The Hand on the Wall(71)

“You’re back,” she said. “And you have . . . Germaine?”

“Hey,” Germaine replied.

Pix shook her head.

“Get warm,” she said, pointing them to the fireplace. “I give up.”

It’s a funny thing about being cold—sometimes it doesn’t hit you until you start to get warm again. As soon as Stevie was in front of the fire, she started to shake almost uncontrollably. Her feet and hands burned.

“H-h-how are you here too?” Stevie said through chattering teeth.

“You guys n-n-never turned up on the coach that day,” Germaine said. “I f-f-figured something was up. I took the c-c-coach back when they were doing the next pickup. I told the guy I forgot something. Then I s-s-stayed. It was really easy. I wrote to my parents and said I was staying.”

“You c-c-can do that?” Stevie asked.

“My parents t-t-trust me.”

Stevie and David looked at her blankly.

“What’s that l-l-like?” David asked.

Germaine shrugged.

The rest of the group came out to see the stragglers from the snow and were surprised to find Germaine Batt had joined their number. They had a lot of questions, but none of the three were up to answering them yet. They were covered in dust, still coughing. The ringing was getting less loud, but it had not stopped entirely.

And then, it arrived.

Anxiety does not ask your permission. Anxiety does not come when expected. It’s very rude. It barges in at the strangest moments, stopping all activity, focusing everything on itself. It sucks the air out of your lungs and scrambles the world. Her vision went spotty around the edges. The ringing in her ears swelled again. Her knees buckled.

“Stevie?” someone said. She really didn’t know who.

She stumbled away from them all. The Great House was turning into a hideous parody of itself. The fireplace was like a terrible maw of fire. Her friends’ faces made no sense. Everything was rushing. She was on a current she could not control.

“Where’s your medicine?” Janelle said, kneeling next to her.

Her medicine was in a hole in the ground, having been dumped out to carry bricks. She was going to ride this one with no help.

She stared at the grand staircase sweeping up in front of her. Anxiety, her therapist had told her many times, never killed anyone. It felt like death, but it was an illusion. A terrible illusion that inhabited your body and tried to make it its puppet. It told you nothing mattered because everything was made of fear.

“Fuck it,” she mumbled, barely able to make the words.

For no reason that she could think of, she started for the steps.

“Hey, wait,” Janelle said, holding her arm. “Maybe you should sit down.”

“Steps,” she said. The word popped out of her mouth like a strange bubble.

“Steps,” Janelle repeated. “Okay. Fine. Nate, get her arm. We’ll help you.”

Where do you look for something that’s never really there . . . Together, between her two friends, Stevie climbed the staircase.

The Ellinghams waited for her on the landing. Always on a staircase, but never on a stair. That’s where they were. She needed to look for something and hold on to it—something she could wrap her head around. Any rope would do. The Ellinghams. That’s why she was here. Albert. Iris. Alice. She repeated their names to herself over and over. Leonard Holmes Nair had preserved them here, in this bizarre painting, the one he had altered to include the dome, the pool of moonlight stretching over . . .

Where do you look for someone who could be anywhere?

The question popped up in the corner of her mind, distracting her for a moment.

The kid is there, Fenton had said on the phone. The kid is there. If George Marsh had committed the crime, what if he brought her back? What if he buried her out of guilt? What if Alice had been in the tunnel, and . . .

She looked at the painting again, forcing her eyes to focus. The pool of light, the moonbeam, it stretched over the point where the tunnel would have been. And the form of the light—it was vaguely in the shape of . . .

“Hey,” David said. He had joined them and was sitting in front of her. “It’s okay. It’s just panic.”

“Shut up,” she said. She could not articulate what was happening in her head, this massive word problem that was assembling itself in some part of her brain. Alice had been buried here. Alice was here. The kid was here. Alice had been found.

Point by point, things began to line up. Suddenly, it all made sense. All of it. The facts, which before had been falling from the sky like snow and evaporating in her memory, all sprang forth, solid, and put themselves in line. The tunnel. The excavation. Hayes in the tunnel . . . Fenton . . .

“It all makes sense,” she said to David. She could feel her eyes widening.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Your phone!” she said. “Give it to me.”

“Why?”

“Please.”

There must have been something in her tone. Though he looked confused, he pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to her. She scrolled through until she found what she needed.

There it was—the one discordant note.

Of course, it wasn’t an accident that it ended like this. She had done the work, reading things for years. She had gotten herself to Ellingham. She had made herself a detective and put herself on this path. She had summoned this moment through work and falling down holes and running into the dark. It was time to gather the suspects, like they did at the end of every mystery.