The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(31)

“There’s a call record.”

“I know, but . . . what if it was wrong somehow?”

“Or what if Ellie did do it?” Stevie said. “She had motive. She had the ability. She could have done it as a goof, to mess with the video. She doesn’t seem like someone who would know all the science. Why would she think that would hurt him?”

“Because that’s not how she was,” David said. “She wouldn’t move hundreds of pounds of dry ice to mess up someone else’s art.”

For the first time, she heard his voice take on a raw edge.

“I’m just saying . . .”

“Look, I get what you did and it makes sense. I’m just telling you. She wouldn’t do that. The one thing Ellie would never do is mess up someone else’s art. That was like her religion. I know things ended kind of weird with us and maybe you don’t trust me, but you have to trust me.”

It was a sudden twist.

“You mean how your dad isn’t dead and is Edward King?” she asked.

“I mean, if you want to get super specific about it. Just so you know, I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you right away. But there were two reasons I didn’t. One, because my dad is Edward King, which means you would hate me. And two, my dad is Edward King, which means everyone would hate me.”

“I didn’t even know he had kids,” Stevie said. “I didn’t know he could mate with humans.”

“Yeah,” David said. “Nature finds a way.”

Had he moved closer? It seemed like he might have. Stevie’s mouth had gone dry. The thing about David was that he was very beautiful—long and lean and damaged and twisted, smiling at her. She saw Edward King’s silhouette in David’s features again. In his smile.

Good job, Stevie. That’s right. Kiss him. That will make him happy.

Stevie stepped back a few feet, repelled by the thought. Her brain could not handle this conflict of input. There was something there, something that pulsed between her and David. And now there was Edward King hanging overhead, almost literally. He even had cameras on them. The thought made her queasy.

“I should have told Nate I was going,” she said. “I’m going to go back . . . tell him.”

David lifted his chin an inch.

“Sure,” he said, with the slightest trace of a smile. “Nate. Yeah. I’ll see you at home.”

He turned and started walking back toward Minerva, his hands in his pockets.

Stevie stood on the path, trying to take in all the new information that shaped her life. She had always wondered how people got to lead interesting lives. Maybe this was how—you set up the conditions, and then you get the events. And maybe those events took you by surprise even if you wanted them to happen, even if you prepared. She had wished so much to work on this case, and now here she was, doing deals with the devil.

Maybe, she wondered, that was what it was like to plan a murder. Maybe you make successive bad deals with yourself that you can’t back out of, until you make one that can never be reversed.





April 14, 1936, 6:00 a.m.


AT THE START, THERE WAS MUCH FRANCIS CRANE ADMIRED ABOUT Albert Ellingham. She was inclined to like a man who built tunnels for no apparent reason. He encouraged her love of chemistry. He instructed the librarian to order whatever crime magazines she wanted to read. Boys and girls took exercise together, took class together, shared meals. He told the staff to turn the other way when students were caught drinking. He liked to play games, and he and Francis had gone toe-to-toe in Monopoly several times.

Her appreciation for the man peaked when he took her on a walk of the property and showed her where they had blasted away the mountain with dynamite. He even took Francis to where the explosives were stored and let her hold a stick in her hands. She tried not to show her excitement, but it must have come through.

“You seem interested,” he said with a laugh. “Go on. Tell me about dynamite.”

“It’s simply nitroglycerine, stabilized and absorbed by diatomaceous earth and sodium carbonate,” Francis said. “Unless you’re using TNT, which is . . .”

“Well!” he said, laughing. “I wasn’t expecting an answer that quickly!”

He reached out to take the stick back, and Francis’s fingers reflexively coiled around it before she told them to release.

“It’s a good thing you’ll never need this,” he said. “You could be dangerous!”

“I might be,” she said.

Albert Ellingham roared with laughter.

“I have to be careful what we’re teaching you,” he said, laughing again. “Your father would murder me if I made you too dangerous to marry.”

That was the moment it all broke for Francis. He had given her dynamite and he had laughed in her face. It was a joke to him, something he would never think of again. But it would be all Francis would think of.

She decided that if he liked games so much, she would play one of her own. It would be a good game too. Edward liked her idea of fun, so they made their great plan together.

The letter hadn’t even been important to the plan. It had been, in Eddie’s words, “a bit of art.” She’d gotten the idea from the true-crime magazines that she loved so much. People in those magazines were always getting kidnapped, and the kidnappers always sent the messages with the cut-out letters.