The Hand on the Wall(4)

Well, that had failed.

That alone would have occupied her mind entirely, except that on the same night, Stevie’s adviser, Dr. Irene Fenton, had died in a house fire. Stevie had not been close to Dr. Fenton, or Fenton, as she preferred to be called. There was one upside to this horrific event—the fire was in Burlington. Burlington wasn’t here, at Ellingham, and Fenton was identified as a professor at the University of Vermont. This meant that the death wasn’t attributed to Ellingham. The school probably couldn’t survive if there was another death. In a world where everything went wrong all the time always, having your adviser die in a fire off campus was one of the few “but on the bright side . . .” elements of her confusing new life. It was a terrible and selfish way of thinking about things, but at this point, Stevie had to be practical. If you wanted to solve crime, you needed to detach.

All of that would have been plenty to deal with. But the crowning item, the one that spun through her mind like a mobile, was . . .

“Don’t you think we should talk?” Nate said. “About what’s going on? About what happens now?”

It was quite a loaded question. What happens now?

“Walk with me,” she said.

She turned and headed away from the classroom buildings, away from people, away from cameras posted on poles and trees. This was to keep their conversation private and also so no one could see the devastation she was going to wreak on this doughnut. She was hungry.

“Ish olfed decaf,” she said, shoving a bite of doughnut in her mouth.

“You want decaf?”

She took a moment to swallow.

“I solved it,” she said. “The Ellingham case.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s what we need to talk about. That and the fire and everything else. Jesus, Stevie.”

“It makes sense,” she said, walking slowly. “George Marsh, the man from the FBI, the one who protected the Ellinghams . . . someone who knew the house layout, the schedules, when the money came in, the family habits . . . someone who easily could have set up a kidnapping. So, here’s what happens . . .”

She got Nate loosely by the arm and changed direction, turning them back toward the Great House. The Great House was the crowning jewel of the campus. In the 1930s, it was the Ellingham home. Today, it was the center of the school administration and a space for dances and events. Around the back, there was a walled garden. Stevie walked on autopilot to a familiar door in the wall and opened it. This was the sunken garden, so called because it was once an artificial lake and Iris Ellingham’s massive swimming pool. Albert Ellingham had drained it following the disappearance of his daughter, on the word of someone who thought her body was at the bottom. It wasn’t, but the lake was never filled again. So it remained, a great big grassy hole in the ground. And in the middle, on a strange little hill that had once been an island in the lake, was a geodesic glass dome. This dome was where Dottie Epstein had met her fate and where, under it, Hayes Major met his end.

“So,” Stevie said, pointing, “Dottie Epstein is sitting in that dome, reading her Sherlock Holmes, minding her own business. All of a sudden, a guy appears. George Marsh. Neither one of them expecting the other. And out of all the students from Ellingham George Marsh could have run into, he runs into the most brilliant one, and the one whose uncle is in the NYPD. Dottie knows who Marsh is. The whole plan is ruined, instantly, because George Marsh met Dottie in that dome. Dottie knows something bad is about to happen, so she makes a mark in her Sherlock Holmes, she does the best she can to say who she’s looking at, and then, she dies. But Dottie fingers the guy. Flash forward . . .”

Stevie turned in the direction of the house, toward the flagstone patio and French doors outside the room that had been Albert Ellingham’s office.

“Albert Ellingham spends the next two years trying to find his daughter, when something . . . something jogs his memory. He thinks about Dottie Epstein and the mark in the book. He gets out the wire recording he made of her—we know he did this, it was on his desk the day he died—and he listens. He realizes that Dottie could have recognized George Marsh. He wonders . . .”

Stevie could practically see Albert Ellingham pacing the office, walking across the trophy rugs, from leather chair to desk, staring at the green marble clock on the mantel, trying to figure out if what he had worked out in his mind was true.

“He writes a riddle, maybe to test himself, to see if he really believed it. Where do you look for someone who’s never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair. He’s saying, take the word stair out of staircase. Who’s always on a case? A detective. Who’s never really there? The person you hired to investigate, the one who was by your side. The one you didn’t even think of or notice . . .”

“Stevie . . .”

“And then, that afternoon, he goes out sailing with George Marsh and the boat explodes. People always thought anarchists did it, because anarchists tried to kill him before, and everyone thought an anarchist kidnapped his daughter. But it can’t be that. One of them caused that boat to explode. Either George Marsh knew it was all over and took them both out, or Albert Ellingham confronted him and did the same. But it ended there. And I know whoever kidnapped Alice isn’t Truly Devious, because I know that note was written by some students here, probably as a joke. This whole thing was just a bunch of stuff that got out of hand. The note was a joke, then the kidnapping went wrong, and all those people died . . .”