that day, and had actually gone into the tunnel where the kidnappers had been. Her brain was full of the crime and was projecting it back at her.

Stevie turned back and looked at the place on the wall where the message had been, even if only in her mind. What had it said? Riddle, riddle on the wall . . . something murder. Something about a body in a field . . . something Alice.

This was the wall that she had shared with Ellie. Minerva was so empty, so doomed. Dottie Epstein and Hayes Major were dead, and Element Walker was on the run.

Was it Ellie? Was the note some kind of art thing? Did it have something to do with the trick she played on Hayes with the dry ice? Did Ellie have a broken sense of humor, or did she secretly hate everyone?

Ellie didn’t seem like the hating kind, but you never knew.

Stevie crossed the room and went to her bag, which was resting on the floor in the corner of the room, and removed the tin. When she reached inside this time, she wanted only one of the objects—the photographs. One in particular. It was thicker than the others, because it was actually stuck to another photo. What was between the photos was the key.

It was a word.

A single word, cut out of a magazine. The word US.

This word, these two letters stuck between some old photos, was the reason Stevie had to be here, because this word was the first clue in eighty years. The Ellingham case was often called the Truly Devious case, because the family had received a letter that week, informing of the crime to come. It was composed of cut-out letters from magazines and newspapers. Stevie, like any person devoted to the case, could recite it by heart:





What she had found in Ellie’s room was proof that there were students on the campus who loved gangsters, who wrote poetry about taking down the king on the hill who liked to play games, and who were cutting words out of magazines and gluing them into things. In short, she had found that Truly Devious could have been a student here at Ellingham. And if Truly Devious could have been a student, then a student could take them down, even all these years later.