The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(26)

The way to handle a scene was to start wide and work your way in, so that’s what Stevie did. She walked around the edge of the room first, looking at the writings and drawings, checking in the drawers and closets to see if anything had been left behind. The bureau top still had a thick covering of makeup dust and wax, as did the bedside stand.

Stevie opened the closet door. There was nothing but a crumpled plastic shopping bag. When she had satisfied herself that the room itself had nothing to tell her, she went to the boxes and had a careful look-through. The top one contained clothes, as David said—Ellie’s thrift-store finds and Parisian punk. Balled-up vintage T-shirts, flowing hippie pants covered in paint, objects that defied definition. The next box contained what appeared to be the used bedding stripped off the bed, and the box below that, towels and bath supplies. Stevie looked through Ellie’s mix of store-brand shower gels and shampoos and her French body oils before putting everything back in the boxes.

“Anything?” David said from the window. “How are the little gray cells?”

She waved him off.

This room had contained everything of Ellie’s here at Ellingham. She’d had the magic tin in this room. Stevie had to try harder. What did this space tell her about Element Walker?

Stevie got down on the floor on her stomach and rested her chin in her hands. Old glitter still sparkled from the floorboards, and bits of feather were snagged on splintered pieces of the wood. Down here, she could smell Ellie’s incense, the endless incense she burned against the school rules.

“No fires, Ellie,” Stevie said out loud.

“What?” David said from the window.

“The first thing I heard about Ellie on the first day, before you got here. You were late and we were having the orientation talk thing . . .”

Stevie scanned the room from her vantage point—a vista of dust bunnies.

“Pix said to her, ‘No fires, Ellie.’ Ellie must have caused a fire?”

“Oh, yeah. Last year. She knocked a candle over.”

“In here?”

“Yeah. In here.”

“And yet she can’t light a match,” Stevie said, mostly to herself. She pushed herself back up to her knees. Where do you look for Ellie, the smoker who can’t light a match? Albert Ellingham was trying to find people too—he was always looking for his lost daughter. All of this was about his lost daughter. And now there was another lost daughter on the mountain.

Against a box by the door, Stevie saw Roota, Ellie’s beloved saxophone. Ellie could not play the saxophone, but that never stopped her. She had purchased Roota with the money Hayes gave her to write The End of It All, and that money came from Hayes’s ex-girlfriend Gretchen. The day Stevie met Ellie, she was playing Roota in the tub at the end of the hall while dying her dress, and herself, pink. It was there that Stevie discovered the bits of metal under the tub, the ones that had marked Hayes’s computer when Ellie stashed it there.

So much of this came down to Roota.

Stevie went over and picked up the saxophone. That’s when she saw it—a scorch mark leading up to the wall. The mark had been scrubbed over, painted away. And, something else. Something wasn’t right in that little patch of the room.

“Don’t you think it’s weird about the matches?” Stevie said, getting down to look at the wall.

“That’s why I said it.”

“No,” Stevie said. “You said it to explain to me why you didn’t think she would do well alone in the woods. Don’t you think that’s odd? Ellie’s an artist. She’s good with her hands.”

It looked like something had fallen—there was one dark mark that stretched out. But the weird thing was that something about the wall was . . . uneven? She got right up to it and ran her hand along it to the molding between the wall and the floor. There was a gap. A tiny, tiny gap, a few millimeters.

“Pass me my bag,” she said to David.

He pushed her bag in her direction. She yanked it over and shuffled through it until she found a pen. She pulled off the cap and used it to pry into the space. David made his way over to her and perched next to her, sitting on his heels.

“Turn on your phone flashlight,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said impatiently. “Flashlight.”

He turned on the flashlight function. By now, Stevie had wiggled the board free. It gave rather easily. It had been pulled loose before, clearly. Behind it was a hole in the base of the wall, about the size of a fist.

David had no snark now. He silently handed her the flashlight. Before she took it, she reached into the front pocket of her bag and pulled out a pair of blue nitrile gloves and snapped them on.

“Really?” he said. “You carry crime-scene gloves?”

“You can get them in any drugstore,” she said, taking the phone from him. “Treat yourself.”

She flattened herself on the floor as best she could and turned her head to the side to get a view into the space. It appeared to be a shallow space, dark, webby. She positioned the phone’s light to get the best illumination she could and reached in, slowly, in case there were wires or sharp edges. She poked finger by finger until she hit the back of the space. It was about as long as her hand. Almost big enough for the tin but not quite.

She lifted her neck and stretched it, then reached her fingers up.