The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(32)

She assumed this was a made-up thing, but one day she was sitting on the lawn reading Real Detective when she saw the man who was always hanging around, the one everyone knew was a cop. His name was George Marsh. He’d been all over the papers when he stopped a bomb from going off in Albert Ellingham’s car—Frankie always read stories about bombs. Now he seemed to be Ellingham’s private bodyguard. He was walking toward the Great House when she called out to him, making sure to use the purest form of her tony New York voice.

“Aren’t you a policeman?” she asked.

Mr. Marsh had come over to her, looking bemused.

“I am,” he said. “Or, I used to be. I work for the FBI.”

“Oh, that must be so exciting! You must have seen all sorts of things. Tell me, do real criminals send notes like this?”

She held up her magazine, open to a page that showed such a note. He smiled.

“I’m surprised you read this kind of thing. Doesn’t seem very Ellingham Academy.”

“Oh,” she said. “I love it. This story is about a kidnapping. Have you ever worked on a kidnapping?”

“Once,” he said. “They’re not all that common.”

“What was it?”

“A banker’s wife,” he said. “Kidnapped while leaving her bridge club.”

“Was there a ransom letter?”

“A call,” he said. “Not a letter. They wanted fifty thousand dollars.”

“What happened?” Frankie said, making sure to widen her eyes and look as innocent as possible.

“The banker paid. She never came home. Turns out she’d run off with her tennis instructor and the fifty grand was for them. We tracked them down in Miami.”

He stubbed out his cigarette on the ground.

“Crank letters are often pretty dull,” he said. “Once in a while you get a live one. One like that, with all those cut-out letters? You’d remember one like that. But I’ll get in trouble with the management if I stand here talking about crime when you’re supposed to be studying. Looks like you’ve got a serious book under that magazine.”

He was correct. Francis had a textbook under the magazine. She was doing both.

“Organic chemistry,” she replied.

“Better you than me, kid. I never had the brains for that.”

He grinned and tipped his hat to her and continued on to the house. Frankie chewed the end of her pencil.

You’d remember one like that.

The idea came into her head at that moment. What if they sent him a letter? It was a joke at first. They’d never really send Albert Ellingham a note like this. But the longer she turned the idea over, the more it gained mass and form. The thing could be done—it just had to be done carefully and with style. Why not rattle the old boy’s chain? Why not give him a little taste of her spark?

When she told Edward the idea that night, he loved it at once. He called it Dadaesque. And being Edward, he elaborated on it. Made it a poem.

“Poetic justice,” he said, before kissing her.

Edward showed her a poem by Dorothy Parker that they modeled their work on. There were so many lovely ways to describe fiendish things. Edward added a ha ha at the end. It had to be signed, and this was the final flourish.

“It has to be truly devious,” Frankie said.

“Perfect!” Edward added this to the draft. Truly, Devious.

For the actual construction of the letter, they lay together on the floor of the empty, newly constructed swimming pool, smoking and picking out letters. The paper was from a notepad Frankie brought from New York—basic, household stuff. They wore gloves and used tweezers, applying each letter carefully, tilting some, spacing them irregularly.

When the letter was complete, Frankie finished off the plan. She paid one of the day laborers to dump a pile of her mail into a Burlington postbox, saying they were personal letters and that the staff at the school went through their mail. For a dollar, her mail got the right postmark on the right date, placing them nowhere near the scene.

A beautiful piece of criminal art.

But now that letter had been swept into something else, something that had taken Iris and Alice Ellingham. And what about Dottie Epstein? These were the things Francis wondered about as she spent a sleepless night on the sofa. Would it be seen as a joke? Would it be traced?

The man with the shotgun sat by the door all night. He did not sleep. Neither did Miss Nelson, who spent the night moving around silently, bringing things down from her room in bags, going through paperwork. She cast only the occasional look at Francis, who gave up and nodded off.

At daybreak the other girls were awoken and told to dress.

“What’s happening?” said Gertie, scuffing out in her heeled slippers.

“Nothing to worry about,” Miss Nelson said stiffly. “A bomb threat was made. Nothing will happen, but for safety’s sake you’re all being sent away from campus.”

There were cries and shouts and excitement about this change in routine. There was a rush for the bathroom and dresses and coats. What would they bring? Would there be breakfast? In the melee, Francis stole down to her room and slipped inside. There were things she would need, things that were concealed in her room, things she could not leave behind. She got next to her bureau and began to push. When she had moved it about a foot, she got down on the floor with a nail file and was about to start working the skirting loose, when Miss Nelson was in the doorway.