The Hand on the Wall(19)

It was time to go. It would be dinner soon. She put the photos in her pocket and hurried home to Minerva. Once inside, she considered slipping them under Francis’s door. They belonged to her.

But no. It would be odd to do that. It would give everything away. And for some reason—she needed these for her collection. She went into her room and shut the door, then got down on the floor and pulled back the baseboard.

Francis had told Dottie about using the walls to hide things she didn’t want anyone else to see. The molding came back easily. This was where the rich girls kept their gin and cigarettes. Dottie stored her tin there—her collection of the wonderful things she had found. She tucked them away and stashed the tin back into its space.

She would return the photos at some point, she decided. Soon. Maybe before the end of school.

There would always be time.





6


LAY IT OUT. PUT IT DOWN ON PAPER. WORK IT OUT. WRITE WHAT you remember. Write your first impression, before your memory gets a chance to play with it and switch it around, putting a leg where an arm used to be.

Stevie opened her desk drawer and pulled out a handful of off-brand sticky notes (that she’d nabbed from the Edward King campaign supplies in her parents’ home office). Her wall was currently in use—she had attached several stick-on hooks, so her coat and clothes hung there. She took these down and started putting up the notes. The victims from the 1930s, on yellow ones: Dottie Epstein: head trauma

Iris Ellingham: gunshot

Alice Ellingham: condition unknown

And then, on the other side, people from the present, in light blue: Hayes Major: CO2 poisoning/dry ice Ellie Walker: exposure/dehydration/immurement

Dr. Irene Fenton: house fire

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the six squares, letting her mind go blank and her eyes blurry.

There was a pattern here, something that she wasn’t seeing. She got up and looked at the spines of her mystery books. She pulled one from the shelf—Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was a notorious book when it came out, featuring Hercule Poirot as the detective. Poirot’s method was to use his “little gray cells” to solve the crime—to sit and think, to contemplate the psychology of the murderer. . . .

Stevie turned back to the wall and looked from note to note, repeating the information in order, lingering on the ones from the present. Dry ice, immurement. Fire. Dry ice had that echo of a locked room mystery, where the weapon is ice and the murderer is never there. Immurement—walling in. Another locked room. Fire, where the weapon is the building itself.

Stevie began to see a line running through these things; it was almost literally visible, like a piece of string on a conspiracy wall. The psychology of the murderer. That was what she was seeing. These two sides weren’t just separated by time—they were separated by separation itself. Dottie’s death had been brutal and direct. Iris had been shot. These were hands-on weapons, with blood, where the assailant had to be there, to stand over the victim. But Hayes, Ellie, and Fenton had all died in contained spaces, where someone could set the trap and walk away. Hayes walked into an underground room full of carbon dioxide. Ellie went into a tunnel and the exit was blocked. Dr. Fenton—well, maybe she did forget the gas and lit a cigarette. But maybe someone had been there with her, talking. Someone turned on the gas and shut the door behind them. Then, Dr. Fenton, nose blind and a confirmed smoker, lit up.

Wind it up and let it go, like Janelle’s machine. Depress the toaster lever, and in the end, the gun goes off.

This was someone smart. Someone who planned. Someone who perhaps didn’t want to get their hands dirty. And all these things, they were deniable, almost. Hayes walked into that room on his own, not knowing about the sublimated dry ice that had poisoned the space. Ellie crawled into that tunnel on her own. And Fenton lit the fuse that set her own house ablaze. Three things that seemed like accidents, that happened when someone else was nowhere around.

Who was smart? David.

Who played tricks? David.

Who would be able to lift Janelle’s pass and get the dry ice? Who knew about tunnels and secret places? Who was in Burlington on the night of the fire? David.

But there was no reason at all that Stevie could see for him to do these things. None. He had no strong feelings about Hayes. Ellie was his friend. Her death devastated him. He had broken down in uncontrollable sobs when he found her. He didn’t even know Fenton at all. Unless David was some kind of serial killer who killed for sport, there was no way he did this.

Then who?

And the note on the wall? How did that fit?

What was more frustrating was the fact that Stevie had barely gotten a look at that message on the wall that night. It appeared as she slept. She heard a noise, looked up from her bed, and saw a glowing message. She hadn’t written it down because she had first gone to the window to try to see who did it. Then she’d experienced a massive panic attack and gone to Janelle’s room. After that, she assumed it was a dream—or tried to convince herself it was, because the truth was too creepy. That was a lot of time for her mind to work, to make things up, but maybe she could recover some of it.

She closed her eyes and let her breathing go even and steady. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. She let thoughts come and go and kept setting her attention back on the breathing. After several minutes, she opened her eyes a bit and focused on the wall where the message had been, where the sticky notes now were. This blank, unassuming stretch. What had been there?