The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(78)

There was no point in arguing, as much as she wanted to.

“Anything else?” she said.

“No. I will be checking in this time tomorrow. Good-bye.”

“He’s fine, by the way,” she said.

Edward King hung up.

She felt an odd sense of clarity. The clock would strike. Every day counted, and every hour of every day. This time, right now, in the cool of an Ellingham morning, was the most precious thing she had.

She ejected herself from bed (points for effort), yanked off her fuzzy pajama bottoms, and replaced them with a nearly identical pair of gray sweatpants. No shower. The old T-shirt she was wearing (one of her favorites—something she dug out of a box of old crap in the attic) would do. Yes, she still smelled a bit of night funk, but that was fine.

Sometimes detectives smell like night funk.

She snatched up her backpack and put in all she could anticipate needing: phone, charger, computer, tablet, a flashlight. One of her favorite true-crime authors who was trying to solve a murder case from the seventies would do everything she could to immerse herself in the time and the place. Stevie had read that she would make playlists of all the songs that would have been on the radio at the time of the murders, and then she would drive around those neighborhoods listening to those songs to finely tune her mind to the atmosphere. Because it all mattered, she said. You had to feel it, to understand it in every way you could, to get inside of it—and the thing might take over, it might try to rule your life, but it was your case to solve.

She found a 1930s online station and shoved in her earbuds.

The morning was apple-crisp. The air cleaned the body from the inside, scraping out the lungs, pumping cold life into the arteries. (Not veins. Veins return deoxygenated blood to the heart. The arteries were carrying this, swinging up the arch of the aorta, shooting up the carotid, giving her brain all the delicious oxygen candy it wanted.) She turned on the music, and a low swinging sound pumped into her ears. She walked in time with it, letting her foot hit the stones of the path with each beat. Become it. Tune into it. Go back in time through the air, the rhythm.

She would walk the campus once. She would start by going between the houses, wandering through the streets and the snaking pathways. She found herself moving gracefully, straightening her back. If she saw anyone in the distance, she changed her path, moving gently around a tree, turning a corner. The rumor was that Albert Ellingham had designed his pathways by following a cat that was walking the grounds because “Cats know best.” It probably wasn’t true, but you never knew with Albert Ellingham. As she walked her new, musical path, Stevie suddenly had the realization of how right this statement could be. Cats do know best, in many ways. They are hunters, good at tracking, remaining unseen. They can move from the slinking shadows up to the heights and down again. Cats see all the levels, where people generally look straight in front of them.

Who was here? Edward and Frankie, with their gangster cosplay. They had become Truly Devious. But why? Just to play a game back at the game master?

They looked rich. Two rich, bored kids, wanting to be bad. Sort of like a rich boy she knew who had gone and gotten his face punched to gravy last night for no reason she could fathom except making his father notice him. Today wasn’t about David, but the connection made sense. She would use it. Edward and Frankie were acting something out that only they understood. So they sent a letter. But they didn’t get a car and take Iris and Alice, did they? They would have been noticed, surely. And where would they have put Alice? They weren’t the large man out on the dome that night. They didn’t beat up George Marsh, or get a boat to collect a ransom on Lake Champlain. There was no internet then, and barely any phones. You don’t coordinate something like that when you have basically nothing to work with.

So it was a coincidence, maybe. Or someone used that letter, folded it into the plot.

And what about Dottie? Stevie was walking across the base of the green now, past the statues of the Sphinx. Dottie understood myth. She would have known all about the riddle of the Sphinx. She read constantly.

Stevie stopped and looked at the Great House from this, the farthest point you could survey it on the campus. The music had changed to an up-tempo jazz song. This is the kind of music that would have played that weekend before the kidnapping, when the party was going on in the house. The house, the heart of this place, beating with life and song . . .

What had Fenton told her, about the last thing Albert Ellingham said to Mackenzie? “It was on the wire.” Wire? Wireless? Had he heard something on the radio? Was it meaningless? He was just going out for a boat ride. He had no idea he was going to die. He could have been talking about anything.

But . . .

He had been updating his will. The codicil that had long been rumored, what if that was real? What if he had put together a fortune for anyone who could produce his daughter, dead or alive? What if he knew something was about to happen to him? He wrote a riddle. He finalized his business. And he told Mackenzie it was on the wire.

Stevie once went to one of those sushi places where the food comes by on a little conveyor belt. That’s what her mind felt like sometimes—facts floating by on a little track. Sometimes she’d have the urge to reach for one, pick it up, feast on it. The wire.

“The wire,” she said out loud.

She walked toward the house. It seemed to swell as she approached it. The Neptune fountain was switched off for the season, leaving the god of the sea to regard her from his dry perch.