The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(79)
There was someone in Larry’s place by the front door—a younger guy with a uniform from a security company, the same one Edward King had hired to install the cameras. He stopped her as she tried to walk in, but Call Me Charles called out from the balcony above.
“Stevie! Could you come up a second?”
Stevie continued up the steps, passing the Ellingham family portrait. Charles was standing on the landing with Jenny Quinn.
“Have you seen David Eastman, by any chance?”
“Yesterday,” she said. “In Burlington.”
“Since then?”
She shook her head. Jenny looked to Charles as if to say, See?
“Has he called you, or . . .”
“No,” she said. “Sorry.”
There was no point in telling him that David said he wasn’t coming back. This was not her circus, and he was not her clown on the loose. All of that business would come crashing down on its own. No need to rush it.
“All right,” he said. “Thanks. You going up to the attic?”
Stevie nodded.
“If he happens to call you, would you tell us?”
“You saw the video,” Jenny said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’ll let you know if I hear from him,” Stevie said, continuing up, and then heading to the back staircase that led to the attic.
Stevie usually noodled around when she first got up here, letting herself have a look around, peering into boxes, pulling things from shelves. Not today. There was one thing she had come here for, and she had to find it. It was in the boxes that contained objects from Albert Ellingham’s office. The dust and smell of old paper itched the inside of her nose. So many things from Albert Ellingham’s office—thumbtacks, petrified rolls of tape that had turned amber with age, yellowed unused notepads with his name embossed on them, scissors, paperweights, letter openers, dried up pots of ink . . .
And a bunch of spools in maroon and white with the words Webster-Chicago written on them. Next to that, on a scrap of paper taped down with yellowed tape were the letters: DE. She dug down farther, pulling something from the bottom of the box that had been meaningless. It was a cardboard box, the packaging for the spools. She could tell because there was a picture of one drawn on the package. It read: WEBSTER-CHICAGO RECORDING WIRE.
“Recording wire,” she said out loud. “Recording wire.”
If this was a recording, the question was, what the hell would play it? If you had tapes, clearly something made them. Stevie spun around in the tight confines of the aisle. The music changed again, and so did Stevie’s thinking. Albert Ellingham had handily made her a guide of things in his house and where they were, and he did it in the form of a giant dollhouse. Stevie hurried to the other end of the attic, pulled off the cover, and carefully opened the dollhouse. She squatted down in front of Albert Ellingham’s tiny office, feeling like a giant looking down on this great man’s life. There were so many recognizable things in there—some had moved around a bit, but surprisingly little had changed in terms of placement and decor. There were the leather chairs, the trophy rugs, the two desks covered in tiny papers and telephones no bigger than Stevie’s thumbnail. The bookshelves were full of impossibly small volumes. There was the globe, the green marble clock on the mantel, and . . .
A cabinet with a weird little object on it, about the size of a computer printer. (Well, this thing was about the size of a matchbox. But it represented something the size of a printer.) She reached down and pinched the thing up. It could have been a radio, but it had words painted on it with what must have been a fine brush: WEBSTER-CHICAGO.
The device.
She had the little thing for reference, and now she had to find the big one. The Ellinghams had so much stuff—hundreds and thousands of things, but nothing mattered right now except this thing. She worked methodically, starting on the first shelf that contained office materials. She pulled down one after another, sneezing into documents, hauling down old phone directories, staining her fingertips with dust and muck. She climbed the metal shelving when it was high, not really testing to see if it could hold her. The thing had to be found.
It took almost two hours. It was in a large cardboard box under a box heavy with records. The machine weighed perhaps thirty pounds. It was silver and maroon, very sleek and art deco, the words WEBSTER-CHICAGO still with a bit of a gleam. She looked at the thick old cords, the spools, the dials. She wasn’t even sure if it was safe to plug in or how to make it work.
Luckily, she knew a genius.
23
“OKAY,” JANELLE SAID, FASTENING HER TOOL BELT. “LET’S HAVE A look at this thing.”
The ancient recorder sat on a cart in the middle of the maintenance shed. Janelle had a look of pure happiness on her face, and a pair of goggles resting on her head.
The one nice thing about the new security setup was that Larry was not there to question the fact that Stevie needed this dusty hunk of garbage from the attic. She said she had been told to bring it over to the maintenance shed to be cleaned up, and the person at the desk nodded. She lugged it over, where Janelle, Nate, and Vi were waiting. There was nothing like a text that said I NEED YOU TO FIX A MACHINE to get Janelle’s attention.
Janelle began by wiping the outside of the machine down delicately with a cloth, then she undid the latch, revealing the four spools of the old mechanism. She got down low to examine the machine, walking around it, peering into the top. Then she closed the box and turned it over.