The Hand on the Wall(5)

“Stevie,” Nate said, snapping his friend back to the present, to the cold and marshy grass they stood on.

“Fenton,” Stevie replied. “She believed there was a codicil in Albert Ellingham’s will, something that said that whoever found Alice got a fortune. It’s some real tinfoil-hat, grassy-knoll stuff, but she believed it. She said she had proof. I didn’t see it, but she said she had it. She was really paranoid—she only kept paper records. She kept notepads in old pizza boxes. She had a conspiracy wall. She said she was putting something huge together. I called to tell her what I had figured out, and she said she couldn’t talk and something about ‘the kid is there.’ And then, her house burned down.”

Nate rubbed his head wearily.

“Is there any chance that was an accident?” he said. “Please tell me there is.”

“What do you think?” she asked quietly.

“What do I think?” Nate replied, sitting on one of the stone benches on the edge of the sunken garden.

Stevie sat next to him, the cold of the stone seeping through her clothes.

“I think I don’t know what to think. I don’t believe in conspiracies, usually, because people are generally too uncoordinated to pull off huge, complicated plots. But I also think that if a bunch of weird stuff happens in one place at one time, maybe those things might be connected. So Hayes died while you were making that video about the Ellingham case. And then Ellie died after she ran away after you figured out that she wrote Hayes’s show. And now your adviser is dead—the one you were helping to research the Ellingham stuff—and she died just as you said you figured out who committed the crime of the century. These are all some terrible accidents, or they’re not, but I am out of ideas and need to conserve my energy so I can freak out more effectively. Does that help?”

“No,” Stevie said, looking up at the gray-pink sky.

“What if—hear me out—what if you told the authorities everything you know right now and let all of this go?”

“But I don’t know anything,” she said. “That’s the problem. I need to know more. What if this is all connected? It has to be, right? Iris and Dottie and Alice, Hayes and Ellie and Fenton.”

“Does it?”

“I have to think,” she said, running her hand through her short blond hair. It was standing straight up now. Stevie had not gone to get her hair cut since she had arrived at Ellingham in early September. She had cut it a bit, once, in the bathroom at two in the morning, but lost her vision halfway through. What she had now was an overgrown crop that hung over one eye more than the other and often went right toward the sky like the quiff of an alert cockatoo. She had bitten her nails down to the quick, and even though the school had a laundry service, she wore the same unwashed hoodie almost every day. She was losing track of her physical body.

“So what is your plan, then? You just walk around all the time, not eating or talking to anyone?”

“No,” she said. “I have to do something. I need more information.”

“Okay,” Nate said, defeated. “Where can you get information that isn’t dangerous or misguided?”

Stevie chewed a cuticle thoughtfully. It was a good question.

“Back in the present,” Nate said, “Janelle is showing us a test run of her machine tonight. She’s worried that you’re not going.”

Of course. As Stevie went down these little lanes in her mind, life was going on. Janelle Franklin, her closest friend here and next-door neighbor, had spent all her time at the school building a machine for the Sendel Waxman competition. It was now complete, and she wanted to show her closest friends the test run. Stevie could remember that much through the haze in her mind—tonight, eight o’clock. Look at machine.

“Right,” she said. “I’m going. Of course. I’m going. I need to think some more now.”

“Maybe you need to go home and take a nap, or shower or something? Because I don’t think you’re okay.”

“That’s it,” she said, snapping up her head. “I’m not okay.”

“Wait, what?”

“I need help,” she said with a smile. “I need to go talk to someone who loves to be challenged.”





February 1936


“IT HASN’T COME, DARLING,” LEONARD HOLMES NAIR SAID, WIPING the tip of his brush on a rag. “We have to be patient.”

Iris Ellingham sat in front of him in a wicker chair, usually used in better weather. She shivered under her white mohair coat, but Leo suspected it was not against the cold. It was a relatively mild day for mid-February on the mountain, just warm enough to go outside to work on a painting of the family and the house. Around them, students from the new Ellingham Academy hurried from building to building, bundled in their coats and hats and mittens, arms filled with books. Their chatter broke the once crystalline quiet of the mountain retreat. This palace—the work of architecture and landscaping—this marvel of engineer and human willpower . . . all of it for a school? It was, in Leonard’s opinion, like preparing the most divine of feasts and then taking it outside to watch it be devoured by raccoons.

“Surely you have a little,” Iris said, shifting in her seat. “You always have something.”