The Hand on the Wall(74)
By dawn it was done. The Ellingham family looked out at him from his hallucinatory rendition—all three together, locked in mystery, but together.
23
IT HAD TO BE ALBERT ELLINGHAM’S OFFICE—THE PLACE WHERE IT ALL began that night in April 1936 where a desperate man pulled money from a safe in the wall. This room, with its balcony of books as silent onlookers to the drama below, had seen so much—everything wealth had built and everything wealth had destroyed.
There were only so many seats in the office. Dr. Quinn and Hunter were in chairs by the fireplace, where no fire was lit. Call Me Charles leaned against one of the two desks in his standard “Work can be fun!” pose. Janelle, Nate, and Vi all sat on the floor, avoiding the trophy rug, which Vi was gazing at in horror. Germaine sat on one of the steps to the second-floor balcony, a notebook in her hand. David roamed the room a bit by the windows. Mark Parsons and Pix leaned against the wall by the door.
Stevie took the center of the floor, because that is where the detective stands.
The expressions in the room varied from confused, to annoyed, to faintly bemused, to intensely interested. Whatever anyone felt about Stevie, she was doing a big, weird thing here in the office, where she had already once done a big, weird thing that had then led to Ellie’s death.
Stevie resisted the urge to say, “I’ll bet you’re wondering why I called you all here.” But then she realized that the reason people said that was that once you called people into one room, they were probably wondering why you had called them all there. So Stevie found herself vacillating between possible phrases and heard herself saying, “So, um, the reason . . . well . . .” No. Start over. Start as you mean to go on.
“People have died up here,” she said, “and they didn’t die in accidents.”
“Okay, Stevie,” Dr. Quinn said, “what is—”
“I’m serious,” she said. The words came out so strongly that even Dr. Quinn was taken aback. Stevie regretted them at once, because Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes never had to snap about how serious they were.
Call Me Charles, who always invited a challenge, nodded.
“We have nothing else to do,” he said. “Let’s hear her out.”
Stevie took a deep breath, ignored the bright sparks of panic that danced on the tips of her synapses, and continued.
“They didn’t die in accidents,” she said again. “’They were murdered.”
Nothing from the assembled. They made it look so easy in detective books—like you could just call up the suspects and expect everyone to sit on the edge of their chairs, waiting to be accused so they could walk through the motions of denial before the detective revealed that they weren’t guilty. Those were the rules. The reality was that your friends looked at you with hope bordering on embarrassment, while your teachers and school staff questioned every choice they’d made in their lives to get them to this point. But even Hercule Poirot had to do this for a first time, and everyone made fun of the little Belgian detective for his fastidious ways until he smacked them down with the hammer of deductive truth, so . . .
“Stevie?” Nate said.
Her mouth was hanging open. She snapped her jaw closed and walked with purpose to the fireplace.
“Hayes Major,” she said. “Right from the second I met him, all he talked about was Hollywood. He wanted to leave school and get out there as soon as possible. When all of this started, when Hayes died, when Ellie ran—I thought it was about the show, about The End of It All. It made sense. Why else would Hayes die? It made so much sense. Hayes was someone who took stuff that didn’t belong to him. Someone looking for an easy way out. Someone who used other people to do his work. He used Gretchen, his ex-girlfriend, to write his papers. He used us to do the bulk of the work on his video project. He used someone else to write the show.”
The words were putting themselves in order as fast as Stevie was saying them.
“Only one person had any motive to kill Hayes because of the show,” Stevie said. “That was Ellie. But Ellie didn’t care about the money. She’d been paid—five hundred dollars—which she used to buy her saxophone. She didn’t care what happened to the show because she was busy making her own art.”
“Ellie ran,” Vi said.
“Because she was scared,” Stevie said. “She ran because I had accused her of something. But she knew something else was going on. I don’t even know if she understood the extent of it, just that Hayes had gotten into something a little out of his depth. There was always a rumor that there was a codicil in Albert Ellingham’s will that left a lot of money to anyone who found Alice. Most people didn’t think it was real, but it was a popular theory, a grassy-knoll kind of a thing. But Dr. Fenton believed in it. She was sure it was real. She had interviewed Robert Mackenzie, Albert Ellingham’s secretary, before he died. Mackenzie said it was real. And it is real.”
She pulled out her phone and read the text of the codicil: “‘In addition to all other bequests, the amount of ten million dollars shall be held in trust for my daughter, Alice Madeline Ellingham. Should my daughter no longer be among the living, any person, persons, or organization that locates her earthly remains—provided it is established that they were in no way connected to her disappearance—shall receive this sum. If she is not located by her ninetieth birthday, these funds shall be released to be used for the Ellingham Academy in any way the board sees fit.