The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(42)

It certainly made a kind of sense that someone would have wanted Anton Vorachek dead. People would have known the family, depended on them. And so many people would have had a look at at least part of the grounds. They would not have known the tunnels, but the ice man would have known the basement, the deliveryman the kitchen, the cleaners would have seen the interior of the house. People talked.

Stevie shut her computer and closed her eyes. A feather. A bit of beaded cloth. A lipstick. A pair of would-be gangsters. What did it all mean? Did Francis and Edward talk to someone? Did they work with someone from the outside?

The answers were not available yet.

She dusted herself off and glanced around again. There were old friends to visit. Somewhere around here was a box of newspapers that Albert Ellingham had buried in the tunnel—it had just been excavated. They might contain something useful. She could not find it. She went on to the end of the room, to the attic’s greatest treasure. It was a massive mound, about eight feet across, covered in a sheet. She pulled this off gingerly.

Underneath was another Great House, an exact copy. This had been made for Alice Ellingham after her disappearance. It sat here, gathering dust, waiting for her return. She reached around to find the latch and swung it open, examining the rooms inside as they had existed in the 1930s. There were cooks in the kitchen, working with tiny pots. Iris’s bedroom was there, her bed made in small satin bed linens, her dresser set with little brushes and perfume bottles. Stevie looked down on the scene like a goddess, examining the old bedrooms, the rustic bathrooms with their tiny tiles. And there was Albert Ellingham’s office, with copies of his chairs, his desks, his rugs, and even some of the very things she had just been looking at.

There was even a doll of him. Stevie picked him up. The jointed china bent to her will. His face was painted with a benevolent smile. There was something profoundly disturbing about the dollhouse. Perhaps that was why it had never been displayed.

It was getting darker now. The attic had fallen into shadow. It was probably time to go to dinner. She replaced the doll. On her way out, she looked out the west-facing window toward the maintenance shed and the small faculty parking lot. There were just two very expensive cars down there. Doctor Quinn was walking toward one of them, a red sports car of some kind, switching out her glasses. It seemed fitting that she would drive something that looked like it should be zipping along some European mountain road, or perhaps the coastline of Nice. But the parking lot was not the real view. From here, she could see into the far distance, the mountains. What had it taken to build this place? To take an unbroken mountaintop that no one could live on and build a tiny empire? Albert Ellingham was obsessed with gods and goddesses. Was he trying to make his own Olympus, to own a piece of earth and sky?

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out. It was a text from an unknown number.

Hope things are going well. —EK

Edward King, just letting her know that he was here. That he was keeping tabs. The text felt as palpable as a hand on the shoulder. She had not given him her number, but that was the whole point—he was telling her he did not need to ask for this information. It was his to take.

“You want to play?” she asked the phone.

But she had no move to make against him. The only thing she could do was work down this list, keep working her leads. He didn’t own her—he had simply borrowed a part of her.

That was what she was going to keep telling herself.





12


HALLOWEEN, THE SEASON AND THEN THE DATE, CREPT SLOWLY UP ON the Ellingham campus. The scenery was repainted each evening, the leaves more gold than green. Some of the vines that snaked up the buildings turned a shocking red. Pumpkins began to appear in windows and doorways and nooks. The nights reached into the days with long fingers, dragging back time. Stevie fell back into the ways of Ellingham, and Ellingham fell back into her. Her room felt more snug. It smelled more familiar, of her comforter and Ellingham laundry detergent (they had a service—your laundry went out dirty in a bag and came back clean and folded), like the old smoke from the fire in the common room.

She tried to catch up with her classes, and for maybe a week she believed that she might even be able to do it. This confidence largely came from a one-night sprint doing Spanish modules until three in the morning. The burst left her feeling academic, maybe brilliant, maybe an unsung genius of her time. The euphoria came crashing down when she realized she was missing entire systems in anatomy, was four novels behind in English, and her history paper on the Harding presidency was something that would never really be written. Its existence was a little concept joke.

She had, however, made progress with Fenton’s requests. She had been doing long hours in the attic, going over the tedium of the list. Stevie did not know she could be bored by details about the Ellingham case, but Fenton had accomplished it.

Now, on Halloween morning, she was on the coach again, returning with the first properly completed piece of work she had done at her entire time at Ellingham. It was good to do something right.

Before going to Burlington, Stevie had to assure Janelle that she would be back in time for that night’s Halloween party. Stevie had always been Halloween ambivalent. There were many positive things about Halloween—true-crime shows always got an extra bump, other shows pulled out their murder-mystery episodes, and slinking around in the dark was generally more acceptable. But she could never get on board with the costumes. There was the first problem: being “cute.” That had been the message her whole life. As a child, Halloween was that day Stevie was stuffed into a Disney princess outfit against her will. “You look so cute,” her mom would say, as she safety-pinned the thin polyester Belle dress to the layer of warm clothes she had on underneath. “Don’t you want to be a princess?”