The Hand on the Wall(75)

“‘It is further stipulated that no member of the faculty or administration of Ellingham Academy may claim this sum as their own.’”

Stevie looked at Charles.

“I asked you about it,” Stevie said. “If it existed. And you lied to me and said it didn’t.”

Charles shrugged his cashmere-sweatered shoulders.

“Of course I said it wasn’t real,” he said. “That’s what we tell anyone who asks. We didn’t even know about the codicil until a few years ago. You know the clock I have in my office? The green marble one? We were having it cleaned and repaired, and in the process, they discovered a small drawer in the base. It was folded up in there. Clearly someone wanted it hidden away to keep the school from being overrun with treasure hunters. We felt the same way.”

“That’s true,” Dr. Quinn said from the other side of the room. “We’d have some reality television show trying to get in here to make some kind of find-Alice-and-get-a-fortune thing.”

“So the school gets the money?” Stevie asked.

“That’s why we started work on the art barn,” Dr. Quinn said.

“So you think someone was trying to find Alice to get all the money?” Charles said.

“It makes the most sense,” Stevie went on. “We’re talking about a massive fortune, worth . . . what today?”

“It’s currently just under seventy million,” Dr. Quinn said. “It will fund us for many years.”

“Seventy million dollars is a good reason to commit a murder,” Stevie said. “But there are restrictions. No faculty member can have it. Only someone outside, or a student . . . Someone like Hayes. Or Ellie. Or Dr. Irene Fenton.”

Hunter looked up.

“All three of them died in ways that were different but shared a similar aspect—their deaths seemed to be accidents where they were trapped. Hayes was trapped in a room. Ellie in a tunnel. Dr. Fenton in a house on fire. It wasn’t personal or passionate. It was clinical. It could all be explained away. Somehow, Hayes, Ellie, and Dr. Fenton were all connected to getting the money. Nothing made sense until I put three things together—Janelle’s pass, the message on my wall, and what Dr. Fenton said on the phone. I’ll start with that last one. The night she died, Dr. Fenton was being strange when I called her. She said she couldn’t talk right then, and then she said, ‘The kid is there.’ What if she meant Alice? That Alice was here at Ellingham. If that’s true, everything starts to make sense. I had to go backward to make it all work out. Your aunt . . .”

She turned to Hunter. “She had a drinking problem,” she said.

“Yes.”

“She had no sense of smell.”

“Yes?” Hunter replied.

“She had vulnerabilities, but how much would you say she cared about the Ellingham case, deep down, really?”

“It was everything to her,” Hunter replied. “Everything.”

“Everything,” Stevie repeated. “On the night of her death, she stood up for the case. She stood up for Alice. And that’s why she died. Because she stopped going along with the plan. She knew that the money was real, and she knew where Alice was. That last bit, she’d just found out . . .”

The scene was incredibly clear in Stevie’s head—Fenton at her table, listening, deciding, picking up her cigarettes . . .

“It all started with the art barn construction,” Stevie said. “The money was coming in, and the building was being expanded. So they had to excavate the tunnel. The crew found Alice, but they didn’t know it. They found a trunk. The person who opened that trunk had a problem. They had opened something that they knew was worth about seventy million dollars. Seventy million, sitting there, free to take. Except he couldn’t have it.”

She turned and looked at Call Me Charles.





24


WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN THE BIG FOAM FINGER OF JUSTICE POINTS itself at you?

In books, the accused laughs, or mutters angrily, or knocks over their chair and starts running. That’s what Ellie had done, even though she was innocent. Charles regarded Stevie with the same expression one might have upon finding a particularly bright and beautiful butterfly sitting on the tip of their nose. He almost looked delighted by this turn of events, which was weird. It made Stevie rock back on her heels anxiously.

“I saw the trunk,” Stevie said to him. “You made a point of showing it to me when you took me up to the attic. You had filled it with old newspapers.”

“I did show you a trunk of old newspapers,” Charles said, smiling and nodding. “Yes.”

Stevie walked to the window and looked out at the sunken garden, white with snow. Don’t panic. Keep going.

“The workers pulled the trunk out of the ground and brought it to you,” Stevie said, touching a finger to the frosted glass. “They probably found all kinds of things in there—junk the workmen threw in as they went. You opened it up, expecting nothing, and instead, you found a body. It was old, in bad condition. You knew it could only be one person—Alice Ellingham.”

“It was a trunk full of newspapers,” Charles said, “but all right.”

“Maybe, before, you never thought much about the Ellingham case,” she said. “Maybe you were thinking of the school at first. The school was about to get all that money. If the workmen found the body, they’d get it, and the school couldn’t expand. So maybe at first you just wanted to tuck the body somewhere, bury it, let the matter go away. You take the body out of the trunk and you fill the trunk with some old newspapers. From there, you had to put the body aside until you could work out what to do next. But . . .”