The Hand on the Wall(61)

“There’s so much here,” they said.

“And these people will go down,” Janelle said. “But there are right ways and wrong ways.”

Vi looked to Janelle. Stevie could feel something pass between them, something palpable in the air. Vi got up and gathered all the tablets. They put them in the cold fireplace, then grabbed the poker and began to smash them. As they did so, Janelle sat up straighter, her eyes brimming with tears.

“I’ll flush these,” David said, picking up the flash drives and gathering the remains of the tablets.

Everyone in the room moved away to give Vi and Janelle a little space as Vi sat next to Janelle and took her by both hands.

As David left the room, Stevie almost thought she felt him give her a look as well. At least, someone was watching her. She could feel it.





19


BEING STUCK IN A MOUNTAINTOP RETREAT DURING A BLIZZARD SOUNDS fun and romantic, especially if you are talking about a place like Ellingham Academy, which was entirely made of nooks and views. It had ample firewood and food. It was big enough for everyone. It should have been pleasant, at least.

But snow does funny things to the mind. Everything felt close and airless. Time started to have no meaning. Now that the task many people in this particular group had stayed to perform was complete, there was a baggy confusion to what was supposed to happen next. At least Vi and Janelle were back together, sitting pressed up so close to each other that Stevie thought they might actually overlap. Hunter was napping. Nate was trying to sink into the sofa and be left alone.

And David? Well, he sat on his chair and played a game on his computer, looking at Stevie over the top occasionally.

She got up and left the room, taking her bag with her.

They weren’t supposed to go upstairs, but nobody had said they couldn’t sit on the stairs, so that’s where she sat, alone and in public, on the grand staircase. Where do you look for someone who’s never really there? Always on a staircase, but . . .

“We’ll probably be able to get out in about twenty-four hours,” she heard Mark Parsons saying. He was up on the balcony walkway above with Dr. Quinn and Call Me Charles. Plans were being made. They would all leave this place, to go to an uncertain future.

She sat on the landing, wrapped in a blanket, and stared at the portrait of the Ellingham family. This would be her anchor. It made as much sense as anything else. The swirling colors, the distortion of the moon, the dark sky, the dome looming in the background. Her pulse surged and the world swam, so she dove into the painting. She was there, standing alongside the Ellinghams in their kaleidoscopic world. The doomed Ellinghams.

The painting. That photo of Leonard Holmes Nair painting on the lawn . . .

She pulled her bag over and removed the diary. She blinked away some of the spots from in front of her eyes and flipped it open, grabbing for the photos inside, flipping through the shots of Francis and Eddie in their poses, in the trees, and there . . .

There it was. The photo of Leonard Holmes Nair on the lawn. She looked at the photo and up at the painting several times. Then she got up and went over to the painting, examining it closely. She looked at the sky, specifically, the shape of it around the Ellinghams. The placement of the moon.

It was the same painting. The figures were precisely the same. The moon in this painting was in the same position as the sun in the one in the photograph. Where the Great House had been in the photograph painting, the scene had been converted into the background of the dome, into a halo of light.

Same painting. Different setting. Why had he repainted it like this? The moon was high in the painting, and the moonbeams dipped down around the dome, landing on a spot off to the side, right about where the tunnel was. And the pool of light . . .

There was something there, something she couldn’t put her finger on.

She turned away from the painting and opened the diary again, flipping through the now-familiar entries. Francis in love. Francis in misery. Francis bored. Francis making charts of ammunition and explosives. She glanced through the poems but kept coming back to the one that stood out from the others.

OUR TREASURE

All that I care about starts at nine

Dance twelve hundred steps on the northern line

To the left bank three hundred times

E+A

Line flag

Tiptoe

Was this about places she had been? Dancing at balls? The Northern Line in London? The Left Bank of Paris?

Something was eating at Stevie. She knew what this was. She had seen this. She just couldn’t place it.

She rubbed her eyes and looked back up at the painting, the dome in the moonlight.

The dome.

This wasn’t a poem. These were instructions. And she knew exactly what Francis was talking about.

No one paid any attention as she walked casually back into the morning room and slipped one of the brochures from the table by the door. She retreated to the steps again for privacy and sat on the floor, opening the diary to the poem page and the brochure booklet to the map of Ellingham, the idealized one drawn by the artist who drew books for children.

All that I care about starts at nine. Nine was Minerva House on the map—the house where Francis lived.

Dance twelve hundred steps on the northern line. This was fairly direct. Twelve hundred steps to the north. Stevie couldn’t take twelve hundred steps, but the instructions hinted at where to go. To the left bank three hundred times . . . that was a quarter of the distance of the first instruction. If you roughed this out in your mind, it would land you at . . .