The Hand on the Wall(52)
George sent the man back to the house and stood guard as Jerry did the digging. The first layer was quick—all snow. Alice was not buried deep, barely a foot underground, and not even in a coffin. The body had been wrapped up in some sacking.
“Oh God,” Jerry said, looking down at the bundle. “I never . . .”
“Put the shovel down and move away from her.”
Jerry stumbled back, dropping the shovel. He held up his hands in surrender.
“I’m not going to shoot you, Jerry,” George said, tucking his gun into his waistband.
Jerry half collapsed, breathing heavily, heaving, praising George and God in equal measure. He did not see George pick up the shovel, and was shocked by the first blow, which knocked him to his knees. They came fast, a flurry mixed with cries and gulps. The snow splattered with blood.
When it was over, George tossed the shovel down and panted. There was no movement from the direction of the house. They were far enough that nothing may have been seen or heard. The stranger would have been listening for shots, most likely, and there had been none.
Gathering himself, he walked over to the grave. He lifted the little parcel from the hole. It had frozen stiff. He set Alice down carefully on the fresh snow, then used the shovel to enlarge and deepen the hole. He deposited Jerry, facedown.
He carried Alice to the car and put her gently on the back seat, carefully arranging the car rug over her as if warmth could revive her.
After taking a moment to consider what he had done, he removed his gun from his waistband, confirmed that it was loaded, and began the walk back to the house.
16
STEVIE FELT LIKE SHE WAS CONCEALING A BOMB.
It was so weird that it was night now, weird that the group was back together around the big farm table. In the excitement of the search, Stevie had temporarily forgotten everything else that was going on—the snow, David, the files they were reading.
Pix, unaware of all the activity going on around her, had put out bread and sandwich makings, plus some of the salads and odds and ends that the dining hall had left behind. There were cold drinks with snow still on the bottles. Stevie grabbed one of the maple spruce sodas that she thought were disgusting. She didn’t care how anything tasted right now. She needed to go through the motions, eat, and go back to her room with the diary that was sitting on her bed. There was a bowl of tuna salad. She grabbed two slices of the closest bread and smacked on a gob, squashing it flat. She sliced it with one long cut and dropped down into a chair at the far end of the table.
David sat at the other end, one of the old tablets next to him, facedown.
“I don’t eat tuna salad,” he said, grabbing a piece of bread. “It’s too mysterious. People sneak things into it. It’s a sneak food.”
“I like it,” Hunter said. “We make it at home with sliced-up dill pickle and Old Bay Seasoning.”
“Good to know,” David said. “Nate, where do you come down on tuna salad?”
Nate was trying to read and eat some cold mac and cheese in peace.
“I don’t eat fish,” he said. “Fish freak me out.”
“Noted. What about you, Janelle?”
Vi kept sneaking looks over at Janelle. Janelle remained polite but resolute. She made herself a plate of cold roasted chicken and salad, then sat next to Stevie. Vi stared into the depths of their mug of tea. “I have better things to think about,” she said. “How has your day gone?”
“Slow,” David replied. “But, you know.”
“I don’t, actually,” Janelle said.
David kept looking over at Stevie. His expression was impossible to read. It wasn’t unfriendly. It was almost . . . pitying? Like he felt bad for her?
That was unacceptable. Give her the smirk. Ignore her. But pity didn’t sit well on David’s sharply angled face. Stevie lifted her chin and stared back as she ate her tuna salad. And when she accidentally dropped some tuna salad on her lap, she brushed it to the floor, refusing to acknowledge that it had happened.
She excused herself as soon as she had cleared away her plate. Janelle came with her. Back in her room, Stevie knelt next to her bed, like someone praying or bowing before an artifact. Janelle sat on the bed and watched as Stevie opened the book again. The cover made that same creak. It had a very faintly musty odor, and the pages were a milky yellow, but the diary was otherwise in good repair. The handwriting was an ornate cursive, perfectly level, small and exquisitely formed. The ink was smudged in places.
“Let’s start with the pictures.” Stevie held up the photo of the girl in the slinky knit dress, her hand on her hip, a cigar in her teeth. “This is Francis. This has to be her diary. She lived here.”
Francis Josephine Crane and Edward Pierce Davenport were both students in the first Ellingham class of 1935–36, the class that had to go home early in April when the kidnappings happened. Francis lived in Minerva; this had been her room. Her family owned Crane Flour (“America’s favorite! Baking’s never a pain when you’re baking with Crane!” had apparently been their slogan). They were a massively wealthy family, friends of the Ellinghams in New York City; they had adjacent town houses on Fifth Avenue. She was only sixteen when she was at Ellingham, but her life was full of travel, tutors, summers in Newport, winters in Miami, trips to Europe, balls and parties, everything afforded to the rich during the Depression while the country starved. Her life after Ellingham was a bit of a mystery. She had a coming-out ball at the Ritz when she was eighteen, but there was very little after that.