The Hand on the Wall(17)

“People keep dying here?” Germaine said.

Stevie let this go and focused on the warm lights of the art barn up ahead.

“You want a story?” she said. “Janelle’s going to test-run her machine. Report on that.”

“I don’t do human interest,” Germaine said. “What about David? Everyone’s saying he went home for some family thing, but that seems like bullshit. You guys are dating or something, right? Where is he?”

“I thought you just said you don’t do human interest,” Stevie replied, walking faster.

“I don’t. He got beaten up, and now he’s gone, and no one really knows where. Here, that can mean something. The last person who just went away ended up dead in the tunnel. So where is he? Do you know?”

“No idea,” Stevie said.

“And he was friends with Ellie. Do you think David could be in a tunnel too?”

Stevie tapped her ID on the door panel and pushed her way into the art barn silently, leaving Germaine in the dark.

The workroom in the art barn was now home to a large, strange contraption. Vi was hanging a wooden sign that read “RUBE’S DINER,” while Janelle moved around, checking things with a level. Janelle had taken the budget the school had granted her and also raided the castaways from the dining hall to create her machine. The poles had been put into place to make a frame that held gently tipped shelving, on which stacks of plates and cups and been glued into carefully calculated arrangements. There were small tables, deliberately angled chairs with more piles of plates and cups balanced on them. There were several old toasters and a board painted to represent a soda dispenser. Everything was connected by some plastic tubing that looked like the circulatory system of this diner version of a Frankenstein’s monster.

Nate looked up from his computer.

“That was a long talk you had,” he said.

“I went to Burlington.”

“How? They cut off the coaches since David did his beatdown and run.”

“Okay!” Janelle said. “I’m ready to start.”

Vi came over and sat next to Nate and Stevie. Nate looked at Stevie anxiously, but Stevie turned her attention straight ahead.

“Okay,” Janelle said, nervously knotting her hands together. “So I’m going to do my speech and then I’ll run the machine. So. Here we go. The point of engineering is to make something complex into something simple. The point of a Rube Goldberg machine is to make something simple into something complex . . .”

“Why?” Nate said.

“For fun,” Janelle replied. “Because you can. Don’t interrupt. I have to do this. The point of engineering is to make something complex into something simple. The point of a Rube Goldberg machine is to make something simple into something complex. The Rube Goldberg machine started as a comic. Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist who was also an engineer. He created a character called Professor Butts . . . someone’s going to laugh at that, right?”

Vi gave a thumbs-up.

“Okay, I’ll pause for laughter. A character called Professor Butts, who made ridiculous machines to do things like wipe his mouth with a napkin. People liked the comics so much that Rube Goldberg machines became a feature in his comics and then, later, a regular competition. . . .”

Stevie’s mind was already drifting. Was this what murder was? Something simple that became complex?

“. . . the dimensions cannot exceed ten feet by ten feet and can use only one hydraulic . . .”

Who put that message on the wall? What was the point of it? Just to mess with her? If Hayes or David had done it and Ellie knew about it, why hadn’t she told Stevie?

“. . . and this year’s challenge is to break an egg.”

Janelle delicately placed an egg in a small egg cup on a table by the far wall where a white plastic sheet had been strung up.

“So,” Janelle said, returning to the front of the long and winding machine. “Here we go!”

She depressed the lever on one of the toasters, and it popped up a second later, shooting out a piece of plastic bread. This tipped a wooden lever above, which sent a little metal ball rolling down a series of small half-pipes attached to a menu board. The ball kept rolling, continuing over a tray in the hand of a chef figurine. It fell from there, plopping into a bowl on one side of a scale. This raised the opposite side, which triggered the release of another ball.

The machine made so much sense. A seemingly pointless trigger set off the series of events. The ball rolled, knocking each strange little piece into play. Hayes making a video about the Ellingham case. Janelle’s pass being stolen to get the dry ice. The message on the wall. Hayes turning at the last moment on the day they were shooting, saying he had to go back for a minute to do something and never coming back again. Stevie realizing that Ellie had written the show. Ellie running into the walls, then getting into the tunnel and never coming out.

Another ball was triggered, running down the rims of a stack of cups, which tumbled into the soda dispenser. This began pouring liquid into three plastic pitchers. These weighed something down and . . .

Stevie blinked into alertness as three paintball guns fired off at the same time, all pointing at the egg, which exploded in a blast of red, blue, yellow, and albumen.

Vi screamed in delight and jumped up to embrace Janelle.

“That was pretty good,” Nate said.