The Hand on the Wall(11)

Come see nothing. Have a noise. Dancing is mandatory and forbidden. Everything is yum.

Burlington Art Collective Action House

Every Saturday night, 9:00 p.m.

You are the ticket

There was a picture of a person painted gold and blue playing a violin with a carving knife, another person with cardboard boxes on their feet and fists, and, in the background, holding a saxophone . . .

Was Ellie.





April 4, 1936


ELLINGHAM ACADEMY WAS RICH IN DYNAMITE.

There were boxes of it piled high, beautiful, dull beige sticks with warnings on the side. Dynamite to blast rocks and flatten mountain surfaces. Dynamite for tunnels. Dynamite ruled her heart. Not Eddie. Dynamite.

When she’d first arrived, Albert Ellingham teased her with a stick and then laughed at her interest. After that, Francis kept watch. There was less of it now that most of the campus was built, but every once in a while she would hear a workman say the word, and then she would trail along behind him. It was during one of these walks that she heard someone inquire about what to do with some bits of wood.

“Throw them down the hole,” his coworker replied.

She watched as the man went over to a statue. A moment later, he sat on the ground and was lowering himself into an opening.

Francis immediately investigated when the coast was clear. It took her some time to work out where the man had gone. Just under the statue, there was a bit of rock. This, she was sure, was a hatch in disguise. It took her some time to work out how it opened—Albert Ellingham liked his games and architectural jokes. She found it and the rock dropped, revealing an opening and a wooden ladder to aid her descent.

The space she entered had the look of an unfinished project—much like the time Francis’s mother decided she wanted a music room before she remembered that she neither played nor particularly liked music. The half-finished idea, the first blows of the chisel before the sculptor decided that the subject and the stone were not to their liking . . . rich people did this. They left things unmade.

This project was grander in scale than her mother’s music room. The first part of the space was hollowed out and walled up in rough rock to look like a cave. This space narrowed at the end and turned. There was a rough doorway made of rock. Once she passed through this, she found herself in an underground wonderland—a grotto. There was a vast ditch dug out, about six feet deep. Inside of this there were bags of concrete and piles of brick waiting to be used. Along the back wall was a fresco, that Eddie would later identify as being a painting of the Valkyrie. In the far corner, there was a boat in the shape of a swan, painted in gold and red and green, which was tipped over on its side. Half-constructed stalagmites and stalactites lined the area, so it looked like a mouth full of broken teeth. There was garbage strewn about the place—beer bottles, broken shovels, cigarette packs.

For months, the rock had been frozen over, but now the ground was yielding and Francis could introduce Eddie to the lair. They slipped into the grotto several times a week to go about their secret activities. There were the physical ones, of course; the grotto’s privacy was also very useful when working on their plan.

On the day they decided to leave Ellingham for good, it would be Eddie’s job to get the guns. Shotguns were easy to get—there were loads of them stored around the school. Francis would see to the dynamite. They would steal a car from the garage behind the Great House to make their initial escape, but they would quickly get a new one in Burlington. They got maps and spread them out on the ground of the grotto, plotting their route out of Vermont. They would go south through New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky . . . cut through coal country. Start with small towns. Get in at night—blow the safe. No bloodshed if they could avoid it. Keep going until they got to California, and then . . .

. . . jump off, maybe. Even Bonnie and Clyde hit the end of the road down there in Louisiana, when the cops ambushed and filled their Ford Deluxe with bullets until it was more hole than car. Bonnie and Clyde got it. They were poets, Eddie said, and they wrote with bullets.

All of this planning went into Francis’s diary: possible routes, homemade explosives, tricks she learned from reading true-crime magazines.

On this April afternoon, Francis and Eddie had come down into their secret place once more. Eddie set up a ring of candles on the ground and drew a pentagram in the dirt. He was always doing things like that—playing at paganism. This affectation annoyed Francis; this was a hideout, not some kind of subterranean temple. But Eddie had to have his fun if she wanted to have hers, so she tolerated it.

“Today,” she said, setting down a bag of supplies, “we play.”

“Oh. I like that.” Eddie rolled himself flat on the ground in the circle and pulled up his shirt a bit. “What game did you have in mind?”

“Today we’re playing Let’s Scare Albert Ellingham.”

“Oh?” Eddie pushed up to his elbows. “Not what I was expecting, but I’m listening.”

“He was rude to me,” Francis said. “When he showed me the dynamite. He laughed at me, as if I couldn’t handle explosives because I’m a girl. So we’re going to have a little fun with him. We’ll make him a riddle. He likes riddles. Only one like this.”

Francis reached into the bag and produced a pile of magazines. She pulled one off the top called Real Detective Stories and opened to a page with a folded corner with a picture of a ransom note made of cutout letters. Eddie rolled onto his stomach to examine the magazine.