The Vanishing Stair (Truly Devious, #2)(80)

“This casing has to come off,” she said, going over to a wall of tools and picking up a cordless drill that sat in a charger.

Nate was cross-legged on the floor, looking at his phone. Vi was sitting on a pile of wood, gazing at their girlfriend with an undisguised You look hot with your tools look. Stevie fidgeted, sometimes leaning against the wall or sitting next to Nate or walking to the door. More than once she crossed the room to where the dry ice container had been, the one that had contained the substance that caused Hayes’s death. It had been taken away, possibly for good or maybe stashed somewhere else. A few loose rakes and shovels leaned against the wall in the spot.

There was the quick bzzzzzzzt of the drill as Janelle took out the screws that held the casing.

“It’s going to snow in a few days,” Nate said, looking up from his phone. “A lot. Some kind of monster blizzard is coming.”

“Oh, good!” Janelle said, setting the drill down on the floor. “I love snow. Bet it’s amazing up here.”

“Do you like a lot of snow?” Nate asked.

“Yes, but define ‘a lot.’ I’m from Chicago. It snows there.”

“Three feet. Possibly more with drifts.”

“That . . . is a lot of snow,” Janelle said approvingly. “You probably don’t like snow, right?”

“Oh, I like it,” Nate said. “Snow makes it socially acceptable to stay in.”

Janelle’s laugh rang from one end of the workshop to the other as she carefully turned the machine over and lifted off the casing, revealing the naked mechanism underneath. It was a gray-and-brown mess of spools and wires and grungy metal places.

“Pretty girl,” Janelle said. “Dirty girl. First thing, she needs a cleaning.”

“You think you can get it to work?”

“You gotta have a little patience,” Janelle said, lowering the goggles over her eyes. “I have to do my thing. I’m going to blast it with some air and clean it out.”

She retrieved something that looked like a clunky toy gun with a slender, hummingbird beak of a barrel. She poked it into the machine and began shooting air into it, releasing little puffs of dust and debris.

“Okay,” Janelle said, pushing the goggles back and stuffing the air gun into her belt. “This looks like it’s been preserved pretty well. I think what I need to do is switch out these capacitors and maybe wire on a new power cord. I have capacitors in my supply box, and I’ll find a cord and strip it down, wire it in.”

This was all having an effect on Vi, whose eyes had almost turned to heart shapes.

“Love is in the air,” Nate said quietly. “Love may be on top of your machine in a minute.”

After about an hour of work, Janelle replaced the casing on the machine.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see how this goes.”

She turned one of the dials and the reels began to spin. Stevie and Nate jumped from their places on the floor.

“You did it?” Stevie said. “Seriously?”

“Of course I did it,” Janelle said, reaching into her bra and producing a lip gloss, which she applied without looking. “I’m the queen of the machine.”

Vi wrapped themselves around Janelle.

“Okay,” Stevie said, handing over the wire. “How does this work?”

“Yeah, I was looking that up,” Vi said, detaching themselves from Janelle. “People collect these. Lots of tutorials. This is the best one I could find.”

They passed their phone over to Janelle, who watched a video. She picked up the wire and spooled it, consulting with the video a few times.

“I think that’s it,” she said. “I don’t want to record over it. I think that’s it. Want to try it?”

Stevie nodded and Janelle flipped the switch. The wire turned on the spools. For a moment, there was only a crackling and hissing noise, then a few muffled booms, as if something was hitting a microphone. And then . . . a voice. Deep, male. Albert Ellingham, unmistakably.

“Dolores, sit there.”

“Sit here?” A girl’s voice. Dolores Epstein, speaking. Stevie reeled in shock. Dolores was a character, a person from the past, lost. Here she was now, among them, her voice high and clear, with a very thick New York accent.

“Just there. And lean into the microphone a bit,” Albert Ellingham said.

Janelle looked to Stevie with wide, excited eyes.

“Good,” he said. “Now all you have to do is speak normally. I want to ask you a bit about your experiences at Ellingham. I’m making some recordings about the school so people know what kind of work we do up here. Now, Dolores, before I met you you got into all sorts of scrapes, didn’t you?”

“Is this for the radio?” Dottie asked.

“No, no. You can speak freely.”

“I like to look around, that’s all,” she said.

“And that’s a good thing! I was exactly the same way.”

“My uncle is a cop in New York. He says I’m like a second-story man.”

“A second-story man?” Albert Ellingham asked.

“A second-story man is a thief, who, as the name suggests, enters through a second-story window. Slightly more sophisticated than a snatch-and-grabber. But to be honest, it’s my uncle who taught me how to get into places. Police officers know all the tricks. And I’ve always been interested in locks and things like that.”