The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(41)

He leaned down and pulled on the collar of his Slipknot T-shirt with his gloved fingers. There was a small object pinned to it. It was a Mickey Mouse enamel pin.

“This is a retired one-year-service pin,” he said. “I collect them. I have about a hundred.”

He stood back up.

“It’s why I don’t have any tattoos,” he said. “Cast members can’t have visible tattoos.”

“You want to be a cast member?” Stevie said. “Like, play Mickey?”

“All staff are called cast members,” he said. “I mean, eventually I want to be an Imagineer, but I’d like to start by working the park at the visitor level. What’s the first incision?”

As Stevie stepped out of the building, still smelling of dissection, she found David sitting, waiting for her, wearing a pair of sunglasses and looking smug.

“Hello, Scooby,” he said. “Have you had any brain waves?”

Stevie had conferred with him the night before, saying that she had looked in the basement. The basement hadn’t really advanced her knowledge.

“I told you,” she said. “It seems clear she went down through the passage, grabbed some stuff to get up to the window, and then climbed out.”

“Which we know,” he said. “I guess I’m just surprised she didn’t tell me there was an escape panel in the wall over at the Great House. We shared that kind of thing.”

“Do you know other places?” Stevie asked.

“I know all kinds of things,” he said with a smile. “Maybe, if you’re good, I’ll share. But the point is, how does she go out the window and then vanish into thin air? For all the reasons I said?”

“So what do you think?” Stevie said. “If you were her?”

“Maybe she hid that night,” he said. “That’s been my feeling all along. I think she hid until she could figure out what to do. Lots of places she could have hid. But they locked shit down after that, that’s what keeps getting me. No coat, no phone. I don’t know. She used a phone somewhere. I just don’t get it and can’t get it. But . . . I guess I should go to calc.”

“You’re going to calc?” Stevie said.

“I make the occasional appearance,” he replied. “Keeps Shorty on his toes. Dr. Short loves me. Everyone loves me. I’m lovable.”

He lifted his sunglasses and winked at her, then spun to head to class.

What the hell did that mean? Clearly, they were friends again. Or David felt they were.

She shook off her confusion and headed to the Great House. She had work to do.

The Ellingham attic was a place of true magic. It was perhaps the most private location on campus, this cavern above it all, its expanse as large as the footprint of the Great House. It was shrouded in half-light through the blinds. This is where the detritus of Ellingham life had ended up, here on all of these metal shelving racks. Stevie walked among them again, letting the quiet seep over her. It smelled faintly of dust, but this was a fine, storied dust, gently trapped in velvets, resting like new snow on mirrors. Everything here was trapped in time.

A lot of it, Stevie remembered as she walked around to reacclimatize herself, was junk, really. Good junk, but junk. There were boxes of doorknobs. Stacks of plates. Boxes of old uniforms. Some things she had been wanting to revisit, like the aisle that contained the old items from Albert Ellingham’s office—the things that hadn’t really mattered enough to send on to any museum or archive. There were some telephones and cords, unused papers and slips. She dug into one of the boxes, where she had found the Western Union slip with the riddle that Albert Ellingham had written on the day he died:

Where do you look for someone who’s never really there?

Always on a staircase but never on a stair

She dug around in this box again, eying her notepad to see if anything Fenton wanted might be in here. The box contained things like paperweights, staples, old letterhead, some little boxes marked in Smith Corona typewriter ribbon, F. B. Bridges finest-quality pen tips, Webster-Chicago Recording Wire, paper rolls for a Borough’s Adding Machine . . . all these products that must have been something once, something you’d find everywhere, that meant nothing now. They were obsolete.

She sat down on the floor and read through the notepad that Fenton had given her. There were 307 items she wanted Stevie to check. Some would be relatively easy and quick—checking which rooms had connecting doors, confirming colors and materials and patterns. Some would require reading through the many volumes of household records. What struck Stevie was how mundane, even stupid, these details were. Or, at least, that’s how they seemed. But detection, and maybe book writing, required research, and details mattered.

She opened a document on her laptop and worked out a rough plan of attack, bundling the items into groups that she could search for at the same time. With a little effort, she got them into seven lists, grouped by type. This kind of work soothed her and got her out of her head. Break it down, put it in order, make a list. Soon, Fenton’s sloppy notes were in a clean format. She decided to start on the first list right then and there, and pulled down several volumes of household records.

The records contained all the daily workings of the Ellingham house: groceries and supplies ordered, meals served, tasks accomplished. Meat came on Mondays and Thursdays, fish four times a week, and the dairy made massive deliveries every day. Oranges and lemons were special ordered from Florida in the winter. Groceries, vegetables, and household goods came in sometimes three times a day. Cleaning was a massive, ongoing process. Aside from the regular house staff, local people came in by the truckload to scrub windows and patios, to polish the miles of rosewood, to dust the mountains of marble, to clean out fireplaces and cut and stack wood, to pack the icehouses, to repair anything that needed mending. There was the outdoor staff as well—a small army of gardeners to plant and weed and water and coax life out of the side of the mountain. All of this, plus the hundreds more who were working to finish the school. It became crystal clear just how much Ellingham Academy must have meant to the local people. Everyone must have worked there at one time or another. Everyone sold them things. Businesses depended on this strange man and his school in the middle of nowhere. It was so much effort for so few people, and at the same time, Albert Ellingham became the source of so much. An attack on him would have been an attack on everyone.