The Hand on the Wall(15)

They had done some partying here. And so had David. That’s right. He’d told Stevie that he used to come to visit Ellie’s art friends in Burlington. These were those friends. So maybe these people knew something about where he was? Stevie latched on to this.

“I think another friend of ours came here? David?”

“Not recently,” Bath said. “He used to come with Ellie.”

“But not recently?”

“No,” Bath said. “Not since last year.”

So, no leads on Hayes, and no sightings of David. All she had really accomplished was making this girl cry and making herself late.

“Thanks for your time,” Stevie said, getting up and shaking out a sleeping leg. “I’m really glad I got to meet you.”

“You too,” Bath said. “Come back anytime, maybe for cabaret? Or whenever you want. You’re welcome.”

Stevie nodded her thanks and gathered up her things.

“I’m sorry for all you went through,” Bath said as Stevie reached the stairs. “With all this bad stuff. And that thing on your wall.”

Stevie stopped and turned back toward Bath.

“My wall?” she repeated.

“Someone put a message on your wall?” Bath said. “That was horrible. Ellie was so pissed about that.”

Had Bath said, “By the way, I can turn into a butterfly at will, watch!” Stevie would hardly have been more surprised. The night before Hayes died, Stevie had been woken in the middle of the night to see something glowing on her wall—some kind of riddle, written in the style of the Truly Devious riddle. Stevie felt her body physically tremble, partially at the memory of the strange message that had appeared that night.

“That was a dream,” Stevie said, ignoring the fact that her phone was buzzing in her pocket.

“Ellie didn’t seem to think it was a dream.” Bath leaned back, and her tank top revealed a little casual and confident side boob and armpit hair. “She said she was pissed at the person who did it.”

“She knew who did it?”

“Yeah, she seemed to.”

“I thought . . .” Stevie’s mind was racing now. “I thought, if it happened at all, maybe she did it? As a joke?”

“Ellie?” Bath shook her head. “No. Definitely no. Absolutely no. Ellie’s art was participatory,” she said. “She never worked with fear. Her art was consent. Her art was welcoming. She wouldn’t put something up in your space, especially if she thought it would scare you or mock you. It wasn’t her.”

Stevie thought back to Ellie bleating away on Roota, her beloved saxophone. She would not have described the sound as welcoming, but it also wasn’t aggressive. It was raw and unschooled. Fun.

“No,” Stevie said. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”

“That thing about the wall is messed up,” Bath said. “It’s like Belshazzar’s feast.”

“What?”

“The hand on the wall. You know—the writing? From the Bible. My name is Bathsheba. With a name like mine, you end up reading a lot of Bible stories. There’s a big feast and a hand appears on the wall and starts writing something no one can understand.”

Stevie’s knowledge of the Bible was not tremendous. She’d had some Sunday school classes when she was small, but that was mostly coloring pictures of Jesus and singing along while their Sunday school teacher played “Jesus Loves Me” on the piano. And there was a kid named Nick Philby who liked to eat handfuls of grass and would smile his big green teeth. It was not a complete education. But she had a passing memory of words written on a wall.

“Rembrandt used it as a subject,” Bath said, typing something on her laptop. She turned it around to face Stevie. There was an image of a painting—the central figure was a man, leaping up from a table, his face bug-eyed with horror. A hand reached out of a cloud of mist and etched glowing Hebrew characters on the wall.

“The writing on the wall,” Bath said.

The phone was buzzing again. Stevie put the shopping bag on top of it to muffle the noise.

“But she didn’t say who did it?” Stevie asked.

“No. Just that she was mad that someone was trying to mess with you.”

Buzz.

Someone projected a message. It happened. And if it wasn’t Ellie, who? Hayes? Lazy Hayes who did nothing on his own? Who else would even care enough about her to want to get her attention like that?

Only David. David could have done it. And now David was gone.

“Yeah,” Bathsheba said, nodding to herself. “Ellie always talked about the walls.”

“The walls?”

Buzz.

The phone could have stood up and walked over to her at this point. It could have exploded. It would not have mattered.

“Yeah. She said that there was weird shit in the walls at Ellingham. Things and hollow spaces. Stuff. She’d found things. Shit in the walls.”

Shit. In. The. Walls.

She had a clue now, a point of focus. There were things in the walls. She wasn’t sure what that meant, or what she might be looking for. But so much of this had been about walls. Writing on them. Disappearing into them.

And, at some point, a hand had written on her wall.





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